And for the record do the "Quakers" preach anything bad/evil against their fellow man? Or even against you for making fun of them?
They did when they first started - many were tried for heresy because they thought the Church at the time was full of corruption and had let the ceremony get in the way of the basic belief system of honouring God. And they had no qualms whatsoever in telling Church leaders of this.
You provide a much more cogent argument than most. It's a tad unfortunate, but there still exist (after all these years) projects that are well known in the F/OSS community which are being driven by rabid nutcases who are absolutely convinced that their product can do no wrong.
Mr Netbook Man: "The Gnome desktop is still kinda clunky, even after all these years." Me: "I don't know what you mean by Clunky, but I prefer the functionality of Gnome over Windows or OSX any day of the week. Anyway, I like KDE and XFCE more than I like Gnome."
Gnome Developer: Well, at least it doesn't give you 15 different options, none of which are even remotely intelligible. You must be some sort of idiot.
Mr Graphic Designer Man: "Linux still doesn't do proper color management." Me: "I don't know what that means. You may be right."
GIMP Developer: Nobody needs those features, for the most part you can fudge what you need with X, Y and Z. You must be some sort of idiot. Mr. Graphic Designer Man: Well, somebody obviously needs them because this isn't the first time they've been asked for. The fudges you suggest make everything take a little bit longer and they don't really work very well. And you won't win any friends by describing random strangers as idiots. GIMP Developer: They work for me, now f*ck off back to Photoshop because you're obviously a fanboi. Mr. Graphic Designer Man: Fine, have it your own way.
I take it that SW have video of the complainant strapped into a Clockwork-Orange-esque eye-opening head restraint, so that he couldn't claim to have not seen the policy.
I simply don't believe the airlines when they constantly cry poverty. I think they're cooking their books to hide obscene amounts of money, in the same way the movie studios claim "Forrest Gump" and "Terminator 2" still haven't broken even, in the same way that Wall Street was crying "the End of the World As We know It" if we didn't give them 700 Billion dollars gift-wrapped, but this year posted record profits.
There's a hell of a difference between a profit of $100million on a margin of 2% compared with a profit of $100million on a margin of 25%.
With the former you don't need very many cockups before you are seriously in the brown stuff. The airlines' argument is that they are firmly in the former category and so therefore at any point in time they have to be fantastically careful with how they operate.
Worse still, they're not spending money on maintenance since the average plane in service was manufactured back when cell phones were still the size and weight of bricks.
I would respectfully disagree with that. They may not be buying new planes, but existing ones will almost certainly be properly maintained. I shared a house for a year with a couple of people on an aircraft maintenance course - by all accounts most of the people on the course were ex-air force and one of the things that most certainly was NOT screwed around with was maintenance.
I am given to understand (though I wasn't on the air maintenance course myself) that the reason flying is pretty safe today is because the industry has spent decades improving their processes to the point whereby poor maintenance is vanishingly unlikely to cause an issue in any first-world airline. Obviously, as I have no first-hand experience, ICBW, but the fact that when planes fall out of the sky it's big news and the cause is almost always something that nobody could reasonably have predicted would suggest that my understanding may be correct.
They've exceeded banking and telecommunications to become the most customer-hostile industry on the planet.
I won't disagree with you there. I don't know where you are in the world (or if any such shows have reached you) but the odd reality show where a camera crew camps out by the customer service desk of an airline in an airport shows very neatly that the general attitude is "The customer is always wrong and there's no way on God's sweet Earth I'll make any effort to help them unless I'm in an unusually good mood, the customer is remarkably polite, particularly considering they've just been pushed off the flight that was going to take them to their own Dad's funeral and I think they're good-looking".
However, I am willing to take them at their word. If they really are running "on a razor thin margin," then let's admit the market has failed at this service, and hand this function over to government, like we do roads, fire, police and defense. I would be more than willing to fly on an airline run by either the Navy or the Air Force, and we'd all have the added benefit that for the first time in out history, airline security would be handled by the competent.
Not sure I follow you there fore a couple of reasons:
1. The theory behind the free market suggests that for commodity goods the price will sooner or later become very close to the cost of production. In other words, margins will get thinner unless you can somehow or other demonstrate you're that much better than the competition. Business and first class seats are classic examples of where airlines are still competing on factors other than cost, because such passengers are generally more concerned about comfort than cost. This hasn't done economy class any favours, however - the difference in cost between business and economy class on any flight which is long enough for the extra legroom to be really worth paying for is absurd.
2. Airline security, AIUI, is mostly handled by the airpo
How about this for an answer? Let's make airline seats the same size and legroom as movie theater seats and see if the problem goes away.
It's a nice idea, however it's far too late. The simple fact of the matter is that the aviation industry is run on razor-thin profit margins, and it doesn't cost much less to run a plane with 200 seats which take up X amount of space versus a plane with 240 seats which take up (X * 0.8) amount of space.
It follows that reducing the number and increasing the size of the seats would whack up ticket prices for each flight on such an aircraft considerably. And frankly, economy class seats from A to B are essentially a commodity item - nobody's buying them on the basis of quality because the perception is that there's little difference among the major airlines.
Yep, I fly a lot too, SWA's response is very nice and very reasonable. It's a LOT more than other airlines, say American, would do. In this case the customer IS wrong and SWA points that out in a nice way.
Regardless of whether or not the customer is wrong, publicly saying that (in even the most roundabout way) is seldom the best way to handle the situation. It's only too easy for it to come across as sounding like "Yeah, well, we don't care, it's not our fault if the customer is too f'ing stupid to accept our own policies which they were made aware of before booking".
I know you can edit them. But with Domains you get to store a whole bunch of them, get alerts when they get updated and share with others. It's really a (right now fairly basic) document management system.
You can't have a signature automatically appended to all emails unless you pay. And putting your registered company number and address on all correspondence is a legal requirement in the EU.
There are one or two other features you get if you're a paying customer, though that was the main one for us. AFAICT, the features you have to pay for are by and large features which would only appeal to businesses.
I'd also point out that if you're prepared to accept an all-powerful God, isn't it a little bit insulting to this all-powerful God to suggest that he couldn't devise some mechanism for life to take its own path? Because that's precisely what Intelligent Design does.
First, great sentence construction! Second, religion is not philosophy, but rather an entire system of life than encapsulates everything from philosophy to cosmology to biology to sociology to nutrition and hygiene.
Spot on. And you know something?
It makes perfect sense.
Consider this: Police forces are a modern idea. Hospitals (as we know them) are a very modern idea. Our understanding of why some things have to be properly cooked, and why one shouldn't eat meat that's starting to go green is quite modern.
A lot of the things that police forces enforce, healthcare encourages and food hygiene suggests have been known about in at least some form for centuries. We just haven't known why. So, when you need a society to do as they are damn well told for the benefit of everyone but you can't explain why yourself, what better than to attribute it to than instructions from some unknown higher power?
Do you have any particular source for that or is it speculation?
Reason I ask is that outsourced email is a big business these days and Google seem to be signing people up at a rate of knots. I did the arithmetic for my own employer and concluded that Google worked out rather cheaper than insourced - even if you ignored my own wages. It was something like a third the cost of most hosted Exchange providers.
That's why there's no such thing as Google for Domains. No such thing as the Google Search Appliance. Google Checkout? Figment of the imagination.
And as for advertising not being a sustainable form of revenue - you'd better tell that to all the world's television and radio stations. They think that's formed their core business for decades.
I want a president who surrounds himself with smart people and listens to them. That's a smart leader, not necessarily one who is the best at everything.
It's very common for someone to have an over-inflated view of their own abilities. Such people will only perceive others to be smart if those others agree with everything they say.
This is how you wind up with idiots surrounded by yes-men in charge.
You assume the bank is trying to achieve absolute security.
This, I fear, is mistaken.
There will always be a certain level of fraud and the banks are well aware of this. What they're trying to do is raise the bar so the amount of fraud drops and/or limit their liability so the person who suffers as a result isn't them. If a more sophisticated chip will cost a few pence more (multiplied by every card they issue with that chip....) but won't actually reduce their liability any further, why bother?
If they can't prove a transaction was initiated by you then you don't have to pay
In case of a dispute of a transaction with a magnetic card (and sometimes with EMV cards), in order for the bank to prove that the transaction is legitimate the receipt must have a signature that matches the signature on your ID. If the signature is not the same according to law you have no obligation of paying up and if the amount is big enough you can sue the bank or just don't pay the amount and wait to get sued by the bank.
There are actually instances of customers doing something very like that - and the bank taking the view "We still believe you did it, so we're going to report you to the police for fraud".
Yes, I know all the "innocent until proven guilty" stuff - but for a lot of people just the accusation of fraud would be very damaging indeed.
Serious pressure on software vendors to make sure their app doesn't need admin rights to run on a Windows box would be a nice step.
Normal users can't install a service but they can set up an application to run on a scheduled basis. They can also have some tasks run when they log in.
Normal users can see data. Sometimes it's confidential data.
Normal users can usually somehow connect to the outside world - even if it's only by email.
So I don't see how this would really solve anything in the long term.
A recent report said that approximately 1 crime was solved for every 100,000 surveillance cameras installed
That's quite impressive. By the time you've wired the camera in, powered it, connected it to some sort of recording system and sat someone at the other end, I can't imagine you'd see much change out of £150-200 per camera (and that's before you consider the wages for the person watching the camera). Which comes to around £20 million per crime solved.
I wonder how many more policemen you could hire for £20 million.
Assuming the designers are also not experts and themselves spent less than your generous minute wondering whether anyone might not want to be blinded/deafened/tasered by their device, then you should be well ahead of the game.
Past experience of the British government's uncanny ability with technology suggests that unless these drones can make money by handing out fines, the GP is indeed well ahead of the game.
They'll find a way to monetise this - have the robots automatically hand out fines, for instance - and believe me, within a year they will be amazingly efficient.
He hasn't actually been fined a single cent. The $1.5 million is an out of court settlement.
From what I understand (I don't know how true this is, IANAL), when settlements of this nature are made it's not uncommon for the company getting the settlement to make no real effort to actually get the money. They just wanted a big news headline saying "Man has been stung for $1.5 million for pirating our product".
Though if it's an out of court settlement, I daresay bankruptcy would probably make it go away altogether.
I am assuming that the uranium you mentioned wasn't destined to get in a nuke, but still I am hoping that the next few generations will at least not be that interested in making stuff that blows other stuff (and people) up. There are an infinite number of questions and other stuff that can be done with improved education.
Indeed. Such as "Here is something that, under the right circumstances, releases an enormous amount of energy. Can we harness this energy to do something useful?".
I think it's best to think of it a bit like those portable DVD players with builtin screens. You know, the sort which used to cost a small fortune until a few companies in China started selling cheap generic models. Only with a rather larger screen and you have to transfer DVDs across from your PC.
Whether or not there is enough of a market for this - who knows. It's definitely a risk, and Apple are well aware of that.
If it all works out, they'll make a fortune.
If it doesn't, they'll lose a fortune.
Which is probably why it runs the iPhone OS with very similar hardware - reduce the cost of development and provide a user experience which has already proven to be a massive hit.
Slashdot Mirror
And for the record do the "Quakers" preach anything bad/evil against their fellow man? Or even against you for making fun of them?
They did when they first started - many were tried for heresy because they thought the Church at the time was full of corruption and had let the ceremony get in the way of the basic belief system of honouring God. And they had no qualms whatsoever in telling Church leaders of this.
You provide a much more cogent argument than most. It's a tad unfortunate, but there still exist (after all these years) projects that are well known in the F/OSS community which are being driven by rabid nutcases who are absolutely convinced that their product can do no wrong.
Mr Netbook Man: "The Gnome desktop is still kinda clunky, even after all these years."
Me: "I don't know what you mean by Clunky, but I prefer the functionality of Gnome over Windows or OSX any day of the week. Anyway, I like KDE and XFCE more than I like Gnome."
Gnome Developer: Well, at least it doesn't give you 15 different options, none of which are even remotely intelligible. You must be some sort of idiot.
Mr Graphic Designer Man: "Linux still doesn't do proper color management."
Me: "I don't know what that means. You may be right."
GIMP Developer: Nobody needs those features, for the most part you can fudge what you need with X, Y and Z. You must be some sort of idiot.
Mr. Graphic Designer Man: Well, somebody obviously needs them because this isn't the first time they've been asked for. The fudges you suggest make everything take a little bit longer and they don't really work very well. And you won't win any friends by describing random strangers as idiots.
GIMP Developer: They work for me, now f*ck off back to Photoshop because you're obviously a fanboi.
Mr. Graphic Designer Man: Fine, have it your own way.
I take it that SW have video of the complainant strapped into a Clockwork-Orange-esque eye-opening head restraint, so that he couldn't claim to have not seen the policy.
Do not give the airlines ideas. Please.
I simply don't believe the airlines when they constantly cry poverty. I think they're cooking their books to hide obscene amounts of money, in the same way the movie studios claim "Forrest Gump" and "Terminator 2" still haven't broken even, in the same way that Wall Street was crying "the End of the World As We know It" if we didn't give them 700 Billion dollars gift-wrapped, but this year posted record profits.
There's a hell of a difference between a profit of $100million on a margin of 2% compared with a profit of $100million on a margin of 25%.
With the former you don't need very many cockups before you are seriously in the brown stuff. The airlines' argument is that they are firmly in the former category and so therefore at any point in time they have to be fantastically careful with how they operate.
Worse still, they're not spending money on maintenance since the average plane in service was manufactured back when cell phones were still the size and weight of bricks.
I would respectfully disagree with that. They may not be buying new planes, but existing ones will almost certainly be properly maintained. I shared a house for a year with a couple of people on an aircraft maintenance course - by all accounts most of the people on the course were ex-air force and one of the things that most certainly was NOT screwed around with was maintenance.
I am given to understand (though I wasn't on the air maintenance course myself) that the reason flying is pretty safe today is because the industry has spent decades improving their processes to the point whereby poor maintenance is vanishingly unlikely to cause an issue in any first-world airline. Obviously, as I have no first-hand experience, ICBW, but the fact that when planes fall out of the sky it's big news and the cause is almost always something that nobody could reasonably have predicted would suggest that my understanding may be correct.
They've exceeded banking and telecommunications to become the most customer-hostile industry on the planet.
I won't disagree with you there. I don't know where you are in the world (or if any such shows have reached you) but the odd reality show where a camera crew camps out by the customer service desk of an airline in an airport shows very neatly that the general attitude is "The customer is always wrong and there's no way on God's sweet Earth I'll make any effort to help them unless I'm in an unusually good mood, the customer is remarkably polite, particularly considering they've just been pushed off the flight that was going to take them to their own Dad's funeral and I think they're good-looking".
However, I am willing to take them at their word. If they really are running "on a razor thin margin," then let's admit the market has failed at this service, and hand this function over to government, like we do roads, fire, police and defense. I would be more than willing to fly on an airline run by either the Navy or the Air Force, and we'd all have the added benefit that for the first time in out history, airline security would be handled by the competent.
Not sure I follow you there fore a couple of reasons:
1. The theory behind the free market suggests that for commodity goods the price will sooner or later become very close to the cost of production. In other words, margins will get thinner unless you can somehow or other demonstrate you're that much better than the competition. Business and first class seats are classic examples of where airlines are still competing on factors other than cost, because such passengers are generally more concerned about comfort than cost. This hasn't done economy class any favours, however - the difference in cost between business and economy class on any flight which is long enough for the extra legroom to be really worth paying for is absurd.
2. Airline security, AIUI, is mostly handled by the airpo
Could they not DMCA your upstream provider?
How about this for an answer? Let's make airline seats the same size and legroom as movie theater seats and see if the problem goes away.
It's a nice idea, however it's far too late. The simple fact of the matter is that the aviation industry is run on razor-thin profit margins, and it doesn't cost much less to run a plane with 200 seats which take up X amount of space versus a plane with 240 seats which take up (X * 0.8) amount of space.
It follows that reducing the number and increasing the size of the seats would whack up ticket prices for each flight on such an aircraft considerably. And frankly, economy class seats from A to B are essentially a commodity item - nobody's buying them on the basis of quality because the perception is that there's little difference among the major airlines.
Yep, I fly a lot too, SWA's response is very nice and very reasonable. It's a LOT more than other airlines, say American, would do. In this case the customer IS wrong and SWA points that out in a nice way.
Regardless of whether or not the customer is wrong, publicly saying that (in even the most roundabout way) is seldom the best way to handle the situation. It's only too easy for it to come across as sounding like "Yeah, well, we don't care, it's not our fault if the customer is too f'ing stupid to accept our own policies which they were made aware of before booking".
I know you can edit them. But with Domains you get to store a whole bunch of them, get alerts when they get updated and share with others. It's really a (right now fairly basic) document management system.
We do.
You can't have a signature automatically appended to all emails unless you pay. And putting your registered company number and address on all correspondence is a legal requirement in the EU.
There are one or two other features you get if you're a paying customer, though that was the main one for us. AFAICT, the features you have to pay for are by and large features which would only appeal to businesses.
Tell me, is Google Docs, Spreadsheets and Sites available without a Domain account?
(Though granted, you can have a free, ad-supported domain account - it just has a few limitations).
Not that I'm aware of, but that doesn't mean that Google for Domains cannot pay for itself now.
I'd also point out that if you're prepared to accept an all-powerful God, isn't it a little bit insulting to this all-powerful God to suggest that he couldn't devise some mechanism for life to take its own path? Because that's precisely what Intelligent Design does.
First, great sentence construction! Second, religion is not philosophy, but rather an entire system of life than encapsulates everything from philosophy to cosmology to biology to sociology to nutrition and hygiene.
Spot on. And you know something?
It makes perfect sense.
Consider this: Police forces are a modern idea. Hospitals (as we know them) are a very modern idea. Our understanding of why some things have to be properly cooked, and why one shouldn't eat meat that's starting to go green is quite modern.
A lot of the things that police forces enforce, healthcare encourages and food hygiene suggests have been known about in at least some form for centuries. We just haven't known why. So, when you need a society to do as they are damn well told for the benefit of everyone but you can't explain why yourself, what better than to attribute it to than instructions from some unknown higher power?
Do you have any particular source for that or is it speculation?
Reason I ask is that outsourced email is a big business these days and Google seem to be signing people up at a rate of knots. I did the arithmetic for my own employer and concluded that Google worked out rather cheaper than insourced - even if you ignored my own wages. It was something like a third the cost of most hosted Exchange providers.
That's why there's no such thing as Google for Domains. No such thing as the Google Search Appliance. Google Checkout? Figment of the imagination.
And as for advertising not being a sustainable form of revenue - you'd better tell that to all the world's television and radio stations. They think that's formed their core business for decades.
I want a president who surrounds himself with smart people and listens to them. That's a smart leader, not necessarily one who is the best at everything.
It's very common for someone to have an over-inflated view of their own abilities. Such people will only perceive others to be smart if those others agree with everything they say.
This is how you wind up with idiots surrounded by yes-men in charge.
You assume the bank is trying to achieve absolute security.
This, I fear, is mistaken.
There will always be a certain level of fraud and the banks are well aware of this. What they're trying to do is raise the bar so the amount of fraud drops and/or limit their liability so the person who suffers as a result isn't them. If a more sophisticated chip will cost a few pence more (multiplied by every card they issue with that chip....) but won't actually reduce their liability any further, why bother?
If they can't prove a transaction was initiated by you then you don't have to pay
In case of a dispute of a transaction with a magnetic card (and sometimes with EMV cards), in order for the bank to prove that the transaction is legitimate the receipt must have a signature that matches the signature on your ID. If the signature is not the same according to law you have no obligation of paying up and if the amount is big enough you can sue the bank or just don't pay the amount and wait to get sued by the bank.
There are actually instances of customers doing something very like that - and the bank taking the view "We still believe you did it, so we're going to report you to the police for fraud".
Yes, I know all the "innocent until proven guilty" stuff - but for a lot of people just the accusation of fraud would be very damaging indeed.
Serious pressure on software vendors to make sure their app doesn't need admin rights to run on a Windows box would be a nice step.
Normal users can't install a service but they can set up an application to run on a scheduled basis. They can also have some tasks run when they log in.
Normal users can see data. Sometimes it's confidential data.
Normal users can usually somehow connect to the outside world - even if it's only by email.
So I don't see how this would really solve anything in the long term.
A recent report said that approximately 1 crime was solved for every 100,000 surveillance cameras installed
That's quite impressive. By the time you've wired the camera in, powered it, connected it to some sort of recording system and sat someone at the other end, I can't imagine you'd see much change out of £150-200 per camera (and that's before you consider the wages for the person watching the camera). Which comes to around £20 million per crime solved.
I wonder how many more policemen you could hire for £20 million.
Assuming the designers are also not experts and themselves spent less than your generous minute wondering whether anyone might not want to be blinded/deafened/tasered by their device, then you should be well ahead of the game.
Past experience of the British government's uncanny ability with technology suggests that unless these drones can make money by handing out fines, the GP is indeed well ahead of the game.
Actually, I'd have to disagree with that.
They'll find a way to monetise this - have the robots automatically hand out fines, for instance - and believe me, within a year they will be amazingly efficient.
I read TFA (I know, I know).
He hasn't actually been fined a single cent. The $1.5 million is an out of court settlement.
From what I understand (I don't know how true this is, IANAL), when settlements of this nature are made it's not uncommon for the company getting the settlement to make no real effort to actually get the money. They just wanted a big news headline saying "Man has been stung for $1.5 million for pirating our product".
Though if it's an out of court settlement, I daresay bankruptcy would probably make it go away altogether.
I am assuming that the uranium you mentioned wasn't destined to get in a nuke, but still I am hoping that the next few generations will at least not be that interested in making stuff that blows other stuff (and people) up. There are an infinite number of questions and other stuff that can be done with improved education.
Indeed. Such as "Here is something that, under the right circumstances, releases an enormous amount of energy. Can we harness this energy to do something useful?".
I think it's best to think of it a bit like those portable DVD players with builtin screens. You know, the sort which used to cost a small fortune until a few companies in China started selling cheap generic models. Only with a rather larger screen and you have to transfer DVDs across from your PC.
Whether or not there is enough of a market for this - who knows. It's definitely a risk, and Apple are well aware of that.
If it all works out, they'll make a fortune.
If it doesn't, they'll lose a fortune.
Which is probably why it runs the iPhone OS with very similar hardware - reduce the cost of development and provide a user experience which has already proven to be a massive hit.