Until Adobe released the Creative Suite, it was a hard to justify the cost of their software. Now that you can get Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, GoLive and InDesign for $1000, it's a different story.
Of course, I'd like for them to chop that down even further, but for now, considering the what that software is worth to me, it's a bargain. I wish more companies were as thoughtful. (Autodesk anyone?) Now if Adobe would only get off their ass and get a Universal binary for Intel Macs released. I downgraded to Creative Suite 1 so I could run Photoshop and Illustrator at the same time without crashing both.
Gosh, well obviously since you feel this way, there must be hordes of people who feel the same way! And Linksys is foolish not to take your anecdotal evidence as gospel!
Tell me about the 75mpg vehicles littering the streets in Europe. (Don't bother if the vehicles only have two wheels.) I think you're talking out of your ass.
Just once I'd like to have a discussion about science that doesn't include Yet Another Definition of Science. Especially when the definition changes so much, and often is contradictory to what came before.
It's a fantasy, IMO, to say "here is a group of scientists without an agenda or bias". Scientists, being human, will have either or both of these things. There's nothing wrong with that. If payment in the sciences is reason to distrust the findings, rather than disproving the findings themselves, then let's ferret out the ultimate source of all research dollars so everybody can take a turn at handwaving away "inconvenient truths" because the nerds in lab coats took dirty money. That's certainly a lot easier than proving stuff.
I don't know where you got the idea that I'm asserting no tragedy of the commons. I think you pulled that out of your ass. I simply stated that proponents of global warming solutions and proponents of big-government often are the same people. Also, "tragedy of the commons" is usually used as an example of how private property works more efficiently than a centralized authority, so I'm not even sure you're entirely familiar with the concept.
I also don't see how our collective actions, made freely, cannot be reverted by collective actions, also made freely. Why is it the first instinct of many to demand regulations? You don't have to work too hard to convince people to drive more fuel-efficient cars. They'll do it, assuming that they can find a fuel efficient car that isn't a flimsy tin can and doesn't look like George Jetson took a car-shaped shit.
I think this instinct towards regulation comes because it's a lot easier to get a law passed saying "don't do that" than it is to go to school, get an engineering degree and invent a 75mpg fuel-injection system. And it's easier to blame the middle-class who drive their SUVs on their daily commute rather than fix the rotten political decisions that led first to urban blight and then to suburban flight.
Yeah, they do care. Dead people don't trade up, so car manufacturers have a reason to make safe cars. If people want fuel efficient cars, they'll buy them, and car manufacturers will build them.
I know it's popular on Slashdot to assume that corporations are evil and that consumers are dumb sheeple who will buy whatever they see advertised on Desperate Houswives, but I think that shows remarkable condescension, not to mention more than a little arrogance. It's also the kind of thinking that leads to totalitarianism: "the People don't know what's good for them, but I do!"
Finally, you've constructed an impressive strawman there. Congratulations. Is this normally how you argue, or did you make an exception just for me?
But what I do know is that this theory that global warming is some kind of conspiracy of control is just a stupid invention of Michael Crichton, not a real thing that's actually happening.
You may notice that every solution offered for global warming involves greater government regulation or some other central authority. It's never "you should buy more fuel efficient cars", it's "there should be a law to require more fuel efficient cars".
What annoys me is that more than a few of these same global warming people will denounce George W. Bush for overselling the terrorist threat for political purposes.
My point is that I could not attribute any sincerity to this writer. And there are a lot of folks writing on the "pro" side who don't have money in the fight, and thus it's easier to believe them.
I'm looking for something here that's either science or rationalism, and I'm finding neither.
"Sincerity"? "Easier to believe them"? What is this crap?
"Altruism" was the wrong word. How about "fanciful, and laced with typical left-wing boogeymen"?
"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."
In cased you missed it, he didn't suggest a natural disaster like a meteor smashing into the Earth. Every doomsday scenario suggested had a human-causation. (Except maybe "sudden global warming", whatever that's supposed to be.) The problem of humans being assholes is not something that is fixed by rocketships to new planets.
It's pretty funny, though. Hawking is undoubtably a firm believer in evolution. If the human species bites it, eventually something like us will come along again, given time. So what's the big deal? If you want to do something for the human race, encourage Hawking to get a vasectomy. Poison genes are much more likely to cause harm than a fancied asteroid of doom.
Previous human migrations were driven by less, ahh, altruistic motivations. Survival, distaste for the status quo, better living, things like that. How lame. I think the last time altruism drove emigration folks ended up in Siberia.
We'll have colonies on Mars when there's an economic need for it. It's nothing other than science-fair bullshit until then. End of story. STFU, Hawking.
So your reading of "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" means discrimination against charities that are religious in nature? I'm opposed to the government funding charities in any case, but if they're going to pass out federal monies, they certainly shouldn't discriminate based on religiosity.
Anyway, your complaint was about churches, not faith-based charities, which are two different things. Maybe you can come back and argue later when you're less confused.
Yeah the ol' 'estate tax' eh? That's what has been keeping our poor people poor all these years?
Well, no. IMO, people being poor has nothing to do with how much money they have or are given. "Broke" is a transient condition; poor is forever. People are poor because poor people make terrible decisions and fall prey to mistakes that ruin their chances for years to come. That's unfortunate, but it's not something that can be fixed. Witness the Katrina aid money that went to buy iPods.
But the estate tax is a tax that give incentives to NOT invest for the future. This is always a bad idea. The idea behind the estate tax is to punish rich fucks with trust funds, but those are the very people who can afford to find the loopholes. It's the guy who wants to leave a pizza shop to his kids who gets screwed when his sole proprietorship is found to be valued at umpty-million dollars, half of which is now owed to the government.
Churches--most churches--are non-profit organizations. Unless you also want to tax Greenpeace, you're inconsistant.
Since the parent of this illiterate kid obviously won't take responsibility for him, the school has to. I'm wildly uninterested in this punk kid's woes. Teenager doesn't have free speech? Whoop-de-fucking-do. If he has a parent of any ability, there's a lot he's not able to do that normal adults can.
Christ almighty, the only overreach is the shrill complaints coming from Slashdotters who should be smart enough to know better.
Please describe the Conservative plans which would work better.
Allowing people to keep more of what they earn, both alive and dead. It's hard to build wealth for your family if half of it is taken away simply because you died, especially when a lot of family wealth is accounted for in a business's assets rather that sacks of cash like in Scrooge McDuck's money building.
What about all the Conservatives who love trade with China?
That's hardly a monolithic conservative viewpoint. See Pat Buchanan for example. I would say that there's a difference between Darfur and China myself. One's a staggeringly awful shithole, the other's sort-of staggering in the right direction. And in the case of China, nothing's more helpful to the actual Chinese people than free trade. A war with a billion Chinamen would not be helpful.
What about all the Conservatives who love Saudi Arabia?
Who are these conservatives? I think they're few and far between if they exist at all post-9/11.
Replace 'universities' with 'churches' and for every 'kook in Colorado' (do you even know his name?) I'll give you a Jerry Falwel. Which one is worse?
I'm sorry--when did preachers get legally enforceable tenure?
My Netflix queue is filled with movies made in the '30s, '40s and '50s. Very few modern movies. Why? The older movies are telling a story I'd like to see, and done in an imitable style that is at once believable and larger-than-life. Watch Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh--his dancing is largely done in a single take. Actors these days only have to learn a handful of lines at a time because the scene will be cut and edited so mercilessly that there's no point in long, difficult takes where there's a lot of talky talky.
Acting is now limited to a pretty person staring at a fixed point while a camera pans around them. Drama is introduced through one or more crippled orphans contracting AIDS and bird flu. Movies just aren't done well these days, though they look very good and cost a lot of money.
I agree with Adams's contention that milk should go first, then tea. There really is a difference.
In regards to the grandparent post, I prefer to make a pot at a time. When I'm alone, a pot will last for a while. With other people, offering a fresh cup of tea will make you very popular, especially if you're even remotely competant at making tea. Also, if you make a pot, it's much easier to use loose tea. Loose tea is almost always superior to bags, if much less convenient.
Except for the fact that in order to unfuck this situation you have to know whether it's KDE or Gnome; where it's set; how to set it; and best of all, you might have to be an administrator in order to do that, depending on how things are set up. "Okay mom, you need to log out and log back in as 'root', with a password of '*7%%3adBkD'..."
You overlook that on the Mac, there's only one email client installed, unless you specifically install another one. Most Linux distributions will spew 3 or 4 different mail clients onto your computer by default--KMail, Gnome mail, DiscoMail, and maybe pine and mutt just incase grandma wants to relive the glory days of the PDP-11.
She may have accidentally changes things herself. I'd be surprised, because she is basically given a checklist of things to do to accomplish what she wants, and she doesn't deviate from that because at that points she gets lost and confused. Add to this the fact that for some reason her clock fails to sync to NTP servers for some damn reason and I'm of the opinion that Suse silently changed it somehow. Not that it matters. Even assuming it was a piece of cake to change things back, the miserably poor design of KMail is enough to indict the whole schlemiel.
After spending gobs of time keeping my mother's computer virus- and spyware-free, my brother finally just said "to hell with it" and installed Suse on it. After some time and some coaching, she was using Thunderbird as her email and OpenOffice as her word processor.
This morning I get a call. Mom's literally in tears. She tried to send her newspaper column as an email as she always does, and for some reason, it opens up KMail instead of doing it the way it used to. Why? I haven't a clue. Maybe she did something. Maybe Suse silently changed her preferences. I don't know, but I do know that brought her morning to a screeching halt.
Of course, KMail was not configured for anything. I tried to talk her through setting up the mail account, but to no avail. She wasn't sure what she was looking at, she didn't know any of the terminology (tabs, menubar, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc.), and who the fuck knows the difference between SMTP and sendmail? Me, you, and about 12 other nerds. I couldn't make heads or tails of what she was telling me--"Identities" sounded promising, but AFAICT, it contained no information on mail servers or log in information. It was a dog's breakfast of dipshittery.
I finally talked her through sending the column through a webmail account, but Christ almighty people--this is damned unacceptable. I'm going today to buy a Mac Mini, and I will set her up with it, and I will set up VNC or some kind of remote administration, and I'll never suggest such a nightmare again.
The prophet jwz said it best when he described the "Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers" syndrome. You make a nice server, open-sourcers, but your desktop sucks balls. (If your first instinct is to tell me that we should have used a different distribution, you are unteachable and should probably go fuck yourself.)
Nonsense. Download the demo to SketchUp. It's as simple as 3D can get. Blender is much more complex, but it's hard to use because it follows no existing paradigm, it is inconsistent even with itself, and the UI is atrociously designed.
I don't do that. They come in, we watch 'em when we have time. They go back out. Some months we watch 3 movies a week--some months, just 3 movies total. At $20/month, it's a good deal for me for these reasons:
1) If I hear about a movie I might want to see, or if somebody recommends something I haven't seen, I put the movie in the queue. No fuss trying to remember anything.
2) We don't have cable, so this is the majority of our entertainment budget.
3) With no late fees, we have total control of when we want to watch something.
4) Practically endless choices. I've never gone looking for a movie that I couldn't find.
If you're going to rip the DVDs as soon as they arrive, why not just download them from torrents? It's just a legal (or illegal, rather), and you don't have to worry about shelling out that MASSIVE $19.95 every month and making sure that you somehow game the system so your Netflix rentals work out to be $0.25/movie like a penniless schlub.
Slashdot Mirror
Until Adobe released the Creative Suite, it was a hard to justify the cost of their software. Now that you can get Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, GoLive and InDesign for $1000, it's a different story.
Of course, I'd like for them to chop that down even further, but for now, considering the what that software is worth to me, it's a bargain. I wish more companies were as thoughtful. (Autodesk anyone?) Now if Adobe would only get off their ass and get a Universal binary for Intel Macs released. I downgraded to Creative Suite 1 so I could run Photoshop and Illustrator at the same time without crashing both.
Gosh, well obviously since you feel this way, there must be hordes of people who feel the same way! And Linksys is foolish not to take your anecdotal evidence as gospel!
Tell me about the 75mpg vehicles littering the streets in Europe. (Don't bother if the vehicles only have two wheels.) I think you're talking out of your ass.
Just once I'd like to have a discussion about science that doesn't include Yet Another Definition of Science. Especially when the definition changes so much, and often is contradictory to what came before.
It's a fantasy, IMO, to say "here is a group of scientists without an agenda or bias". Scientists, being human, will have either or both of these things. There's nothing wrong with that. If payment in the sciences is reason to distrust the findings, rather than disproving the findings themselves, then let's ferret out the ultimate source of all research dollars so everybody can take a turn at handwaving away "inconvenient truths" because the nerds in lab coats took dirty money. That's certainly a lot easier than proving stuff.
I don't know where you got the idea that I'm asserting no tragedy of the commons. I think you pulled that out of your ass. I simply stated that proponents of global warming solutions and proponents of big-government often are the same people. Also, "tragedy of the commons" is usually used as an example of how private property works more efficiently than a centralized authority, so I'm not even sure you're entirely familiar with the concept.
I also don't see how our collective actions, made freely, cannot be reverted by collective actions, also made freely. Why is it the first instinct of many to demand regulations? You don't have to work too hard to convince people to drive more fuel-efficient cars. They'll do it, assuming that they can find a fuel efficient car that isn't a flimsy tin can and doesn't look like George Jetson took a car-shaped shit.
I think this instinct towards regulation comes because it's a lot easier to get a law passed saying "don't do that" than it is to go to school, get an engineering degree and invent a 75mpg fuel-injection system. And it's easier to blame the middle-class who drive their SUVs on their daily commute rather than fix the rotten political decisions that led first to urban blight and then to suburban flight.
Yeah, they do care. Dead people don't trade up, so car manufacturers have a reason to make safe cars. If people want fuel efficient cars, they'll buy them, and car manufacturers will build them.
I know it's popular on Slashdot to assume that corporations are evil and that consumers are dumb sheeple who will buy whatever they see advertised on Desperate Houswives, but I think that shows remarkable condescension, not to mention more than a little arrogance. It's also the kind of thinking that leads to totalitarianism: "the People don't know what's good for them, but I do!"
Finally, you've constructed an impressive strawman there. Congratulations. Is this normally how you argue, or did you make an exception just for me?
But what I do know is that this theory that global warming is some kind of conspiracy of control is just a stupid invention of Michael Crichton, not a real thing that's actually happening.
You may notice that every solution offered for global warming involves greater government regulation or some other central authority. It's never "you should buy more fuel efficient cars", it's "there should be a law to require more fuel efficient cars".
What annoys me is that more than a few of these same global warming people will denounce George W. Bush for overselling the terrorist threat for political purposes.
My point is that I could not attribute any sincerity to this writer. And there are a lot of folks writing on the "pro" side who don't have money in the fight, and thus it's easier to believe them.
I'm looking for something here that's either science or rationalism, and I'm finding neither.
"Sincerity"? "Easier to believe them"? What is this crap?
"Altruism" was the wrong word. How about "fanciful, and laced with typical left-wing boogeymen"?
"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."
In cased you missed it, he didn't suggest a natural disaster like a meteor smashing into the Earth. Every doomsday scenario suggested had a human-causation. (Except maybe "sudden global warming", whatever that's supposed to be.) The problem of humans being assholes is not something that is fixed by rocketships to new planets.
It's pretty funny, though. Hawking is undoubtably a firm believer in evolution. If the human species bites it, eventually something like us will come along again, given time. So what's the big deal? If you want to do something for the human race, encourage Hawking to get a vasectomy. Poison genes are much more likely to cause harm than a fancied asteroid of doom.
We'll have colonies on Mars when there's an economic need for it. It's nothing other than science-fair bullshit until then. End of story. STFU, Hawking.
I've had two LaCie drives fail. The best part was they were both halves of a software mirror. BTW, the LaCie drives are (usually) Seagate drives.
Christ, I've only been complaining about this since 2001 in my /. journal.
Because it costs a lot to go to the moon? Did you think through your question? At all?
Unless you're being humorous.
Anyway, your complaint was about churches, not faith-based charities, which are two different things. Maybe you can come back and argue later when you're less confused.
Well, no. IMO, people being poor has nothing to do with how much money they have or are given. "Broke" is a transient condition; poor is forever. People are poor because poor people make terrible decisions and fall prey to mistakes that ruin their chances for years to come. That's unfortunate, but it's not something that can be fixed. Witness the Katrina aid money that went to buy iPods.
But the estate tax is a tax that give incentives to NOT invest for the future. This is always a bad idea. The idea behind the estate tax is to punish rich fucks with trust funds, but those are the very people who can afford to find the loopholes. It's the guy who wants to leave a pizza shop to his kids who gets screwed when his sole proprietorship is found to be valued at umpty-million dollars, half of which is now owed to the government.
Churches--most churches--are non-profit organizations. Unless you also want to tax Greenpeace, you're inconsistant.
Christ almighty, the only overreach is the shrill complaints coming from Slashdotters who should be smart enough to know better.
Allowing people to keep more of what they earn, both alive and dead. It's hard to build wealth for your family if half of it is taken away simply because you died, especially when a lot of family wealth is accounted for in a business's assets rather that sacks of cash like in Scrooge McDuck's money building.
What about all the Conservatives who love trade with China?
That's hardly a monolithic conservative viewpoint. See Pat Buchanan for example. I would say that there's a difference between Darfur and China myself. One's a staggeringly awful shithole, the other's sort-of staggering in the right direction. And in the case of China, nothing's more helpful to the actual Chinese people than free trade. A war with a billion Chinamen would not be helpful.
What about all the Conservatives who love Saudi Arabia?
Who are these conservatives? I think they're few and far between if they exist at all post-9/11.
Replace 'universities' with 'churches' and for every 'kook in Colorado' (do you even know his name?) I'll give you a Jerry Falwel. Which one is worse?
I'm sorry--when did preachers get legally enforceable tenure?
Acting is now limited to a pretty person staring at a fixed point while a camera pans around them. Drama is introduced through one or more crippled orphans contracting AIDS and bird flu. Movies just aren't done well these days, though they look very good and cost a lot of money.
In regards to the grandparent post, I prefer to make a pot at a time. When I'm alone, a pot will last for a while. With other people, offering a fresh cup of tea will make you very popular, especially if you're even remotely competant at making tea. Also, if you make a pot, it's much easier to use loose tea. Loose tea is almost always superior to bags, if much less convenient.
You overlook that on the Mac, there's only one email client installed, unless you specifically install another one. Most Linux distributions will spew 3 or 4 different mail clients onto your computer by default--KMail, Gnome mail, DiscoMail, and maybe pine and mutt just incase grandma wants to relive the glory days of the PDP-11.
She may have accidentally changes things herself. I'd be surprised, because she is basically given a checklist of things to do to accomplish what she wants, and she doesn't deviate from that because at that points she gets lost and confused. Add to this the fact that for some reason her clock fails to sync to NTP servers for some damn reason and I'm of the opinion that Suse silently changed it somehow. Not that it matters. Even assuming it was a piece of cake to change things back, the miserably poor design of KMail is enough to indict the whole schlemiel.
I timeshift too. I watch it when I'm good and ready. Then I mail it back. That's kind of the point of Netflix.
I wonder if he's ever had a rip go corrupt on him and needed to re-rent the disc.
This morning I get a call. Mom's literally in tears. She tried to send her newspaper column as an email as she always does, and for some reason, it opens up KMail instead of doing it the way it used to. Why? I haven't a clue. Maybe she did something. Maybe Suse silently changed her preferences. I don't know, but I do know that brought her morning to a screeching halt.
Of course, KMail was not configured for anything. I tried to talk her through setting up the mail account, but to no avail. She wasn't sure what she was looking at, she didn't know any of the terminology (tabs, menubar, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc.), and who the fuck knows the difference between SMTP and sendmail? Me, you, and about 12 other nerds. I couldn't make heads or tails of what she was telling me--"Identities" sounded promising, but AFAICT, it contained no information on mail servers or log in information. It was a dog's breakfast of dipshittery.
I finally talked her through sending the column through a webmail account, but Christ almighty people--this is damned unacceptable. I'm going today to buy a Mac Mini, and I will set her up with it, and I will set up VNC or some kind of remote administration, and I'll never suggest such a nightmare again.
The prophet jwz said it best when he described the "Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers" syndrome. You make a nice server, open-sourcers, but your desktop sucks balls. (If your first instinct is to tell me that we should have used a different distribution, you are unteachable and should probably go fuck yourself.)
Nonsense. Download the demo to SketchUp. It's as simple as 3D can get. Blender is much more complex, but it's hard to use because it follows no existing paradigm, it is inconsistent even with itself, and the UI is atrociously designed.
1) If I hear about a movie I might want to see, or if somebody recommends something I haven't seen, I put the movie in the queue. No fuss trying to remember anything.
2) We don't have cable, so this is the majority of our entertainment budget.
3) With no late fees, we have total control of when we want to watch something.
4) Practically endless choices. I've never gone looking for a movie that I couldn't find.
If you're going to rip the DVDs as soon as they arrive, why not just download them from torrents? It's just a legal (or illegal, rather), and you don't have to worry about shelling out that MASSIVE $19.95 every month and making sure that you somehow game the system so your Netflix rentals work out to be $0.25/movie like a penniless schlub.