TurboTax lost market share due to having to contact the TurboTax server to get authentication for the tax product. People know that software companies fade over the years and to have something so important tied to a company that may not be there one day turned many customers off to the product.
Exactly! To think that in a couple of years, I would no longer be able to use TurboTax 2002... why I... ummm... oh, fuck.
n. A circular particle accelerator in which charged subatomic particles generated at a central source are accelerated spirally outward in a plane perpendicular to a fixed magnetic field by an alternating electric field. A cyclotron is capable of generating particle energies between a few million and several tens of millions of electron volts.
Instead it has created a self-perpetuating system of high costs driving a mystique driving high costs.
People don't live in California because of some mystique. Nor is it a mystery why costs are high.
People live in California because the weather is great year-round, you have access to a bevy of natural resources (beaches, deserts, mountains), the beaches have better weather than east coast beaches, and it is a high-tech state with a massive highway system.
It is expensive because (a) they tax the hell out of everyone to pay to maintain that freeway system, maintain the natural resources, and support the huge number of illegals living in California, and (b) there are a lot of people jockeying for housing, esp. in the nicer areas.
In other words, you posted a non-sequitur in response to me.
The company I work for is a corporation. We are incorporated. Yet we have less than 10 employees. Small businesses can be corporations also.
Oh, so what you're saying is if a company becomes too large, too successful, and has too many employees, THEN it is evil? That too is an illogical argument.
Either the rest of the world is hopelessly naive, or the current US administration is obsessed only with making themselves and their corporate backers grotesquely large short-term profits, and fuck everybody else.
Which could it be?
C. None of the above. Let's rush into this Kyoto treaty, which will do NOTHING to stop global warming, though it will guarantee even more American companies start putting factories overseas.
I love people like you who see the world in black and white. Corporations - evil. (Forget that they supply you with jobs, not the government, unless you work for the government.)
Or simply make me one of your Slashdot "friends" via the "Relation" operator on my slashdot page.
No, crazy socialists go into my foe list.
Yet what you are proposing is far worse than socialism, and has far less vision. Socialists want everyone to pay a lot to a system that will (in theory) help everyone.
You want to increase taxes on the richer half to punish them and take away some perceived power that you apparantly feel they stole from you by being successful.
Setting aside for the moment that I feel what you propose is fundamentally wrong, it is also incredibly stupid -- you are advocating taking money away from the rich to "make them less powerful." Who is going to get this money? The government. In other words, you are just going to shift the power, from the rich, further into the government's hands. Now you don't have to worry about the rich being powerful. But, uh oh, now the government has all the guns AND all the money.
Scary.
And even more short-sightedness... where do you think all of the money and jobs are going to come from once all the people you are punishing leave the country and setup shop elsewhere? Why would a business invest in a country like the dystopia you are presenting? They wouldn't. They'd leave, they'd take their money and their company with them, and then you'd be left wondering where all of America's prosperity went.
I was thinking that if I was a criminal, I would already be playing.
One of your few valid criticisms...
In order to play, you have to have Valve's spyware program running on your system.
You must have a different concept of "spyware" than I do. Can you explain how exactly Steam is spyware? They tell you what it reports to Valve. You choose to install it (you don't have to buy HL2). It is simple to uninstall it. Choice, valid information, and easy uninstallation are 3 things not found in real spyware.
You have to sign yourself up on two different services.
Not sure what you mean. I created a Steam account, bought HL2 via Steam, downloaded it, unlocked it. I started downloading it a few weeks ago, so it was just a matter of unlocking it when the day hit.
An internet connection is mandatory as you play the game.
This is false. An internet connection is mandatory to unlock the game initially.
keep the disk in your computer while playing
Not sure why this would be, if it is true, since anyone that bought it via steam of course does not need to do this.
Updates are mandatory.
Right-click on HL2 in Steam, select Properties, and change the automatic update setting. I do not see any indication that updates are mandatory for HL2. I can imagine they are for any online games, to prevent cheating.
If you click the "play" button, you have to wait 50 minutes before the game actually starts
If this is true, I think your system is not up to the task of HL2 to begin with.
It means we're still capitalist until the way that citizens elect their leaders is changed.
Please define capitalism, because I think we are talking about two completely different words, based on the stuff you are saying.
if 99 citizens out of 100 vote for elected officials that support taxes, that means that 99% of the county supports taxes implicitly, either because the voters believe in taxes, or because voters believe the taxes are necessary or are a necessary compromise.
This is an incredibly simplistic view of the voting process. There are dozens and dozens of issues that candidates take positions on. Taxes and fiscal policy are but two of those issues. Rarely can a person ever vote for someone that they agree with on 100% of the issues. Just because 99% of the people vote for a candidate doesn't mean any of those people agree with 100% of the candidate's positions. Therefore the only vote that I would ever call "pro-taxes" is one in which a person specifically votes to raise/keep taxes. Votes for candidates have no bearing on how capitalistic a group of people are... None.
Basic flaw of Libertarianism? I think you are confused. Libertarians support the Constitution, basic tenets of which are that one of the very few roles of the federal government is to protect its citizens from violent criminals/countries, and enforce the rule of law.
What you speak of is not a problem with capitalism, but with government intervention in the free market. After all, who do you think grants that something is "intellectual property"? It is an idea enforced by government. True capitalism is concerned only with physical property: having it, making it, selling it, and acquiring it.
Capitalism can survive intellectual property problems. The question is, how much impact will these problems have on the U.S. economy.
I see where you're going, but that's an over-simplification of a GUI, isn't it? There are plenty of things that could never translate to a commandline, regardless of how many keys you have on your keyboard.
So basically, we're supposed to wait years or decades for a large corporation to suffer the consequences of its own bad policies for the market to finally convince it to change its ways. In the meantime, hundreds or thousands of employees and or customers are hurt because enacting faster moving regulation would be seen as "hindering" economic activity.
1. Those employees are free to work for another company.
2. Those customers are free to buy from someone else.
Where exactly are the customers and the employees being hurt, of anything but their own volition.
Freedom works both ways, it has the power to let you help or hurt yourself. Unfortunately, the opposite of freedom, government control, offers to help you, but usually fails, providing you with a false sense of security.
While I don't have much against a free market, this is clearly abuse. We take skilled workers, and treat them like shit. People that are great programmers, talented minds, etc. We run them through the dirt and then don't even have the common courtesy to give them overtime.
Abuse? No. These people don't have to work for companies that do this.
However, is it a stupid move on the part of EA? An incredibly short-sighted way of handling their employees that will come back to haunt them? ABSOLUTELY.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, how do you prove that you purchased the game?
A receipt? A credit card statement? A copy of your check? A picture of you holding today's paper and the original game CDs?
TurboTax lost market share due to having to contact the TurboTax server to get authentication for the tax product. People know that software companies fade over the years and to have something so important tied to a company that may not be there one day turned many customers off to the product.
... ummm... oh, fuck.
Exactly! To think that in a couple of years, I would no longer be able to use TurboTax 2002... why I
I just don't see how it could work without the juxtaposed images and character narration - that's the best part of the comic medium.
Yeah, it's impossible to do that.
Sorry, meant to cite my source
n. A circular particle accelerator in which charged subatomic particles generated at a central source are accelerated spirally outward in a plane perpendicular to a fixed magnetic field by an alternating electric field. A cyclotron is capable of generating particle energies between a few million and several tens of millions of electron volts.
Instead it has created a self-perpetuating system of high costs driving a mystique driving high costs.
People don't live in California because of some mystique. Nor is it a mystery why costs are high.
People live in California because the weather is great year-round, you have access to a bevy of natural resources (beaches, deserts, mountains), the beaches have better weather than east coast beaches, and it is a high-tech state with a massive highway system.
It is expensive because (a) they tax the hell out of everyone to pay to maintain that freeway system, maintain the natural resources, and support the huge number of illegals living in California, and (b) there are a lot of people jockeying for housing, esp. in the nicer areas.
No mystique, just plain old economics.
most jobs come from small business.
Most grass is green.
In other words, you posted a non-sequitur in response to me.
The company I work for is a corporation. We are incorporated. Yet we have less than 10 employees. Small businesses can be corporations also.
Oh, so what you're saying is if a company becomes too large, too successful, and has too many employees, THEN it is evil? That too is an illogical argument.
I'm saying the Kyoto treaty, as it is designed, will not cut greenhouse gases. It's a big circle jerk.
Either the rest of the world is hopelessly naive, or the current US administration is obsessed only with making themselves and their corporate backers grotesquely large short-term profits, and fuck everybody else.
Which could it be?
C. None of the above. Let's rush into this Kyoto treaty, which will do NOTHING to stop global warming, though it will guarantee even more American companies start putting factories overseas.
I love people like you who see the world in black and white. Corporations - evil. (Forget that they supply you with jobs, not the government, unless you work for the government.)
I'll say this louder....
SHARPIE.
Or simply make me one of your Slashdot "friends" via the "Relation" operator on my slashdot page.
No, crazy socialists go into my foe list.
Yet what you are proposing is far worse than socialism, and has far less vision. Socialists want everyone to pay a lot to a system that will (in theory) help everyone.
You want to increase taxes on the richer half to punish them and take away some perceived power that you apparantly feel they stole from you by being successful.
Setting aside for the moment that I feel what you propose is fundamentally wrong, it is also incredibly stupid -- you are advocating taking money away from the rich to "make them less powerful." Who is going to get this money? The government. In other words, you are just going to shift the power, from the rich, further into the government's hands. Now you don't have to worry about the rich being powerful. But, uh oh, now the government has all the guns AND all the money.
Scary.
And even more short-sightedness... where do you think all of the money and jobs are going to come from once all the people you are punishing leave the country and setup shop elsewhere? Why would a business invest in a country like the dystopia you are presenting? They wouldn't. They'd leave, they'd take their money and their company with them, and then you'd be left wondering where all of America's prosperity went.
Fucking stupid.
I was thinking that if I was a criminal, I would already be playing.
One of your few valid criticisms...
In order to play, you have to have Valve's spyware program running on your system.
You must have a different concept of "spyware" than I do. Can you explain how exactly Steam is spyware? They tell you what it reports to Valve. You choose to install it (you don't have to buy HL2). It is simple to uninstall it. Choice, valid information, and easy uninstallation are 3 things not found in real spyware.
You have to sign yourself up on two different services.
Not sure what you mean. I created a Steam account, bought HL2 via Steam, downloaded it, unlocked it. I started downloading it a few weeks ago, so it was just a matter of unlocking it when the day hit.
An internet connection is mandatory as you play the game.
This is false. An internet connection is mandatory to unlock the game initially.
keep the disk in your computer while playing
Not sure why this would be, if it is true, since anyone that bought it via steam of course does not need to do this.
Updates are mandatory.
Right-click on HL2 in Steam, select Properties, and change the automatic update setting. I do not see any indication that updates are mandatory for HL2. I can imagine they are for any online games, to prevent cheating.
If you click the "play" button, you have to wait 50 minutes before the game actually starts
If this is true, I think your system is not up to the task of HL2 to begin with.
Why just today I was playing Half-Life 2 multiplayer mode, and thinking how great it was there were no cheaters on my server.
Then I realized Half-Life 2 doesn't have a multiplayer mode, and cried.
It takes a while for them to catch up because CNN is only operating at Mach 9.
Wow... I forgot I updated my signature. Apropos.
tell 'em you shit your pants, no-one ever wants to check that one.
You insensitive clod, I did just shit my pants... playing HL2!
It means we're still capitalist until the way that citizens elect their leaders is changed.
Please define capitalism, because I think we are talking about two completely different words, based on the stuff you are saying.
if 99 citizens out of 100 vote for elected officials that support taxes, that means that 99% of the county supports taxes implicitly, either because the voters believe in taxes, or because voters believe the taxes are necessary or are a necessary compromise.
This is an incredibly simplistic view of the voting process. There are dozens and dozens of issues that candidates take positions on. Taxes and fiscal policy are but two of those issues. Rarely can a person ever vote for someone that they agree with on 100% of the issues. Just because 99% of the people vote for a candidate doesn't mean any of those people agree with 100% of the candidate's positions. Therefore the only vote that I would ever call "pro-taxes" is one in which a person specifically votes to raise/keep taxes. Votes for candidates have no bearing on how capitalistic a group of people are... None.
It's 100% capitalism if you're allowed to choose, by vote, the leaders who determine the tax rate.
The logic here is flawed beyond reason.
Where to begin? One person has no control over who is voted into office. I might vote for a Libertarian, and you might vote for a Socialist.
What if we vote a socialist into office? Does that mean we're still 100% capitalist, just because we collectively voted for someone?
Whether a society is capitalist or note, and to what degree, is based on the reality of the situation, and not whether people are able to vote.
Basic flaw of Libertarianism? I think you are confused. Libertarians support the Constitution, basic tenets of which are that one of the very few roles of the federal government is to protect its citizens from violent criminals/countries, and enforce the rule of law.
We are about individual freedom, not anarchy.
What you speak of is not a problem with capitalism, but with government intervention in the free market. After all, who do you think grants that something is "intellectual property"? It is an idea enforced by government. True capitalism is concerned only with physical property: having it, making it, selling it, and acquiring it.
Capitalism can survive intellectual property problems. The question is, how much impact will these problems have on the U.S. economy.
Let's ask China what they think.
When will people learn that you will pay for schools or for prisons.
Compared to now, where we pay for bad schools AND bad prisons?
Gee, maybe these people just don't want to pay the government to mismanage either?
Some of us in the rural midwest speak perfectly good english.
You meant you "speak English perfectly well," right?
I see where you're going, but that's an over-simplification of a GUI, isn't it? There are plenty of things that could never translate to a commandline, regardless of how many keys you have on your keyboard.
So basically, we're supposed to wait years or decades for a large corporation to suffer the consequences of its own bad policies for the market to finally convince it to change its ways. In the meantime, hundreds or thousands of employees and or customers are hurt because enacting faster moving regulation would be seen as "hindering" economic activity.
1. Those employees are free to work for another company.
2. Those customers are free to buy from someone else.
Where exactly are the customers and the employees being hurt, of anything but their own volition.
Freedom works both ways, it has the power to let you help or hurt yourself. Unfortunately, the opposite of freedom, government control, offers to help you, but usually fails, providing you with a false sense of security.
While I don't have much against a free market, this is clearly abuse. We take skilled workers, and treat them like shit. People that are great programmers, talented minds, etc. We run them through the dirt and then don't even have the common courtesy to give them overtime.
Abuse? No. These people don't have to work for companies that do this.
However, is it a stupid move on the part of EA? An incredibly short-sighted way of handling their employees that will come back to haunt them? ABSOLUTELY.
That is the beauty of the free market.