Oil companies are refusing to do anything to lower pump prices because it's not in the best interest of the shareholders, despite it being in the best interest of society as a whole.
No, it isn't. High prices encourage conservation and investigation of alternatives, which is exactly what's needed when demand exceeds supply.
Heh. Of course, the Java bridge is now deprecated (with good reason; Java's lack of dynamism causes large impedence mismatches with ObjC). I'm hoping Apple officially adopts PyObjC as a replacement.
The issue is deeper than that; its the fact that capitalism has failed. We should just cut our losses and put an end to this miserable system
Excellent. What's your alternative? Make sure to consider failure modes; when capitalism goes bad, you get overpriced cable service and silly restrictions on what you can do with your own property. When socialism goes bad, you get millions of people shot or starved to death.
How about someone who owns a boat and needs to tow it to a lake, so he needs a big V-8 or V-10? Should these people "feel the pain" when despite owning gas guzzlers, are driving vehicles they need?
Essentially, yes. Need is relative; for example, how many people who own boats really "need" them?
Ideally, people would buy more sensible vehicles
Sufficiently high gas prices will eventually make that happen.
I really don't have to see it the way of mass-murdering tyrants, who do not represent "China".
But, I also feel that forcibly punching through and digging under a countries virtual customs borders to be tantamount to waging a stateless if not de facto war against various organs of a government.
And fundamentalist Islamic nutjobs may consider it an act of war that the Western world broadcasts TV shows featuring women exposing their arms and driving cars. There is no moral reason to respect the desires of oppressive governments. (There may be practical reasons, as Google and Yahoo have shown).
I don't condone rambunctious or strategized abuse of the values of a country.
Again, you're equating the country with the gang of criminals currently in charge. The Chinese student trying to access uncensored news may have a rather different set of values than the thugs trying to detect and imprison him.
Um its their own propety, you have to sign a NDA to be able to use those manuals, that NDA was broken by it being posted elsewhere.
Perhaps, but apparently not by SA. And Apple isn't complaining about breach of contract or trade secrets, where they *might* have a case; they're arguing copyright infringment in a textbook fair use scenario.
Its not like the are censoring the whole fucking story just the page someone stole out of their manual. Jesus fucking christ I hope morons like you arnt allowed to vote in the US. People like you are the reason Bush won.
Yes, I hope only rational and levelheaded individuals such as yourself vote.
Without mutual consideration, there is no contract. When you buy a software license, your benefit is the use of the software, the seller's benefit is the payment you make for that license.
I would argue that in most cases, there is no consideration because I already have the right to use the software via 17 USC 117. The publisher would counter that I'm not the "owner" because all I really bought is a "license", but I didn't buy a license from them, I bought an actual product from Best Buy or whoever. (See Softman v Adobe). Most EULAs claim to retroactively transform sales into licenses and give the user no benefit whatsoever, and as such they should be invalid.
Yeah, I know this wouldn't hold up in court. I just don't see any reason why it shouldn't.
While you're at it, make it read objects from a gzip compressed network stream:
Sure, that's cool. But while Java often makes hard things possible, it makes easy things hard. The large majority of the time if I'm reading a file I don't care about buffering and don't need a pipeline of readers; I just want the file's contents as a string or array of lines. This is trivial in Perl and Python, and irritating in Java. Thus, everybody ends up with their own (incompatible, buggy) utility classes to do the simple stuff that it should do out of the box.
I don't think that/. is as much a unitary voting block as you think it is. At first glance it appears that/. is a direct split between the vocal pro-privacy, anti-war libertarians, and the pro-privacy, anti-war liberals, but I would hazzard to guess that at least a 3rd of/.ers are pro-war, pro-snooping conservatives.
And then there's us pro-privacy pro-war semi-libertarians. Right after 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld said: ""We have a choice: either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable; or to change the way that they live. And we chose the latter." I agree with that entirely, but it seems the Bush administration no longer does.
Perhaps you meant "Opposition to any attempts to increase equality" which DOES seem to be one of the core tenets of the right (as many believe that capitalism=meritocracy, and government intervention to increase equality is always 'reverse discrimination')
Nope. Your parenthetical is slightly less inaccurate. Conservatives (principled conservatives at least) generally oppose government intervention for *any* special interest groups, whether the result would be to increase or decrease equality. For example, I oppose both affirmative action and corporate welfare.
The choices are not 1. Wal-Mart exists, lots of people have low pay and bad health benefits, and 2. Wal-mart does not exist, those same people are all unemployed. There is also 3. Wal-Mart gives better health benefits.
And why not "4. You give Walmart employees better health benefits". Walmart is already paying mutually agreed-upon wages for labor. You would have them pay above the market rate, which is equivalent to giving them charity. But you or I could do the same, and I don't see why Walmart has any more obligation to do so than you or I do.
You assume "low-prices" are good. Care to explain why, logically?
Um, because we can get more stuff. How can they possibly not be? Is it bad that computers have gotten tremendously faster and cheaper over the last 30 years? If we discovered a cheap, unlimited, and nonpolluting energy source, would that be bad because oil companies would suffer?
As a retailer or competitor, I may disagree with that
Yes, established businesses often don't like competition. Tough. As we tell the MPAA and RIAA, evolve or die.
Rather than do our part to give back to those who provide to us, we want to reap all the benefits at little expense.
Yeah, we try to buy stuff for as little as possible. And we try to sell stuff (for example, our labor) for as much as possible. Meanwhile, the sellers and buyers on the other side are trying to do the opposite. I fail to understand why any of this should cause great moral outrage.
You forgot: ruins small businesses -- family country stores ran by generations suddenly without a prayer to compete.
Nobody is forcing customers to abandon these stores and go to Walmart. But astoundingly, it seems most people appreciate paying less for stuff.
You also forgot: ruins medium sized businesses who have had a half dozen stores across several counties and cities, suddenly and entirely eclipsed by this juggernaut that bestrides the narrow world as a colossus.
See above. Businesses that can't compete should evolve or die. That's what you'd tell the RIAA, right?
They drive out small retail business who actually have knowledge and skill in their field and replace them with people with neither subject knowledge nor the inclination to gain it.
Only if customers allow them to. Your real problem seems to be with consumers who are making price/quality tradeoffs that you don't agree with.
If you can be found to make $100 a month (who cant?) then you will be refused bankrupcy.
Again, only if you make above the median income. The details of the bill may have some problems, but I have no issue with the general concept that relatively wealthy people shouldn't be able to spend like drunken sailors and then easily walk away from the resulting debt.
If you go and buy a laptop, best to spring for the little bit extra for the warranty.
I disagree. Yes, laptops fail more often, but the warranties are more expensive. The manufacturer knows the expected failure rates, and prices the warranty to make a profit. Therefore, on average you lose. One thing to remember is that if you buy a laptop for $2000 and it dies 2 years later, you haven't lost $2000, you've only lost its replacement cost which at that point is much less. It only makes sense to buy an extended warranty if you have unusual usage patterns that you know will result in a significantly higher than normal chance of failure.
and indeed, how else can one force corporate america to take care of the planet other than through law?
Market forces can often do the trick. See the above comment about Walmart making their trucks more fuel-efficient; not because they care about the environment, but because it will lower their costs and make them more filthy profits.
It's using your shoulder/hand to hold the phone that impairs your ability to drive - because you have fewer appendages fully free to operate the vehicle - not talking to someone you can't see.
This is completely wrong. Hands-free devices do not reduce impairment; look at the studies. The problem is not that you're holding a small object to your head; it's that you're talking to someone who doesn't share your environment. If you're talking to a passenger, he'll probably know to shut up if you get into a tricky situation, and even if he doesn't you'll have no problem ignoring them when you need to focus on driving. With a disembodied voice who isn't aware of your situation, this is much harder.
I live in NJ where talking on a phone while driving requires a headset. Since I have been required to use it, I tried it out and found that it's more distracting to use the headset!
Of course. Headset laws are useless except that they let legislators pretend they're doing something. A number of studies have shown that the problem isn't holding the cell phone, it's having a conversation with a disembodied voice who doesn't share your environment.
Crossing the street is not safe. But often the benefits outweigh the risks.
Please go tell how safe it is to the thousands of people affected by the Chernobyl accident.
Chernobyl was a disaster for many reasons, most of which have no relevance to modern nuclear plants not run by Communist dictatorships. It is also instructive to look at the number of people killed in coal mining accidents.
That's because you're a rational environmentalist who wants to actually protect the environment, as opposed to the utopians who want to Change the World.
Even if you give your software away for free you still have to include those clauses disclaiming liabilities for "loss of business" (on a free product no less, but some people really do have that much nerve), "merchantability", and/or "fitness for a particular purpose", and all the rest of that crap.
Sure, but that's not a EULA. A EULA is "you would normally have these rights under copyright law, but we're taking them away in exchange for nothing". Warranty disclaimers are orthogonal.
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Oil companies are refusing to do anything to lower pump prices because it's not in the best interest of the shareholders, despite it being in the best interest of society as a whole.
No, it isn't. High prices encourage conservation and investigation of alternatives, which is exactly what's needed when demand exceeds supply.
Heh. Of course, the Java bridge is now deprecated (with good reason; Java's lack of dynamism causes large impedence mismatches with ObjC). I'm hoping Apple officially adopts PyObjC as a replacement.
The issue is deeper than that; its the fact that capitalism has failed. We should just cut our losses and put an end to this miserable system
Excellent. What's your alternative? Make sure to consider failure modes; when capitalism goes bad, you get overpriced cable service and silly restrictions on what you can do with your own property. When socialism goes bad, you get millions of people shot or starved to death.
How about someone who owns a boat and needs to tow it to a lake, so he needs a big V-8 or V-10? Should these people "feel the pain" when despite owning gas guzzlers, are driving vehicles they need?
Essentially, yes. Need is relative; for example, how many people who own boats really "need" them?
Ideally, people would buy more sensible vehicles
Sufficiently high gas prices will eventually make that happen.
But, you've GOT to see it China's way
I really don't have to see it the way of mass-murdering tyrants, who do not represent "China".
But, I also feel that forcibly punching through and digging under a countries virtual customs borders to be tantamount to waging a stateless if not de facto war against various organs of a government.
And fundamentalist Islamic nutjobs may consider it an act of war that the Western world broadcasts TV shows featuring women exposing their arms and driving cars. There is no moral reason to respect the desires of oppressive governments. (There may be practical reasons, as Google and Yahoo have shown).
I don't condone rambunctious or strategized abuse of the values of a country.
Again, you're equating the country with the gang of criminals currently in charge. The Chinese student trying to access uncensored news may have a rather different set of values than the thugs trying to detect and imprison him.
Um its their own propety, you have to sign a NDA to be able to use those manuals, that NDA was broken by it being posted elsewhere.
Perhaps, but apparently not by SA. And Apple isn't complaining about breach of contract or trade secrets, where they *might* have a case; they're arguing copyright infringment in a textbook fair use scenario.
Its not like the are censoring the whole fucking story just the page someone stole out of their manual. Jesus fucking christ I hope morons like you arnt allowed to vote in the US. People like you are the reason Bush won.
Yes, I hope only rational and levelheaded individuals such as yourself vote.
Without mutual consideration, there is no contract. When you buy a software license, your benefit is the use of the software, the seller's benefit is the payment you make for that license.
I would argue that in most cases, there is no consideration because I already have the right to use the software via 17 USC 117. The publisher would counter that I'm not the "owner" because all I really bought is a "license", but I didn't buy a license from them, I bought an actual product from Best Buy or whoever. (See Softman v Adobe). Most EULAs claim to retroactively transform sales into licenses and give the user no benefit whatsoever, and as such they should be invalid.
Yeah, I know this wouldn't hold up in court. I just don't see any reason why it shouldn't.
While you're at it, make it read objects from a gzip compressed network stream:
Sure, that's cool. But while Java often makes hard things possible, it makes easy things hard. The large majority of the time if I'm reading a file I don't care about buffering and don't need a pipeline of readers; I just want the file's contents as a string or array of lines. This is trivial in Perl and Python, and irritating in Java. Thus, everybody ends up with their own (incompatible, buggy) utility classes to do the simple stuff that it should do out of the box.
I don't think that /. is as much a unitary voting block as you think it is. At first glance it appears that /. is a direct split between the vocal pro-privacy, anti-war libertarians, and the pro-privacy, anti-war liberals, but I would hazzard to guess that at least a 3rd of /.ers are pro-war, pro-snooping conservatives.
And then there's us pro-privacy pro-war semi-libertarians. Right after 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld said: ""We have a choice: either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable; or to change the way that they live. And we chose the latter." I agree with that entirely, but it seems the Bush administration no longer does.
Perhaps you meant "Opposition to any attempts to increase equality" which DOES seem to be one of the core tenets of the right (as many believe that capitalism=meritocracy, and government intervention to increase equality is always 'reverse discrimination')
Nope. Your parenthetical is slightly less inaccurate. Conservatives (principled conservatives at least) generally oppose government intervention for *any* special interest groups, whether the result would be to increase or decrease equality. For example, I oppose both affirmative action and corporate welfare.
The choices are not 1. Wal-Mart exists, lots of people have low pay and bad health benefits, and 2. Wal-mart does not exist, those same people are all unemployed. There is also 3. Wal-Mart gives better health benefits.
And why not "4. You give Walmart employees better health benefits". Walmart is already paying mutually agreed-upon wages for labor. You would have them pay above the market rate, which is equivalent to giving them charity. But you or I could do the same, and I don't see why Walmart has any more obligation to do so than you or I do.
You assume "low-prices" are good. Care to explain why, logically?
Um, because we can get more stuff. How can they possibly not be? Is it bad that computers have gotten tremendously faster and cheaper over the last 30 years? If we discovered a cheap, unlimited, and nonpolluting energy source, would that be bad because oil companies would suffer?
As a retailer or competitor, I may disagree with that
Yes, established businesses often don't like competition. Tough. As we tell the MPAA and RIAA, evolve or die.
Rather than do our part to give back to those who provide to us, we want to reap all the benefits at little expense.
Yeah, we try to buy stuff for as little as possible. And we try to sell stuff (for example, our labor) for as much as possible. Meanwhile, the sellers and buyers on the other side are trying to do the opposite. I fail to understand why any of this should cause great moral outrage.
You forgot: ruins small businesses -- family country stores ran by generations suddenly without a prayer to compete.
Nobody is forcing customers to abandon these stores and go to Walmart. But astoundingly, it seems most people appreciate paying less for stuff.
You also forgot: ruins medium sized businesses who have had a half dozen stores across several counties and cities, suddenly and entirely eclipsed by this juggernaut that bestrides the narrow world as a colossus.
See above. Businesses that can't compete should evolve or die. That's what you'd tell the RIAA, right?
They drive out small retail business who actually have knowledge and skill in their field and replace them with people with neither subject knowledge nor the inclination to gain it.
Only if customers allow them to. Your real problem seems to be with consumers who are making price/quality tradeoffs that you don't agree with.
What's wrong with MacBook Pro anyway?
It's the exact opposite of "rolling off the tongue". "Pro" is fine, but the ack-uck combo in "MacBook" is ugly.
If you can be found to make $100 a month (who cant?) then you will be refused bankrupcy.
Again, only if you make above the median income. The details of the bill may have some problems, but I have no issue with the general concept that relatively wealthy people shouldn't be able to spend like drunken sailors and then easily walk away from the resulting debt.
If you go and buy a laptop, best to spring for the little bit extra for the warranty.
I disagree. Yes, laptops fail more often, but the warranties are more expensive. The manufacturer knows the expected failure rates, and prices the warranty to make a profit. Therefore, on average you lose. One thing to remember is that if you buy a laptop for $2000 and it dies 2 years later, you haven't lost $2000, you've only lost its replacement cost which at that point is much less. It only makes sense to buy an extended warranty if you have unusual usage patterns that you know will result in a significantly higher than normal chance of failure.
If you look at the productivity per hour worked, instead of productivity per real-time year, France comes out ahead of the United States.
On the other hand, look at unemployment rates. The minimum productivity needed to get a job in the US is lower than in France.
and indeed, how else can one force corporate america to take care of the planet other than through law?
Market forces can often do the trick. See the above comment about Walmart making their trucks more fuel-efficient; not because they care about the environment, but because it will lower their costs and make them more filthy profits.
It's using your shoulder/hand to hold the phone that impairs your ability to drive - because you have fewer appendages fully free to operate the vehicle - not talking to someone you can't see.
This is completely wrong. Hands-free devices do not reduce impairment; look at the studies. The problem is not that you're holding a small object to your head; it's that you're talking to someone who doesn't share your environment. If you're talking to a passenger, he'll probably know to shut up if you get into a tricky situation, and even if he doesn't you'll have no problem ignoring them when you need to focus on driving. With a disembodied voice who isn't aware of your situation, this is much harder.
I live in NJ where talking on a phone while driving requires a headset. Since I have been required to use it, I tried it out and found that it's more distracting to use the headset!
Of course. Headset laws are useless except that they let legislators pretend they're doing something. A number of studies have shown that the problem isn't holding the cell phone, it's having a conversation with a disembodied voice who doesn't share your environment.
Nuclear power is not safe!
Crossing the street is not safe. But often the benefits outweigh the risks.
Please go tell how safe it is to the thousands of people affected by the Chernobyl accident.
Chernobyl was a disaster for many reasons, most of which have no relevance to modern nuclear plants not run by Communist dictatorships. It is also instructive to look at the number of people killed in coal mining accidents.
To me, nuke is an obvious choice.
That's because you're a rational environmentalist who wants to actually protect the environment, as opposed to the utopians who want to Change the World.
Even if you give your software away for free you still have to include those clauses disclaiming liabilities for "loss of business" (on a free product no less, but some people really do have that much nerve), "merchantability", and/or "fitness for a particular purpose", and all the rest of that crap.
Sure, but that's not a EULA. A EULA is "you would normally have these rights under copyright law, but we're taking them away in exchange for nothing". Warranty disclaimers are orthogonal.