Interesting comment, perhaps even worth an "Insightful" mod if I ever saw a mod point to give. (In contrast to receiving so many of the trolls', eh?) Still a bit stretched to see how your comment fits as a reply to my questions. It does sound like you might be someone in a position to answer some of them, so let me recap:
I think Apple designs well, but limits my freedom through monopolistic practices. For that reason, I have only purchased one Apple device in my life, a MacBook Pro with Retina display. I do have LOTS of experience with Apple products, from professional programming on a Apple II through some years of teaching university students to work with Macs. My relatively recent experiences with the MacBook Pro have been quite mixed. It has some excellent features and I normally use it every day for certain tasks (though I do most of my work and play on Windows and Ubuntu Linux boxen), but many of my experiences with the MacBook and especially with the Apple websites have been extremely negative. I would say that overall my view of Apple have become much more negative, and right I now regard Apple as the nastiest and most dangerous case of corporate cancer in the world.
And yet I want to learn new things. The iPhone is a significant new thing in the world, but I have no firsthand experience with it. There is much to learn there, and perhaps the current situation allows me a way to learn some of those things with little direct profit to Apple (thereby preventing me from contributing too directly to worsening the problems created by Apple's cancerous ways).
Let me pose my questions more directly from my perspective:
Should I buy a secondhand iPhone? If so, which models should I consider? Will a cheap secondhand iPhone with a new battery be almost as good as an expensive new iPhone? How much of the "iPhone experience" can I really get from an older iPhone?
Just adding my firsthand experience at AMD. I was working there in 1988 during the presidential campaign. There were lots of rumors that the company was in trouble and needed to start laying people off, but...
The owner of the company was a big supporter of Poppy Bush. Lots of "Don't worry, be happy" messages were distributed.
After the election and Poppy's victory, the message changed. "Off with their heads."
I actually survived those cuts, but the rise of Quayle contributed strongly to my decision to leave the country. Things got much worse after that.
Honest Abe Lincoln would NEVER believe what today's Republican Party has become. Liars and hypocrites with a smattering of fools. My only question now is how much blame to give the Dixiecrats when they switched to the GOP. Maybe Nixon and Dubya deserve less blame?
The replacement battery for my oldest smartphone (not an iPhone, but a popular model from [never again] Samsung) costs around $30, and that's with me doing all the work. Even if Apple can keep the labor time to 20 minutes, I think that's at least another ten bucks, and on top of that you have the administrative costs of tracking the phones.
Not sure, but I think the original battery-replacement charge was pretty close to their real costs. Apple is NOT in the business of trying to make money from replacing batteries. If there was a significant premium in the original charge, then I strongly believe that was mostly to encourage people to upgrade their iPhones. That's where Apple's big profits are coming from, and lost sales of new iPhones are their biggest profit reduction from this new battery replacement program.
I think ichimunki was fishing for a "Funny" mod, but it's hard to say without looking for the invisible AC comment he's replying to. Moot in my case, since I never see a mod point to give.
Having said that, I'm seriously wondering if this fiasco is my opportunity to learn about the iPhone on the cheap. It would seem that I could now get a secondhand iPhone at the usual low cost, but then replace the battery and make it almost as good as new thanks to Apple's tiny dip into their humongous cash reserves.
Any experts willing to address possible problems and questions with this plan?
(1) What older models are worth considering? (2) Are the secondhand prices already jumping up? (3) How do older models compare with using newer iPhones? (4) Can I just pop my SIM from my Android phone into the iPhone and go?
I can guess a bit on Question (4). I think it should be okay as long as the used iPhone is locked to the same network I am using now. However I'm not sure about the SIM form factors for iPhones...
Whoops, thought up three more questions:
(5) What are the time constraints? (6) Does Apple profit from secondhand iPhones? (7) How much backward compatibility is there from newer apps to older iPhones?
I also question between parts and labor if Apple is really making money on the battery replacement at that price. That was just thrown out as a given but who claims that is still a profit?
Depends on the capacity of the battery, but I'm pretty sure Apple is losing a little money on this special battery replacement program. However, the company has sufficient cash reserves to survive. Probably with enough cash left over to weather American Civil War II, as well.
I still see this entire fiasco as another symptom of the disease of corporate cancerism. "There is no Gawd but profit, and Apple is Gawd's #1 prophet." The battery replacement is a nice gesture, but it's symbolic. The real problem is that Apple can treat the customers like that without any real penalty.
The REAL punishment that Apple deserves would be loss of customers to a competing company that didn't do such things. Just too bad there is no freedom to choose a company that is actually competing directly against Apple, eh? (At least not yet, though if their financial models continue converging, at some point the google will be directly up against Apple. Right now the google is only around #6 on the prophet list.)
I think ichimunki was fishing for a "Funny" mod, but it's hard to say without looking for the invisible AC comment he's replying to. Moot in my case, since I never see a mod point to give.
Having said that, I'm seriously wondering if this fiasco is my opportunity to learn about the iPhone on the cheap. It would seem that I could now get a secondhand iPhone at the usual low cost, but then replace the battery and make it almost as good as new thanks to Apple's tiny dip into their humongous cash reserves.
Any experts willing to address possible problems and questions with this plan?
(1) What older models are worth considering? (2) Are the secondhand prices already jumping up? (3) How do older models compare with using newer iPhones? (4) Can I just pop my SIM from my Android phone into the iPhone and go?
I can guess a bit on Question (4). I think it should be okay as long as the used iPhone is locked to the same network I am using now. However I'm not sure about the SIM form factors for iPhones...
I'd heard of the book earlier, probably from John Dean, who later wrote a related book. My database says that I didn't finish reading it, however. I have a hard time actually getting through any ebook. Only managed that feat a couple of times, whereas I can usually apply myself to finishing any dead-tree book, even if tedious.
Hmm... Some of those symptoms (especially the social problems) certainly remind me of periods when I was spending too much time playing computer games, but I rarely played any games that I would describe as "video games". I remember a period with rogue (or hack?) and another period where I was split between a game called Backbone on Ubuntu and a Windows game whose name I can't remember just now... I'm also remembering another game called larn? I feel like it was somehow a reverse version of rogue?
Was loss of memory one of the symptoms?
Then again, there is evidence that I'm not that afflicted after all. I can't remember why I quit playing rogue. Maybe I just solved it and got the big prize? I do remember that I quit playing Backbone (and Freecell, the other game was called Freecell!) when I moved a few years ago. Didn't make any big effort to quit, but just stopped for no particular reason that I can specify now and haven't felt like playing since then. (Moved again this year, but still no interest in the computer games.)
You know these poll results are tearing the Donald up on the inside. "The election was rigged", furiously tweets #PresidentTweety. "I could have won the popular vote by campaigning differently! I didn't need no help from Vladimir... I mean Russian dictator Putin."
Actually, the real relationship of the poll results to this topic is how the activities of the paid trolls are proving how accurate REAL president Obama is. Good chance that when he says something it actually might be true.
The poll itself is rubbish. More like a name-recognition context than anything else. One fix would be to pair it with a poll for least admired people and report the net scores. An even better fix would require more work: (1) Stage one poll to get the top candidates, followed by (2) A runoff poll to pick a real winner from a reasonably small slate of candidates.
So imagine that 99% of the male fetuses were aborted. Tough luck if you were never born, but I'll bet the remaining 1% of males wouldn't complain so much. Or fight any wars, except maybe against the Chinese Granny Amazons! Long story short.
Most insightful comment I could find. Searched all of the comments moderated as insightful and on a variety of key words.
How much insight? Sorry, but I have to say not so much.
It doesn't matter who has 100% visibility on all of your financial transactions. If you think the government is more dangerous or less ethical than the too-big-to-fail banks and various corporations, then you aren't paying attention. The only thing keeping them in line has been the government, which is looking more and more pitiful as a defensive mechanism for ANYTHING these days. Especially for protecting our rights and freedoms.
I think the funniest delusion is actually held by the avaricious and super-rich bastards who think they are winning because they get to die with the most toys. Die tax free, too, thanks to the latest scam the cheapest politicians were bribed to deliver.
Get used to the new world. As I've noted before capitalism is as dead as communism. What we have now is corporate cancerism. There is no gawd but profit, and the chief prophets are giant corporations that will soon know your every movement and most of your thoughts because they will be able to track exactly where you spent every nickel and what you spent it on.
If any government still had the power or competence to capture the data, you can safely bet that government would be absolutely corrupted by so much power. However I think we are headed for NO government and NO laws except whatever the the last and most humongous corporation feels like having. Just for PR and advertising purposes.
“Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas.”
This particular comment has been praying upon my mind, even though I've read it before. Before the editing of my question, I actually asked for a rather larger Christmas present, a secret of deeper thinking, but maybe all I got was a deeper thought. If so, then I think this brief comment may have triggered it, though the chain of reasoning seems obscure as I think about it now. Even more obscure when I see that you [thinkwaitfast] were replying to an AC [Anonymous Cowad] post. My settings rarely show them...
My xmas present in the form of a deep thought is not that I'm too judgemental and intolerant. I already knew that, but I'm now wondering how much my judgment focuses on material things that are not affected by what anyone thinks of them versus people who naturally hate being judged, especially the negative judgments. I would say I'm even too judgmental about ideas, though I think I do have a much higher tolerance for bad ideas. The better to blow them away? Should my highest priority be to become less judgmental?
One related observation is that it probably explains why I have relatively few friends these years... Even worse that the old ones seem to be passing away faster than I acquire new ones. Worst of all that it doesn't bother me more?
The deeper topic underlying the quote as a possible example of 'great minds thinking alike' is the ontology of people that I've been working on over the last few months. Was it really seeded by some earlier encounter with that quote? I've been thinking about people divided into materialists, humanists, and idealists.
Many of the world's problems seem attributable to people who put material things (including money as a token for things) first. They love these material things above all else, leading to the state of corporate cancerism we live in today. They are avaricious and greedy beyond reason, to the point where they don't care if their greed injures or even kills other people. They may also worship such material things as drugs or alcohol or gambling (to acquire more material things), with all of their attendant problems. Last week's tax "reform" may be one of the materialists greatest triumphs in making super-rich people richer at the expense of relatively poor people who will suffer and die for their profits. As I've often said, under corporate cancerism, there is no gawd but profit.
The humanists focus on other people first, though I don't think they should necessarily be regarded as the "lowest class" solely on that basis. I believe many of my best teachers were humanists. However, some of the humanists are kind of despicable. For example, I regard #PresidentTweety as primarily a humanist, though his twisted form of humanism is to put himself first. Malignant narcissists are like that, eh?
Me? I'm obviously one of those idealists. Mostly harmless?
Hmm... The topic seems to have mostly expired, but I would say that I have read that authoritarian tendencies tend to be innately favored in about 30% of the population (and it must be a coincidence that #PresidentTweety's hardcore base is estimated around 30%), but I think bad schooling can make things worse. The current trend of teaching to the test under the guise of accountability for those damn tenured left-wing teachers is a kind of obedience training that will stifle any development of independent thinking.
ALL of the answers are already known and the students MUST memorize them.
Question authority? Perish the thought and fail the test, too, if you dare to do so.
All I got for Christmas was a relatively nice discussion on Slashdot. Judging by what I've seen recently, it makes me wonder if the professional trolls started their vacations early...
My main reaction is that the editing of the submission to direct it towards information overload has kind of limited the scope of the discussion. Probably a good thing, even though I think the underlying topic is mostly deeper and broader than the important aspect tagged "information overload".
I have to disagree with your premise, though you managed to land some good punches from the side. I would say that our current reality is we live in an economy of corporate cancerism. Capitalism and communism are long dead. The only gawd is profit, and <your favorite (or least favorite) profitable corporation here> is gawd's prophet.
While I agree that there is a whole lot of stupidity going on, I think much of it has been cultivated. There was method in their madness when they divided and conquered public education in America. Now there is a tiny division of good schools that the truly concerned parents can slimly hope their children can get into, while the lion's share of students are in obedience schools you wouldn't send your dog to. Or worse. We created our own crop of mindless mushrooms for a certain Russian kleptocrat to harvest...
The funny part happens when you consider the motivations. I used to think it was mostly stupid parents who were motivated to make sure their children were as stupid as they were, but now I realize they were just useful idiots. Follow the money. In this case, property taxes. Killing public schools reduces the need for property taxes that used to fund the public schools. Certain rich real estate speculators have always hated property taxes, and suddenly the circle is unbroken.
However, all of this is getting rather far away from the original question...
If you're referring to me, then no, but I would recommend seeing what your local library has to offer. I do read more than average, but I couldn't afford the habit if I didn't use the library so much.
Actually, I can only think of one book I bought in the last two years and two more than have been given to me as gifts, and I haven't finished those three...
I'd probably give you the "Funny" mod if I ever saw a mod point, but the deeper truth underlying your joke is that the Internet was largely paid for by porn. I had that not from the horse's mouth, but straight from the owner of an early ISP.
However I'm not sure whether to classify the joke itself as the shallowest form of not thinking or as deep fantasies. I'm embarrassed that I can't recall the name of the anonymizing network... The thing with the little onion?
Actually the last advice in The Art of Thinking Clearly was to stop reading the news. While I do agree that the lion's share of the news is trivia, disaster porn, or worse, I think that it's going too far to ignore all of it.
In terms of solutions, I've been thinking along two lines. One involves time management, as you mentioned, but the problem there is project planning. It's really hard to judge how much time a specific task or project will consume, but it's even harder to decide how much time that task or project is worth.
The line that seems more tractable to me involves public reputation of the sources. This would involve collecting and displaying such public information as how people have reacted to public writings, but I think there's also enormous potential in sharing the profile information that is already being compiled (by such companies as the google) and sharing it back to the people it came from in the first place.
Yes, but, but, but... In the original form [not that I would want to complain about the editing], I was asking for a Christmas present of enlightenment. I think I went wrong when I tried to make it into a joke along the lines of "Go ahead, punks, make my [Christmas] day" with help for deeper thinking.
I think I would be violating the network protocol to say more. However, the revised version did remind me of The Filter Bubble, which is another closely related book. I read that one last year, though it was published in 2012... (I didn't want to bury the topic under the books I've already read. It always leads back to Godel, Escher, Bach.)
(1) The link does not link to the described tool. None of the comments I looked at said this, which indicates that NONE of the comments were from people who had made that much effort to know what they were commenting about.
(2) No mention of "Dark Money" or other explanations of how the elections of America have been rigged and gamed. That was a broader search beyond checking all the so-called insightful comments.
(3) No funny comments.
(4) Lots of trollage including bogus moderation. Doesn't really matter who's paying for it.
If I ever saw a mod point I'd add a "Funny" to acknowledge the format of your reply. Then again, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have squandered an "Insightful" mod, even if brevity is the soul of wit. As of my writing, when the story is already about to fall off the Slashdot front page, there are no comments moderated "Funny", even though I think the target was juicy for jokes, and most of the "Insightful" comments were barely at best.
To me the main insight in this topic is something along the lines of "Why would anyone be surprised that Apple would abuse its monopoly position to increase its profits?"
Not sure if it represents some sort of insight, but I also wonder if there's an interesting parallelism here? Something about closed worldviews? Within AppleWorld, the most 'dangerous' competitors are old iPhones, while within TrumpWorld, the most 'dangerous' things are facts.
However, mostly I feel like it's additional evidence for an old insight: Capitalism is deader than communism. What America has now is corporate cancerism. There is no gawd but profit, and Apple is gawd's #1 prophet.
Damn the lawyers, full speed ahead! Unless your battery is getting old.
Apple charges a flat fee of $79, including the battery, for out of warranty iPhone battery replacement.
That's HARDLY "Half the price of a new phone". ANYONE's new phone.
Actually it's more than half the price of my newest smartphone. So far it's been quite adequate for my needs. However, there are less expensive ones. Or I could have replaced the battery on an old smartphone for less than half of $79.
However fans ignore facts. And Apple profits from their ignorance.
To me the only interesting part of this topic is why anyone would be surprised that Apple would abuse its monopoly position to boost its profits. How else could Apple solve their desperate problem of reaching infinite profit?
Oh. Wait. Not yet at infinity. They'll have to try something nastier.
Capitalism is deader than communism ever was. What we have now is corporate cancerism. There is no gawd but profit, and Apple is Profit's #1 prophet. (I'd include a citation, but we've already seen that facts don't matter in TrumpWorld.)
I think in the cases of natural monopolies, you should also have special tax rates. The main goal would be to make sure the government has sufficient money to regulate the monopoly properly and prevent price gouging. However I think there should be a secondary goal of supporting research to break the monopoly with alternative technologies or approaches that will support honest competition. In certain cases, there might be some justification for higher taxes for other purposes, or perhaps it would get more complicated than that. I think sales or consumption taxes are fundamentally wrongheaded because government should be encouraging the sales and consumption that drive the economy, but there are real infrastructure costs that need to be distributed fairly.
Network effects sometimes do lead to natural monopolies. However in many cases they are not really natural monopolies, but are used to create abnormal profits that allow monopoly-based destruction of the alternatives. I would use the delayed adoption of FM radio as an example.
Your Microsoft example is actually one that led me in this direction. Imagine if Microsoft had been divided into two or four competing companies. Each child company would have started with a copy of the source code and a roughly equal share of the human and physical resources. After that they would have competed freely using Windows as a standard technology. They would even be allowed to extend the standard by sharing the new extensions in public, but perhaps some of the children would decide to go their own way. I strongly believe the overall result would have been faster overall evolution of the OS situation and higher total profits. Perhaps Microsoft Child A would make bad choices and go down, but Children B and C would probably do better, and the overall result would have been REAL OS options (and more freedom) for everyone...
Very enlightening discussion. Basically I had ignored the laser printer option because I thought the upfront cost was too high and also wanted the option to print photos.
Wait, I almost never print a photo, but just send the link. Given that the low-end laser printers are so low, now I'm pretty sure I can find a really good value on a laser printer if I keep my eyes open for a few months... No rush that I know of.
Minor concerns do remain. WiFi printing from Windows 10, Mac OS, and Linux was not mentioned much. Also, not sure how much I should worry about the cartridge refill costs and long-term availability.
However, all in all there was a lot of useful information and many interesting testimonials here. My thanks to all the contributors, for what little that's worth. Gratitude and a couple of bucks can still get you a cup of coffee?
I'd give you the funny mod if I ever got a mod point. However, my first printer beats your Epson MX-80. I can't remember the brand name, but it was a dot-matrix thermal paper printer.
My second or third printer was a Brother with two daisy wheels. One was for the italic font, and I think it was so fancy as to have a red ribbon for two colors, too. Good experience with that one, but my second Brother printer (after a long gap filled with various other printers) was a huge disappointment. This discussion has me reconsidering the brand. The Brother color laser was substantially less expensive and smaller than the Canon offering...
I also remember a TI printer that was a pretty good workhorse. Also several HPs, which were mostly pretty good, except for the ink cartridge problems that caused me to ask the question that way... (These days HP seems to have disappeared locally as far as the stores are concerned, so I'm not even seeing it as an option.)
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting comment, perhaps even worth an "Insightful" mod if I ever saw a mod point to give. (In contrast to receiving so many of the trolls', eh?) Still a bit stretched to see how your comment fits as a reply to my questions. It does sound like you might be someone in a position to answer some of them, so let me recap:
I think Apple designs well, but limits my freedom through monopolistic practices. For that reason, I have only purchased one Apple device in my life, a MacBook Pro with Retina display. I do have LOTS of experience with Apple products, from professional programming on a Apple II through some years of teaching university students to work with Macs. My relatively recent experiences with the MacBook Pro have been quite mixed. It has some excellent features and I normally use it every day for certain tasks (though I do most of my work and play on Windows and Ubuntu Linux boxen), but many of my experiences with the MacBook and especially with the Apple websites have been extremely negative. I would say that overall my view of Apple have become much more negative, and right I now regard Apple as the nastiest and most dangerous case of corporate cancer in the world.
And yet I want to learn new things. The iPhone is a significant new thing in the world, but I have no firsthand experience with it. There is much to learn there, and perhaps the current situation allows me a way to learn some of those things with little direct profit to Apple (thereby preventing me from contributing too directly to worsening the problems created by Apple's cancerous ways).
Let me pose my questions more directly from my perspective:
Should I buy a secondhand iPhone?
If so, which models should I consider?
Will a cheap secondhand iPhone with a new battery be almost as good as an expensive new iPhone?
How much of the "iPhone experience" can I really get from an older iPhone?
Just adding my firsthand experience at AMD. I was working there in 1988 during the presidential campaign. There were lots of rumors that the company was in trouble and needed to start laying people off, but...
The owner of the company was a big supporter of Poppy Bush. Lots of "Don't worry, be happy" messages were distributed.
After the election and Poppy's victory, the message changed. "Off with their heads."
I actually survived those cuts, but the rise of Quayle contributed strongly to my decision to leave the country. Things got much worse after that.
Honest Abe Lincoln would NEVER believe what today's Republican Party has become. Liars and hypocrites with a smattering of fools. My only question now is how much blame to give the Dixiecrats when they switched to the GOP. Maybe Nixon and Dubya deserve less blame?
The replacement battery for my oldest smartphone (not an iPhone, but a popular model from [never again] Samsung) costs around $30, and that's with me doing all the work. Even if Apple can keep the labor time to 20 minutes, I think that's at least another ten bucks, and on top of that you have the administrative costs of tracking the phones.
Not sure, but I think the original battery-replacement charge was pretty close to their real costs. Apple is NOT in the business of trying to make money from replacing batteries. If there was a significant premium in the original charge, then I strongly believe that was mostly to encourage people to upgrade their iPhones. That's where Apple's big profits are coming from, and lost sales of new iPhones are their biggest profit reduction from this new battery replacement program.
I think ichimunki was fishing for a "Funny" mod, but it's hard to say without looking for the invisible AC comment he's replying to. Moot in my case, since I never see a mod point to give.
Having said that, I'm seriously wondering if this fiasco is my opportunity to learn about the iPhone on the cheap. It would seem that I could now get a secondhand iPhone at the usual low cost, but then replace the battery and make it almost as good as new thanks to Apple's tiny dip into their humongous cash reserves.
Any experts willing to address possible problems and questions with this plan?
(1) What older models are worth considering?
(2) Are the secondhand prices already jumping up?
(3) How do older models compare with using newer iPhones?
(4) Can I just pop my SIM from my Android phone into the iPhone and go?
I can guess a bit on Question (4). I think it should be okay as long as the used iPhone is locked to the same network I am using now. However I'm not sure about the SIM form factors for iPhones...
Whoops, thought up three more questions:
(5) What are the time constraints?
(6) Does Apple profit from secondhand iPhones?
(7) How much backward compatibility is there from newer apps to older iPhones?
I also question between parts and labor if Apple is really making money on the battery replacement at that price. That was just thrown out as a given but who claims that is still a profit?
Depends on the capacity of the battery, but I'm pretty sure Apple is losing a little money on this special battery replacement program. However, the company has sufficient cash reserves to survive. Probably with enough cash left over to weather American Civil War II, as well.
I still see this entire fiasco as another symptom of the disease of corporate cancerism. "There is no Gawd but profit, and Apple is Gawd's #1 prophet." The battery replacement is a nice gesture, but it's symbolic. The real problem is that Apple can treat the customers like that without any real penalty.
The REAL punishment that Apple deserves would be loss of customers to a competing company that didn't do such things. Just too bad there is no freedom to choose a company that is actually competing directly against Apple, eh? (At least not yet, though if their financial models continue converging, at some point the google will be directly up against Apple. Right now the google is only around #6 on the prophet list.)
I think ichimunki was fishing for a "Funny" mod, but it's hard to say without looking for the invisible AC comment he's replying to. Moot in my case, since I never see a mod point to give.
Having said that, I'm seriously wondering if this fiasco is my opportunity to learn about the iPhone on the cheap. It would seem that I could now get a secondhand iPhone at the usual low cost, but then replace the battery and make it almost as good as new thanks to Apple's tiny dip into their humongous cash reserves.
Any experts willing to address possible problems and questions with this plan?
(1) What older models are worth considering?
(2) Are the secondhand prices already jumping up?
(3) How do older models compare with using newer iPhones?
(4) Can I just pop my SIM from my Android phone into the iPhone and go?
I can guess a bit on Question (4). I think it should be okay as long as the used iPhone is locked to the same network I am using now. However I'm not sure about the SIM form factors for iPhones...
I'd heard of the book earlier, probably from John Dean, who later wrote a related book. My database says that I didn't finish reading it, however. I have a hard time actually getting through any ebook. Only managed that feat a couple of times, whereas I can usually apply myself to finishing any dead-tree book, even if tedious.
Hmm... Some of those symptoms (especially the social problems) certainly remind me of periods when I was spending too much time playing computer games, but I rarely played any games that I would describe as "video games". I remember a period with rogue (or hack?) and another period where I was split between a game called Backbone on Ubuntu and a Windows game whose name I can't remember just now... I'm also remembering another game called larn? I feel like it was somehow a reverse version of rogue?
Was loss of memory one of the symptoms?
Then again, there is evidence that I'm not that afflicted after all. I can't remember why I quit playing rogue. Maybe I just solved it and got the big prize? I do remember that I quit playing Backbone (and Freecell, the other game was called Freecell!) when I moved a few years ago. Didn't make any big effort to quit, but just stopped for no particular reason that I can specify now and haven't felt like playing since then. (Moved again this year, but still no interest in the computer games.)
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
You know these poll results are tearing the Donald up on the inside. "The election was rigged", furiously tweets #PresidentTweety. "I could have won the popular vote by campaigning differently! I didn't need no help from Vladimir... I mean Russian dictator Putin."
Actually, the real relationship of the poll results to this topic is how the activities of the paid trolls are proving how accurate REAL president Obama is. Good chance that when he says something it actually might be true.
The poll itself is rubbish. More like a name-recognition context than anything else. One fix would be to pair it with a poll for least admired people and report the net scores. An even better fix would require more work: (1) Stage one poll to get the top candidates, followed by (2) A runoff poll to pick a real winner from a reasonably small slate of candidates.
So imagine that 99% of the male fetuses were aborted. Tough luck if you were never born, but I'll bet the remaining 1% of males wouldn't complain so much. Or fight any wars, except maybe against the Chinese Granny Amazons! Long story short.
Most insightful comment I could find. Searched all of the comments moderated as insightful and on a variety of key words.
How much insight? Sorry, but I have to say not so much.
It doesn't matter who has 100% visibility on all of your financial transactions. If you think the government is more dangerous or less ethical than the too-big-to-fail banks and various corporations, then you aren't paying attention. The only thing keeping them in line has been the government, which is looking more and more pitiful as a defensive mechanism for ANYTHING these days. Especially for protecting our rights and freedoms.
I think the funniest delusion is actually held by the avaricious and super-rich bastards who think they are winning because they get to die with the most toys. Die tax free, too, thanks to the latest scam the cheapest politicians were bribed to deliver.
Get used to the new world. As I've noted before capitalism is as dead as communism. What we have now is corporate cancerism. There is no gawd but profit, and the chief prophets are giant corporations that will soon know your every movement and most of your thoughts because they will be able to track exactly where you spent every nickel and what you spent it on.
If any government still had the power or competence to capture the data, you can safely bet that government would be absolutely corrupted by so much power. However I think we are headed for NO government and NO laws except whatever the the last and most humongous corporation feels like having. Just for PR and advertising purposes.
“Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas.”
https://quoteinvestigator.com/...
This particular comment has been praying upon my mind, even though I've read it before. Before the editing of my question, I actually asked for a rather larger Christmas present, a secret of deeper thinking, but maybe all I got was a deeper thought. If so, then I think this brief comment may have triggered it, though the chain of reasoning seems obscure as I think about it now. Even more obscure when I see that you [thinkwaitfast] were replying to an AC [Anonymous Cowad] post. My settings rarely show them...
My xmas present in the form of a deep thought is not that I'm too judgemental and intolerant. I already knew that, but I'm now wondering how much my judgment focuses on material things that are not affected by what anyone thinks of them versus people who naturally hate being judged, especially the negative judgments. I would say I'm even too judgmental about ideas, though I think I do have a much higher tolerance for bad ideas. The better to blow them away? Should my highest priority be to become less judgmental?
One related observation is that it probably explains why I have relatively few friends these years... Even worse that the old ones seem to be passing away faster than I acquire new ones. Worst of all that it doesn't bother me more?
The deeper topic underlying the quote as a possible example of 'great minds thinking alike' is the ontology of people that I've been working on over the last few months. Was it really seeded by some earlier encounter with that quote? I've been thinking about people divided into materialists, humanists, and idealists.
Many of the world's problems seem attributable to people who put material things (including money as a token for things) first. They love these material things above all else, leading to the state of corporate cancerism we live in today. They are avaricious and greedy beyond reason, to the point where they don't care if their greed injures or even kills other people. They may also worship such material things as drugs or alcohol or gambling (to acquire more material things), with all of their attendant problems. Last week's tax "reform" may be one of the materialists greatest triumphs in making super-rich people richer at the expense of relatively poor people who will suffer and die for their profits. As I've often said, under corporate cancerism, there is no gawd but profit.
The humanists focus on other people first, though I don't think they should necessarily be regarded as the "lowest class" solely on that basis. I believe many of my best teachers were humanists. However, some of the humanists are kind of despicable. For example, I regard #PresidentTweety as primarily a humanist, though his twisted form of humanism is to put himself first. Malignant narcissists are like that, eh?
Me? I'm obviously one of those idealists. Mostly harmless?
Hmm... The topic seems to have mostly expired, but I would say that I have read that authoritarian tendencies tend to be innately favored in about 30% of the population (and it must be a coincidence that #PresidentTweety's hardcore base is estimated around 30%), but I think bad schooling can make things worse. The current trend of teaching to the test under the guise of accountability for those damn tenured left-wing teachers is a kind of obedience training that will stifle any development of independent thinking.
ALL of the answers are already known and the students MUST memorize them.
Question authority? Perish the thought and fail the test, too, if you dare to do so.
All I got for Christmas was a relatively nice discussion on Slashdot. Judging by what I've seen recently, it makes me wonder if the professional trolls started their vacations early...
My main reaction is that the editing of the submission to direct it towards information overload has kind of limited the scope of the discussion. Probably a good thing, even though I think the underlying topic is mostly deeper and broader than the important aspect tagged "information overload".
I have to disagree with your premise, though you managed to land some good punches from the side. I would say that our current reality is we live in an economy of corporate cancerism. Capitalism and communism are long dead. The only gawd is profit, and <your favorite (or least favorite) profitable corporation here> is gawd's prophet.
While I agree that there is a whole lot of stupidity going on, I think much of it has been cultivated. There was method in their madness when they divided and conquered public education in America. Now there is a tiny division of good schools that the truly concerned parents can slimly hope their children can get into, while the lion's share of students are in obedience schools you wouldn't send your dog to. Or worse. We created our own crop of mindless mushrooms for a certain Russian kleptocrat to harvest...
The funny part happens when you consider the motivations. I used to think it was mostly stupid parents who were motivated to make sure their children were as stupid as they were, but now I realize they were just useful idiots. Follow the money. In this case, property taxes. Killing public schools reduces the need for property taxes that used to fund the public schools. Certain rich real estate speculators have always hated property taxes, and suddenly the circle is unbroken.
However, all of this is getting rather far away from the original question...
If you're referring to me, then no, but I would recommend seeing what your local library has to offer. I do read more than average, but I couldn't afford the habit if I didn't use the library so much.
Actually, I can only think of one book I bought in the last two years and two more than have been given to me as gifts, and I haven't finished those three...
I'd probably give you the "Funny" mod if I ever saw a mod point, but the deeper truth underlying your joke is that the Internet was largely paid for by porn. I had that not from the horse's mouth, but straight from the owner of an early ISP.
However I'm not sure whether to classify the joke itself as the shallowest form of not thinking or as deep fantasies. I'm embarrassed that I can't recall the name of the anonymizing network... The thing with the little onion?
Actually the last advice in The Art of Thinking Clearly was to stop reading the news. While I do agree that the lion's share of the news is trivia, disaster porn, or worse, I think that it's going too far to ignore all of it.
In terms of solutions, I've been thinking along two lines. One involves time management, as you mentioned, but the problem there is project planning. It's really hard to judge how much time a specific task or project will consume, but it's even harder to decide how much time that task or project is worth.
The line that seems more tractable to me involves public reputation of the sources. This would involve collecting and displaying such public information as how people have reacted to public writings, but I think there's also enormous potential in sharing the profile information that is already being compiled (by such companies as the google) and sharing it back to the people it came from in the first place.
Yes, but, but, but... In the original form [not that I would want to complain about the editing], I was asking for a Christmas present of enlightenment. I think I went wrong when I tried to make it into a joke along the lines of "Go ahead, punks, make my [Christmas] day" with help for deeper thinking.
I think I would be violating the network protocol to say more. However, the revised version did remind me of The Filter Bubble , which is another closely related book. I read that one last year, though it was published in 2012... (I didn't want to bury the topic under the books I've already read. It always leads back to Godel, Escher, Bach .)
(1) The link does not link to the described tool. None of the comments I looked at said this, which indicates that NONE of the comments were from people who had made that much effort to know what they were commenting about.
(2) No mention of "Dark Money" or other explanations of how the elections of America have been rigged and gamed. That was a broader search beyond checking all the so-called insightful comments.
(3) No funny comments.
(4) Lots of trollage including bogus moderation. Doesn't really matter who's paying for it.
If I ever saw a mod point I'd add a "Funny" to acknowledge the format of your reply. Then again, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have squandered an "Insightful" mod, even if brevity is the soul of wit. As of my writing, when the story is already about to fall off the Slashdot front page, there are no comments moderated "Funny", even though I think the target was juicy for jokes, and most of the "Insightful" comments were barely at best.
To me the main insight in this topic is something along the lines of "Why would anyone be surprised that Apple would abuse its monopoly position to increase its profits?"
Not sure if it represents some sort of insight, but I also wonder if there's an interesting parallelism here? Something about closed worldviews? Within AppleWorld, the most 'dangerous' competitors are old iPhones, while within TrumpWorld, the most 'dangerous' things are facts.
However, mostly I feel like it's additional evidence for an old insight: Capitalism is deader than communism. What America has now is corporate cancerism. There is no gawd but profit, and Apple is gawd's #1 prophet.
Damn the lawyers, full speed ahead! Unless your battery is getting old.
Apple charges a flat fee of $79, including the battery, for out of warranty iPhone battery replacement.
That's HARDLY "Half the price of a new phone". ANYONE's new phone.
Actually it's more than half the price of my newest smartphone. So far it's been quite adequate for my needs. However, there are less expensive ones. Or I could have replaced the battery on an old smartphone for less than half of $79.
However fans ignore facts. And Apple profits from their ignorance.
To me the only interesting part of this topic is why anyone would be surprised that Apple would abuse its monopoly position to boost its profits. How else could Apple solve their desperate problem of reaching infinite profit?
Oh. Wait. Not yet at infinity. They'll have to try something nastier.
Capitalism is deader than communism ever was. What we have now is corporate cancerism. There is no gawd but profit, and Apple is Profit's #1 prophet. (I'd include a citation, but we've already seen that facts don't matter in TrumpWorld.)
I think in the cases of natural monopolies, you should also have special tax rates. The main goal would be to make sure the government has sufficient money to regulate the monopoly properly and prevent price gouging. However I think there should be a secondary goal of supporting research to break the monopoly with alternative technologies or approaches that will support honest competition. In certain cases, there might be some justification for higher taxes for other purposes, or perhaps it would get more complicated than that. I think sales or consumption taxes are fundamentally wrongheaded because government should be encouraging the sales and consumption that drive the economy, but there are real infrastructure costs that need to be distributed fairly.
Network effects sometimes do lead to natural monopolies. However in many cases they are not really natural monopolies, but are used to create abnormal profits that allow monopoly-based destruction of the alternatives. I would use the delayed adoption of FM radio as an example.
Your Microsoft example is actually one that led me in this direction. Imagine if Microsoft had been divided into two or four competing companies. Each child company would have started with a copy of the source code and a roughly equal share of the human and physical resources. After that they would have competed freely using Windows as a standard technology. They would even be allowed to extend the standard by sharing the new extensions in public, but perhaps some of the children would decide to go their own way. I strongly believe the overall result would have been faster overall evolution of the OS situation and higher total profits. Perhaps Microsoft Child A would make bad choices and go down, but Children B and C would probably do better, and the overall result would have been REAL OS options (and more freedom) for everyone...
Very enlightening discussion. Basically I had ignored the laser printer option because I thought the upfront cost was too high and also wanted the option to print photos.
Wait, I almost never print a photo, but just send the link. Given that the low-end laser printers are so low, now I'm pretty sure I can find a really good value on a laser printer if I keep my eyes open for a few months... No rush that I know of.
Minor concerns do remain. WiFi printing from Windows 10, Mac OS, and Linux was not mentioned much. Also, not sure how much I should worry about the cartridge refill costs and long-term availability.
However, all in all there was a lot of useful information and many interesting testimonials here. My thanks to all the contributors, for what little that's worth. Gratitude and a couple of bucks can still get you a cup of coffee?
I'd give you the funny mod if I ever got a mod point. However, my first printer beats your Epson MX-80. I can't remember the brand name, but it was a dot-matrix thermal paper printer.
My second or third printer was a Brother with two daisy wheels. One was for the italic font, and I think it was so fancy as to have a red ribbon for two colors, too. Good experience with that one, but my second Brother printer (after a long gap filled with various other printers) was a huge disappointment. This discussion has me reconsidering the brand. The Brother color laser was substantially less expensive and smaller than the Canon offering...
I also remember a TI printer that was a pretty good workhorse. Also several HPs, which were mostly pretty good, except for the ink cartridge problems that caused me to ask the question that way... (These days HP seems to have disappeared locally as far as the stores are concerned, so I'm not even seeing it as an option.)