If even 1% of the population hate them then whether those people can rant about it on Twitter is basically irrelevant... ten million Chinese can kick out the government at any time.
Oh, but hang on: if those 1% who hate the government are spending their time ranting about it on Twitter then they won't be out in the streets burning things down. So the government should be encouraging people to use Twitter rather than get angry in the real world. Maybe this is reverse psychology where they talk about the evils of Twitter so that anyone who's anti-government wastes that energy ranting to their friends?
Sorry for being cynical, but it seems we get all sorts of researchers making breakthrough discoveries and then it takes a decade or longer for the stuff to get out to the general public to be used.
That's the wonder of government regulation. It's better that you die of cancer than risk taking a treatment that might save you.
Reduce the administrator to teacher ratio, allow performance based pay increases for teachers (no tenure after 3 years, that's crazy), and allow the truly bad teachers to be fired.
And eliminate the idea that kids should have to spend twenty years sitting in a classroom before they're allowed to do something useful with their lives. That is the real problem with 'education'.
I don't know where you are seeing this vitality. This outsourcing model applied here, with the predatory competition, took us to an unviable economy.
Only because there's so much regulation that few people in their right mind would want to set up a new company in a new field to employ the engineers whose jobs have been shipped offshore.
The fact that those laws aren't enforced means that they are free to abuse customers all they want, in the name of maximizing profit.
The original quote claimed that there's a law forcing companies to abuse customers, not that some companies will do so in the belief that it will increase profits. The government is apparently holding a gun to their heads saying 'YOU WILL ABUSE YOUR CUSTOMERS OR ELSE!'
Except no-one has actually managed to show such a law because it doesn't exist.
Not really, not just. Free market depends on the concept of "Perfect Competition".
No it doesn't. It just depends on you and me being able to freely agree on what price we sell to each other for (or whether we refuse to sell).
The free market says nothing about whether anyone will give a crap about your environmental views; merely that if people do want to 'save then environment' then they'll choose to do so, and if they don't then they won't. In the real world very few people give a crap about 'the environment' in the abstract, and most would rather save $10,000 next time they buy a car than save any endangered bug.
Zynga games are really not games. They're Skinner boxes. You unlock more stuff by performing many repetitive actions (clicking different areas on the areas for 5 minutes, for example). The more repetitive actions you perform, the more pictures and widgets you unlock. Nothing of what you unlock changes the game in any significant fashion.
You just described pretty much every MMOG I've ever tried.
What they are failing to take into account is that corporations, by law, have to abuse people for profit
[citation needed]
I don't believe there's any law that says corporations have to 'abuse people'.
Corporations may have to work to maximise profits, but that's a very different matter. Corporations who 'abuse' their customers tend to find they don't have customers for long, unless they're a government-backed monopoly.
In the end it's just a neo-feudal model of extracting money from people without giving anything real back in return.
If you don't count actually making the game as 'anything real'.
I'm not a fan of microtransactions, and if they're poorly implemented they can really harm a game, but ultimately the people who spend that money are the ones paying for the game to exist.
I've watched the videos and read all the online stuff about Win8, and I have no freaking idea how MS convinced themselves that this is a good idea. Treating tablets and laptops/desktops the same way is beyond stupid.
Probably the same way that Gnome and Ubuntu did.
There seems to be a very potent Stupidification Virus going around the IT world at the moment.
Before anyone jumps to the conclusion that green technology is not profitable and therefore a big scam, or a modern religion if you will, with all of its guilt, shame and asking for money, let me state an opinion that might not be popular here: Maybe, just maybe, the subsidies was too low?
Ah, yes. We can make 'green technology' profitable by simply... taking more money from taxpayers and giving it to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. I'm glad that I wasn't drinking coffee when I read that joke about the Conservatives being 'far right'.
Harper has been copying the republican play book throughout his term in politics. Manufacture a crisis that needs the response he wants anyway.
Um, no. That's been the _LEFT-WING_ play book for the last century or more.
I guess only firefox / chrome plugins will save us here.
Google Analytics seems to be trivial to block in /etc/hosts. Facebook tracking isn't so easy.
The OP said nothing about running Linux. I quote:
Seriously, why would one want an optical drive in a PC these days?
Even then, plenty of Windows games run on Linux.
Except when you want an archival copy of something.
Or when they suddenly stop working, as many USB sticks I've used have done.
To run any of the numerous games or software packages which use the CD/DVD for DRM?
What's to stop Apple or Microsoft from releasing a new PDA or tablet computer called a "Tricorder"?
Where do I buy a CBS Tricorder?
People will line up around the whole block the moment Apple announces an iPhone 5.
Only if The Jobs is still around to use his alien mind powers on them.
If even 1% of the population hate them then whether those people can rant about it on Twitter is basically irrelevant... ten million Chinese can kick out the government at any time.
Oh, but hang on: if those 1% who hate the government are spending their time ranting about it on Twitter then they won't be out in the streets burning things down. So the government should be encouraging people to use Twitter rather than get angry in the real world. Maybe this is reverse psychology where they talk about the evils of Twitter so that anyone who's anti-government wastes that energy ranting to their friends?
Sorry for being cynical, but it seems we get all sorts of researchers making breakthrough discoveries and then it takes a decade or longer for the stuff to get out to the general public to be used.
That's the wonder of government regulation. It's better that you die of cancer than risk taking a treatment that might save you.
That is really cool.... it won't go terribly wrong, right?
If it does, you'll die. Which you were going to do anyway.
Reduce the administrator to teacher ratio, allow performance based pay increases for teachers (no tenure after 3 years, that's crazy), and allow the truly bad teachers to be fired.
And eliminate the idea that kids should have to spend twenty years sitting in a classroom before they're allowed to do something useful with their lives. That is the real problem with 'education'.
I don't know where you are seeing this vitality. This outsourcing model applied here, with the predatory competition, took us to an unviable economy.
Only because there's so much regulation that few people in their right mind would want to set up a new company in a new field to employ the engineers whose jobs have been shipped offshore.
The fact that those laws aren't enforced means that they are free to abuse customers all they want, in the name of maximizing profit.
The original quote claimed that there's a law forcing companies to abuse customers, not that some companies will do so in the belief that it will increase profits. The government is apparently holding a gun to their heads saying 'YOU WILL ABUSE YOUR CUSTOMERS OR ELSE!'
Except no-one has actually managed to show such a law because it doesn't exist.
So where does that show:
What they are failing to take into account is that corporations, by law, have to abuse people for profit
Ah, it doesn't, does it?
Are you seriously claiming that there's a law requiring BP to cause oil leaks?
Zynga isn't improving. .: The free market doesn't exist, through contradiction.
Zynga is selling things that hundreds of millions of people want and making a lot of money. That you don't like the things they do is irrelevant.
Not really, not just. Free market depends on the concept of "Perfect Competition".
No it doesn't. It just depends on you and me being able to freely agree on what price we sell to each other for (or whether we refuse to sell).
The free market says nothing about whether anyone will give a crap about your environmental views; merely that if people do want to 'save then environment' then they'll choose to do so, and if they don't then they won't. In the real world very few people give a crap about 'the environment' in the abstract, and most would rather save $10,000 next time they buy a car than save any endangered bug.
What planet are you living in? There's no real free market, because free markets work on a number of premisses which are unrealistic.
The free market is just what people do when no-one is holding a gun to their head forcing them to do something different.
Unfortunately we live in a world where there are millions of people with guns telling others what to do all the time.
Zynga games are really not games. They're Skinner boxes. You unlock more stuff by performing many repetitive actions (clicking different areas on the areas for 5 minutes, for example). The more repetitive actions you perform, the more pictures and widgets you unlock. Nothing of what you unlock changes the game in any significant fashion.
You just described pretty much every MMOG I've ever tried.
What they are failing to take into account is that corporations, by law, have to abuse people for profit
[citation needed]
I don't believe there's any law that says corporations have to 'abuse people'.
Corporations may have to work to maximise profits, but that's a very different matter. Corporations who 'abuse' their customers tend to find they don't have customers for long, unless they're a government-backed monopoly.
In the end it's just a neo-feudal model of extracting money from people without giving anything real back in return.
If you don't count actually making the game as 'anything real'.
I'm not a fan of microtransactions, and if they're poorly implemented they can really harm a game, but ultimately the people who spend that money are the ones paying for the game to exist.
There aren't to many user replaceable parts on laptops
Batteries, RAM, disks, wireless card, possibly GPU. Heck, my first laptop even had a socketed CPU.
Those are most of the things that anyone might want to replace.
I've watched the videos and read all the online stuff about Win8, and I have no freaking idea how MS convinced themselves that this is a good idea. Treating tablets and laptops/desktops the same way is beyond stupid.
Probably the same way that Gnome and Ubuntu did.
There seems to be a very potent Stupidification Virus going around the IT world at the moment.
Before anyone jumps to the conclusion that green technology is not profitable and therefore a big scam, or a modern religion if you will, with all of its guilt, shame and asking for money, let me state an opinion that might not be popular here: Maybe, just maybe, the subsidies was too low?
Ah, yes. We can make 'green technology' profitable by simply... taking more money from taxpayers and giving it to them.
That'll work.
It's too bad that Good Thoughts won't help these companies out.
They don't need 'Good Thoughts', they need a viable business plan.
Of course that's not actually possible with 'green technology' because very little of it makes any financial sense.