witness how many don't realise that no, it's not only about "me paying for their education")
Taxes are confiscatory. You do not pay them on a voluntary basis. If someone doesn't pay their taxes, the government will send armed men to confiscate their assets, by force if necessary. That is the nature of taxation and no amount of hair-splitting over "context" will change that. Now, because this is money taken by force or threat of force from the people who earned it, there needs to be a damned good reason to justify this. Otherwise it's just plain wrong. It so happens that there is a good reason to justify this, which I acknowledged.
I simply think you ommitted important parts; what you wrote is factual but not accurate if it's not complete
Had I claimed it was complete I'd perhaps see your point. Unfortunately to completely do justice to this subject in the strictest sense would probably require writing an entire book. Several books have sought to do just that, in fact.
Meanwhile, I am not you. I may (and probably will) not say things the way you would say them. I may not emphasize things you feel are important, and the most likely reason why I won't do that is because they're plainly obvious things which any moron is capable of understanding if they are so inclined. You're going to have to get over that.
I emphasize the things I feel like emphasizing. I reserve that right so long as I do not make claims of having completely covered every possible angle of a subject. If that's what you wanted, do your own research. Often the viewpoints I emphasize are not heard so often. There are already myriad sources for common ways of viewing things so I add little of value by parroting them. I am not going to change any of this just to please you. If that troubles you, feel free to style your own speech any way you like. I've tried to accommodate your objections but it's becoming unreasonable. This is a game you can play with someone else, as quibbling about style is useless and adds nothing of value to the discussion.
Is that response mysterious to you? Consider that you're telling me how to express myself and aren't satisfied even after learning that I was not actually contradicting you. Thus, this cannot be about proving a point, advocating a position, or convincing anyone. It can only be about you telling me how I should be myself, which naturally means being more like you and saying things the way you would say them. I realize you might not have noticed that you have such a motive, because if you were aware of it you'd get rid of it. Thus, I am pointing it out because it can't be intentional.
Perhaps you are not browsing at "-1" and did not see it, but my response to him is an attempt to explain that. If you have feedback towards or questions about my explanation, it'd be a pleasure to answer those for you.
But putting it in context of "paying for someone else's children education" is not a desire for reasonable talks about the issue; it outright passes individual judgment of what the issue is as the topic of "talks". But, for one example, it disregards (rather foolishly and destructivelly for the offspring of proposers...) that funding better public education is a crucial part of having all around pleasant society in the future.
It's a factually accurate statement. If a person has no children but still pays (in my state, property) taxes that fund public schools, they are indeed paying for the education of someone else's children. There's nothing wrong with saying so.
I even said that paying for the education of someone else's children is justifiable. It's justified by the benefit to society of a (at least somewhat) educated population. I even said that the alternative is to spend that money, and probably more, on things like welfare and police, since the links between education and poverty, and then poverty and crime, are quite well established. That's very much the opposite of "disregard[ing] that funding better public education is a crucial part of having all around pleasant society in the future."
I mean no offense but even if I didn't want to, I am forced to conclude that you read what you wanted to read and not what I actually wrote.
Incidentally, if my opinion on the matter were consulted, I'd be strongly in favor of homeschooling and building communities around homeschooling, so that the children don't miss out on the social interaction that public schooling provides. This would be superior in every way to public schooling as we know it. It's also my opinion that if people had to bear the full burden of child-rearing on their own, they might be more likely to reconsider whether they are actually in a good position to handle the awesome responsibility that it represents before children are conceived. But that's another discussion, and it's how I would prefer things to be (that is, it's my opinion) and has nothing to do with acknowledging the obvious truth that public education is better than no education at all.
I have to disagree with you. When people say "Life isn't fair" they are usually talking about situations that ARE created by humans (just do a google search for the term and look at the results).
That's actually exactly what I said. Re-read my post with this in mind and you'll probably see it. I apologize if I wrote in a way that made this unclear.
My point was that it's useless to speak of fairness when you are talking of things that are beyond anyone's control, like the parents to whom an individual was born. By contrast, it is reasonable to speak of fairness with regard to decisions people make when those people could have chosen differently.
should these questions be left to be answered and executed in private by the parents of kids?
yes.
This is currently at "-1 Flamebait". What a failure of moderation. The question posed by this summary is "Should kids be bribed to do well in school?" The post to which I reply states an opinion that the parents should be the ones who decide whether this is the best way to raise their children. That's flamebait? Really??
An instant, dismissive attempt to censor what is obviously a valid, honest opinion only lends credibility to that opinion. So good job, mods. Your childish reaction to this tells me only one thing: that a person who is not so puerile and emotionally overreactive views this differently than you do. Anyone with some understanding who might have entertained the idea of both views being merely different but equal now knows that yours is inferior. Anyone who can't see that for themselves would have already agreed with you anyway, so you truly have wasted your time and your mod points.
As I've heard it said, you might chronologically be an adult but that doesn't mean you've grown up. If you want to try growing up a little, perhaps instead of wasting mod points you can explain why parents should not be the ones who ultimately decide these matters.
Incidentally, I have plenty of karma. Do your worst. Waste your points on me. I'd be happy with that, since you might have otherwised use them to censor someone who doesn't have plenty of karma. I'd suggest "Offtopic" but feel free to be creative.
I understand that you aren't thrilled with the idea of paying/motivating kids to get good grades. And I respect your position as a parent and a tax payer. But if you think it's just the "A" or "gold stars" that a child gets from doing the "busy work" then you're missing the point. The better they do on tests, and the better their homework is, the more they have learned.
... by rote memorization, with a method designed to make them dependent on someone else to tell them what is worth learning and when they have learned it. Neither future job placement nor immediate financial rewards teach them that learning is a joy, that the world is a place full of wonderous and interesting things, that you can value your own edification for its own sake and not just as a means to accomplish something else. Instead, the public schools teach by experience that learning is tedious and boring and that there must always be something to force you to do it, like future poverty or immediate disapproval of parents and teachers.
Ever wonder why someone will make a 30 minute call to technical support, just to ask a basic question that they could answer themselves with 5-10 minutes of research? It's because they have learned the dependency lesson. Not only does it never occur to them to take the situation into their own hands, they would resent the suggestion. That's why they immediately seek assistance instead of seeking help only as a last resort after first making a sincere effort to obtain their own answers.
I think this link would explain a great deal of what I am saying.
well, this is all being done in the name of saving money. that is the problem, especially considering it's a fiat currency.
betterment should never be defined in getting the same for less relative to a fiat currency.
Unfortunately, you are going to discover (and may have already) that most people just don't understand the full implications of our financial system. They either don't understand that fiat currency with fractional reserve banking can do nothing other than perpetually increase debt, or they know this only intellectually, like a memorized fact which they can parrot without true understanding and appreciation for its full implications.
Most people don't know these things, have not done the research themselves, do not know the history (of Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis) that brought us this system, and don't appreciate what happens when there is a tremendous amount of debt that someone must end up holding. For one thing, they think the dollar in their pocket represents wealth. They don't understand that if every last debt were paid off, there would be zero money in circulation, though this can't happen because there is more debt than dollars in circulation. That's much of the "national debt" that the news media keeps talking about without actually defining.
There's little appreciation for the fact that this is not an accident caused by bumbling idiots, but a massive fraud perpetrated by people who knew what they were doing and designed it very carefully. It's not like the public schools consider it an important priority to educate people on this matter. Unfortunately most people will never make any real effort to educate themselves. They think that's a burden, not an honor and a privilege. That, above all else, is why the status quo perpetuates. We've lost our initiative and have become passive spectators waiting for someone, like the schools and colleges, to tell us what we need to know.
I for one greatly appreciate what you are saying. I regret that many will not, for all of this should be common knowledge.
...as a taxpayer, i don't think it's fair that i'm already paying for your child's education, and now i must also pay to motivate them to receive it.
so you think the world is fair?
Apparently YOU do though, as evident in your post he was replying to.
There's an important distinction though. The parents to whom you're born is beyond anyone's control. There's no possible way to predict that in advance or modify it. There is no birth to speak of until after you have been born, at which point the identity of your biological parents has already been established.
Contrast that with taxation which funds public schools. That was a decision that human beings got together and made. It's also a decision that human beings can get together and un-make. It's a deliberate decision to impose a burden on the members of the public whether or not they actually have children who are using these schools. It's justified by the impact on society that a lack of education would have (i.e. do you prefer to pay for more schools or more welfare and police?). It's reasonable to argue that "X burden is reasonably justified, but X+Y burden is not."
Thus, it's quite useless to talk about fairness in the context of someone who was born into an affluent family versus someone who was born into a poor family. On the other hand, it's reasonable to talk about fairness in the context of whether your tax burden, especially for someone else's children, is or is not already high enough. That's especially true when a desire is expressed to use tax money in order to have government institutionalize an aspect of child-rearing that is properly the decision of the parents.
That's why you have failed to catch the GP making a contradiction. You failed because you don't recognize that these two situations can be contrasted but are not actually comparable.
The ads are in APPS, not in the general use of the phone. The developers have a choice to include ads or not in their apps and you have the choice to buy or not buy APPS with ADS in them. It is actually acceptable for any app developers who wants to include ads in their app. You are always free to purchase the app or not purchase the app.
I said it's parasitic behavior and that it would be foolish to reward this behavior. Nowhere did I say anyone should be prevented from doing anything. If people would like to do something foolish, it's not my job to stop them, but it's still foolish. This concept just can't be that hard to understand.
The real objection is not about whether you like to see ads or don't like to see ads. No. The objection is that the moment you see a single ad you did not wish to see, you have lost control over the device. That's completely unacceptable when you are already paying.
So you don't own your radio or television?
That's cute. I own the device, yes. That device can play both programming I have to pay money for, like store-bought DVDs, or it can play programming I don't have to pay money for, like broadcast TV. I likened that to the device of the iPhone and the "programming" of the apps.
Still waiting for a substantive response to my actual objections. So far people just want to quibble over semantics.
And yet millions of people pay for cable television, or for magazines, which still have ads in them. I fail to see the problem. When people have the choice of services or appliances to use, then the problem solves itself. Content servers find a way to operate profitably with some kind of split revenue from customer billing and from ad revenues. Why shouldn't ad serving subsidize subscription cost?
So because many people will go along with something and will not oppose it on principle, and therefore precedent for it exists, that automatically means it's not exploitative and is not an instance of double-dipping?
And for that matter, so what if this were to go to the ridiculous extreme and Apple requires all apps to serve ads, or they won't get approved? So what? Then you can simply not use an Apple appliance. Nothing is forcing you to do business with them.
You seem to so badly need to make this a matter of taste or preference. No. I oppose this not because I find it distasteful, or like something better. I'm sorry you automatically assume everything is that shallow. I oppose it because I believe it's wrong.
Seriously, I don't understand where you're coming from. Because of a set of values YOU hold, that are far from universal, you want to limit the choices available to me as a consumer, and to developers also?
What have I limited? Back this up, please. I have not been calling for the government to use force to stop them. I have not in any way tried to prevent anyone from doing what they like. What I have done is explain that I won't be going along with this, and that I did not arrive at that decision by flipping a coin. It's the case for several good reasons.
Your need to trivialize this by making it a matter of taste or preference, ignoring my principled objection, and acting like I am somehow limiting anyone by speaking my mind weakens your argument more than I likely could.
Ask me about CoApp, I'll tell ya everything ya wanna know.
Garrett Serack
CoApp Project Owner
I'll bite. Given Microsoft's track record, particularly its embrace-and-extend tactics, its questionable business practices, its status as a convicted monopolist, its use of vendor lock-in, its related use of proprietary file formats, and the Halloween e-mails from top management clearly defining Open Source as an enemy, I have just one question: why should we trust them?
Most (nearly all) of the upper management people who arranged everything I just listed are still working at Microsoft.
"Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."
I personally don't care about advertising. It doesn't bother me one bit in the grand scheme of things, since I'm capable of tuning them out. If the ads in a particular context bother me, then I avoid that context.
I wonder if you're aware that you're making excuses. The real objection is not about whether you like to see ads or don't like to see ads. No. The objection is that the moment you see a single ad you did not wish to see, you have lost control over the device. That's completely unacceptable when you are already paying. That's why personal preferences towards advertising are completely irrelevant.
For something like broadcast TV or broadcast radio, that's acceptable, since it costs money to produce those things and you are viewing ads instead of paying a bill. You are obtaining something of value to offset the cost of watching ads. That makes it a fair exchange. However, when you are paying for a phone, phone service, and the application, and still see ads, this is no longer justifiable. It's a form of double-dipping. Thus, it's an adversarial way of relating to your customers because it amounts to taking advantage of them.
It has nothing to do with whether anyone likes ads. It has to do with the fact that a company is making money from ad revenue without earning that money by providing something of value in return. If you're already paying for it on your own, they are failing to do this but are still collecting ad revenues. It's foolish to reward this behavior because it's parasitic in nature. Do you ever wonder why there are so many companies that take advantage, exploit, and find ways to screw people over? It's because we reward them with our business.
The only time this would be acceptable would be for free apps that would otherwise cost money. Please read this quote from the summary and tell me whether you believe Apple is going to restrict these ad functions to free apps only (emphasis mine):
And CWmike adds more infomation at MacWorld about iAd, which he considers the biggest news in today’s announcement, writing that one way to look at the new advertising hooks "is that Apple can now leverage the App Store/iTunes ‘ecosystem’ lock-in in effect, and deliver to advertisers a huge captive audience."
Spammers need a legit server to receive those clicks. See how I tracked down one spammer half an hour ago [slushdot.com] to learn more.
That's wonderful, and probably made you feel better, only it misses my point. You can track down 500 more spammers if you want. Even if you manage to get every last one of those 501 taken offline, more will show up to take their place. That will continue so long as spam remains profitable. What you're doing there is more about a visceral feeling of nailing someone for being a pest, and unfortunately nothing else. We will never run out of symptoms like that spammer you tracked down until we address the actual root of the problem.
Or would you like to prove this isn't a big issue by posting your phone number, address, license plate number, and check routing/account numbers here for us?
STRANGELY ENOUGH the people who argue against privacy never seem to want to do that. They aren't terribly committed to their statements after all.
Want to fix the spam problem? Get rid of "private" domain registrations. If the domain isn't registered to a real human being, pull the plug.
This will help stop sites that offer crap like "bullet-proof email services" - spam-on-demand.
Real question because I don't honestly know: how much spam is actually sent from people with registered domain names who own blocks of IP addresses? How does this number compare to the spam sent from compromised Windows machines that participate in various botnets? If the latter is a much larger source, then this looks more like another ineffective feel-good measure. Though to be honest, even if you shut down every last botnet I don't believe that would stop spam, because spam predates large botnets.
The way I see it, spammers are like drug dealers. You will never run out of them until you remove their profits. Economic forces are that powerful. If one drug dealer gets busted, the rest probably feel like the cops did them a favor by removing some competition. For every dealer busted, another will take his place because there is no shortage of people with no scruples who will do anything for money. The higher the risk, the more they can charge for their products.
You will never win the War on Drugs with force. We've tried that for decades now and it hasn't done anything (not that we're willing to learn from this). Your only hope is to convince the users to give up their habits through education. Education has been phenomenonally successful at reducing the use of tobacco, to make a comparison. Likewise, I don't see how busting spammers is going to stop spam. I don't believe you will ever stop spam until the average Internet user stops buying their products and stops falling for their scams.
In the interest of truth, how about the commenters in this thread start by telling us if they own or have used at length an iPhone, Ipod Touch, or an iPad. I think that if we pay more attention to the people who have something that they know to add we might discover something useful here.
That would exclude the people who don't own those and believe they have good reasons for this. Truth is not served by discounting them. Even if you could never agree with them, consider them an important contrast.
I mean, sheesh - if you want to see people holding forth on things they know nothing about you can always tune in the Fox channel. We're better than that here, aren't we? This "I heard it was bad so it must be" nonsense isn't doing anyone any good. It's a product, not a philosophical statement
It's possible to know something about an object that you've still chosen not to purchase. In fact I'd recommend knowing something about it before you decide whether or not to purchase it. There actually are philosophical aspects to this. Your own might motivate you to dismiss the opinions of anyone who hasn't patronized Apple. They could also motivate you to understand an alternative viewpoint and why a given person holds it. Either way you are reflecting a philosophy, worldview, set of priorities, values, whatever you wish to call it. Is it therefore an offense when others do the same?
so get down off of those high horses and let's discuss this like men and women.
That's a related but different subject, easily conflated with your first. This one is about the style with which something is expressed, not the nature of what is being conveyed. It's really about how the tone that is used can affect the quality of discourse but not the subject.
Then how is this a good publicity move if it is meaningless?
Were you expecting a PR effort to contain concrete meaning and substance, instead of style and hand-waving? Really, what you mention is how it's always been done.
Israel, as per their usual policy, has never admitted nor denied to have nuclear weapons.
They certainly have the technology, so it would be foolish to assume that they don't have them. The USA didn't talk about the Manhatten Project until much later on as well.
The world really isn't as evil a place as some think it is. And it's not really the "evil" monkeys we need to be afraid of, it's the fearful ones.
The world would be a less dangerous place if folks could stop being such hair-trigger fearmonkeys.
Take that one step further: look at who is profiting from that status quo. Now you have identified the source of the problem, and they have extensive connections in both government and media. I bet they could all fit in a single medium to large-sized room. As long as the average person fails to realize this, the problem will perpetuate.
The only times people should be talking about economic matters and presidents in the same breath, is when presidents do things that harm the economy, such as allowing fed chairmen to "lower interest rates."
Or failing to do everything in their power to replace our fiat currency with a representative currency, that way the nation can do something other than perpetually increase debt according to the design of the financial system.
If I had a nickle for every moron who posts "Citation please" I'd be a fucking millionaire.
Unlike these jackasses, I don't think everyone on Slashdot is posting lies or misconceptions.
I suspect that these imbeciles often do and expect that everyone else does too.
They're often called "Wikitards" because they are taking something that is a normal part of the culture of one place (Wikipedia) and trying to apply it to another (Slashdot) as though it were universal. For the rest, I can speak only for myself. I don't assume anyone is posting lies or misconceptions, but I don't assume they're telling the truth either. If it's important to me, I look it up. If It's not important to me, I entertain the notion without regard for whether it's actually true ("If that's the case, then..."). It's basic skepticism and I consider it a healthy thing.
It's quite rare that a single individual is in a unique position to provide the only known source of information. That's why I honestly see most of the "[Citation Needed]" memes on Slashdot and it's plain to me the person is too lazy to do their own research. It's almost always something that could easily be Googled. If using Google is difficult for the person, they'd be better off improving their basic research skills instead of asking someone else to spoonfeed information to them. That's because even if the requested citation IS provided, there is such a thing as confirmation bias. The person providing a citation might have ignored the ten other relevant citations that say something different. There's no substitute for not being lazy.
Additionally, lots of people start with good data and then use incorrect argumentation to come to invalid conclusions. Therefore, for any non-trivial issue, good citations alone are not enough to determine the validity of a position. The couple of minutes with Google that the "[Citation Please]" folks are trying so hard to avoid to avoid is only a small part of the overall process of determining truth. That is again why I think it's about having someone else do your legwork for you and not about a genuine concern for the quality of information.
They say that as though today were not. The practice has become more sophisticated and better able to mislead without actually making demonstrably false statements, mostly by framing, omission of inconvenient facts, and repetition. But that's the only difference I see between the journalism of then and most journalism that happens today.
That's why "put in the extra hours" was a very tiny part of my overall comment, precisely because I did not wish to put too much emphasis on it. What I had in mind there had more to do with 3am emergencies (servers going down, etc) that somebody has to handle yet is often rather thankless work.
Not to mention there is more to IT than coding. If you are physically running CAT5 through a building, it takes a certain amount of time to do that no matter how skilled you are. If you are cloning hard drives, you can't do that faster than the transfer rate of the drives. Etc. If your clients have requirements that must be met, these things could mean staying after hours. That's all.
Slashdot Mirror
Taxes are confiscatory. You do not pay them on a voluntary basis. If someone doesn't pay their taxes, the government will send armed men to confiscate their assets, by force if necessary. That is the nature of taxation and no amount of hair-splitting over "context" will change that. Now, because this is money taken by force or threat of force from the people who earned it, there needs to be a damned good reason to justify this. Otherwise it's just plain wrong. It so happens that there is a good reason to justify this, which I acknowledged.
Had I claimed it was complete I'd perhaps see your point. Unfortunately to completely do justice to this subject in the strictest sense would probably require writing an entire book. Several books have sought to do just that, in fact.
Meanwhile, I am not you. I may (and probably will) not say things the way you would say them. I may not emphasize things you feel are important, and the most likely reason why I won't do that is because they're plainly obvious things which any moron is capable of understanding if they are so inclined. You're going to have to get over that.
I emphasize the things I feel like emphasizing. I reserve that right so long as I do not make claims of having completely covered every possible angle of a subject. If that's what you wanted, do your own research. Often the viewpoints I emphasize are not heard so often. There are already myriad sources for common ways of viewing things so I add little of value by parroting them. I am not going to change any of this just to please you. If that troubles you, feel free to style your own speech any way you like. I've tried to accommodate your objections but it's becoming unreasonable. This is a game you can play with someone else, as quibbling about style is useless and adds nothing of value to the discussion.
Is that response mysterious to you? Consider that you're telling me how to express myself and aren't satisfied even after learning that I was not actually contradicting you. Thus, this cannot be about proving a point, advocating a position, or convincing anyone. It can only be about you telling me how I should be myself, which naturally means being more like you and saying things the way you would say them. I realize you might not have noticed that you have such a motive, because if you were aware of it you'd get rid of it. Thus, I am pointing it out because it can't be intentional.
Why does its status as a fiat currency matter?
Perhaps you are not browsing at "-1" and did not see it, but my response to him is an attempt to explain that. If you have feedback towards or questions about my explanation, it'd be a pleasure to answer those for you.
But putting it in context of "paying for someone else's children education" is not a desire for reasonable talks about the issue; it outright passes individual judgment of what the issue is as the topic of "talks". But, for one example, it disregards (rather foolishly and destructivelly for the offspring of proposers...) that funding better public education is a crucial part of having all around pleasant society in the future.
It's a factually accurate statement. If a person has no children but still pays (in my state, property) taxes that fund public schools, they are indeed paying for the education of someone else's children. There's nothing wrong with saying so.
I even said that paying for the education of someone else's children is justifiable. It's justified by the benefit to society of a (at least somewhat) educated population. I even said that the alternative is to spend that money, and probably more, on things like welfare and police, since the links between education and poverty, and then poverty and crime, are quite well established. That's very much the opposite of "disregard[ing] that funding better public education is a crucial part of having all around pleasant society in the future."
I mean no offense but even if I didn't want to, I am forced to conclude that you read what you wanted to read and not what I actually wrote.
Incidentally, if my opinion on the matter were consulted, I'd be strongly in favor of homeschooling and building communities around homeschooling, so that the children don't miss out on the social interaction that public schooling provides. This would be superior in every way to public schooling as we know it. It's also my opinion that if people had to bear the full burden of child-rearing on their own, they might be more likely to reconsider whether they are actually in a good position to handle the awesome responsibility that it represents before children are conceived. But that's another discussion, and it's how I would prefer things to be (that is, it's my opinion) and has nothing to do with acknowledging the obvious truth that public education is better than no education at all.
That's actually exactly what I said. Re-read my post with this in mind and you'll probably see it. I apologize if I wrote in a way that made this unclear.
My point was that it's useless to speak of fairness when you are talking of things that are beyond anyone's control, like the parents to whom an individual was born. By contrast, it is reasonable to speak of fairness with regard to decisions people make when those people could have chosen differently.
should these questions be left to be answered and executed in private by the parents of kids?
yes.
This is currently at "-1 Flamebait". What a failure of moderation. The question posed by this summary is "Should kids be bribed to do well in school?" The post to which I reply states an opinion that the parents should be the ones who decide whether this is the best way to raise their children. That's flamebait? Really??
An instant, dismissive attempt to censor what is obviously a valid, honest opinion only lends credibility to that opinion. So good job, mods. Your childish reaction to this tells me only one thing: that a person who is not so puerile and emotionally overreactive views this differently than you do. Anyone with some understanding who might have entertained the idea of both views being merely different but equal now knows that yours is inferior. Anyone who can't see that for themselves would have already agreed with you anyway, so you truly have wasted your time and your mod points.
As I've heard it said, you might chronologically be an adult but that doesn't mean you've grown up. If you want to try growing up a little, perhaps instead of wasting mod points you can explain why parents should not be the ones who ultimately decide these matters.
Incidentally, I have plenty of karma. Do your worst. Waste your points on me. I'd be happy with that, since you might have otherwised use them to censor someone who doesn't have plenty of karma. I'd suggest "Offtopic" but feel free to be creative.
Ever wonder why someone will make a 30 minute call to technical support, just to ask a basic question that they could answer themselves with 5-10 minutes of research? It's because they have learned the dependency lesson. Not only does it never occur to them to take the situation into their own hands, they would resent the suggestion. That's why they immediately seek assistance instead of seeking help only as a last resort after first making a sincere effort to obtain their own answers.
I think this link would explain a great deal of what I am saying.
well, this is all being done in the name of saving money. that is the problem, especially considering it's a fiat currency.
betterment should never be defined in getting the same for less relative to a fiat currency.
Unfortunately, you are going to discover (and may have already) that most people just don't understand the full implications of our financial system. They either don't understand that fiat currency with fractional reserve banking can do nothing other than perpetually increase debt, or they know this only intellectually, like a memorized fact which they can parrot without true understanding and appreciation for its full implications.
Most people don't know these things, have not done the research themselves, do not know the history (of Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis) that brought us this system, and don't appreciate what happens when there is a tremendous amount of debt that someone must end up holding. For one thing, they think the dollar in their pocket represents wealth. They don't understand that if every last debt were paid off, there would be zero money in circulation, though this can't happen because there is more debt than dollars in circulation. That's much of the "national debt" that the news media keeps talking about without actually defining.
There's little appreciation for the fact that this is not an accident caused by bumbling idiots, but a massive fraud perpetrated by people who knew what they were doing and designed it very carefully. It's not like the public schools consider it an important priority to educate people on this matter. Unfortunately most people will never make any real effort to educate themselves. They think that's a burden, not an honor and a privilege. That, above all else, is why the status quo perpetuates. We've lost our initiative and have become passive spectators waiting for someone, like the schools and colleges, to tell us what we need to know.
I for one greatly appreciate what you are saying. I regret that many will not, for all of this should be common knowledge.
Apparently YOU do though, as evident in your post he was replying to.
There's an important distinction though. The parents to whom you're born is beyond anyone's control. There's no possible way to predict that in advance or modify it. There is no birth to speak of until after you have been born, at which point the identity of your biological parents has already been established.
Contrast that with taxation which funds public schools. That was a decision that human beings got together and made. It's also a decision that human beings can get together and un-make. It's a deliberate decision to impose a burden on the members of the public whether or not they actually have children who are using these schools. It's justified by the impact on society that a lack of education would have (i.e. do you prefer to pay for more schools or more welfare and police?). It's reasonable to argue that "X burden is reasonably justified, but X+Y burden is not."
Thus, it's quite useless to talk about fairness in the context of someone who was born into an affluent family versus someone who was born into a poor family. On the other hand, it's reasonable to talk about fairness in the context of whether your tax burden, especially for someone else's children, is or is not already high enough. That's especially true when a desire is expressed to use tax money in order to have government institutionalize an aspect of child-rearing that is properly the decision of the parents.
That's why you have failed to catch the GP making a contradiction. You failed because you don't recognize that these two situations can be contrasted but are not actually comparable.
I said it's parasitic behavior and that it would be foolish to reward this behavior. Nowhere did I say anyone should be prevented from doing anything. If people would like to do something foolish, it's not my job to stop them, but it's still foolish. This concept just can't be that hard to understand.
So you don't own your radio or television?
That's cute. I own the device, yes. That device can play both programming I have to pay money for, like store-bought DVDs, or it can play programming I don't have to pay money for, like broadcast TV. I likened that to the device of the iPhone and the "programming" of the apps.
Still waiting for a substantive response to my actual objections. So far people just want to quibble over semantics.
So because many people will go along with something and will not oppose it on principle, and therefore precedent for it exists, that automatically means it's not exploitative and is not an instance of double-dipping?
You seem to so badly need to make this a matter of taste or preference. No. I oppose this not because I find it distasteful, or like something better. I'm sorry you automatically assume everything is that shallow. I oppose it because I believe it's wrong.
What have I limited? Back this up, please. I have not been calling for the government to use force to stop them. I have not in any way tried to prevent anyone from doing what they like. What I have done is explain that I won't be going along with this, and that I did not arrive at that decision by flipping a coin. It's the case for several good reasons.
Your need to trivialize this by making it a matter of taste or preference, ignoring my principled objection, and acting like I am somehow limiting anyone by speaking my mind weakens your argument more than I likely could.
Ask me about CoApp, I'll tell ya everything ya wanna know.
Garrett Serack CoApp Project Owner
I'll bite. Given Microsoft's track record, particularly its embrace-and-extend tactics, its questionable business practices, its status as a convicted monopolist, its use of vendor lock-in, its related use of proprietary file formats, and the Halloween e-mails from top management clearly defining Open Source as an enemy, I have just one question: why should we trust them?
Most (nearly all) of the upper management people who arranged everything I just listed are still working at Microsoft.
"Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."
I wonder if you're aware that you're making excuses. The real objection is not about whether you like to see ads or don't like to see ads. No. The objection is that the moment you see a single ad you did not wish to see, you have lost control over the device. That's completely unacceptable when you are already paying. That's why personal preferences towards advertising are completely irrelevant.
For something like broadcast TV or broadcast radio, that's acceptable, since it costs money to produce those things and you are viewing ads instead of paying a bill. You are obtaining something of value to offset the cost of watching ads. That makes it a fair exchange. However, when you are paying for a phone, phone service, and the application, and still see ads, this is no longer justifiable. It's a form of double-dipping. Thus, it's an adversarial way of relating to your customers because it amounts to taking advantage of them.
It has nothing to do with whether anyone likes ads. It has to do with the fact that a company is making money from ad revenue without earning that money by providing something of value in return. If you're already paying for it on your own, they are failing to do this but are still collecting ad revenues. It's foolish to reward this behavior because it's parasitic in nature. Do you ever wonder why there are so many companies that take advantage, exploit, and find ways to screw people over? It's because we reward them with our business.
The only time this would be acceptable would be for free apps that would otherwise cost money. Please read this quote from the summary and tell me whether you believe Apple is going to restrict these ad functions to free apps only (emphasis mine):
That's wonderful, and probably made you feel better, only it misses my point. You can track down 500 more spammers if you want. Even if you manage to get every last one of those 501 taken offline, more will show up to take their place. That will continue so long as spam remains profitable. What you're doing there is more about a visceral feeling of nailing someone for being a pest, and unfortunately nothing else. We will never run out of symptoms like that spammer you tracked down until we address the actual root of the problem.
STRANGELY ENOUGH the people who argue against privacy never seem to want to do that. They aren't terribly committed to their statements after all.
Want to fix the spam problem? Get rid of "private" domain registrations. If the domain isn't registered to a real human being, pull the plug.
This will help stop sites that offer crap like "bullet-proof email services" - spam-on-demand.
Real question because I don't honestly know: how much spam is actually sent from people with registered domain names who own blocks of IP addresses? How does this number compare to the spam sent from compromised Windows machines that participate in various botnets? If the latter is a much larger source, then this looks more like another ineffective feel-good measure. Though to be honest, even if you shut down every last botnet I don't believe that would stop spam, because spam predates large botnets.
The way I see it, spammers are like drug dealers. You will never run out of them until you remove their profits. Economic forces are that powerful. If one drug dealer gets busted, the rest probably feel like the cops did them a favor by removing some competition. For every dealer busted, another will take his place because there is no shortage of people with no scruples who will do anything for money. The higher the risk, the more they can charge for their products.
You will never win the War on Drugs with force. We've tried that for decades now and it hasn't done anything (not that we're willing to learn from this). Your only hope is to convince the users to give up their habits through education. Education has been phenomenonally successful at reducing the use of tobacco, to make a comparison. Likewise, I don't see how busting spammers is going to stop spam. I don't believe you will ever stop spam until the average Internet user stops buying their products and stops falling for their scams.
That would exclude the people who don't own those and believe they have good reasons for this. Truth is not served by discounting them. Even if you could never agree with them, consider them an important contrast.
It's possible to know something about an object that you've still chosen not to purchase. In fact I'd recommend knowing something about it before you decide whether or not to purchase it. There actually are philosophical aspects to this. Your own might motivate you to dismiss the opinions of anyone who hasn't patronized Apple. They could also motivate you to understand an alternative viewpoint and why a given person holds it. Either way you are reflecting a philosophy, worldview, set of priorities, values, whatever you wish to call it. Is it therefore an offense when others do the same?
That's a related but different subject, easily conflated with your first. This one is about the style with which something is expressed, not the nature of what is being conveyed. It's really about how the tone that is used can affect the quality of discourse but not the subject.
Then how is this a good publicity move if it is meaningless?
Were you expecting a PR effort to contain concrete meaning and substance, instead of style and hand-waving? Really, what you mention is how it's always been done.
Israel, as per their usual policy, has never admitted nor denied to have nuclear weapons.
They certainly have the technology, so it would be foolish to assume that they don't have them. The USA didn't talk about the Manhatten Project until much later on as well.
The world really isn't as evil a place as some think it is. And it's not really the "evil" monkeys we need to be afraid of, it's the fearful ones.
The world would be a less dangerous place if folks could stop being such hair-trigger fearmonkeys.
Take that one step further: look at who is profiting from that status quo. Now you have identified the source of the problem, and they have extensive connections in both government and media. I bet they could all fit in a single medium to large-sized room. As long as the average person fails to realize this, the problem will perpetuate.
Sad, isn't it?
Or failing to do everything in their power to replace our fiat currency with a representative currency, that way the nation can do something other than perpetually increase debt according to the design of the financial system.
How do you sleep at night?
If I had a nickle for every moron who posts "Citation please" I'd be a fucking millionaire.
Unlike these jackasses, I don't think everyone on Slashdot is posting lies or misconceptions.
I suspect that these imbeciles often do and expect that everyone else does too.
They're often called "Wikitards" because they are taking something that is a normal part of the culture of one place (Wikipedia) and trying to apply it to another (Slashdot) as though it were universal. For the rest, I can speak only for myself. I don't assume anyone is posting lies or misconceptions, but I don't assume they're telling the truth either. If it's important to me, I look it up. If It's not important to me, I entertain the notion without regard for whether it's actually true ("If that's the case, then ..."). It's basic skepticism and I consider it a healthy thing.
It's quite rare that a single individual is in a unique position to provide the only known source of information. That's why I honestly see most of the "[Citation Needed]" memes on Slashdot and it's plain to me the person is too lazy to do their own research. It's almost always something that could easily be Googled. If using Google is difficult for the person, they'd be better off improving their basic research skills instead of asking someone else to spoonfeed information to them. That's because even if the requested citation IS provided, there is such a thing as confirmation bias. The person providing a citation might have ignored the ten other relevant citations that say something different. There's no substitute for not being lazy.
Additionally, lots of people start with good data and then use incorrect argumentation to come to invalid conclusions. Therefore, for any non-trivial issue, good citations alone are not enough to determine the validity of a position. The couple of minutes with Google that the "[Citation Please]" folks are trying so hard to avoid to avoid is only a small part of the overall process of determining truth. That is again why I think it's about having someone else do your legwork for you and not about a genuine concern for the quality of information.
They say that as though today were not. The practice has become more sophisticated and better able to mislead without actually making demonstrably false statements, mostly by framing, omission of inconvenient facts, and repetition. But that's the only difference I see between the journalism of then and most journalism that happens today.
That's why "put in the extra hours" was a very tiny part of my overall comment, precisely because I did not wish to put too much emphasis on it. What I had in mind there had more to do with 3am emergencies (servers going down, etc) that somebody has to handle yet is often rather thankless work.
Not to mention there is more to IT than coding. If you are physically running CAT5 through a building, it takes a certain amount of time to do that no matter how skilled you are. If you are cloning hard drives, you can't do that faster than the transfer rate of the drives. Etc. If your clients have requirements that must be met, these things could mean staying after hours. That's all.