I'm not sure what the point of this would be, other than to get attention.
The point would be to say "Hello, I am a consumer, and while you are a large corporation, you still have to meet my criteria if you wish me to purchase itemX through you."
Of course, Orbitz is under no obligation to listen, but they may find, if this does become an issue, that they will change their TOS. It's not as if it would be a bad business decision from their stand point, and it may garner them a few more customers. That's the power of the consumer, right there. Contrary to popular belief, the consumer DOES have a say in the business world; it's their wallet, after all. Not using Orbitz is fine, but they could chalk this loss in business up to other, non related things. Writing an email informing them of your decision not to spend money at their website is just ensuring that they know why revenue is down.
Of course, it is true that this one little act is of such minor importance that Orbitz is most likely to just ignore it, but maybe, just maybe, it WILL catch their attention and things will change. I know I still hold doors open for people when entering or leaving a restaurant, even knowing that that one small act of kindness does relatively little in making the world a better place, overall. It takes little effort and, who knows, it's quite possible that it does have some effect after all.
Also, to go back to your example of profanity on a web site; it is well within your rights to completely ignore, or derogatively reply to any email sent to you concerning your decisions in running your site. But, for instance, what if your site's ToS said something like "You shall not use the letter p on Tuesdays or Thursdays until after tea." It's a pretty silly statement, yes, and I seriously doubt it is going to harm the existence of your website. Knowing that it is a ridiculous rule, you would be more inclined to listen to complaints concerning it than, say, you would about profanity (or that Orbitz would be if, say, they got 100,000 emails for people wanting free tickets to Hawaii). In the latter two situations (profanity and free air fare), you are both completely justified in saying "you're all fucking idiots, 'stfukthxbai'", because it has a serious adverse effect on your business (or organization). In the former two situations (not deep-linking-for-personal-use and using the letter p), there are (in all probability) no adverse effects, and as such, you would be MUCH more inclined to modify your ToS.
Agreed, it was a bad example. What if it was some private user who posted the result set from his search criteria in his blog for some reason or another? Clearly as benign use, but also as clearly, a breach of the TOS. And maybe I'm just paranoid in thinking they would sue some Joe Schmoe for doing this, but I've seen too many ridiculous lawsuits over the last few years to be surprised if it did happen.
Those are two instances which are clearly not in the best interests of Orbitz. However, what about more mundane uses? Perhaps I want to help a friend find the best price for their trip? Technically, I won't be able to directly link them to the results I've found. Instead, I'd have to walk them through exactly what search/browse/filter criteria to use and hope that their result set is no different than mine.
Perhaps Orbitz should be allowed to do this. After all, it is their site. At the same time, however, consumers should voice their annoyance at being so inconvenienced. Just a quick email to their customer service department telling them "I'd love to use your site to find the best travel information I can, however, I find the TOS too restrictive for my needs and will be using Travelocity instead. I felt it important to inform you of this loss of business in the hopes that you will one day revise your TOS to allow deep linking for personal use."
Ahh, until their webmonkeys forget to put out the robots.txt file, Google (or other) crawls them, and then they get sued for breaching their TOS. Whether they'd win or not isn't the issue; it's still pretty damn expensive to defend yourself from lawsuits. Sure, Google brings in mad cash, but I'm sure they'd much rather spend that on free soda for their employees than epic teams of lawyers.
You're assuming every child has the capacity to make use of that education. That's what equal opportunity IS. You give everyone the same opportunity to succeed with the knowledge that, no matter what you do, they're still going to fuck up and throw away any chance of a good future. Don't worry, you'll still have your labor force.
I'd have to agree x 3 with you there. It really is a dangerous situation to be in, because it becomes that much easier to pull the wool over our collective eyes as we squabble back and forth like spoiled brats.
And see, this is what needs to be done, in America. Not necessarily what you propose, but the fact that we discussed the situation. I come from one side who doesn't want the welfare to be taken away entirely, which is the (false) label those in welfare reform receive, and you want it to save money, without being irresponsible. If people didn't saddle others with these ridiculous labels that have extremely negative connotations, our nation wouldn't be nearly as polarized today as it is. Initially, I would have said "yes, I disagree with eljasbo". After hearing your point, I admit there is definite potential, and if we (and others!) would only work together, we could come to a beneficial conclusion. But sadly, that isn't the way America seems to work, any longer.:(
Bag lunches would be a great thing, but I know they haven't spread to our neck of the woods, yet. Also, breakfast is only served for kids whose busses arrive early enough, at least at our school. While I understand what you're saying, in those situations, wouldn't it be best if the children WERE removed from their parents custody?
I don't know for sure. There are pros and cons. But it's worth discussing.
I'm really curious how eating 1 time a day, 5 of 7 days of the weak is in any way considered "acceptable". I've seen anorexic people eat more often than that.
The problem is, that is what the bill did (not allowing the health of the mother to come into play). Hence the reason that various courts throughout the nation declared it unconstitutional. Hence the reason so many "pro life" people (at least the ones that I know) were so opposed to it.
But you are correct, that is the question; is abortion a valid form of birth control for an arbitrary reason, or isn't it? When does life begin? On top of that, when does it become meaningful?
But those aren't the points that are actually discussed in any meaningful way. In depth discussion is required, but that is rarely, if ever, an option in this current political landscape. It's possible it never was, but it seems to me that at some point, somewhere, people actually did get together and discuss the real meat of the issues and come to an agreement - or at least an understanding. Nowadays, there is no understanding, much less agreement; it's constant, ridiculous vilification.
This isn't communist. This is "manuring your field", as any country would be wise to do. It's the same exact thing as public schools. Technically, but your definition, public schools would be communist, as it is the government spending money on the public good. This is the same thing. Just like making sure children have an education and can do more than manual labor made us a great country, so, too, will making sure they don't starve to death. It's pretty much common sense.
Well, actually, they are rather right-wing from a non-American perspective. But in America, apparently, it's the difference between night and day. It's all in our head, but whatever.
Republicans essentially stand for lowering taxes, decreasing the size/amount of government and government regulation, etc, etc. Recently they've also seemed to take a very socially conservative point of view (ie: wanting to regulate the private life), which is somewhat ironic. However, this may just be a momentary trend and go away in the future, as Republican ideals are consistently in favor of less Federal Government intervention.
Democrats essentially stand for government programs that benefit the people (though this is not always what we get in practice!), higher taxes for the rich (to support these new government programs) and Federal regulation on anything they believe needs it (which could be quite the slippery slope toward socialism).
And there are more than two parties: there's the Libertarian party, the Green party, hell, we even have the Communist and Nazi Party in the US. If you don't like those two parties, start your own! Until you get a moderate amount of votes for president, you won't recieve any funding to help you run your party, but there you have it.
Also, even if you belong to a party, you don't have to vote for them if you don't want to. You can write in "Micky Mouse" on the ballot if it really struck your fancy. It's your choice.
The big reason that these two standpoints are mentioned is because our country has, apparently, become completely incapable of respecting the intricasy of any argument, and tries to boil everything down to two base-line viewpoints. Everything gets simpliified down to sound bites and harped on and used as war cries, regardless of whether they even truly have any meaning for their particular point.
For example, we have the "anti partial birth abortion" people vs. "pro choice". They argued back and forth for weeks/months, but no one seemed to notice that the "pro choice" people weren't necessarily for murdering fully formed fetuses, per se, but only in wanting to allow the mother, if medically necessary, an "escape route", so to speak. I don't want to get into details on which side is right or wrong, but the point is, "pro choice" is a far cry from "wanting to make sure the mother's life isn't in danger by not allowing this". But instead, it was made to sound like these people wanted to go about aborting fetuses willy nilly, just for fun. It's really dishonest - and I don't blame the Republicans/Conservatives for this - it's rampant throughout America, and, in my opinion, a serious, terminal disease to the political process in America.
(Please note that I am not a political scientist, just a geek who takes politics very seriously. I'm sure Republicans would try to paint themselves in a different way and Democrats as well, but it's really difficult to determine what is fact and what is an offshoot of their respective Public Relations campaigns.)
Actually, no, we expect all children, whether rich or poor, to have the same opportunities. Who gives a shit if some dead-beat asshole has money to buy beer or not? No one. No one expects anyone to give him money. But when his kids don't have anything on their back, then there goes that whole "equal opportunity" thing right out the fucking window. And unless you're willing to start taking children from poor parents who can't (or won't) give them anything to help them succeed in life, then welfare is the only to do it.
Back to taxes: yes, if you make more money, you can better pay more taxes than some guy who can barely put food on the table, much less heat the home. Ooo. So you can't buy that new BMW. Big fucking deal. At least you're not fucking starving.
I guess I've just been missing it the whole time. A vast left-wing conspiracy? And here I have, been working on my own individual left-wing "agenda" for years, without coordinating with the hive! Damn. For all I know, I was reinventing the wheel OR being counter productive to Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy official policy! I must make contact soon. It sounds like one hell of a good time.
(Substitute Left-Wing with Right-Wing and reuse at will)
I thought about this before (and I'm sure people much smarter than I have thought about it much sooner, but I haven't heard about it yet:) ): what if we could get a space probe to "catch" on to an asteroid (if it was large enough) and use its gravitational pull to essentially "drag" it out into deep space along with it? Wouldn't this be much faster than using its own propulstion?
Now it gets even more interesting; what if, in the far future, we have intra-gallactic travel down pat, but intergallactic is quite different. What if we could find a star that is going to do the same exact thing as this star and "latch on" to it, having it drag us waaaaaaaaay out into deep space (and by we, I mean a probe, a space station, whatever). Would it be possible? Useful?
You're right, they do. But you have to admit, there is something disturbing about the fact that they can fire you for, say, mowing your lawn in an inappropriate fashion (ie: the perimeter method vs. the row method). Or for any reason at all. The Way It Is (TM), but disturbing all the same. On the flip side of that token, however; where could one accurately define a line as to what firing is appropriate and what isn't?
(This is going under the assumption that there aren't already laws restricting this, which, for some reason, I believe there may be, but I'm not really sure of).
Shoo, I would be furious if I couldn't write files wherever I goddam well pleased on my harddrive. I'm perfectly content with all the idiots out there running into problems because they don't know how to use computers. When these problems happen, one of two things (eventually) happen: 1) they grow wiser and become geeks or 2) they get frustrated and give up. Sure, there's a lot of collateral damage (like when they call you crying at midnight because they can't get manage to open Word to access their 18 page final paper for class_xyz and you have to crawl out of bed and put clothes on and run over and help them out because you're sometimes a nice guy like that), but in the long run, it's worth it. Eventually people will learn. They'll learn the hard way. It's kind of like letting people run amok when they're just turning 18, only to find out that there are consequences and repercussions to their actions, and they need to start acting like an adult and not do stupid shit. In the long run, it's best for them that they learn this way, rather than have a totalitarian fascist regime that restricts their every action down to the "right way" to do things.
I wish I had some mod points for you. I've gone months without finding anything worth modding up, and when I finally do, I'm completely bereft of points.
At the risk of sounding sappy; that was beautiful. Thank you.
Yes, because Mars just recently grew very cold and the lifeforms have been dying out. But now that we're coming along, proposing to raise the temperature over the next hundreds, or thousands of years, everything will be okay, and the Martians will take us as their Supreme Overlords and buy us copius amounts of birthday presents just because we saved their microbial asses from extinction.
Slashdot Mirror
The point would be to say "Hello, I am a consumer, and while you are a large corporation, you still have to meet my criteria if you wish me to purchase itemX through you."
Of course, Orbitz is under no obligation to listen, but they may find, if this does become an issue, that they will change their TOS. It's not as if it would be a bad business decision from their stand point, and it may garner them a few more customers. That's the power of the consumer, right there. Contrary to popular belief, the consumer DOES have a say in the business world; it's their wallet, after all. Not using Orbitz is fine, but they could chalk this loss in business up to other, non related things. Writing an email informing them of your decision not to spend money at their website is just ensuring that they know why revenue is down.
Of course, it is true that this one little act is of such minor importance that Orbitz is most likely to just ignore it, but maybe, just maybe, it WILL catch their attention and things will change. I know I still hold doors open for people when entering or leaving a restaurant, even knowing that that one small act of kindness does relatively little in making the world a better place, overall. It takes little effort and, who knows, it's quite possible that it does have some effect after all.
Also, to go back to your example of profanity on a web site; it is well within your rights to completely ignore, or derogatively reply to any email sent to you concerning your decisions in running your site. But, for instance, what if your site's ToS said something like "You shall not use the letter p on Tuesdays or Thursdays until after tea." It's a pretty silly statement, yes, and I seriously doubt it is going to harm the existence of your website. Knowing that it is a ridiculous rule, you would be more inclined to listen to complaints concerning it than, say, you would about profanity (or that Orbitz would be if, say, they got 100,000 emails for people wanting free tickets to Hawaii). In the latter two situations (profanity and free air fare), you are both completely justified in saying "you're all fucking idiots, 'stfukthxbai'", because it has a serious adverse effect on your business (or organization). In the former two situations (not deep-linking-for-personal-use and using the letter p), there are (in all probability) no adverse effects, and as such, you would be MUCH more inclined to modify your ToS.
Agreed, it was a bad example. What if it was some private user who posted the result set from his search criteria in his blog for some reason or another? Clearly as benign use, but also as clearly, a breach of the TOS. And maybe I'm just paranoid in thinking they would sue some Joe Schmoe for doing this, but I've seen too many ridiculous lawsuits over the last few years to be surprised if it did happen.
Those are two instances which are clearly not in the best interests of Orbitz. However, what about more mundane uses? Perhaps I want to help a friend find the best price for their trip? Technically, I won't be able to directly link them to the results I've found. Instead, I'd have to walk them through exactly what search/browse/filter criteria to use and hope that their result set is no different than mine.
Perhaps Orbitz should be allowed to do this. After all, it is their site. At the same time, however, consumers should voice their annoyance at being so inconvenienced. Just a quick email to their customer service department telling them "I'd love to use your site to find the best travel information I can, however, I find the TOS too restrictive for my needs and will be using Travelocity instead. I felt it important to inform you of this loss of business in the hopes that you will one day revise your TOS to allow deep linking for personal use."
</ramble%gt;
Ahh, until their webmonkeys forget to put out the robots.txt file, Google (or other) crawls them, and then they get sued for breaching their TOS. Whether they'd win or not isn't the issue; it's still pretty damn expensive to defend yourself from lawsuits. Sure, Google brings in mad cash, but I'm sure they'd much rather spend that on free soda for their employees than epic teams of lawyers.
You're assuming every child has the capacity to make use of that education. That's what equal opportunity IS. You give everyone the same opportunity to succeed with the knowledge that, no matter what you do, they're still going to fuck up and throw away any chance of a good future. Don't worry, you'll still have your labor force.
I'd have to agree x 3 with you there. It really is a dangerous situation to be in, because it becomes that much easier to pull the wool over our collective eyes as we squabble back and forth like spoiled brats.
And see, this is what needs to be done, in America. Not necessarily what you propose, but the fact that we discussed the situation. I come from one side who doesn't want the welfare to be taken away entirely, which is the (false) label those in welfare reform receive, and you want it to save money, without being irresponsible. If people didn't saddle others with these ridiculous labels that have extremely negative connotations, our nation wouldn't be nearly as polarized today as it is. Initially, I would have said "yes, I disagree with eljasbo". After hearing your point, I admit there is definite potential, and if we (and others!) would only work together, we could come to a beneficial conclusion. But sadly, that isn't the way America seems to work, any longer. :(
Bag lunches would be a great thing, but I know they haven't spread to our neck of the woods, yet. Also, breakfast is only served for kids whose busses arrive early enough, at least at our school. While I understand what you're saying, in those situations, wouldn't it be best if the children WERE removed from their parents custody?
I don't know for sure. There are pros and cons. But it's worth discussing.
edit: weak => week.
I'm really curious how eating 1 time a day, 5 of 7 days of the weak is in any way considered "acceptable". I've seen anorexic people eat more often than that.
"Republican" and "Democrat" US political... er... stuff
:]
I think the phrase you're looking for is bullshit
The problem is, that is what the bill did (not allowing the health of the mother to come into play). Hence the reason that various courts throughout the nation declared it unconstitutional. Hence the reason so many "pro life" people (at least the ones that I know) were so opposed to it.
But you are correct, that is the question; is abortion a valid form of birth control for an arbitrary reason, or isn't it? When does life begin? On top of that, when does it become meaningful?
But those aren't the points that are actually discussed in any meaningful way. In depth discussion is required, but that is rarely, if ever, an option in this current political landscape. It's possible it never was, but it seems to me that at some point, somewhere, people actually did get together and discuss the real meat of the issues and come to an agreement - or at least an understanding. Nowadays, there is no understanding, much less agreement; it's constant, ridiculous vilification.
This isn't communist. This is "manuring your field", as any country would be wise to do. It's the same exact thing as public schools. Technically, but your definition, public schools would be communist, as it is the government spending money on the public good. This is the same thing. Just like making sure children have an education and can do more than manual labor made us a great country, so, too, will making sure they don't starve to death. It's pretty much common sense.
Well, actually, they are rather right-wing from a non-American perspective. But in America, apparently, it's the difference between night and day. It's all in our head, but whatever.
Republicans essentially stand for lowering taxes, decreasing the size/amount of government and government regulation, etc, etc. Recently they've also seemed to take a very socially conservative point of view (ie: wanting to regulate the private life), which is somewhat ironic. However, this may just be a momentary trend and go away in the future, as Republican ideals are consistently in favor of less Federal Government intervention.
Democrats essentially stand for government programs that benefit the people (though this is not always what we get in practice!), higher taxes for the rich (to support these new government programs) and Federal regulation on anything they believe needs it (which could be quite the slippery slope toward socialism).
And there are more than two parties: there's the Libertarian party, the Green party, hell, we even have the Communist and Nazi Party in the US. If you don't like those two parties, start your own! Until you get a moderate amount of votes for president, you won't recieve any funding to help you run your party, but there you have it.
Also, even if you belong to a party, you don't have to vote for them if you don't want to. You can write in "Micky Mouse" on the ballot if it really struck your fancy. It's your choice.
The big reason that these two standpoints are mentioned is because our country has, apparently, become completely incapable of respecting the intricasy of any argument, and tries to boil everything down to two base-line viewpoints. Everything gets simpliified down to sound bites and harped on and used as war cries, regardless of whether they even truly have any meaning for their particular point.
For example, we have the "anti partial birth abortion" people vs. "pro choice". They argued back and forth for weeks/months, but no one seemed to notice that the "pro choice" people weren't necessarily for murdering fully formed fetuses, per se, but only in wanting to allow the mother, if medically necessary, an "escape route", so to speak. I don't want to get into details on which side is right or wrong, but the point is, "pro choice" is a far cry from "wanting to make sure the mother's life isn't in danger by not allowing this". But instead, it was made to sound like these people wanted to go about aborting fetuses willy nilly, just for fun. It's really dishonest - and I don't blame the Republicans/Conservatives for this - it's rampant throughout America, and, in my opinion, a serious, terminal disease to the political process in America.
(Please note that I am not a political scientist, just a geek who takes politics very seriously. I'm sure Republicans would try to paint themselves in a different way and Democrats as well, but it's really difficult to determine what is fact and what is an offshoot of their respective Public Relations campaigns.)
Actually, no, we expect all children, whether rich or poor, to have the same opportunities. Who gives a shit if some dead-beat asshole has money to buy beer or not? No one. No one expects anyone to give him money. But when his kids don't have anything on their back, then there goes that whole "equal opportunity" thing right out the fucking window. And unless you're willing to start taking children from poor parents who can't (or won't) give them anything to help them succeed in life, then welfare is the only to do it.
Back to taxes: yes, if you make more money, you can better pay more taxes than some guy who can barely put food on the table, much less heat the home. Ooo. So you can't buy that new BMW. Big fucking deal. At least you're not fucking starving.
I guess I've just been missing it the whole time. A vast left-wing conspiracy? And here I have, been working on my own individual left-wing "agenda" for years, without coordinating with the hive! Damn. For all I know, I was reinventing the wheel OR being counter productive to Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy official policy! I must make contact soon. It sounds like one hell of a good time.
(Substitute Left-Wing with Right-Wing and reuse at will)
That depends COMMA.
You BASTARD.
I thought about this before (and I'm sure people much smarter than I have thought about it much sooner, but I haven't heard about it yet :) ): what if we could get a space probe to "catch" on to an asteroid (if it was large enough) and use its gravitational pull to essentially "drag" it out into deep space along with it? Wouldn't this be much faster than using its own propulstion?
Now it gets even more interesting; what if, in the far future, we have intra-gallactic travel down pat, but intergallactic is quite different. What if we could find a star that is going to do the same exact thing as this star and "latch on" to it, having it drag us waaaaaaaaay out into deep space (and by we, I mean a probe, a space station, whatever). Would it be possible? Useful?
No kidding. We worry about asteroids; imagine catching a star in the face.
You're right, they do. But you have to admit, there is something disturbing about the fact that they can fire you for, say, mowing your lawn in an inappropriate fashion (ie: the perimeter method vs. the row method). Or for any reason at all. The Way It Is (TM), but disturbing all the same. On the flip side of that token, however; where could one accurately define a line as to what firing is appropriate and what isn't?
(This is going under the assumption that there aren't already laws restricting this, which, for some reason, I believe there may be, but I'm not really sure of).
Shoo, I would be furious if I couldn't write files wherever I goddam well pleased on my harddrive. I'm perfectly content with all the idiots out there running into problems because they don't know how to use computers. When these problems happen, one of two things (eventually) happen: 1) they grow wiser and become geeks or 2) they get frustrated and give up. Sure, there's a lot of collateral damage (like when they call you crying at midnight because they can't get manage to open Word to access their 18 page final paper for class_xyz and you have to crawl out of bed and put clothes on and run over and help them out because you're sometimes a nice guy like that), but in the long run, it's worth it. Eventually people will learn. They'll learn the hard way. It's kind of like letting people run amok when they're just turning 18, only to find out that there are consequences and repercussions to their actions, and they need to start acting like an adult and not do stupid shit. In the long run, it's best for them that they learn this way, rather than have a totalitarian fascist regime that restricts their every action down to the "right way" to do things.
I wish I had some mod points for you. I've gone months without finding anything worth modding up, and when I finally do, I'm completely bereft of points.
At the risk of sounding sappy; that was beautiful. Thank you.
Ahh, yes, the great and powerful Mostajes. Indeed, a god amongst trees everywhere.
</silly>
Should be Q2, not 2Q. That's what grandparent was referring to.
Yes, because Mars just recently grew very cold and the lifeforms have been dying out. But now that we're coming along, proposing to raise the temperature over the next hundreds, or thousands of years, everything will be okay, and the Martians will take us as their Supreme Overlords and buy us copius amounts of birthday presents just because we saved their microbial asses from extinction.