A five year old PC could have a Core 2 Quad Q6600, three Nvidia 8800GTXs in SLI, and 8GB RAM. That's still pretty powerful, even if it's a joke compared to the workstations that you're using in that complicated render. I'm not sure how well that system would play Skyrim, but I suspect that it'd be able to hold its own quite well. My own system is a Core 2 Duo (E6750), 8800 GTS 512, and 4GB RAM. Skyrim might be the application that makes me finally upgrade my system, after four years. I never found anything that stressed my system, though I had to back down a little on the anti-aliasing over the years.
My ex-girlfriend was even able to play some modern PC games on her netbook, though many were a real test of patience. Also, the resolution was extremely limited (1024x600). However, I think that a lot of geeks really over-estimate the importance of staying on the upgrade treadmill. Having an out-of-date, obsolete computer really isn't the end of the world, if it does everything that you need it to do, and it can still get the job done in a reasonable period of time. Obviously, if you need to upgrade (such as reducing the render time from months to days or hours), then you should. But if you're just playing Flash games on Facebook, posting to Twitter, and watching streaming movies on NetFlix, what incentive do you really have to upgrade that system? It's just not going to perform any of those jobs any better or any faster. The best you can really hope for is that it will be more energy efficient and/or give an overall better experience (ie, multitask better, as you add more memory and cores).
Yeah, I shouldn't have flippantly characterized the relationship as being so one-sided. Apple obviously does invest quite heavily in research and design, even if some of the others have been rather unimpressive lately.
You're right. Re-reading my post, I think I mixed together two or three different points indiscriminately, ultimately switching abruptly to a rant about the evils of commercial software, right in the middle of some kind of socialist rant. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking. In my defense, I'm bipolar and unmedicated. If my thought processes end up being a bit chaotic and disconnected, hopefully I can be a source of amusement, at least.
That just wasn't a very well thought out or composed post. Unsurprisingly, it still got modded up.:)
Gerstner and Palmisano transformed IBM from a lumbering, confused giant into a lithe dancer. I admire them for that. They also taught me to never put my trust in a multinational corporation. You'd think that, by the 1990s, I would have learned that, but, no, I needed further negative reinforcement before the lesson would stick. OS/2 was a very special object lesson -- abandoned by one vendor, then the other. Both vendors had been deliriously enthusiastic, hyping it to levels that were only topped by the Amiga. Unsurprisingly, I also bought into that, as well. Yes, I really know how to pick a winner. After the slow, agonizing deaths of the Amiga and OS/2, I had an epiphany and switched to Linux. My resolve has not been resolute over the years (being a gamer under Linux sucks), but I can credit IBM with driving home the lesson that I should have learned 10 years prior to that: never, ever trust a multinational corporation. It's unsurprising that a corporation willing to treat its customers poorly would also treat its employees poorly. It's just business, though. Business as usual.
The lesson is not such an easy one to learn. Everyone hates Sony, Microsoft, Intel, and other Slashdot whipping boys, but how many people implicitly trust Apple or Google? Well, I don't trust any of them. Multinational corporations exist to make money, not to follow through on promises made to customers. That doesn't necessarily mean you should boycott every multinational corporation, if you're already happy with their products and services -- just be realistic enough to recognize that if they can make more money by screwing you over than by providing good service, most of them will.
Maybe that's because there are only a small handful of companies that make laptops. Dell, Apple, IBM/Lenovo, HP, etc all buy laptops from a few ODMs, then put their sticker on it. From a long time, Asus was the only company that designed, manufactured, and sold their own laptops, but they recently spun-off their ODM business. Chances are, half of those laptops that you were using before were simply rebadged Asus laptops. They sold many laptops to Apple, Dell, and IBM. Nowadays, it looks like they just slap on a sticker, like everyone else -- too bad. I liked being able to skip the middle man.
Pointing out injustice, inequality, and corruption is not a worthless endeavor.
Look at the civil rights movement. The leaders were vilified, propagandists twisted the message to turn people against it, and grandstanding assholes eventually rose to prominence. Look at modern feminism: the message, egalitarianism, is something that anyone should be able to get behind. And yet you constantly see terms like "feminazi" and people distancing themselves from feminism, saying things like, "Oh, I'm not a feminist. I'm an egalitarian." Feminism is vilified by those who have privilege and don't want to give it up. In many people's minds, feminism is a bad thing, even though they believe in the same things as feminists. The Tea Party made some good points early on in their formation -- things that the OWS protestors are trying to make, as well. However, the Tea Party was taken over by shills and infiltrators and moved back toward traditional Republican lines.
Now, given all that history, is it really such a good idea to have clear leadership, a unifying doctrine, and a singular voice? All those things can be used against you. Once the problems are identified and acknowledged, solutions can be hashed out. OWS isn't about electing a specific politician or advancing a specific POV. It's about raising awareness. By withholding explicit policies and solutions, they keep the movement from being overtaken by astroturfers and political shills. With the absence of a policy statement, the OWS protestors can't simply become a mouthpiece for politics as usual, such as the Democratic or Republican parties.
There are some whiny, entitled young adults uploading videos to YouTube, but if you look at them from the point of the uploaders, it's really not so hard to be sympathetic to them. They've been fed bullshit by the system all their lives. If that's made them a little bitter and entitled, I find it understandable. Now, like anyone else, I have to repress the urge to beat the entitlement complex out of them, but they still make some decent points. I think a lot of people focus waaay too much on the kids uploading videos to YouTube. The OWS protests were meant to be more than just disgruntled kids who have some vague complaints about society being unfair. To characterize the entire movement by that is, well, unfair, and this is probably the best (perhaps even only) way to attack the movement, since it was designed to have as few weaknesses as possible. It's smart of the opposition to focus on this, but it's also a very dirty move.
Social media is generally populated by what I like to call "internet activists". It's apathy that you can rationalize. I did my part... I posted an outraged blog entry about the state of the world! I then signed an online petition denouncing this outrage. Finally, I posted an inspirational picture. What more can one person do? I have successfully harnessed the power of the internet to make change in the world! Oh yeah, and I pirated a few MP3 files, to show my solidarity with the musicians and stick it to The Man. I can now rest easy, knowing that I have done everything a person can do, without actually exerting any effort at all.
Just because some people happened to use Facebook (or whatever) to communicate doesn't mean that that tool is now suddenly a tool for change. It's still just a tool, no different than any other tool that lets you communicate. Social media doesn't overthrow governments. People do.
Nixon was not as much of a right-wing extremist as he's often portrayed. He was a skilled manipulator and liar. He was smart enough to see the way that things were going, and he acted as an advocate of those ideas. He knew how to take something like environmentalism, pacifism, and other leftist causes and give them a conservative spin, so that he could walk a centrist road and give lip service to whatever people wanted to hear. Don't like the Vietnam War? No problem. Nixon will end it. Want a strong Asia that can stand up to the Communists? No problem. Nixon isn't going to cut and run -- he's staying until the job is done. Nixon had a promise for every centrist stance, with enough spin that it could mean whatever was necessary at that point. He was a realist. A realist doesn't choose sides in an ideological battle; instead, he courts the middle while chastising the extremists, even though his own sympathies may very well lie with one of the extreme positions. Nixon was an authoritarian centrist, though he certainly was willing to support "states' rights" (and other Conservative talking points), as long as it didn't impede his own power. I think he legitimately believed that he could handle the power and make the best decisions for the country, though history proved that wrong.
Most Democrats are center-right. A few are centrists. The few that actually are on the left usually get vilified as extremists. Certainly, if you're on the far right, the centrists must seem like socialists, and the center-left must seem like communists. However, an actual Marxist would be horrified by the Democrats' policies. Lenin reserved much scorn for social democrats (which are more to the left than the Democratic party), allegedly calling them "useful idiots" (which has been disputed, of course). Lenin thought that social democrats were sissies who couldn't handle Big Ideas and clung to the old ways (capitalism), trying to reform a broken system that couldn't be fixed. I don't share Lenin's views, and I view social democrats very sympathetically. However, it just goes to show that there's always someone so ideologically pure, so unwilling to compromise, that he's willing to dismiss an entire spectrum of opinion. The challenge is to avoid falling into that trap. Thus, if you're a Libertarian, you should recognize that not every Marxist is going to be stark raving mad, and vice versa for the Marxist.
While I have my own opinions on the validity of the test, the Political Compass expresses this rather well. Check out how far the right almost every political party is. Very few can legitimately profess to hold leftist views. This tends to annoy people on the right, who view any amount of regulation to be socialist.
If he had actually said that, I think a lot of people would have been willing to forgive and forget. Certainly, he'd still get the odd harassing phone call in the middle of the night, but it'd go a long way to actually defusing the situation. Instead, we get his "I'm sorry that I got caught" apology that simply further enrages everyone. And this guy is in PR? He's incompetent on a scale that's almost unimaginable. Truly, I can't think of a worse PR guy, unless you hired Ted Bundy or something.
It's human nature. If someone screws over a customer, a few outraged people will leave, but many others will stay, because the company never did anything to them. A couple on the sidelines will be wondering, "What the fuck is wrong with you? Right from the start, I could tell that company was slimy." And someone, somewhere will say, "It was his/her own fault for getting screwed. The company was perfectly justified in doing what it did. They're not a charity."
As a smug asshole who loves to be right, this whole drama has been very fun. Not that I need the validation of the entire fucking internet coming around to my opinion or anything, but it's still nifty.
One could make a weak argument that it was Marxist. Of course, the Marxist interpretation would probably differ greatly from the mainstream interpretation: a utopian society, living in a state of peace and egalitarianism, is caused to splinter, because God fears the accomplishments capable of this society that has no need of him. In fact, you could even use that same exact sentence as the Objectivist interpretation. Hey, I should publish this! I bet you could bend it into half a dozen interpretations without changing a word.
But, no, it's definitely not socialist. There's nothing in that story about workers owning the means of production.
Oh, I completely agree with you. I'm not a hater... just a cranky critic. Facebook is infinitely worse, and I'd rather have a hundred Googles than one Facebook. Google admittedly does a lot of good for the web, but I can't think of a single thing that Facebook has ever done that benefits the web. I rewrote my original post, because it seemed to be too negative. Maybe I should have rewritten it again, to make it even less negative, but it does seem somewhat even-handed to me. Maybe it's because I'm so used to massive flamewars and melodramatic rants, anything that's not trollishly polemical seems even-handed and neutral. To be honest, I think that whenever I write anything on the internet, it comes out at least a bit too harshly worded. So, in conclusion, I don't hate Google... but I certainly don't love them, either. I'd say that I'm vaguely dissatisfied.
People seem to think that Google is some kind of non-profit charity, powered by rainbows and idealism, with a unicorn as their CEO (and a pony as VP). You can't buy that kind of brand loyalty and PR. It's thoroughly amazing, and, yet, also disturbing, because along with it comes a reluctance to pay any attention to criticism. It doesn't help that Google's detractors, for a long time, were spammers, SEO professionals, shills, and other assorted scum.
I liked Google a lot back when it first became popular. It was clearly the best search engine. They eventually started diversifying into all sorts of things, while always collecting more and more information on their users. Fine. That's how they make their money. I don't begrudge them their demographics information, but if you listen to the average person, Google is doing all this out of the kindness of their hearts, to better make a utopian society, and the whole advertising / data collection business is a distasteful, necessary evil that Google engages in, because they need to fund their good works. And that's if they even recognize that there's a trade going on here. A lot of people, if they see no price attached to something, think that it's completely free, with no associated loss of privacy as a price. Nothing is ever free, in that absolute sense. Even if there's no price, it's still got an opportunity cost.
Microsoft or IBM would literally kill to have this kind of PR. Yes, literally. I think they would outright murder a homeless man tomorrow, if they thought it would buy them this kind of sentiment from the public. Apple is about halfway there, but I think that it's more likely that Apple is a nascent religious cult, as opposed to the true believers lining up to join Google's utopian society.
It seems like it's getting increasingly difficult to find software projects that don't have some ideological drive behind them. You can't just use a program. You're buying into a worldview. Oh well. I guess it could be worse. At least we're not stuck with IE 4 and Netscape Communicator.
Yeah. It reminds me of the spammers who threaten to sue Google, after Google bitchslaps them into irrelevance.
There are many perfectly legitimate reasons to dislike Google (most of them linked to Eric Schmidt's PR blunders) and Facebook, but when spammers with an entitlement complex sue them, I'm certainly not going to root for the spammer or criticize Google/Facebook.
I haven't used it in years, particularly what with having a smartphone, but I still keep it because why not?
Yeah. It's difficult to throw away something that still works. I used to pride myself in my lack of sentimentality, and then I realized that I'd been carting around vintage computers from house to house, as I moved over the years. I eventually forced myself to junk all of them (including a first generation SPARCstation and a Compaq luggable), except for a single conceit: a DEC Multia. How the fuck do you throw a DEC Alpha in the trash? It's like destroying a Model T.
It's easy to rationalize keeping that old junk, when you see stories like this, but, really, all it does is scare away your date.
Like it or not, you fell right into his trap, and you're just changing the goalposts here. Your original assertion was that there is no competition, no alternative, no possibility for people to leave the service. That's exactly what he was counting on you to say.
I'm not saying that I necessarily support his free market solution. However, even as a person deeply cynical about the free market, I see a lot of Chicken Little screeching and screaming on Slashdot, whenever Net Neutrality to brought up. For decades, the internet has more or less worked. There was a brief point when I thought that maybe this would change, with a huge digital divide, one part of the internet living in Internet slums, where the only content you can access is corporate-approved, and the other part being cordoned off, ostensibly as "unsafe, anarchic, and lawless". However, it hasn't happened yet, and it's looking like such a thing probably won't happen. Without net neutrality laws, it certainly could happen. But so could almost anything. What people talk about these days is a bit more down-to-Earth: Comcast surreptitiously dropping packets or charging extra for packets destined to their competitors, such as Netflix. This is deeply troubling, but, even without Net Neutrality, it still hasn't happened today. Why not? If it's legal, it's technologically possible, and people have no ability to stand up to it, why hasn't it happened? I see two reasons: the first is that the corporations believe it will finally give enough weight to the Net Neutrality arguments, allowing for the government oversight that they fear. The second is that there's a fundamental flaw in the arguments of the proponents of Net Neutrality, such that the corporations simply don't the monopolies that proponents believe they do.
Either way, it means that I don't have to be especially worried about Net Neutrality, because the problems that it fixes are, as of yet, entirely hypothetical, with no real-world examples of problems that need fixing.
I'm far from a free market evangelist, and I'd describe myself as more of a European-style social democrat than anything else. However, in this case, while I'm sympathetic to the concepts and arguments, I just don't really see how Net Neutrality is a pressing issue that must be pushed forward with the same vigor as free healthcare. People are demonstrably suffering from lack of insurance, yet no one is demonstrably suffering from lack of Net Neutrality. While I disagree with SuperKendall's politics and economic views, I think he makes a fairly convincing argument. Not enough so that I argue against Net Neutrality, which is something that I wouldn't ever do, but enough to give me pause in my vocal support for it. There are more important issues to fight for than Net Neutrality. If it becomes an actual issue, then I'll change my tune and start marching for packet equality, along with Martin Luther Ping and his dream for a packet that is judged only by its compliance, not its destination.
Slashdot Mirror
A five year old PC could have a Core 2 Quad Q6600, three Nvidia 8800GTXs in SLI, and 8GB RAM. That's still pretty powerful, even if it's a joke compared to the workstations that you're using in that complicated render. I'm not sure how well that system would play Skyrim, but I suspect that it'd be able to hold its own quite well. My own system is a Core 2 Duo (E6750), 8800 GTS 512, and 4GB RAM. Skyrim might be the application that makes me finally upgrade my system, after four years. I never found anything that stressed my system, though I had to back down a little on the anti-aliasing over the years.
My ex-girlfriend was even able to play some modern PC games on her netbook, though many were a real test of patience. Also, the resolution was extremely limited (1024x600). However, I think that a lot of geeks really over-estimate the importance of staying on the upgrade treadmill. Having an out-of-date, obsolete computer really isn't the end of the world, if it does everything that you need it to do, and it can still get the job done in a reasonable period of time. Obviously, if you need to upgrade (such as reducing the render time from months to days or hours), then you should. But if you're just playing Flash games on Facebook, posting to Twitter, and watching streaming movies on NetFlix, what incentive do you really have to upgrade that system? It's just not going to perform any of those jobs any better or any faster. The best you can really hope for is that it will be more energy efficient and/or give an overall better experience (ie, multitask better, as you add more memory and cores).
Preach it, brother. Or don't. It's not like I care.
Yeah, I shouldn't have flippantly characterized the relationship as being so one-sided. Apple obviously does invest quite heavily in research and design, even if some of the others have been rather unimpressive lately.
You're right. Re-reading my post, I think I mixed together two or three different points indiscriminately, ultimately switching abruptly to a rant about the evils of commercial software, right in the middle of some kind of socialist rant. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking. In my defense, I'm bipolar and unmedicated. If my thought processes end up being a bit chaotic and disconnected, hopefully I can be a source of amusement, at least.
That just wasn't a very well thought out or composed post. Unsurprisingly, it still got modded up. :)
Gerstner and Palmisano transformed IBM from a lumbering, confused giant into a lithe dancer. I admire them for that. They also taught me to never put my trust in a multinational corporation. You'd think that, by the 1990s, I would have learned that, but, no, I needed further negative reinforcement before the lesson would stick. OS/2 was a very special object lesson -- abandoned by one vendor, then the other. Both vendors had been deliriously enthusiastic, hyping it to levels that were only topped by the Amiga. Unsurprisingly, I also bought into that, as well. Yes, I really know how to pick a winner. After the slow, agonizing deaths of the Amiga and OS/2, I had an epiphany and switched to Linux. My resolve has not been resolute over the years (being a gamer under Linux sucks), but I can credit IBM with driving home the lesson that I should have learned 10 years prior to that: never, ever trust a multinational corporation. It's unsurprising that a corporation willing to treat its customers poorly would also treat its employees poorly. It's just business, though. Business as usual.
The lesson is not such an easy one to learn. Everyone hates Sony, Microsoft, Intel, and other Slashdot whipping boys, but how many people implicitly trust Apple or Google? Well, I don't trust any of them. Multinational corporations exist to make money, not to follow through on promises made to customers. That doesn't necessarily mean you should boycott every multinational corporation, if you're already happy with their products and services -- just be realistic enough to recognize that if they can make more money by screwing you over than by providing good service, most of them will.
Maybe that's because there are only a small handful of companies that make laptops. Dell, Apple, IBM/Lenovo, HP, etc all buy laptops from a few ODMs, then put their sticker on it. From a long time, Asus was the only company that designed, manufactured, and sold their own laptops, but they recently spun-off their ODM business. Chances are, half of those laptops that you were using before were simply rebadged Asus laptops. They sold many laptops to Apple, Dell, and IBM. Nowadays, it looks like they just slap on a sticker, like everyone else -- too bad. I liked being able to skip the middle man.
I think that, at this point, China is fascist, not communist.
Pointing out injustice, inequality, and corruption is not a worthless endeavor.
Look at the civil rights movement. The leaders were vilified, propagandists twisted the message to turn people against it, and grandstanding assholes eventually rose to prominence. Look at modern feminism: the message, egalitarianism, is something that anyone should be able to get behind. And yet you constantly see terms like "feminazi" and people distancing themselves from feminism, saying things like, "Oh, I'm not a feminist. I'm an egalitarian." Feminism is vilified by those who have privilege and don't want to give it up. In many people's minds, feminism is a bad thing, even though they believe in the same things as feminists. The Tea Party made some good points early on in their formation -- things that the OWS protestors are trying to make, as well. However, the Tea Party was taken over by shills and infiltrators and moved back toward traditional Republican lines.
Now, given all that history, is it really such a good idea to have clear leadership, a unifying doctrine, and a singular voice? All those things can be used against you. Once the problems are identified and acknowledged, solutions can be hashed out. OWS isn't about electing a specific politician or advancing a specific POV. It's about raising awareness. By withholding explicit policies and solutions, they keep the movement from being overtaken by astroturfers and political shills. With the absence of a policy statement, the OWS protestors can't simply become a mouthpiece for politics as usual, such as the Democratic or Republican parties.
There are some whiny, entitled young adults uploading videos to YouTube, but if you look at them from the point of the uploaders, it's really not so hard to be sympathetic to them. They've been fed bullshit by the system all their lives. If that's made them a little bitter and entitled, I find it understandable. Now, like anyone else, I have to repress the urge to beat the entitlement complex out of them, but they still make some decent points. I think a lot of people focus waaay too much on the kids uploading videos to YouTube. The OWS protests were meant to be more than just disgruntled kids who have some vague complaints about society being unfair. To characterize the entire movement by that is, well, unfair, and this is probably the best (perhaps even only) way to attack the movement, since it was designed to have as few weaknesses as possible. It's smart of the opposition to focus on this, but it's also a very dirty move.
I strongly agree.
Well, in that case, we have nothing to argue about. What a bummer!
Social media is generally populated by what I like to call "internet activists". It's apathy that you can rationalize. I did my part... I posted an outraged blog entry about the state of the world! I then signed an online petition denouncing this outrage. Finally, I posted an inspirational picture. What more can one person do? I have successfully harnessed the power of the internet to make change in the world! Oh yeah, and I pirated a few MP3 files, to show my solidarity with the musicians and stick it to The Man. I can now rest easy, knowing that I have done everything a person can do, without actually exerting any effort at all.
Just because some people happened to use Facebook (or whatever) to communicate doesn't mean that that tool is now suddenly a tool for change. It's still just a tool, no different than any other tool that lets you communicate. Social media doesn't overthrow governments. People do.
Nixon was not as much of a right-wing extremist as he's often portrayed. He was a skilled manipulator and liar. He was smart enough to see the way that things were going, and he acted as an advocate of those ideas. He knew how to take something like environmentalism, pacifism, and other leftist causes and give them a conservative spin, so that he could walk a centrist road and give lip service to whatever people wanted to hear. Don't like the Vietnam War? No problem. Nixon will end it. Want a strong Asia that can stand up to the Communists? No problem. Nixon isn't going to cut and run -- he's staying until the job is done. Nixon had a promise for every centrist stance, with enough spin that it could mean whatever was necessary at that point. He was a realist. A realist doesn't choose sides in an ideological battle; instead, he courts the middle while chastising the extremists, even though his own sympathies may very well lie with one of the extreme positions. Nixon was an authoritarian centrist, though he certainly was willing to support "states' rights" (and other Conservative talking points), as long as it didn't impede his own power. I think he legitimately believed that he could handle the power and make the best decisions for the country, though history proved that wrong.
Most Democrats are center-right. A few are centrists. The few that actually are on the left usually get vilified as extremists. Certainly, if you're on the far right, the centrists must seem like socialists, and the center-left must seem like communists. However, an actual Marxist would be horrified by the Democrats' policies. Lenin reserved much scorn for social democrats (which are more to the left than the Democratic party), allegedly calling them "useful idiots" (which has been disputed, of course). Lenin thought that social democrats were sissies who couldn't handle Big Ideas and clung to the old ways (capitalism), trying to reform a broken system that couldn't be fixed. I don't share Lenin's views, and I view social democrats very sympathetically. However, it just goes to show that there's always someone so ideologically pure, so unwilling to compromise, that he's willing to dismiss an entire spectrum of opinion. The challenge is to avoid falling into that trap. Thus, if you're a Libertarian, you should recognize that not every Marxist is going to be stark raving mad, and vice versa for the Marxist.
While I have my own opinions on the validity of the test, the Political Compass expresses this rather well. Check out how far the right almost every political party is. Very few can legitimately profess to hold leftist views. This tends to annoy people on the right, who view any amount of regulation to be socialist.
If he had actually said that, I think a lot of people would have been willing to forgive and forget. Certainly, he'd still get the odd harassing phone call in the middle of the night, but it'd go a long way to actually defusing the situation. Instead, we get his "I'm sorry that I got caught" apology that simply further enrages everyone. And this guy is in PR? He's incompetent on a scale that's almost unimaginable. Truly, I can't think of a worse PR guy, unless you hired Ted Bundy or something.
It's human nature. If someone screws over a customer, a few outraged people will leave, but many others will stay, because the company never did anything to them. A couple on the sidelines will be wondering, "What the fuck is wrong with you? Right from the start, I could tell that company was slimy." And someone, somewhere will say, "It was his/her own fault for getting screwed. The company was perfectly justified in doing what it did. They're not a charity."
As a smug asshole who loves to be right, this whole drama has been very fun. Not that I need the validation of the entire fucking internet coming around to my opinion or anything, but it's still nifty.
One could make a weak argument that it was Marxist. Of course, the Marxist interpretation would probably differ greatly from the mainstream interpretation: a utopian society, living in a state of peace and egalitarianism, is caused to splinter, because God fears the accomplishments capable of this society that has no need of him. In fact, you could even use that same exact sentence as the Objectivist interpretation. Hey, I should publish this! I bet you could bend it into half a dozen interpretations without changing a word.
But, no, it's definitely not socialist. There's nothing in that story about workers owning the means of production.
My name is Rig H. Thaven. This is perfect!
Granted, that's not ironic... but it sure is amusingly coincidental.
Oh, I completely agree with you. I'm not a hater... just a cranky critic. Facebook is infinitely worse, and I'd rather have a hundred Googles than one Facebook. Google admittedly does a lot of good for the web, but I can't think of a single thing that Facebook has ever done that benefits the web. I rewrote my original post, because it seemed to be too negative. Maybe I should have rewritten it again, to make it even less negative, but it does seem somewhat even-handed to me. Maybe it's because I'm so used to massive flamewars and melodramatic rants, anything that's not trollishly polemical seems even-handed and neutral. To be honest, I think that whenever I write anything on the internet, it comes out at least a bit too harshly worded. So, in conclusion, I don't hate Google... but I certainly don't love them, either. I'd say that I'm vaguely dissatisfied.
People seem to think that Google is some kind of non-profit charity, powered by rainbows and idealism, with a unicorn as their CEO (and a pony as VP). You can't buy that kind of brand loyalty and PR. It's thoroughly amazing, and, yet, also disturbing, because along with it comes a reluctance to pay any attention to criticism. It doesn't help that Google's detractors, for a long time, were spammers, SEO professionals, shills, and other assorted scum.
I liked Google a lot back when it first became popular. It was clearly the best search engine. They eventually started diversifying into all sorts of things, while always collecting more and more information on their users. Fine. That's how they make their money. I don't begrudge them their demographics information, but if you listen to the average person, Google is doing all this out of the kindness of their hearts, to better make a utopian society, and the whole advertising / data collection business is a distasteful, necessary evil that Google engages in, because they need to fund their good works. And that's if they even recognize that there's a trade going on here. A lot of people, if they see no price attached to something, think that it's completely free, with no associated loss of privacy as a price. Nothing is ever free, in that absolute sense. Even if there's no price, it's still got an opportunity cost.
Microsoft or IBM would literally kill to have this kind of PR. Yes, literally. I think they would outright murder a homeless man tomorrow, if they thought it would buy them this kind of sentiment from the public. Apple is about halfway there, but I think that it's more likely that Apple is a nascent religious cult, as opposed to the true believers lining up to join Google's utopian society.
It seems like it's getting increasingly difficult to find software projects that don't have some ideological drive behind them. You can't just use a program. You're buying into a worldview. Oh well. I guess it could be worse. At least we're not stuck with IE 4 and Netscape Communicator.
That's what makes the irony of this story so funny.
That's actually a very good idea...
...or you could go to a library.
Yeah. It reminds me of the spammers who threaten to sue Google, after Google bitchslaps them into irrelevance.
There are many perfectly legitimate reasons to dislike Google (most of them linked to Eric Schmidt's PR blunders) and Facebook, but when spammers with an entitlement complex sue them, I'm certainly not going to root for the spammer or criticize Google/Facebook.
Yeah. It's difficult to throw away something that still works. I used to pride myself in my lack of sentimentality, and then I realized that I'd been carting around vintage computers from house to house, as I moved over the years. I eventually forced myself to junk all of them (including a first generation SPARCstation and a Compaq luggable), except for a single conceit: a DEC Multia. How the fuck do you throw a DEC Alpha in the trash? It's like destroying a Model T.
It's easy to rationalize keeping that old junk, when you see stories like this, but, really, all it does is scare away your date.
Like it or not, you fell right into his trap, and you're just changing the goalposts here. Your original assertion was that there is no competition, no alternative, no possibility for people to leave the service. That's exactly what he was counting on you to say.
I'm not saying that I necessarily support his free market solution. However, even as a person deeply cynical about the free market, I see a lot of Chicken Little screeching and screaming on Slashdot, whenever Net Neutrality to brought up. For decades, the internet has more or less worked. There was a brief point when I thought that maybe this would change, with a huge digital divide, one part of the internet living in Internet slums, where the only content you can access is corporate-approved, and the other part being cordoned off, ostensibly as "unsafe, anarchic, and lawless". However, it hasn't happened yet, and it's looking like such a thing probably won't happen. Without net neutrality laws, it certainly could happen. But so could almost anything. What people talk about these days is a bit more down-to-Earth: Comcast surreptitiously dropping packets or charging extra for packets destined to their competitors, such as Netflix. This is deeply troubling, but, even without Net Neutrality, it still hasn't happened today. Why not? If it's legal, it's technologically possible, and people have no ability to stand up to it, why hasn't it happened? I see two reasons: the first is that the corporations believe it will finally give enough weight to the Net Neutrality arguments, allowing for the government oversight that they fear. The second is that there's a fundamental flaw in the arguments of the proponents of Net Neutrality, such that the corporations simply don't the monopolies that proponents believe they do.
Either way, it means that I don't have to be especially worried about Net Neutrality, because the problems that it fixes are, as of yet, entirely hypothetical, with no real-world examples of problems that need fixing.
I'm far from a free market evangelist, and I'd describe myself as more of a European-style social democrat than anything else. However, in this case, while I'm sympathetic to the concepts and arguments, I just don't really see how Net Neutrality is a pressing issue that must be pushed forward with the same vigor as free healthcare. People are demonstrably suffering from lack of insurance, yet no one is demonstrably suffering from lack of Net Neutrality. While I disagree with SuperKendall's politics and economic views, I think he makes a fairly convincing argument. Not enough so that I argue against Net Neutrality, which is something that I wouldn't ever do, but enough to give me pause in my vocal support for it. There are more important issues to fight for than Net Neutrality. If it becomes an actual issue, then I'll change my tune and start marching for packet equality, along with Martin Luther Ping and his dream for a packet that is judged only by its compliance, not its destination.
Oh, I give in to hatred very easily. In fact, I'm probably halfway to being a sith lord, already.
p.s. my first post was obviously off-topic. Flamebait? Come on. I could even see troll, but flamebait? Moderators on crackers!