Wanting to save some money, I got a Blackberry, instead of an iPhone or Android. It was a stupid mistake. The phone's quality is sub-par (I had to send it off to be repaired after the screen snapped under the pressure of my thumb, from picking it up). The menus are complicated and convoluted; nothing is where you'd think it should be and somethings need to be adjusted from several different locations (and I'm good with menus. I work with computers all day). On top of all of that, the audio, on my phone model anyway, is terrible. It's muffled and hard to hear.
As soon as my commitment on this phone runs out, I am ditching this thing and never looking back.
If you're going to succeed in the "being a stupid shill" industry, you need to remember to plug the product you're being paid to shill. Knocking the competition is only half the job.
I can only score you "5/10 must try harder". Remember, next time, the final clause should be something along the lines of "I am ditching this thing for an iPhone, with its vastly superior build quality, wide selection of Angry Birds games and easy-to-use virtual keyboard, and never looking back."
Since when did the fact that a company's user base stopped growing mean it was the beginning of the end for them?
In any normal (non-tech) business, as long as you are making decent profits your company is successful. You don't suddenly panic and close down if one year your sales figures don't increase. I've worked for engineering firms that have been going for fifty or more years; they may be smaller than when they were at their peak and outsource a lot of manufacturing to China, but they're still happily profitable.
The myth that someone like Apple can keep on growing for ever is...a myth.
As the curator of Greece is Goldman Sachs, I don't think any money will really go to Greece.
Greece would be a lot better off now, and would have been a lot better off for the last sixty years, if the Germans had been forced to return all the wealth the Nazis looted from them in WW2.
Listen, don't mention the war. I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it all right.
VAT is different. VAT gets refunded for the vast majority of payments.
Only the final sale to the consumer actually ends up having VAT. All the (hundreds) of purchases that preceded that final purchase have their VAT refunded.
VAT doesn't get refunded (at least in the UK) if you're offering VAT exempt financial service products.
And 1% would give everybody a monthly income of 800. And why stop there? A 25% tax would give everybody 20,000 euro a MONTH and everybody will be filthy rich and nobody will have to work ever again. You, Sir, are a genius!
Sounds fair enough to me. Not all of us regard the redistribution of wealth as a bad thing.
If you do that, you'll simply end most of the financial transactions that can be taxed
You almost make it sound like that's a bad thing. The whole point is that most of the "trading" activity is socially and economically useless. Personally, I'd just go for punishingly high rates of tax (90%+) for anyone who basically makes money out of gambling
I worked out that a Europe wide 0.5% financial transaction tax would be enough to pay an unconditional base income of 400euro/month to every single person living in Europe with money to spare....just saying.
More to the point, a 5% tax would let everyone have 4000 euros a month, which would be a comfortable income for most people.
I hate religion as much as the next person with a brain, but isn't it a bit hypocritical for everyone on slashdot to suddenly be all in favour of the DMCA just because the copyright breaker is a religious group?
Switzerland: the country where doing this is legal, now gets a pirate party major. When kids go to college, I'm moving there;)
Why are you so impressed with a radio controlled plane taking video footage? Wouldn't that be legal in most places in the world, except near military installations? What am I missing?
On the one hand, churches do not force their members to tithe at gunpoint (at least, none in America of which I know). On the other hand, many seem to be doing just fine with their funding being completely from voluntary sources, even when some people make use of their resources without paying tithes. Makes you wonder whether the IRS is needed at all.
If you only had church tithes instead of government taxes (assuming such a hellish conception could even remotely be workable in a population that was not composed entirely of braindead slaves), then do you really think they would be voluntary? At the very least there would have to be very strong social pressure to contribute, and presumably if you didn't you would be ostracized.
The root problem with politics is that government, at its very core, is based on actions, based on aggression that when committed by anyone else other than "the government" would be rightfully condemned by everyone. If someone outside of government would implement taxation people would rightfully view it as theft. If someone outside of government introduced conscription people would rightfully view it as slavery. Those who have understood this naturally view politics as repulsive, just as we view working for the mafia as repulsive.
I think this is the point at which someone says "fuck off and live in Somalia then" isn't it?
Seriously. Everyone with a desk job (or student) doesn't need to drive into work. Get some good video conferencing solutions, a huge pipe to your office files, a cheap-as-dirt dumb terminal in your living room (or home-office), and now you actually have a fighting chance at staving off unimportant things like global warming (less gas for travel).
What a pile of old toot. You can work or study from home perfectly easily with a very modest internet connection already. It's just that most people don't want to, and most companies don't want them to. It's a social, not a technical issue..
You should probably read a little more about Bill Gates.
Yeah, his alcohol and drug addiction, history of rape and child abuse, known support for Nazi politics and unhealthy interest in Satanism are well documented. Oh, wait...no, he just made a lot of money selling software, which on slashdot is the worst crime known to humanity.
Yes, they're designed to make money, we live in a Capitalistic society, everything that companies do is designed to maximize profit.
Bullshit, most people lived in some version of a mixed economy, and not everything is done by for-profit organisations. There is no inherent reason why you couldn't nationalise all farms and food producers.
Sure, Gates is donating to charity, but to obtain the money to do so, he used business practices which set the industry back several years
He made computing affordable for the masses, which is why the geek snobs on slashdot hate him. Faced with a choice between using windows on a generic PC or spending five times that on some cool UNIX workstation, the market broadly decided to go for the former.
I got the impression this guy was posting a tongue in cheek response. If he was posting in jest, then it's another case like the bloke in Britain who tweeted about blowing up an airport that was closed due to inclement weather.
Yeah, I'm sure the cops and lawyers never even thought of that one. This may surprise many people on slashdot, the law does not operate like a simple A + B = C program where you just feed in A and B and get a nice neat answer.
Nobody should be reaching for *any* guns in this situation, because there is no situation.
Reaching for a gun to defend yourself (or calling the police to do so) is not the same thing as deciding to shoot someone because you want something of theirs, or don't like them.
If there simply is no legal basis for any of this, it won't go any further, but the fact that someone has been arrested and charged would suggest there is something there.
(Unless you go along with the slashdot-libertarian theory that any action by law enforcement is nothing more than an infringement on your right to do absolutely what you like regardless of the consequences).
Slashdot Mirror
Wanting to save some money, I got a Blackberry, instead of an iPhone or Android. It was a stupid mistake. The phone's quality is sub-par (I had to send it off to be repaired after the screen snapped under the pressure of my thumb, from picking it up). The menus are complicated and convoluted; nothing is where you'd think it should be and somethings need to be adjusted from several different locations (and I'm good with menus. I work with computers all day). On top of all of that, the audio, on my phone model anyway, is terrible. It's muffled and hard to hear. As soon as my commitment on this phone runs out, I am ditching this thing and never looking back.
If you're going to succeed in the "being a stupid shill" industry, you need to remember to plug the product you're being paid to shill. Knocking the competition is only half the job.
I can only score you "5/10 must try harder". Remember, next time, the final clause should be something along the lines of "I am ditching this thing for an iPhone, with its vastly superior build quality, wide selection of Angry Birds games and easy-to-use virtual keyboard, and never looking back."
Since when did the fact that a company's user base stopped growing mean it was the beginning of the end for them?
In any normal (non-tech) business, as long as you are making decent profits your company is successful. You don't suddenly panic and close down if one year your sales figures don't increase. I've worked for engineering firms that have been going for fifty or more years; they may be smaller than when they were at their peak and outsource a lot of manufacturing to China, but they're still happily profitable.
The myth that someone like Apple can keep on growing for ever is...a myth.
As the curator of Greece is Goldman Sachs, I don't think any money will really go to Greece.
Greece would be a lot better off now, and would have been a lot better off for the last sixty years, if the Germans had been forced to return all the wealth the Nazis looted from them in WW2.
Listen, don't mention the war. I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it all right.
Company shows its own free products before those of the competition.
Film at 11.
So Microsoft were fine pushing their free Internet Explorer in order to wipe out Netscape after all? Just checking.
VAT is different. VAT gets refunded for the vast majority of payments.
Only the final sale to the consumer actually ends up having VAT. All the (hundreds) of purchases that preceded that final purchase have their VAT refunded.
VAT doesn't get refunded (at least in the UK) if you're offering VAT exempt financial service products.
And 1% would give everybody a monthly income of 800. And why stop there? A 25% tax would give everybody 20,000 euro a MONTH and everybody will be filthy rich and nobody will have to work ever again. You, Sir, are a genius!
Sounds fair enough to me. Not all of us regard the redistribution of wealth as a bad thing.
If you do that, you'll simply end most of the financial transactions that can be taxed
You almost make it sound like that's a bad thing. The whole point is that most of the "trading" activity is socially and economically useless. Personally, I'd just go for punishingly high rates of tax (90%+) for anyone who basically makes money out of gambling
I worked out that a Europe wide 0.5% financial transaction tax would be enough to pay an unconditional base income of 400euro/month to every single person living in Europe with money to spare. ...just saying.
More to the point, a 5% tax would let everyone have 4000 euros a month, which would be a comfortable income for most people.
I hate religion as much as the next person with a brain, but isn't it a bit hypocritical for everyone on slashdot to suddenly be all in favour of the DMCA just because the copyright breaker is a religious group?
> remind me never to buy any music from the swiss... or respect any other intellectual property from Switzerland.
All of a sudden, all Swiss products became a lot more interesting to me.
Try pirating a Rolex watch and see how amusing they find it.
Switzerland: the country where doing this is legal, now gets a pirate party major. When kids go to college, I'm moving there ;)
Why are you so impressed with a radio controlled plane taking video footage? Wouldn't that be legal in most places in the world, except near military installations? What am I missing?
On the one hand, churches do not force their members to tithe at gunpoint (at least, none in America of which I know). On the other hand, many seem to be doing just fine with their funding being completely from voluntary sources, even when some people make use of their resources without paying tithes. Makes you wonder whether the IRS is needed at all.
If you only had church tithes instead of government taxes (assuming such a hellish conception could even remotely be workable in a population that was not composed entirely of braindead slaves), then do you really think they would be voluntary? At the very least there would have to be very strong social pressure to contribute, and presumably if you didn't you would be ostracized.
The root problem with politics is that government, at its very core, is based on actions, based on aggression that when committed by anyone else other than "the government" would be rightfully condemned by everyone. If someone outside of government would implement taxation people would rightfully view it as theft. If someone outside of government introduced conscription people would rightfully view it as slavery. Those who have understood this naturally view politics as repulsive, just as we view working for the mafia as repulsive.
I think this is the point at which someone says "fuck off and live in Somalia then" isn't it?
I fail to see how someone promoting a new player in politics is a bad thing...
How about if they were promoting a new neo-Nazi party?
You believe that the Pirate party are a good thing and so are using false logic.
Pretty much instant gratification.
That does not mean it is either necessary or desirable.
give me the speed and I'll figure out what to do with it soon enough... probably something I can't do now.
How can you possibly know that?
Seriously. Everyone with a desk job (or student) doesn't need to drive into work. Get some good video conferencing solutions, a huge pipe to your office files, a cheap-as-dirt dumb terminal in your living room (or home-office), and now you actually have a fighting chance at staving off unimportant things like global warming (less gas for travel).
What a pile of old toot. You can work or study from home perfectly easily with a very modest internet connection already. It's just that most people don't want to, and most companies don't want them to. It's a social, not a technical issue..
No. It is like breaking up a penny into very small parts and giving away one of the pieces.
Yes, if he'd made the prize a couple of billion, I'm sure you'd have got much higher quality software out of it.
You should probably read a little more about Bill Gates.
Yeah, his alcohol and drug addiction, history of rape and child abuse, known support for Nazi politics and unhealthy interest in Satanism are well documented. Oh, wait...no, he just made a lot of money selling software, which on slashdot is the worst crime known to humanity.
Yes, they're designed to make money, we live in a Capitalistic society, everything that companies do is designed to maximize profit.
Bullshit, most people lived in some version of a mixed economy, and not everything is done by for-profit organisations. There is no inherent reason why you couldn't nationalise all farms and food producers.
Sure, Gates is donating to charity, but to obtain the money to do so, he used business practices which set the industry back several years
He made computing affordable for the masses, which is why the geek snobs on slashdot hate him. Faced with a choice between using windows on a generic PC or spending five times that on some cool UNIX workstation, the market broadly decided to go for the former.
It's consumer capitalism in action.
I got the impression this guy was posting a tongue in cheek response. If he was posting in jest, then it's another case like the bloke in Britain who tweeted about blowing up an airport that was closed due to inclement weather.
Yeah, I'm sure the cops and lawyers never even thought of that one. This may surprise many people on slashdot, the law does not operate like a simple A + B = C program where you just feed in A and B and get a nice neat answer.
U mad, bro? Seriously, a touch of Asperger's, maybe? I can see that this is WAY serious business to you.
If you think that someone threatening to kill children isn't serious, it's you that's got the mental problem. Bro.
Nobody should be reaching for *any* guns in this situation, because there is no situation.
Reaching for a gun to defend yourself (or calling the police to do so) is not the same thing as deciding to shoot someone because you want something of theirs, or don't like them.
If there simply is no legal basis for any of this, it won't go any further, but the fact that someone has been arrested and charged would suggest there is something there.
(Unless you go along with the slashdot-libertarian theory that any action by law enforcement is nothing more than an infringement on your right to do absolutely what you like regardless of the consequences).
And decades of judges and juries have ruled in favor of the slave owners property rights.. What's your point?
Not for two hundred years. What's your point? That because there were bad laws in the past, therefore all laws are bad? That is just stupid.