Do you want a monolithic program, which can't be scripted, and has many, many restrictions imposed on it, or a small, simple tool that you can script to manipulate and modify data any way you choose?
Number One!
No, wait... Number Two!
Wait wait wait... oh, damn, I was sure I had it right. Can't I have both?
I beg to differ. Every hospital I have been to in Arizona charges MUCH less if you pay cash.
Whereas, here in California, my understanding is that the law says this is unfair business practice. Doctors cannot charge one customer less than another customer for healthcare, as a matter of law. It makes sense if you think about it. How would you like it if your doctor charged his buddies $100 for a procedure that was going to cost you $1000? Would you consider a private kick-back on the side to get onto his "buddy list"? Fair and consistent pricing should be every consumer's right.
The difference, of course, is that insurance companies are charged the same as private citizens -- they're just not expected to pay the full amount. My mom worked in medical billing for many years and she said that a doctor will never, repeat never recover the full amount for any procedure billed to an insurance company.
If you fry some potatoes in non-hydrogenated vegetable oil, it's a perfectly healthy side dish.
Is there any such thing as "perfectly healthy"? Potatoes are nothing but starch -- raw carbohydrate. It's not much different than eating sugar. Having fried potatoes with every meal is going to contribute significantly to your overall calorie intake without giving you much actual nutrition. You'd be better off eating whole grain rice as your side dish (but, as the parent implies, it goes against popular culture).
Applebee's isn't great, but it's not McDonald's either.
Yeah it is.
If you are 'on a budget', you aren't eating in restaurants anyway, if you can't find something good to eat in a grocery store, you are doing something wrong
No! This is exactly the problem. Go watch the movie "Super-Size Me"... ignore the stuff that's obvious (junk food is bad for you) and pay attention to the parts about fast food and its relationship to the community -- like the part about how there are communities where the only public play space available for kids is at a McDonald's.
Then consider that for a single parent with a low-paying job, maybe two jobs, the faster the food comes, the better. If that single parent can get a double cheeseburger and fries in 5 minutes for $1.98, that's going to be attractive. Me personally, I might eat a bowl of cereal for dinner, but its undeniable that there's a certain point of pride in "putting hot food on the table."
You're looking at it from the perspective that somebody who doesn't have a lot of money is going to be very conscious of how that money is spent, but in practice that's not how it works. In practice, the more desperate your circumstances the more likely you are to look for the easiest short-term answers. That's part of the whole problem with economic disparity -- it's easy to keep poor people poor.
And yes, here in Europe we really have some really _fine_ beers and wines, thankfully.
Tut tut! Same in the U.S., though admittedly the distribution of fine beers and wines is not spread evenly throughout the country. The reason you never hear about it is the same as the reason why we Americans aren't familiar with European beers and wines: They're seldom exported (with the exception of high-end wines). The Heineken you buy in the U.S., for example, is not the same formula as that sold in Holland. Until very recently at least, the Guinness wasn't the same either. But then again, most Europeans are going to think that all American beer is Bud and Miller because they've never seen beers from Anchor Brewing, Sierra Nevada, Anderson Valley, Speakeasy, Full Sail, etc. And surely you've heard of the California wine industry?
At first the store owners and distributors tried to actually count how many were broken and adjust the invoices appropriately, but that was just too hard, and allowed merchants to take advantage by claiming a higher level of breakage than actually occurred.
Amusingly enough, the modern classical composer Philip Glass's first job was working at a relative's record store, where among his duties he had to take poor-selling records down to the basement and smash them, so the store wouldn't have to pay. (Heard that on NPR once.)
The reason a recording artist can't just re-record an album with a different record company is because the recording company has secured the mechanical rights, i.e., the recording rights.
While some of what you say is mostly true, mechanical rights do not equal recording rights. They represent the record company's rights to a particular recording. So, while you cannot take your master tapes and put out the same recording on a different label, if you own the publishing rights there should not be anything stopping you from re-recording your old songs and releasing them on a new label. I believe the only reason this does not happen more often is because albums with "no new material" do not typically sell all that well, so labels aren't all that interested in them. They'd prefer you record brand-new songs. But it does happen. The skatecore band Suicidal Tendencies, for example, re-recorded their entire eponymous debut album and released the new versions of the songs on a new label under the title "Still Cyco After All These Years."
There's only one way to make that happen for sure, and that's for Apple to buy Adobe.
Apple has the stock, they have the cash -- such a purchase would effectively cost Apple nothing, the market would like it so well.
Uhhhhh... "cost Apple nothing," eh? Last I checked, Adobe's market cap was $23.65 billion. Apple's is not quite $60 billion. Just how much cash and stock does Cringely figure Apple wants to throw around?
Actually, when CDs first appeared in the 80s they were a fair bit more expensive than LPs, and only moved back to more normal levels as production capacity was ramped up.
Seems to me that's what they told you was going to happen. If it did, I must have missed it.
I was buying compact discs in 1987 and the average price was $12.95-13.95. A used CD went for around $9.95. It doesn't seem like much has changed -- except that a vinyl LP now costs $14.95.
They can't agree on merging one... so the obvious answer is just to drop one format.
Well, that's the argument in favor of the whole "format war," anyway. I seem to remember similar bickering over DVD-R versus DVD+R. You don't hear much about it these days. Bottom line: If being able to play HD-DVD discs is valuable to you as a consumer, the next computer you buy will have a drive that can do that. Likewise Blu-Ray; my desktop PC came standard with two optical drives.
It's why e-books have not, and will not replace books.
I think that's too narrow an analysis. When you go to Barnes and Noble and pick through a couple of volumes of "The Compleat Workes of William Shakespeare" and you settle on the one that seems like it will last the most reading, while still being compact enough to carry easily, you probably don't go home and think to yourself, "OMG!!11! I totally own the complete works of William Shakespeare!" It probably doesn't make the slightest bit of difference to you who the publisher of the particular edition is, and you're only subconsciously aware of what was used for cover art. It stands to reason, therefore, that most people should prefer an e-book edition... if possession was the only argument against it, that is.
Fan service (Japanese simply "saabisu", "service"), sometimes written as a single word, fanservice, is a vaguely defined term used in visual media -- particularly in anime fandom --to refer to elements in a story that are unnecessary to a storyline, but designed to amuse or excite the audience.... This term is, however, occasionally used in the video gaming community, most notably in MMORPGs. The meaning remains mostly the same, content added for the sake of fans and not for any actual gaming value, and is almost always derogatory.
You seem to be missing the point. The point is not how often you use cash...the point is that for the most part it is an anonymous payment system. A direct transfer is not.
There is a more sinister aspect to it, even if you are not a completely paranoid conspiracy theorist. Money is a piece of paper. Once upon a time it was a receipt for a certain quantity of a precious substance, like gold or silver, but chances are that's no longer the case where you live. But at least it's still a piece of paper. People recognize that it's money, and when you've got some in your pocket, most people will accept it for goods and services.
A payment card, on the other hand -- be it a credit card or a bank debit card -- is itself a service. You use that piece of plastic at the whim of some financial institution. If whatever power chooses to rescind your right to that service -- in other words, if, for whatever reason, they turn off your card -- POOF! It doesn't matter how much "money" you have. You can no longer carry out transactions. You have been effectively ostracized from society.
And think of all the reasons this might happen. The government might decide that people who use their cards to buy drugs are bad citizens, and that those cards should be restricted from use. Or the finance corporation that provides the payment card service might decide that you're not in full compliance with the terms of their service -- maybe the corporation feels you owe it some fee, or you haven't signed off on some clause or another -- and it's going to withhold your use of the service until you settle up.
This is a slippery slope. And you can come at it from all different angles -- call it another tool of totalitarianism if you want, or call it the erosion of capitalism. In effect it makes free commerce the privilege of those who follow the rules, rather than the right of every free citizen. That ain't the country I signed up for.
We are not slaves to capitalism. We are slaves to greed. We are one of the most overworked nations in the world. It is not so much that our employers or our government are demanding this from us. It is that we demand it from ourselves. We want that new boat. We want that bigger house. We want that bigger/better car -- and it better be new!
OK, well... I don't own a boat. I don't own a house. I don't even own a car. Explain to me again why my situation is my fault?
My impression of McNealy from hearing him speak was that he was an amazing businessman (he told stories about his job before Sun... at a dog food company)
The market wants Sun Microsystems to be a company that eats its own dogfood.
Clearly, Scott McNealy is not and has never been that man... I hope.
One should be skeptical of how well bureaucracies can dole out our money, or whether in some cases we would be better off doing it ourselves individually or in smaller more maneagable cooperatives.
Um... it would be pretty hard to build out citywide Wi-Fi on an individual, person-by-person basis, don't you think? Blanket coverage of an entire area is the goal. You may not be interested in using said service, but... see grandparent. You are of course free to move to a municipality that shares your libertarian attitudes toward development, and reap the benefits in terms of lower taxes. (Good luck finding one that delivers the latter benefit, however.)
Already last fall, one might theorize that Oracle Corp. had decided it had been feeding Linux enough, and that it should start watering some other ecosystems:
Oracle Selects Solaris as preferred OS
Oh please, that was so obviously a bone thrown to Sun. I'm sure it was not done without some consideration given by Sun to Oracle. Plus, it's easy to announce that Solaris is your preferred OS when... well... Solaris is your preferred OS. The market for Oracle boxes running on Linux is growing rapidly and may overtake those running Solaris in the near future, but it hasn't yet. More people still run Oracle on Solaris than any other OS, last I heard.
No offense but if you're spending only one week a year travelling, you've got time management issues. Even if you're a wage worker, its not that hard to take a local bus to some regional tourist site/attraction. In New York state, you can spend an entire weekend visiting museums and not visit them all simply because there are too many.
Um... you call that travel?
As for travelling abroad, people would do that more often if the conditions were different. As it stands, travelling abroad is still relatively expensive (plane ticket and hotel for 3 days generally averages $1000 when travelling aboard), the language barrier is different for virtually every country (you learn English to visit the U.S. one of the few countries to rival Russia in terms of land mass, but you learn French for France, German for Germany, Italian for Italy and three different dialects of Chinese for China, wth?) the world isn't all that much 'better' than the U.S. (people pointed to the anti-Bush protesting but then we see riots in France, a weak Spanish government installed after a terrorist attack on a train and a continent so compact its possible to drive across three different countries without even knowing it), and overall people (still) hate Americans (no thanks to Bush).
Spoken like somebody who has never traveled. Seriously, you've just rattled off about every bullshit excuse why Americans never leave the town they grew up in, and they're all just that... bullshit. If you're talking about the middle class, then I've got news for you... $1000 don't buy you as much as it used to, but it will still buy you a trip to anywhere in Europe. (Provided, that is, you can get the time off.) I'm as much an "ugly American" as anybody -- I can grunt out minimal conversation in German, a few phrases in French, and as much Spanish as living in California will teach you -- and none of that has ever stopped me from traveling all over Europe and the rest of the world, to boot.
Try going to a Muslim country like Malaysia or Indonesia sometime, get into a cab, and start apologizing to the driver for being an American. Guarantee you, he'll assume you're a masochist and drive you to an S&M club.
I swear, a lot of Americans seem to take some kind of comfort in assuming the whole world hates them. Guess what? The whole world doesn't hate Americans. The whole world hates idiots. As a fellow American, I implore you -- try to stop acting like one.
The point is that all these "strategies" are nothing more than scams. You're dancing around your boss's expectations because you're boss's expectations are unrealistic. That's like saying the high price of bread doesn't matter to you because bread is so compact that it's easy to steal. Who wants to be crooked just to be able to eat? Likewise, who wants to have to find ways to "cheat" his boss just so he can have some decent time away from the coal mine?
If you have a problem with the bay area, feel free to move elsewhere.
Ah, but the trick is, what would I do for a living once I moved there? Personally, I'm done with babysitting people's computers. Absolutely no interest in carrying a pager 24 hours a day, working over all my holiday weekend to produce deliverables for a client who will only tear them all down to nothing a few months later. My best hope, as far as I can tell, is to skip the big TV and throw as much of that money into the bank as I possibly can, and then get the F out of here as soon as something promising comes up. (And yep, you got it -- Canada's an option. I have dual citizenship.)
Also, as a side note, many Europeans appear to be rich because they are childless. Their birthrates are well below replacement levels, making such a society unsustainable. Instead of having kids, they are wasting money on travel and fashion. Does this make them richer?
I completely agree with your sentiment, and yet, living in the United States this is exactly the situation I find myself in. I live in San Francisco, having grown up in the Bay Area my whole life, and the average house in the area I live costs $700K. Even if I could scrape up the downpayment to buy one, I'd be eating peanut butter sandwiches every night. Two incomes can do something to offset this, but two people working 50-hour a week jobs do not good parents make.
Thus, I can't complain that I'm poor -- I'm certainly not, not by African standards, European standards or even American standards. I do quite well, overall. And yet the money is all but useless to me, as far as enriching my life in any meaningful way. I can't afford to own property and I surely can't afford to start a family. Sure, I can buy big TVs, a fancy computer, and spend a bunch of money in restaurants -- in other words, dump all that money right back into the endless cycle of meaningless, conspicuous consumerism. But like you say -- does that make me richer?
I'd take the European standard of wealth, thank you very much, if it meant I could take a long lunch to spend time with friends, travel the world a little more, have a yard to let a dog run around in... et f'ing cetera.
No joke. The holiday situation in the U.S. is deplorable compared to the rest of the so-called Western World. If you worked at a low-paying job, like a fast food franchise, you might be lucky to get those 80 hours.
A lot of Europeans complain that Americans are sheltered and don't know anything about the rest of the world. And why should we? We're hard pressed to find any time to travel. If you travel for just one week out of an entire year, that leaves you with just five available vacation days to plan for friends' weddings, a visit from family, a camping trip, etc.
Most of us burn our sick days for short-term time off like that, but that's hardly a good solution. Oh wait -- you have heard about the American healthcare system, haven't you?
Companies in the U.S. are fond of management philosophies that emphasize effective "human capital management." Say that ten times fast. Sounds a lot like "human cattle management," doesn't it? Coincidence?
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No, wait ... Number Two!
Wait wait wait ... oh, damn, I was sure I had it right. Can't I have both?
I can? Oh, well that's fine then.
The difference, of course, is that insurance companies are charged the same as private citizens -- they're just not expected to pay the full amount. My mom worked in medical billing for many years and she said that a doctor will never, repeat never recover the full amount for any procedure billed to an insurance company.
Then consider that for a single parent with a low-paying job, maybe two jobs, the faster the food comes, the better. If that single parent can get a double cheeseburger and fries in 5 minutes for $1.98, that's going to be attractive. Me personally, I might eat a bowl of cereal for dinner, but its undeniable that there's a certain point of pride in "putting hot food on the table."
You're looking at it from the perspective that somebody who doesn't have a lot of money is going to be very conscious of how that money is spent, but in practice that's not how it works. In practice, the more desperate your circumstances the more likely you are to look for the easiest short-term answers. That's part of the whole problem with economic disparity -- it's easy to keep poor people poor.
I was buying compact discs in 1987 and the average price was $12.95-13.95. A used CD went for around $9.95. It doesn't seem like much has changed -- except that a vinyl LP now costs $14.95.
Hardly a sterling recommendation:
... This term is, however, occasionally used in the video gaming community, most notably in MMORPGs. The meaning remains mostly the same, content added for the sake of fans and not for any actual gaming value, and is almost always derogatory.
Fan service (Japanese simply "saabisu", "service"), sometimes written as a single word, fanservice, is a vaguely defined term used in visual media -- particularly in anime fandom --to refer to elements in a story that are unnecessary to a storyline, but designed to amuse or excite the audience.
Haha! That is the funniest thing. Who would have thunk it? And yes, the Apple store in downtown San Francisco is next to Sephora.
A payment card, on the other hand -- be it a credit card or a bank debit card -- is itself a service. You use that piece of plastic at the whim of some financial institution. If whatever power chooses to rescind your right to that service -- in other words, if, for whatever reason, they turn off your card -- POOF! It doesn't matter how much "money" you have. You can no longer carry out transactions. You have been effectively ostracized from society.
And think of all the reasons this might happen. The government might decide that people who use their cards to buy drugs are bad citizens, and that those cards should be restricted from use. Or the finance corporation that provides the payment card service might decide that you're not in full compliance with the terms of their service -- maybe the corporation feels you owe it some fee, or you haven't signed off on some clause or another -- and it's going to withhold your use of the service until you settle up.
This is a slippery slope. And you can come at it from all different angles -- call it another tool of totalitarianism if you want, or call it the erosion of capitalism. In effect it makes free commerce the privilege of those who follow the rules, rather than the right of every free citizen. That ain't the country I signed up for.
Hide with my parents? Dude, I'm 33. When the economy collapses, there's no hiding. I'm it.
Clearly, Scott McNealy is not and has never been that man... I hope.
Try going to a Muslim country like Malaysia or Indonesia sometime, get into a cab, and start apologizing to the driver for being an American. Guarantee you, he'll assume you're a masochist and drive you to an S&M club.
I swear, a lot of Americans seem to take some kind of comfort in assuming the whole world hates them. Guess what? The whole world doesn't hate Americans. The whole world hates idiots. As a fellow American, I implore you -- try to stop acting like one.
The point is that all these "strategies" are nothing more than scams. You're dancing around your boss's expectations because you're boss's expectations are unrealistic. That's like saying the high price of bread doesn't matter to you because bread is so compact that it's easy to steal. Who wants to be crooked just to be able to eat? Likewise, who wants to have to find ways to "cheat" his boss just so he can have some decent time away from the coal mine?
Thus, I can't complain that I'm poor -- I'm certainly not, not by African standards, European standards or even American standards. I do quite well, overall. And yet the money is all but useless to me, as far as enriching my life in any meaningful way. I can't afford to own property and I surely can't afford to start a family. Sure, I can buy big TVs, a fancy computer, and spend a bunch of money in restaurants -- in other words, dump all that money right back into the endless cycle of meaningless, conspicuous consumerism. But like you say -- does that make me richer?
I'd take the European standard of wealth, thank you very much, if it meant I could take a long lunch to spend time with friends, travel the world a little more, have a yard to let a dog run around in ... et f'ing cetera.
No joke. The holiday situation in the U.S. is deplorable compared to the rest of the so-called Western World. If you worked at a low-paying job, like a fast food franchise, you might be lucky to get those 80 hours.
A lot of Europeans complain that Americans are sheltered and don't know anything about the rest of the world. And why should we? We're hard pressed to find any time to travel. If you travel for just one week out of an entire year, that leaves you with just five available vacation days to plan for friends' weddings, a visit from family, a camping trip, etc.
Most of us burn our sick days for short-term time off like that, but that's hardly a good solution. Oh wait -- you have heard about the American healthcare system, haven't you?
Companies in the U.S. are fond of management philosophies that emphasize effective "human capital management." Say that ten times fast. Sounds a lot like "human cattle management," doesn't it? Coincidence?