To be fair, the windows users didn't pay the hardware premium at the beginning.
Unless they bought from another tier 1 manufacturer... they may have even paid more for lesser quality and poorer design, if they were buying a laptop.
There is a way to make Macs cheaper than equivalent windows-based PC's: a kind of arbitrage.
You simply have to take advantage of the overpriced used mac market. Instead of hanging on to your machine for 5 years and complaining about obsolescence or swearing at the cost and hassle of upgrading components, sell it after two years, then buy a refurb from Apple and add your own RAM. You will likely lose a few hundred dollars, about the price of OS, HD, and graphics card updates. However, you wind up with a warranty and better components, and an OS upgrade.
Doing this has been cheaper than building a hackintosh, for me.
Three of my grandparents died of cancer. Two had lung cancer: one died in her 70's, her husband fought it and survived to live another 12 years, including getting remarried to a younger woman when he was 80 and travelling around the world on cruise ships playing shuffleboard and bridge... whatever floats your boat, I guess. The lung cancer reclaimed him in the end, though. Both he and his wife had unpleasant deaths, despite the sucess in beating cancer the first time. The irony: he was a tobacco executive, starting off as a small town tobacco rep in the 1930's, and so was an insider on the dangers. The company comp'ed him and his wife a free carton of smokes every week. Saves on paying out pensions I guess!
My other grandfather died of throat cancer (he smoked the filterless raunchy cigs), but was a shining example of how to manage the end of a full life, with a painful disease. He remarried to a 40-year-old when he was 80 (not a gold-digger, it's complicated) and had a lusty last couple of years, the old dog. He worked in his beloved fields (a subsistence peasant farmer) until the day he went to the hospital, then died a month later. He would have died earlier, but was waiting for various family members to visit. At last, after a ceremonial drink of his own wine, he told the group of us to "go, go, I can die now" -- and he died a couple of hours later, obviously under control of his own will. Badass.
Driving is the most dangerous activity I engage in frequently. Bungee jumping is probably safer.
So driving while lit up on three tabs of meth shouldn't be illegal unless you actually get into an accident?
The GP didn't really insinuate that. Driving under the influence generally makes you incompetent, and does harm. Mind you, I'd prefer that the person driving behind me had taken one toke, rather than having started an argument with the kids in the back seat.
However, if this is about risk, then a fair risk assessment would have to look at the statistical causes of accidents, and set traffic laws based on that. Smoking cigarettes while driving, being sleep-deprived, failing to wear appropriate glasses, cellphone use, even changing the radio while driving might have to be specified as prohibited activities.
Or, you could just fine-tune existing laws about dangerous driving, without having to be too specific.
I used Word to write my master's thesis, and by consistently using styles, along with Zotero, cross-referenced fields, and bookmarks, it came out very nice looking.
I did too, just like you! It was great for indexing, working with chapters, footnotes, and ToC, even drop caps. Styles were a lifesaver.
Here's the kicker: I did all that on a 512K RAM original Mac, with two floppy drives and no HD, with MS Word v.3.0. It booted in 17 seconds, and starting Word took 10 seconds. It didn't crash once in 10 years of regular usage.
Now I use Word 2008 [when I must]. It takes just as long to start on a computer thousands of times faster/bigger, and I don't use as many features (OS X has nicer spellcheck, for instance). The application is less stable than its 1989 version. I have to struggle with its settings, like activating hyperlinks (keeps losing the autocorrect setting to turn that shit off), or selecting text I don't want. About the only feature enhancement I actually use is commenting, the rest is just foofaraw.
Those crappy white keyboards? Terrible design. They're white, so look grungy in a few days. It's a clear plastic bowl that collects crap, hair, fuzz, what have you... and then shows it to you, inaccessible to any cleaning strategy. The keys don't depress at the correct angle, and so feel sticky unless you hold your hand at an unergonomic angle. They don't sound right. The cord is too short. The USB hub doesn't provide enough power to most USB sticks.
The only thing those keyboards have right in the design department is the thin frame, so you can snug your mouse pad up to it and they fit on a keyboard tray together.
That's not a CD, according to the spec. It's an optical disc that acts like a CD in many, but not all, devices.
I bought a Ben Harper CD only to find it wasn't actually a CD and wouldn't play in all my players. Had to bring it back for a refund, and (legally, I'm Canadian) download all his music henceforth. I support that artist via performances but not Sony, his distributor. Rinse and repeat.
As someone who consumed organic food for several years I can attest that none of the organic food I ate tasted better than its conventional counterpart.
This is modded insightful but lacks a key insight: we think about plant varieties in an industrial sense, as though a potato is either red, brown, or 'new' or a bell pepper is green or red.
We've been dumbed-down about agricultural variety, both plants and animals. The biggest difference in flavour will be between one variety and the next, as well as how fresh it is or when it was picked or how handled.
It's astonishing that people think the use of pesticides or lack thereof will make a big difference in taste. Farming practices are much much more than 'to spray or not spray'. Try a blue potato sometime; most of the blue varieties are utterly delicious.
In other words, stop buying produce at the supermarket.
You should not, however, use that as an argument for producing food with less efficient methods like organic farming - the key to better taste is to get the veggies locally.
It isn't just freshness, though that's enormously important.
Often smaller family farms are planting more interesting and tasty varieties, as well---varieties that you can't get in the supermarket because they don't fit in as well with large-scale equipment or rapid growth.
People ask if I eat meat, because I don't eat a lot. I generally say "yes, but I prefer to know its name first". Just bought a lamb off a friend, and waiting on some meat birds from another friend, and am collecting a couple of dozen eggs later today.
We bought into a shared cow so we can get legal unpasteurized milk, and I'm watering a friend's garden in exchange for fresh goat's milk.
If you think beef is bad, just take a peek (or a whiff) at industrial meat chickens or even salmon farms.
Eggs, too. Chickens were meant to eat fresh greens and bugs.
If you care about organic certification, learn a bit about the certification process; the best bet is to look for certification stamps from private bodies like Oregon Tilth, and be leery of lobbyist-certified bodies like the National Organic Program. In Canada, consider the more regional certifying bodies.
And always, always, choose buying locally from a farmer you trust over supermarket organic brands. Smart smaller-scale farmers don't poison their kids by overspraying, even if they aren't certified.
Anyone who eats seedless fruit while complaining about "GM food" is a fucking idiot.
Anyone who equates selective breeding with current methods of genetic modification is either a shill or badly misinformed. I bet you fall into the shill category, because you're right, in principle, that there's nothing wrong with the concept of GMO's in a loose sense, but everything wrong with the way it's being done and who's doing it, and I suspect that you don't care about those things, and obfuscating the difference between breeding and transgenics-with-a-shotgun (yes really) works for your ideology.
GMO crops do contaminate other crops, deal with it. You're setting up a straw man argument agin' them thar hippies.
Personally, Monsanto, Novartis, and Cargill can just stay the fuck off my plate, and stop undermining family farms.
Species variation is completely different to "organic" foods.
And yet it's a key difference between industrial large-scale agriculture and family-farm scale organic agriculture: plant varieties. Conscientious organic farmers generally use varieties that benefit from certain genetics. One of the most common advantages of the varieties grown by small-scale ag is taste. Many organic farmers are also part of an international seed saver network who shepherd agricultural genetic heritage by preserving varieties that are not suited to industrial ag: potatoes are an excellent example (only a handful of the 5000+ varieties of spud are good for combine farming: mainly the big but pathetic russet).
Sustainable practices like crop rotation are still not used by these "organic" farmers, they think they can still treat the land with the same contempt that chemical farmers do.
That's a key point: large scale organically certified farming as practiced by corporate farms is not what you think of in the store. It's still bad for the soil, still engages in shameful labour practices, is wasteful with water and energy, and uses the same anemic tasting plant varieties. Given the choice, I will always buy local over organic, preferably from a family farm (luckily, where I live, they're mostly family farms). One thing you can do if you care about pesticide use plus sustainability, is look into the certification body: for the USA, Oregon Tilth is the go-to organisation, for instance. Don't trust national or stat certification bodies, they're compromised.
Unfortunately this is a HUGE business, so crop rotation won't happen in the near future....Either way, your point is moot as "organic farmers" still use the same varieties as non-"organic".
Your point is partly excellent, partly uninformed. Good farmers use good varieties, that usually are tastier (and often have more concentrated nutrients as a result). Please search out good food producers and support them. Look into Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) -- where you invest directly in a market garden crop and get a steady supply of it -- and farmers markets as well as farm gate sales and U-pick. Likewise, don't bother supporting corporate organic farming that is basically greenwashing. Find a good butcher who buys from the producer, if that's legal in your jurisdiction.
OK, off to buy fantastic eggs and lettuce from friends down the road. We invested in a calf there, waiting for her to get pregnant soon then we'll be getting today's milk.
By suppressing some portions of free speech as you propose
What proposal? Which post were you reading? I thought I was just saying that it's tough to do but every society tries.
Maybe you don't think it should be criminal to shout "Fire Fire" in a crowded theatre, just to watch the trampling? Is that free speech? Where does that cross over into "burn that bastard"?
I was speculating that since we pretty universally agree that fraudulent transactions need regulating, there might be a corollary in the advocacy of violence. In other words, if you expend a lot of energy calling for a murder, and then it happens, maybe you should be liable.
My only real recommendation? ban sociopaths from politics. Not currently possible, but necessary.
P.S. propaganda doesn't come only from politicians: it propagates from many points.
Yes, the relationship between public discourse and the sociopaths who take power for genocidal reasons is very interesting and easily described as the forces of darkness. You still can't be evil at that scale without a massive web of lies to reprogram society.
So why aren't we concentrating on sociopaths? They're the crux.
please don't say it was just words, because it went much deeper than that.
Did anyone actually say it was just words that caused genocide? The point was that you can't run a genocide (or a totalitarian state, etc.) without propaganda, so it gets hard to separate the two.
Words do not have the power to kill or otherwise (really) hurt someone. Therfore they should be unregulated unless dealing with a contract or an offer to trade.
I so wish you were right. The problem is that we don't want to acknowledge the elephant in the room... propaganda works, on enough people to make a difference. Ask a Rwandan or Bosnian, or study Himmler (who famously claimed that it was the loudspeaker that conquered Germany). Sometimes, during genocide, it's hard for people to separate the words from the machete; one is an extension of the other.
I don't mean that in any mystical sense, I'm thinking of the stanford prison experiment etc. The line between speech and a decision to act disappears. Your conviction (and my wishes) about the independence of speech from action is an abstraction, since it requires humans who are uniformly well-schooled to be proud individualists, skeptics, and responsible citizens.
Perhaps we can find a functional way to make political speech a social contract that is bound to regulation like other transactions... after all, genocide relies on fraudulent and deceptive claims. The problem always resides with who gets to determine the truth.
if Facebook doesn't have a Canadian legal entity, nor Canadian hosting, the answer is "who cares"?.... Just because there's users on FB from all around the world, it doesn't mean that FB has to abide by all countries' laws. If that were the case, the Internet would be a hobbled and useless mess.
You may be right about most things internet-wise. However, Facebook is an interesting case; fully one-third of the canadian population subscribes to FB (so a much more sizeable proportion of internet users), and thus the privacy commissioner is well within their mandate to ring alarms by whatever means necessary. The implications are enormous. The nature of Facebook's control over the personal information of our citizens means that if we don't have a clear legal means to manage privacy issues of our nation, the gov rightly feels a need to seek such means. I'm in favour of education over regulation, but something has to be done. I've been ranting about FB's ToS for years, but few seem to care. We have warnings on cigarette packages, for instance. That's a good idea. If one third of Canada is engaged in a transaction from their own homes, saying that that is not business conducted in Canada rings a bit false, don't you think? It isn't a technical stretch to divide such major sites into country regions. Google, for instance, easily resolves my visits to google.ca based on IP, whereas facebook.ca redirects to the.com. As usual, the internet throws all former definitions of communication into doubt.
]They evolved by the ones who were better able to survive wiping out the ones who were not.
Bunk. Please cite your sources, else it's just ideological prattle. It's just as easy to say that your ancestors prevailed because their language used clicks, which are better for hunting, and that they had better sex, and were better cooks. (All of which has some support in the evidence.)
Most of the world is perfectly happy to let other people carry the load for them.
The vast majority of the people in my community like to be productive, and as I travelled the world living and working like a local, discovered pretty much a universal pride in productivity, equating a variant on a work ethic with self worth.
A "right" is only a protection from other people curtailing your own freedoms.
Your argument is full of ideology (as are most arguments about rights, so no offense). Unfortunately, ideology is like halitosis: it's always someone else's problem. Your viewpoint is natural; others' are constructed. Nowhere is this more obvious than the notion of rights. Your particular ideology calls on a specious "objective fact" that the wealth of society is to be parted out to individuals based on their ability to crowd close to the trough. Now, there may be a kind of sociobiological correctness to this, by acknowledging that civilization is a thin hallucinatory veneer on our endocrine-driven counter-adaptive animal impulses and "that's simply natural", but that's not what we're taught in kindergarten or by ecologists, so it rings false. Health care is a collective activity, akin to utilities and other components of what is loosely called the social 'safety net'. One of the things that is astounding about the american health care system to an outsider is its utter complexity and inefficient bureaucracies, with their sometimes kafkaesque cruelty. Since health care benefits from continuity, one could argue that it naturally becomes a 'lifelong transaction' --- and that it is in the interest of a populace that that transaction be with a public institution, in order to best protect people from abuse and neglect, and ensure fair access. I realize that there is a certain amount of that protection built in to most health care in the US, but nothing like a socialized system. So, in your definition of the right to protection from oppression, universal healthcare can be considered part of maintaining basic human rights. But further, there is the issue of the wealth of society. If wealth in the form of medical knowledge is generated out of collective activity (e.g. internationally available results of research, subsidies for hospitals, university funding, tax breaks, yadda), and one accepts that a minimum level of access to health care protects rights (such as the right to not be denied medical access due to prejudice, cruelty, or opportunism), then that wealth should be distributed in a fair fashion, so that its collective nature is part of the formula. That is the right to not be ripped off (i.e. economic freedom). Further, there is such a thing as collective rights, unless you don't think that hominids evolved in troupes and god made us like cougars, so that civilization is an abomination. The collective right to economic development suggests that since it is so much cheaper and socially stabilizing to have a reliably healthy populace, universal health care protects the collective rights of society to have freedom to develop rationally. Playing devil's advocate here, but as a canuck I see this played out daily, with mixed but mostly supportive results. FWIW, I have no problem with rich bastards jumping to the head of the line, so long as no-one else is denied a needed transplant. The biggest canadian hero isn't Gretzky or Wolverine, but Tommy Douglas, and that's more than just ideology, it's results.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, the windows users didn't pay the hardware premium at the beginning.
Unless they bought from another tier 1 manufacturer... they may have even paid more for lesser quality and poorer design, if they were buying a laptop.
"You are no better than the Iran Shah. He too is..
Woah! Are you from a parallel universe with a different outcome to the 20th century, where the Shah was never overthrown?
Maybe you manage to quiet people down while they try to figure out what the hell you're referring to?
There is a way to make Macs cheaper than equivalent windows-based PC's: a kind of arbitrage.
You simply have to take advantage of the overpriced used mac market. Instead of hanging on to your machine for 5 years and complaining about obsolescence or swearing at the cost and hassle of upgrading components, sell it after two years, then buy a refurb from Apple and add your own RAM. You will likely lose a few hundred dollars, about the price of OS, HD, and graphics card updates. However, you wind up with a warranty and better components, and an OS upgrade.
Doing this has been cheaper than building a hackintosh, for me.
Three of my grandparents died of cancer. Two had lung cancer: one died in her 70's, her husband fought it and survived to live another 12 years, including getting remarried to a younger woman when he was 80 and travelling around the world on cruise ships playing shuffleboard and bridge... whatever floats your boat, I guess. The lung cancer reclaimed him in the end, though. Both he and his wife had unpleasant deaths, despite the sucess in beating cancer the first time. The irony: he was a tobacco executive, starting off as a small town tobacco rep in the 1930's, and so was an insider on the dangers. The company comp'ed him and his wife a free carton of smokes every week. Saves on paying out pensions I guess!
My other grandfather died of throat cancer (he smoked the filterless raunchy cigs), but was a shining example of how to manage the end of a full life, with a painful disease. He remarried to a 40-year-old when he was 80 (not a gold-digger, it's complicated) and had a lusty last couple of years, the old dog. He worked in his beloved fields (a subsistence peasant farmer) until the day he went to the hospital, then died a month later. He would have died earlier, but was waiting for various family members to visit. At last, after a ceremonial drink of his own wine, he told the group of us to "go, go, I can die now" -- and he died a couple of hours later, obviously under control of his own will. Badass.
Right! As the saying goes: "I want to die quietly in my sleep like my grandfather... not screaming and crying like his passengers."
Driving is the most dangerous activity I engage in frequently. Bungee jumping is probably safer.
So driving while lit up on three tabs of meth shouldn't be illegal unless you actually get into an accident?
The GP didn't really insinuate that. Driving under the influence generally makes you incompetent, and does harm. Mind you, I'd prefer that the person driving behind me had taken one toke, rather than having started an argument with the kids in the back seat.
However, if this is about risk, then a fair risk assessment would have to look at the statistical causes of accidents, and set traffic laws based on that. Smoking cigarettes while driving, being sleep-deprived, failing to wear appropriate glasses, cellphone use, even changing the radio while driving might have to be specified as prohibited activities.
Or, you could just fine-tune existing laws about dangerous driving, without having to be too specific.
I used Word to write my master's thesis, and by consistently using styles, along with Zotero, cross-referenced fields, and bookmarks, it came out very nice looking.
I did too, just like you! It was great for indexing, working with chapters, footnotes, and ToC, even drop caps. Styles were a lifesaver.
Here's the kicker: I did all that on a 512K RAM original Mac, with two floppy drives and no HD, with MS Word v.3.0. It booted in 17 seconds, and starting Word took 10 seconds. It didn't crash once in 10 years of regular usage.
Now I use Word 2008 [when I must]. It takes just as long to start on a computer thousands of times faster/bigger, and I don't use as many features (OS X has nicer spellcheck, for instance). The application is less stable than its 1989 version. I have to struggle with its settings, like activating hyperlinks (keeps losing the autocorrect setting to turn that shit off), or selecting text I don't want. About the only feature enhancement I actually use is commenting, the rest is just foofaraw.
Kill it now!
Those crappy white keyboards? Terrible design. They're white, so look grungy in a few days. It's a clear plastic bowl that collects crap, hair, fuzz, what have you... and then shows it to you, inaccessible to any cleaning strategy. The keys don't depress at the correct angle, and so feel sticky unless you hold your hand at an unergonomic angle. They don't sound right. The cord is too short. The USB hub doesn't provide enough power to most USB sticks.
The only thing those keyboards have right in the design department is the thin frame, so you can snug your mouse pad up to it and they fit on a keyboard tray together.
That's not a CD, according to the spec. It's an optical disc that acts like a CD in many, but not all, devices.
I bought a Ben Harper CD only to find it wasn't actually a CD and wouldn't play in all my players. Had to bring it back for a refund, and (legally, I'm Canadian) download all his music henceforth. I support that artist via performances but not Sony, his distributor. Rinse and repeat.
As someone who consumed organic food for several years I can attest that none of the organic food I ate tasted better than its conventional counterpart.
This is modded insightful but lacks a key insight: we think about plant varieties in an industrial sense, as though a potato is either red, brown, or 'new' or a bell pepper is green or red.
We've been dumbed-down about agricultural variety, both plants and animals. The biggest difference in flavour will be between one variety and the next, as well as how fresh it is or when it was picked or how handled.
It's astonishing that people think the use of pesticides or lack thereof will make a big difference in taste. Farming practices are much much more than 'to spray or not spray'. Try a blue potato sometime; most of the blue varieties are utterly delicious.
In other words, stop buying produce at the supermarket.
You should not, however, use that as an argument for producing food with less efficient methods like organic farming - the key to better taste is to get the veggies locally.
It isn't just freshness, though that's enormously important.
Often smaller family farms are planting more interesting and tasty varieties, as well---varieties that you can't get in the supermarket because they don't fit in as well with large-scale equipment or rapid growth.
People ask if I eat meat, because I don't eat a lot. I generally say "yes, but I prefer to know its name first". Just bought a lamb off a friend, and waiting on some meat birds from another friend, and am collecting a couple of dozen eggs later today.
We bought into a shared cow so we can get legal unpasteurized milk, and I'm watering a friend's garden in exchange for fresh goat's milk.
If you think beef is bad, just take a peek (or a whiff) at industrial meat chickens or even salmon farms.
Eggs, too. Chickens were meant to eat fresh greens and bugs.
If you care about organic certification, learn a bit about the certification process; the best bet is to look for certification stamps from private bodies like Oregon Tilth, and be leery of lobbyist-certified bodies like the National Organic Program. In Canada, consider the more regional certifying bodies.
And always, always, choose buying locally from a farmer you trust over supermarket organic brands. Smart smaller-scale farmers don't poison their kids by overspraying, even if they aren't certified.
Anyone who eats seedless fruit while complaining about "GM food" is a fucking idiot.
Anyone who equates selective breeding with current methods of genetic modification is either a shill or badly misinformed. I bet you fall into the shill category, because you're right, in principle, that there's nothing wrong with the concept of GMO's in a loose sense, but everything wrong with the way it's being done and who's doing it, and I suspect that you don't care about those things, and obfuscating the difference between breeding and transgenics-with-a-shotgun (yes really) works for your ideology.
GMO crops do contaminate other crops, deal with it. You're setting up a straw man argument agin' them thar hippies.
Personally, Monsanto, Novartis, and Cargill can just stay the fuck off my plate, and stop undermining family farms.
Species variation is completely different to "organic" foods.
And yet it's a key difference between industrial large-scale agriculture and family-farm scale organic agriculture: plant varieties. Conscientious organic farmers generally use varieties that benefit from certain genetics. One of the most common advantages of the varieties grown by small-scale ag is taste. Many organic farmers are also part of an international seed saver network who shepherd agricultural genetic heritage by preserving varieties that are not suited to industrial ag: potatoes are an excellent example (only a handful of the 5000+ varieties of spud are good for combine farming: mainly the big but pathetic russet).
Sustainable practices like crop rotation are still not used by these "organic" farmers, they think they can still treat the land with the same contempt that chemical farmers do.
That's a key point: large scale organically certified farming as practiced by corporate farms is not what you think of in the store. It's still bad for the soil, still engages in shameful labour practices, is wasteful with water and energy, and uses the same anemic tasting plant varieties. Given the choice, I will always buy local over organic, preferably from a family farm (luckily, where I live, they're mostly family farms). One thing you can do if you care about pesticide use plus sustainability, is look into the certification body: for the USA, Oregon Tilth is the go-to organisation, for instance. Don't trust national or stat certification bodies, they're compromised.
Unfortunately this is a HUGE business, so crop rotation won't happen in the near future....Either way, your point is moot as "organic farmers" still use the same varieties as non-"organic".
Your point is partly excellent, partly uninformed. Good farmers use good varieties, that usually are tastier (and often have more concentrated nutrients as a result). Please search out good food producers and support them. Look into Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) -- where you invest directly in a market garden crop and get a steady supply of it -- and farmers markets as well as farm gate sales and U-pick. Likewise, don't bother supporting corporate organic farming that is basically greenwashing. Find a good butcher who buys from the producer, if that's legal in your jurisdiction.
OK, off to buy fantastic eggs and lettuce from friends down the road. We invested in a calf there, waiting for her to get pregnant soon then we'll be getting today's milk.
By suppressing some portions of free speech as you propose
What proposal? Which post were you reading? I thought I was just saying that it's tough to do but every society tries.
Maybe you don't think it should be criminal to shout "Fire Fire" in a crowded theatre, just to watch the trampling? Is that free speech? Where does that cross over into "burn that bastard"?
I was speculating that since we pretty universally agree that fraudulent transactions need regulating, there might be a corollary in the advocacy of violence. In other words, if you expend a lot of energy calling for a murder, and then it happens, maybe you should be liable.
My only real recommendation? ban sociopaths from politics. Not currently possible, but necessary.
P.S. propaganda doesn't come only from politicians: it propagates from many points.
Yes, the relationship between public discourse and the sociopaths who take power for genocidal reasons is very interesting and easily described as the forces of darkness. You still can't be evil at that scale without a massive web of lies to reprogram society.
So why aren't we concentrating on sociopaths? They're the crux.
please don't say it was just words, because it went much deeper than that.
Did anyone actually say it was just words that caused genocide? The point was that you can't run a genocide (or a totalitarian state, etc.) without propaganda, so it gets hard to separate the two.
Words do not have the power to kill or otherwise (really) hurt someone. Therfore they should be unregulated unless dealing with a contract or an offer to trade.
I so wish you were right. The problem is that we don't want to acknowledge the elephant in the room... propaganda works, on enough people to make a difference. Ask a Rwandan or Bosnian, or study Himmler (who famously claimed that it was the loudspeaker that conquered Germany). Sometimes, during genocide, it's hard for people to separate the words from the machete; one is an extension of the other.
I don't mean that in any mystical sense, I'm thinking of the stanford prison experiment etc. The line between speech and a decision to act disappears. Your conviction (and my wishes) about the independence of speech from action is an abstraction, since it requires humans who are uniformly well-schooled to be proud individualists, skeptics, and responsible citizens.
Perhaps we can find a functional way to make political speech a social contract that is bound to regulation like other transactions... after all, genocide relies on fraudulent and deceptive claims. The problem always resides with who gets to determine the truth.
if Facebook doesn't have a Canadian legal entity, nor Canadian hosting, the answer is "who cares"? .... Just because there's users on FB from all around the world, it doesn't mean that FB has to abide by all countries' laws. If that were the case, the Internet would be a hobbled and useless mess.
You may be right about most things internet-wise. However, Facebook is an interesting case; fully one-third of the canadian population subscribes to FB (so a much more sizeable proportion of internet users), and thus the privacy commissioner is well within their mandate to ring alarms by whatever means necessary. The implications are enormous. .com.
The nature of Facebook's control over the personal information of our citizens means that if we don't have a clear legal means to manage privacy issues of our nation, the gov rightly feels a need to seek such means. I'm in favour of education over regulation, but something has to be done. I've been ranting about FB's ToS for years, but few seem to care. We have warnings on cigarette packages, for instance. That's a good idea.
If one third of Canada is engaged in a transaction from their own homes, saying that that is not business conducted in Canada rings a bit false, don't you think? It isn't a technical stretch to divide such major sites into country regions. Google, for instance, easily resolves my visits to google.ca based on IP, whereas facebook.ca redirects to the
As usual, the internet throws all former definitions of communication into doubt.
If you are 45, live in a rural area, and work out of your house...then we have a different problem.
That's me, you insensitive clod! Oh, but I'm married, never mind.
]They evolved by the ones who were better able to survive wiping out the ones who were not.
Bunk. Please cite your sources, else it's just ideological prattle. It's just as easy to say that your ancestors prevailed because their language used clicks, which are better for hunting, and that they had better sex, and were better cooks. (All of which has some support in the evidence.)
Most of the world is perfectly happy to let other people carry the load for them.
The vast majority of the people in my community like to be productive, and as I travelled the world living and working like a local, discovered pretty much a universal pride in productivity, equating a variant on a work ethic with self worth.
You should probably change the company you keep.
right... I guess I meant "to a canadian", because for the vast majority of us it's so straightforward, it's almost an afterthought.
OK, well:
1. volunteer work or paid in fame and respect
2. legacy code
3. intimacy with the work and ongoing staff continuity
Result: you should be doing what you're doing.
If you were:
1. doing a new site
2. being fully paid
3. needing something close to what a standard CMS offers, and
4. on a restricted budget
then you would have to research CMS offerings carefully before going with a from-scratch system.
A "right" is only a protection from other people curtailing your own freedoms.
Your argument is full of ideology (as are most arguments about rights, so no offense). Unfortunately, ideology is like halitosis: it's always someone else's problem. Your viewpoint is natural; others' are constructed.
Nowhere is this more obvious than the notion of rights.
Your particular ideology calls on a specious "objective fact" that the wealth of society is to be parted out to individuals based on their ability to crowd close to the trough. Now, there may be a kind of sociobiological correctness to this, by acknowledging that civilization is a thin hallucinatory veneer on our endocrine-driven counter-adaptive animal impulses and "that's simply natural", but that's not what we're taught in kindergarten or by ecologists, so it rings false.
Health care is a collective activity, akin to utilities and other components of what is loosely called the social 'safety net'. One of the things that is astounding about the american health care system to an outsider is its utter complexity and inefficient bureaucracies, with their sometimes kafkaesque cruelty. Since health care benefits from continuity, one could argue that it naturally becomes a 'lifelong transaction' --- and that it is in the interest of a populace that that transaction be with a public institution, in order to best protect people from abuse and neglect, and ensure fair access.
I realize that there is a certain amount of that protection built in to most health care in the US, but nothing like a socialized system. So, in your definition of the right to protection from oppression, universal healthcare can be considered part of maintaining basic human rights.
But further, there is the issue of the wealth of society. If wealth in the form of medical knowledge is generated out of collective activity (e.g. internationally available results of research, subsidies for hospitals, university funding, tax breaks, yadda), and one accepts that a minimum level of access to health care protects rights (such as the right to not be denied medical access due to prejudice, cruelty, or opportunism), then that wealth should be distributed in a fair fashion, so that its collective nature is part of the formula. That is the right to not be ripped off (i.e. economic freedom).
Further, there is such a thing as collective rights, unless you don't think that hominids evolved in troupes and god made us like cougars, so that civilization is an abomination. The collective right to economic development suggests that since it is so much cheaper and socially stabilizing to have a reliably healthy populace, universal health care protects the collective rights of society to have freedom to develop rationally.
Playing devil's advocate here, but as a canuck I see this played out daily, with mixed but mostly supportive results. FWIW, I have no problem with rich bastards jumping to the head of the line, so long as no-one else is denied a needed transplant. The biggest canadian hero isn't Gretzky or Wolverine, but Tommy Douglas, and that's more than just ideology, it's results.