Actually your having helped earn the profits is irrelevant, the profits are not yours...
It is actually hugely relevant. Corporations are anti-democratic, semi-feudal domains that assign all ultimate rights to an ownership class. Everyone else is a serf, who either works silently or is evicted from the estate. SCOTUS has decided that this sort of entity is a first-class participant in a modern democracy, which is disgusting, but then again, I'm not an American, so I'm a bit behind the times. In my own admittedly backwards country, the only legitimate participants in a democracy are citizens who can vote.
Corporations, shareholders, and boards of directors do not have democratic interests. The corporation itself is merely a legal proxy for the purposes of sharing property and liability. To the shareholders, the corporation is a money-making investment, like real estate or gold. It doesn't make sense to give your condominium the right to interfere in political debate, so why would you do such a thing for any other piece of investment-grade property? The directors do not share the interests of their corporations; they are duty-bound to ensure that shareholders get proper value from their investments, that is all. They are perfectly capable (in fact, are probably more capable) of ensuring that shareholders don't get defrauded if they treat their corporation like an untrustworthy, slightly dangerous animal, not like their liege lord.
Corporations do, however, have some inherent interests of their own that cannot be projected by proxy onto any of their human servants. For example, they are immortal. They can also reside in many cities and countries simultaneously. They are invulnerable to both conventional and nuclear weapons. They use these attributes to skirt and abuse laws that were designed for humans who have none of these characteristics. You know that these same corporations that are claiming the rights of people in the USA, will also be claiming that they are not governed by US law when it comes time to pay taxes or clean up their environmental messes.
I want a 12" powerbook "app" on my iSlab. Launch it and you get a regular OS X desktop in a super-lightweight package to replace my 12" PB. No need to refactor the OS for multitouch - just use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse for the regular desktop interface. Close the powerbook app and you're back to the mobile OS X interface and multitouch.
That simply means that smaller federal government has never served the aims of the military-industrial establishment. It's not that they forgot, it's that smaller government is actually contrary to their aims. The US military alone spends more than all state and local governments combined, and that is only one federal department. Conservatives who think conservatism has anything to do with small government are borderline romantics, thinking back to a pre-WWII America, even a 19th-Century America where the USA was individualistic, isolationist, and still driven by the pioneer spirit. It's an appealing national myth, but a myth nonetheless in the 21st Century.
How else do you explain the politicians who self-identify as "conservative" who are so eager to expand the size and power of government?
That's an easy one. The core philosophy in conservatism is maintaining the existing power structures in society. The size of government is immaterial, and will be increased when necessary and decreased when unnecessary to the achievement of this aim. The existing power structure in the USA is based around the military industrial complex, which dictates big, big, big government (but which spends very little on actual social programs). The power structure in Canada is based around the resource economy, which dictates government small enough that the energy, mining, and forestry companies can override popular opposition. That pretty much explains everything you need to know about the differences between American and Canadian conservatives.
Say goodbye to bacon pizzas, tasty and meaty hamburgers, hot dogs...
Whoa, hold on. Hot dogs? You're saying that we're going to have to give up our pink, slightly gelatinous, ground-up lips and anuses in exchange for something that doesn't taste good? That's outrageous.
There's no violation of the 2nd law here. The whole contraption is fueled by the nutrients that are fed into the system, so there is a net consumption of energy. It's no different than an internal combustion engine that can generate surplus energy for external use, while also generating its own electricity. It all works fine, just as long as you keep adding fuel.
The problem with faith is when it becomes blind faith.
No, the problem with faith is that it is always blind. Faith is a strong belief in the absence of evidence, but without evidence, you are utterly and completely blind.
Faith will always be there for the things we do not have the tools to understand.
There are better words for the things we do not have the tools to understand. "Ignorance" is a pretty good one, for instance.
If you notice, there are "science" folk in here mocking this new theory because it contradicts the old one. Think about this next time you want to take a swing at someone who holds faith.
Criticizing new theories is part of what "science folk" do, you know.
This whole thread is so full of mind-numbingly self-indulgent American pseudo political philosophy that was debunked by the rest of the world 50 years ago, that it is actually quite painful to realize some people still think there is a debate here to be waged.
Anyway, welcome to the 20th Century, American friends. Next on the list of major social experiments to be hostly debated by your intellectually gifted elites:
is military imperialism just a big waste of money and lives?
where exactly does torture and execution fit into a modern justice system?
is manufacturing the basis of a strong economy?
When apply your rugged individualism and constitutional wanking to figure out the answers to these important questions, do let us know. We're dying for your leadership here.
You think Twitter is a stupid name, but "RSS" is okay.
You think soccer moms will know what an RSS feed is.
You think that even if they know what to do with an RSS feed, that they will be able to hook it up to SMS or their IM client.
You don't see the use for a simple interface to do all of this so easily that it works for 10 year olds and their grandparents.
You think that your team members, half of whom are already on Twitter, will appreciate being given a hodgepodge of other technologies that they have manually link together, all to do what Twitter already does.
You think that this is a good way to build a social network.
I consider Twitter to be the *only* useful social networking site. It's certainly the only one I have any use for, and it's really, really useful.
I have a real need to get information out to a specific set of people, and they have a real desire to get that information instantly. To whit: I run a sports team, and there are regular announcements, schedule changes, special practices, entry deadlines, and other items that need to be pushed out to the team members, parents, etc. By using Twitter, they can choose to receive these updates by phone SMS, RSS, on a mobile Twitter client, or by a web bookmark that they are in the habit of checking. It's their choice how they want to use it, and it works *really* well. When I send out an announcement while at a practice, people's phones start chirping as they get the SMS within 2 seconds of me sending it.
Personally, I think that's pretty impressive. Twitter is the bomb.
Why they don't version OS X the same way everyone else does I've no idea, but there you are.
It's a Unix, so it needs an X in the name so that the other Unix kids won't laugh at it. It was a happy coincidence that the upgrade to the Unix flavour also followed the switch from version 9, so that the X could cutely double as version 10.
It all made perfect sense, until it was time to switch to version 11.
Ubuntu shouldn't be *just* windows, it should be windows and more.
Wanting a better windows is like wanting a better Ford Escort. A better version of an obsolete piece of crap seems like a good idea to people who are accustomed to the piece of crap, but it's holding back the rest of the world who isn't interested in compatibility with old things done in a retarded way. Desktop Linux has been on a long march sideways since about RedHat 4, with its FVWM-95 Windows theme. (So yes, for some of us, the Year of the Linux Desktop was around 1997. We've moved on.)
The basic problem is that until the late '90s, Linux had its sights set on high-end Unix workstations, which generally had large, high-resolution monitors, and were used by professionals with a sophisticated understanding of computer systems and multitasking workflows. Early Linux, for all its problems, was catering to the cutting edge of computer science, but at a tiny fraction of the price. By the late 90s, Windows 95/98 had taken over the low-end of the computing world, and Linux changed its focus to low-end PCs used by ignorant consumers with 14" low-resolution monitors that could only reasonably show one window at a time. The Windows GUI paradigm has never outgrown these modest roots, and so this day we still have die-hard Windows users who insist that Start menus, maximise buttons, two-button mice, ctrl-C to copy, monolithic apps, and various other naive UI paradigms are the Right and True way to compute. And Linux desktop designers who believe them.
Apple's laptops are much more traditional than their desktops, and sell much better.
They only appear to be traditional, because every laptop maker on earth abandoned the traditional designs and copied Apple's radical Powerbook design in the early 90s.
I guess this means BeOS would be a terrible server OS
Just about anything would be a terrible server OS while you are playing your videos on it. But being pre-empted by user whims shouldn't be a big deal if there are no users on the system, which I hope is the case for most servers. And it might be a huge advantage in some cases--for instance figuring out what the hell is going on when your sysload spikes up to 100.
The doctrine of the Christian Trinity says that one god exists as three persons. Jesus, as one of the three, is therefore God, the same in substance as the Father, and it is this particular concept of God that distinguishes Christianity from other monotheistic religions.
It is non-Christians (ie. those who do not accept the divinity of Jesus) or poorly-indoctrinated Christians (who have never heard of the Nicene creed) who don't accept Jesus as God.
Jews for Jesus don't appear to add anything interesting to the mythological equation. They just run with all the stock myths.
This is the popular belief, but it doesn't stand up well to academic scrutiny. The Jewish, Muslim, and Christian gods can be traced back to different ancestral deities, which became fused as monotheism (belief in one and only one god) gradually replaced monolatry (belief in many gods, but worship of only one).
The Judaic god is Yahweh. The Muslim god is Allah, formerly El (the etymology survives as Elohim in the Bible, as well as in the names of the archangels, Gabri-El, Rafa-El, Micha-El, Uri-El). El was a sky god, and therefore a king of the gods, like Zeus. (Elohim is a plural form, and probably originally referred to El plus his lesser gods, analogous to the Olympians.) In Judaism, Yahweh took over El's duties either by absorbing a neighbouring tribe that worshipped El, or by the mythological feat of overthrowing El and taking over the King of gods position, as did Zeus, when the Jews had risen to a position of political and military power that clearly signaled the ascendance of Yahweh. In any case, Yahweh absorbed many of the aspects of El, and after several rounds of edits, they came to be referred to interchangeably but not especially consistently in the Old Testament. El survived this fusion outside of Jewish realms, but because of Judaism's superior documentation of the matter, the fusion was accepted by later religions such as Islam.
The Christian god is Jesus, an entirely different figure who took on all of the myths and characteristics of Roman Empire sun gods. Sun gods generally were fathered by the king of the gods, and birthed by a virgin. That meant that Jesus worshipers needed two more gods, a father and virgin mother, to fit the sun god archetype. But the trinity idea didn't work so well with the trendy monotheism thing, and kind of distracted from Jesus himself. After a couple centuries of various heresies, purges, and whatnot, the Christians got it all sorted out: the trinity was really just facets of the same monotheistic god; the Father was the abstracted god in heaven, easily equated with Yahweh-El (or any other local King god, which was how it got sold to the Romans); Jesus was the real manifestation of that God on earth; and the Virgin got booted from the Trinity because there was no room for another god or another person. (Nevertheless, the Virgin cult has survived in many respects to this day.)
Or how about this: don't give it a friggin' version number at all. Did Queen Elizabeth I actually add the "I" to her name? Of course not! It's only when new versions comes out that you need to distinguish them.
The product's name should be "Foomatic", end of story. Then when they come out with a new and improved version, that should be "Foomatic Plus". The version after that is "Foomatic Supreme", and then after you start running out of superlatives, "Foomatic 4.0".
The Apple ads are not saying PCs are boring. That's insecure geek talk. PC is actually quite likeable. But he is hapless. He's going to fail. He's Wile E. Coyote, to Mac's Road Runner. Everybody likes Wile E. Coyote (who is anything but boring), even though you know he's gonna end up crushed or burned or worse.
That's why the ads are pure genius. People like, identify with, and root for PC guy. But they know that he's gonna lose to Mac, and the comedy is in how bad it's gonna be, and how annoyed PC guy is going to be with smug Mac guy. He's a classic anti-hero, you empathize with him, but you know it's not going to end well for him. Everyone who thinks the ads got it wrong because they don't like Mac guy has missed the point. Or rather they got the point, but didn't understand Apple's real objective, which is appealing to PC users, not preaching to the choir.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually your having helped earn the profits is irrelevant, the profits are not yours...
It is actually hugely relevant. Corporations are anti-democratic, semi-feudal domains that assign all ultimate rights to an ownership class. Everyone else is a serf, who either works silently or is evicted from the estate. SCOTUS has decided that this sort of entity is a first-class participant in a modern democracy, which is disgusting, but then again, I'm not an American, so I'm a bit behind the times. In my own admittedly backwards country, the only legitimate participants in a democracy are citizens who can vote.
Corporations, shareholders, and boards of directors do not have democratic interests. The corporation itself is merely a legal proxy for the purposes of sharing property and liability. To the shareholders, the corporation is a money-making investment, like real estate or gold. It doesn't make sense to give your condominium the right to interfere in political debate, so why would you do such a thing for any other piece of investment-grade property? The directors do not share the interests of their corporations; they are duty-bound to ensure that shareholders get proper value from their investments, that is all. They are perfectly capable (in fact, are probably more capable) of ensuring that shareholders don't get defrauded if they treat their corporation like an untrustworthy, slightly dangerous animal, not like their liege lord.
Corporations do, however, have some inherent interests of their own that cannot be projected by proxy onto any of their human servants. For example, they are immortal. They can also reside in many cities and countries simultaneously. They are invulnerable to both conventional and nuclear weapons. They use these attributes to skirt and abuse laws that were designed for humans who have none of these characteristics. You know that these same corporations that are claiming the rights of people in the USA, will also be claiming that they are not governed by US law when it comes time to pay taxes or clean up their environmental messes.
I want a 12" powerbook "app" on my iSlab. Launch it and you get a regular OS X desktop in a super-lightweight package to replace my 12" PB. No need to refactor the OS for multitouch - just use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse for the regular desktop interface. Close the powerbook app and you're back to the mobile OS X interface and multitouch.
That's worth $1000 right there.
That simply means that smaller federal government has never served the aims of the military-industrial establishment. It's not that they forgot, it's that smaller government is actually contrary to their aims. The US military alone spends more than all state and local governments combined, and that is only one federal department. Conservatives who think conservatism has anything to do with small government are borderline romantics, thinking back to a pre-WWII America, even a 19th-Century America where the USA was individualistic, isolationist, and still driven by the pioneer spirit. It's an appealing national myth, but a myth nonetheless in the 21st Century.
How else do you explain the politicians who self-identify as "conservative" who are so eager to expand the size and power of government?
That's an easy one. The core philosophy in conservatism is maintaining the existing power structures in society. The size of government is immaterial, and will be increased when necessary and decreased when unnecessary to the achievement of this aim. The existing power structure in the USA is based around the military industrial complex, which dictates big, big, big government (but which spends very little on actual social programs). The power structure in Canada is based around the resource economy, which dictates government small enough that the energy, mining, and forestry companies can override popular opposition. That pretty much explains everything you need to know about the differences between American and Canadian conservatives.
I suppose that technically the GG could refuse to give royal accent to the new law
Canadian Law would be much funnier if given in the royal accent.
Say goodbye to bacon pizzas, tasty and meaty hamburgers, hot dogs...
Whoa, hold on. Hot dogs? You're saying that we're going to have to give up our pink, slightly gelatinous, ground-up lips and anuses in exchange for something that doesn't taste good? That's outrageous.
There's no violation of the 2nd law here. The whole contraption is fueled by the nutrients that are fed into the system, so there is a net consumption of energy. It's no different than an internal combustion engine that can generate surplus energy for external use, while also generating its own electricity. It all works fine, just as long as you keep adding fuel.
The problem with faith is when it becomes blind faith.
No, the problem with faith is that it is always blind. Faith is a strong belief in the absence of evidence, but without evidence, you are utterly and completely blind.
Faith will always be there for the things we do not have the tools to understand.
There are better words for the things we do not have the tools to understand. "Ignorance" is a pretty good one, for instance.
If you notice, there are "science" folk in here mocking this new theory because it contradicts the old one. Think about this next time you want to take a swing at someone who holds faith.
Criticizing new theories is part of what "science folk" do, you know.
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."
-- Henry Ford
This whole thread is so full of mind-numbingly self-indulgent American pseudo political philosophy that was debunked by the rest of the world 50 years ago, that it is actually quite painful to realize some people still think there is a debate here to be waged.
Anyway, welcome to the 20th Century, American friends. Next on the list of major social experiments to be hostly debated by your intellectually gifted elites:
When apply your rugged individualism and constitutional wanking to figure out the answers to these important questions, do let us know. We're dying for your leadership here.
So let me get this straight:
...And the most useless.
I consider Twitter to be the *only* useful social networking site. It's certainly the only one I have any use for, and it's really, really useful.
I have a real need to get information out to a specific set of people, and they have a real desire to get that information instantly. To whit: I run a sports team, and there are regular announcements, schedule changes, special practices, entry deadlines, and other items that need to be pushed out to the team members, parents, etc. By using Twitter, they can choose to receive these updates by phone SMS, RSS, on a mobile Twitter client, or by a web bookmark that they are in the habit of checking. It's their choice how they want to use it, and it works *really* well. When I send out an announcement while at a practice, people's phones start chirping as they get the SMS within 2 seconds of me sending it.
Personally, I think that's pretty impressive. Twitter is the bomb.
Why they don't version OS X the same way everyone else does I've no idea, but there you are.
It's a Unix, so it needs an X in the name so that the other Unix kids won't laugh at it. It was a happy coincidence that the upgrade to the Unix flavour also followed the switch from version 9, so that the X could cutely double as version 10.
It all made perfect sense, until it was time to switch to version 11.
Ubuntu shouldn't be *just* windows, it should be windows and more.
Wanting a better windows is like wanting a better Ford Escort. A better version of an obsolete piece of crap seems like a good idea to people who are accustomed to the piece of crap, but it's holding back the rest of the world who isn't interested in compatibility with old things done in a retarded way. Desktop Linux has been on a long march sideways since about RedHat 4, with its FVWM-95 Windows theme. (So yes, for some of us, the Year of the Linux Desktop was around 1997. We've moved on.)
The basic problem is that until the late '90s, Linux had its sights set on high-end Unix workstations, which generally had large, high-resolution monitors, and were used by professionals with a sophisticated understanding of computer systems and multitasking workflows. Early Linux, for all its problems, was catering to the cutting edge of computer science, but at a tiny fraction of the price. By the late 90s, Windows 95/98 had taken over the low-end of the computing world, and Linux changed its focus to low-end PCs used by ignorant consumers with 14" low-resolution monitors that could only reasonably show one window at a time. The Windows GUI paradigm has never outgrown these modest roots, and so this day we still have die-hard Windows users who insist that Start menus, maximise buttons, two-button mice, ctrl-C to copy, monolithic apps, and various other naive UI paradigms are the Right and True way to compute. And Linux desktop designers who believe them.
Check out the Grizzly, the NEV, the Spyder, or the ZENN. Yes, they're all pretty strange. If we want normal cars, we buy Hondas.
Apple's laptops are much more traditional than their desktops, and sell much better.
They only appear to be traditional, because every laptop maker on earth abandoned the traditional designs and copied Apple's radical Powerbook design in the early 90s.
I guess this means BeOS would be a terrible server OS
Just about anything would be a terrible server OS while you are playing your videos on it. But being pre-empted by user whims shouldn't be a big deal if there are no users on the system, which I hope is the case for most servers. And it might be a huge advantage in some cases--for instance figuring out what the hell is going on when your sysload spikes up to 100.
I hate Python. yada yada Python sucks yada yada...
Why bother to learn the differences between Perl 5 and Perl 6 when you can go ahead and learn Python or Ruby?
I think I'll just stick with Perl and not get all bitter and conflicted.
The doctrine of the Christian Trinity says that one god exists as three persons. Jesus, as one of the three, is therefore God, the same in substance as the Father, and it is this particular concept of God that distinguishes Christianity from other monotheistic religions.
It is non-Christians (ie. those who do not accept the divinity of Jesus) or poorly-indoctrinated Christians (who have never heard of the Nicene creed) who don't accept Jesus as God.
Jews for Jesus don't appear to add anything interesting to the mythological equation. They just run with all the stock myths.
They worship the same damn god.
This is the popular belief, but it doesn't stand up well to academic scrutiny. The Jewish, Muslim, and Christian gods can be traced back to different ancestral deities, which became fused as monotheism (belief in one and only one god) gradually replaced monolatry (belief in many gods, but worship of only one).
The Judaic god is Yahweh. The Muslim god is Allah, formerly El (the etymology survives as Elohim in the Bible, as well as in the names of the archangels, Gabri-El, Rafa-El, Micha-El, Uri-El). El was a sky god, and therefore a king of the gods, like Zeus. (Elohim is a plural form, and probably originally referred to El plus his lesser gods, analogous to the Olympians.) In Judaism, Yahweh took over El's duties either by absorbing a neighbouring tribe that worshipped El, or by the mythological feat of overthrowing El and taking over the King of gods position, as did Zeus, when the Jews had risen to a position of political and military power that clearly signaled the ascendance of Yahweh. In any case, Yahweh absorbed many of the aspects of El, and after several rounds of edits, they came to be referred to interchangeably but not especially consistently in the Old Testament. El survived this fusion outside of Jewish realms, but because of Judaism's superior documentation of the matter, the fusion was accepted by later religions such as Islam.
The Christian god is Jesus, an entirely different figure who took on all of the myths and characteristics of Roman Empire sun gods. Sun gods generally were fathered by the king of the gods, and birthed by a virgin. That meant that Jesus worshipers needed two more gods, a father and virgin mother, to fit the sun god archetype. But the trinity idea didn't work so well with the trendy monotheism thing, and kind of distracted from Jesus himself. After a couple centuries of various heresies, purges, and whatnot, the Christians got it all sorted out: the trinity was really just facets of the same monotheistic god; the Father was the abstracted god in heaven, easily equated with Yahweh-El (or any other local King god, which was how it got sold to the Romans); Jesus was the real manifestation of that God on earth; and the Virgin got booted from the Trinity because there was no room for another god or another person. (Nevertheless, the Virgin cult has survived in many respects to this day.)
Though a Mac is not an alternative for me, as so much of my software is not available on Mac and I'm not about to buy it all again anyway.
Um, why would you have to buy it again? I'm pretty sure it will run just fine on a Mac.
Or how about this: don't give it a friggin' version number at all. Did Queen Elizabeth I actually add the "I" to her name? Of course not! It's only when new versions comes out that you need to distinguish them.
The product's name should be "Foomatic", end of story. Then when they come out with a new and improved version, that should be "Foomatic Plus". The version after that is "Foomatic Supreme", and then after you start running out of superlatives, "Foomatic 4.0".
Trendy people where I live usually wear something a bit hipper than blue jeans and a hoodie that could have come from Wal-mart.
I think Apple is making a distinction between office wear and home wear, not between boring and cool.
The Apple ads are not saying PCs are boring. That's insecure geek talk. PC is actually quite likeable. But he is hapless. He's going to fail. He's Wile E. Coyote, to Mac's Road Runner. Everybody likes Wile E. Coyote (who is anything but boring), even though you know he's gonna end up crushed or burned or worse.
That's why the ads are pure genius. People like, identify with, and root for PC guy. But they know that he's gonna lose to Mac, and the comedy is in how bad it's gonna be, and how annoyed PC guy is going to be with smug Mac guy. He's a classic anti-hero, you empathize with him, but you know it's not going to end well for him. Everyone who thinks the ads got it wrong because they don't like Mac guy has missed the point. Or rather they got the point, but didn't understand Apple's real objective, which is appealing to PC users, not preaching to the choir.
"Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities."
-- Voltaire
I think the OP's concern is legitimate.