My point is that a truly and totally free market is a farce. There has to be a balancing act performed to keep the market truly competitive and profitable. Unfortunately, one groups idea of fair and balanced differs from another groups idea of fair and balanced. That is why we need regulation. Maybe this particular case isn't one that requires regulation. Maybe this particular case works as it currently is implemented. Obviously not everyone believes that, especially the person who DIDN'T get a DROID and then for whatever reason had to cancel their contract two months early.
The only way you would ever have a free market is if the average person always fully understood both the product/service that is being sold AND any contract that goes along with it. Even that wouldn't be enough. You would then need for all people, as individuals, to be willing to boycott a company (even in the absence of a competitor) and bring it to its financial knees and to be willing to do this over even minor abuses. They must do this individually and not as the result of some organization's decision, and nearly all of them must do so. Then if a corporation even remotely looks like maybe it is screwing someone over, it gets faced with its own bankruptcy and made an example of. This will put other corporations on notice, proving to them that anything resembling bad-faith or malfeasance absolutely will not be tolerated and will be punished at all costs.
This model would not result in more bankrupt companies. It would result in companies complying with the wishes of the people in order to make a profit, just like everything they do now is for profit. The only thing that would change are the particular behaviors that lead to profitability. This would radically change the way citizens relate to corporations. It would fundamentally alter the balance of power. Right now that balance of power favors the corporations -- they are the major players in the market, and most customers cannot truly negotiate with them but must instead accept contracts of adhesion. They have the money and the lawyers and the political clout, meaning they can alter laws in their favor RIAA-style.
Until and unless people come to see it this way, we will indeed need government regulation. Government is about the only thing big enough and powerful enough to deal with corporations that are often larger than many nations. Even then we have the problem of well-funded lobbyists that were not sent to Washington by average citizens, but by monied interests. That's why I think this is ultimately only a partial better-than-nothing solution, as it merely relocates the problem from the marketplace to the realm of public policy.
There are a helluva lot of people out there who also consider things like education, firefighting, healthcare, and provision of basic needs like food and shelter as a "basic and legitimate function of government" as well.
I know of no tenet of Libertarianism which states that these things are forbidden. Some people who call themselves Libertarians may believe that these have no place in government, but you'd have to take it up with those people, for that is their personal interpretation of the concept. The only other thing I'll say is that if you study the works of folks like John Taylor Gatto, the assumption that government education is the only effective education is shown to be the farce that it is. Gatto affirms that it takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and mathematics skills; from that point on, the person is capable of educating themselves. In this era of personal helplessness and the decline of self-sufficiency, that sounds unreasonable, though this was the way things were done in the USA until right about the late 1800s.
"Security" in what sense of the word ? Many would argue that being in a position where an unexpected illness, an accident, or an episode of gullibility could permanently ruin a life is substantially less "security" than they have now.
To that I say: live within your means, spend less money than you make, and put away savings. Anyone who does that won't be ruined by an illness or an accident. No massive social spending programs are necessary to achieve this. They only seem necessary when conspicuous consumption is our first priority and people refuse to live within their means. People who do this really would need a government to come along and bail them out of their poor financial decision-making. That doesn't mean that government intervention is the only possible way.
The AC was responding to this line of mine: "though personally one thing that would make a smaller, less-powerful device like this appeal to me would be..." In other words, a price of under $300 would make such a device appeal to him. As this netbook sells for about $500, it fails to appeal to him on that basis. Reading comprehension FTW! (sorry, couldn't help it)
The problem with libertarianism is it professes to draw a distinct line in where government should and should not intervene where none exists.
Even communists and fascists see limits to government. Only anarchists can legitimately claim to objectively hold claim to limiting the scope of government.
I'm not sure why you seem to equate Libertarianism to Anarchism in response to my post. Sure, anarchy would reduce the size and power of government, but its ultimate goal would be to eliminate government entirely. With no government of any kind, what you can expect next is that a few warlords would establish local dictatorships. They would protect their territory against other warlords much like street gangs do against rival gangs. A perfect implementation of Anarchism would quickly lead to the average person having both less freedom and less security than they have now.
The perfect implementation of Libertarianism would include a government that is at least strong enough to provide effective law enforcement, as this is viewed as a basic and legitimate function of government. What would be against the law are any activities which deprive another person of their natural rights (such as property, life, and freedom) against that person's will. Anything consenting adults do would be legal. No one would be protected by the government from the consequences of their poor decision-making. The state would only use its law-enforcement powers to curtail activities that use force, fraud, or the threat of force to coerce others. Such an implementation would lead to the average person having both more freedom and more security than they have now.
So no, they are not equal. Any similarity of effect is superficial in nature.
is the claimed 5-hour battery life. Not bad, on par with many full-size laptops and notebooks, though personally one thing that would make a smaller, less-powerful device like this appeal to me would be a longer battery life than standard laptops.
The thing is, on/. you get to see some of the crazy left, and some of the crazy right. But the craziest motherfuckers you see here? All self-professed libertarians.
Honestly I haven't seen too many crazy Libertarians here and I'm no stranger to the site, but for the sake of argument let's assume that many of them fit this description.
It's still up to the reader to determine whether these folks actually represent what they claim to represent. It always was and has always been this way for as long as humans have communicated with one another. If I saw a Christian talking about how much he loves to worship Satan, I have two choices: I can assume all Christians are just like him, or I can look into the teachings of Christianity and decide whether what he says is consistent with them. The former option is myopic at best, naive and stupid at worst. It's the same with Libertarianism.
There never was, is not, and never will be any substitute for thoroughly investigating a thing to your own satisfaction. It would be nice if everyone were always exactly what they claim to be, and if they always had a perfect understanding of what they are claiming to be. That's not the case and we do not live in such a world. Any desire to pretend that we do is little more than a thinly-veiled excuse for being too lazy to look into things before opinions are formed about them, or for being too ignorant to realize the importance of doing so. Of course such people are going to be misled; how can it be otherwise?
So really, I don't care how many crazy people claim to be Libertarian. I don't care if they think that anarchy or anarco-capitalism is the same thing as Libertarianism. The true definition of Libertarian thought was embodied in the Founding Fathers. Not only did they tolerate the idea of having a government, they created one! What was Libertarian about this was that they advocated a relatively weak State, and advised us that freedom can only truly be honored when the State is kept weak enough that it can only focus on its essential functions ("that government is best which governs least" etc.). I can do my own research and see that for myself no matter how a bunch of fools wish to exercise their freedom of speech.
He did tell me that if I was really interested I could become influential with time, but that you had to know people that are already in the game to play it properly...
People who probably won't give you the time of day unless your beliefs are not too different from theirs. Hence the problem with reforming the Democrat/Republican system or otherwise introducing pro-freedom elements into it. Both of them function to get people as helpless and dependent on government as possible. One does this with social programs and financial security (i.e. Social Security), while the other does it with the military and physical security (i.e War on Terror). Both take turns blaming each other for any problems while never actually addressing those problems, or doing so only in a superficial and reactive way, for they derive their perception of usefulness from having such problems to solve.
Sad isn't it?
It was never about who has the best ideas or whose principles, if implemented, would lead to the best government. Not for a moment. Major political parties do for politics what trade guilds once did for professions. Their only function is to raise the barriers to entry as high as possible in order to lock out competitors for the sake of protecting an entrenched hierarchy.
But why do you hate the ideas? I'm a weak libertarian myself and find that personal liberty is important. Don't generalize and say all libertarians are extremists. We don't all want to abolish the government. I'm curious about your ideas since I feel a decentralized government that helps those who truly need it, while not having ideas to force upon you about religion and ethics (marriage, alcohol, etc) would be the best deal. This is libertarianism for you.
Libertarianism is one of those few ideas that, if implemented and accepted, really would reverse the current trend of ever-expanding intrusive government and the general decline of personal liberty. For just that reason, it cannot be tolerated by anyone who stants to profit from this status quo. Such people include powerful politicians and influential members of the media. These are people who can influence the society and the prevailing opinions of the day quite a bit more than most people would like to admit.
It's no surprise to me that denigrating Libertarianism is another trendy bandwagon. That bandwagon is intended for people who won't personally investigate it and see what it's about on their own. If they did that, they'd quickly find that the Founding Fathers are some of the truest Libertarians who ever lived, except that back then it did not have such a name. They'd also see that throwing out those freedoms for any reason and with them the traditions of this nation is always a mistake, no matter how tempting.
Such people who form strong opinions and beliefs about things they have not investigated are sometimes called "useful idiots." They are extremely useful anytime you want to deceptively campaign against something. They are so useful because they will accept ideas from others and adopt them as if they independently came up with those ideas on their own. Look at the methods used here. The negative portrayal of Liberterianism is based almost exclusively on pretending like its most extreme form is its only form, and so anyone who calls himself a Libertarian is immediately equated with an anarchist or anarco-capitalist. This is a classic example of straw-man or red-herring demagoguery in the media. It's so easily refuted that there can be nothing accidental about it.
Well the Yes Men don't try to get me to install stuff to my PC for one thing.
If they succeed in getting you to download, install, and execute untrusted and unvetted code, that's your fault. I really consider any "threat" that requires my active participation to be a complete and total non-issue.
I can see what they are getting at but it is a real douche thing for them to be all "shame on you!" for downloading and using software that they themselves created, provided, and handed out. I can't see a whole lot of people taking them seriously, as a result.
The lesson here is that serious security software is not a black box. It's something you can audit and verify. And yes, shame on anyone who thought otherwise and fell for this. They should consider themselves fortunate that this one was rather benign. It could have easily done real damage.
I really think the EU is missing the point in this "anti-trust" case: the fact that the consumer doesn't have a choice in what OS comes with his computer doesn't bother anyone?
I think the reasoning is that it's not illegal to have this sort of monopoly (on OSes), but it's illegal to abuse it in such a way that you leverage it in order to dominate other markets, like browsers. Since they leveraged the Windows monopoly to make IE a dominant browser, the government is focusing their anti-trust efforts on browser choice specifically. At least that's what I think their reasoning is, though I'm no lawyer.
In the course of that first Gentoo install, so much about how a modern Linux system functions made sense to me that didn't before. Of course there's nothing stopping me from learning all that with another distro- but the Gentoo install showed me how it all (grub, parted, lvm, filesystems, kernel config, manual network config, syslog, X, kde, mysql, iptables, apache, etc, etc) fits together to achieve the goal of a usable system.
Once I was introduced to that framework, I could begin to make that crucial step when I stopped searching forums for the right commands to paste into xterm, and instead sought an understanding by reading official documentation and manpages.
There are two friends of mine whom I introduced to Linux. What I really want for both of them is just as you describe there. I strongly believe in that saying about giving a man a fish and feeding him for one day, versus teaching him how to fish so he can always feed himself.
It really enriches the whole experience when you have an understanding of how the system works and why it works that way. That's especially true for an open, transparent system like Linux, where you can look under the hood and see for yourself how it is put together. I have emphasized to both of my friends that a large volume of memorized knowledge is not nearly so important as holistic understanding, good problem-solving skills, and the ability to quickly and accurately find information whenever it is needed.
I started both of them with Gentoo. I believe that for both of them, it was their first experience with anything other than Windows. While Gentoo now has an automated installer, we always used the manual installation. From the very beginning, at each step in the process, I did my best to carefully explain to them what they were doing, why they were doing it, what effects and implications it will have, and which options were available. I offered suggestions but tried not to influence their decisions too much.
I also went over basic Unix design principles, how and why they differed from Windows, and general things like filesystem layouts and how Unix-like systems handle networking. We then moved on to distribution-specific topics like "emerge" and package management in general, what USE flags are and how they work, source compilation and CFLAGS, the INIT system, that sort of thing. My approach was always to focus on the principles and concepts, for a foundation of understanding solidly based on those gives one the ability to quickly reference any details that are needed. I like to explain things first in abstract, and then follow-up with concrete examples to demonstrate how those abstract ideas have real effects on the system.
Gentoo was a great choice for this, quite possibly the best I could have made. This is the case because I am willing to be actively involved, to take the time to share the knowledge that has brought me a great deal of enjoyment. It's my way of trying to give something back, by sharing with others what has benefitted me. This made it easy for me to communicate a real appreciation for the solid design and overall elegance (even beauty) of the system as a whole. It's as simple as possible, but no simpler, and any complexity comes from various permutations of those simple designs.
It would have been quite a mistake to just hand them a Gentoo installation CD and say "ok, I'm done now, have fun." Doing that with Gentoo may have turned them off to Linux entirely. For that kind of instant-gratification usage, Kubuntu would have been a much better choice. But had I done that, I would have missed out on all the enjoyment of teaching and sharing something I truly appreciate. I mean, think about it, we have large communities of dedicated volunteers around the world who put together and maintain some really high-quality systems and generally ask for nothing in return. Passing on the benefits I have received from that is not a duty or an obligation; it's quite a privilege.
Linux From Scratch and Gentoo users > Ubuntu and Fedora users. When something breaks on your Linux system and you don't know how to fix it, guess which one you'd rather hear from? A LFS user, or someone who uses Ubuntu because he's scared of the command line? Yeah, that's what I thought. Pwnd.
I disagree. A LFS user or other advanced user may not fix things "the proper way". Just because you know a lot about Linux, doesn't mean that you've read what the distributions way is for doing something like setting up wireless. Sure, you may get it setup by tinkering directly iwconfig and some config files, but if you're not doing it the way the distribution expects, your changes may get clobbered pretty quickly.
I myself have been caught by this trap, where I moved to a different distribution and tried to do things the way I knew how, but then somebody told me on some forum later that I wasn't doing it the right way.
I've definitely had to spend extra time learning a distro's particular way of doing things for just that reason. I use Gentoo on my own computer and one of my friends uses OpenSUSE. When I help him to i.e. set up a new server, I am more used to just directly editing a configuration file. I start doing that only to find that the config file is auto-generated by a GUI utility, and will get clobbered if I directly edit it. Ah well, at least they usually tell you that up-front by commenting the config file.
Still, it can be a bit annoying. You may not always have a GUI utility (or even a GUI) available. It also seems possible in my mind that you can have a GUI utility for modifying a configuration file without also throwing out hand-edited settings. But regardless of my opinions on it, you're right that this is a reality that needs to be accounted for. It's just about knowing the distribution you're working with.
Not everyone really wants to be on the cutting edge, and I like being at least a bit closer to Fedora/CentOS because i use them a lot at work (Debian and CentOS/RHEL are among the best Linuces for servers, while Gentoo is completely inappropriate (although this almost never comes up because Gentoo fans are also completely inappropriate as sysadmins)).
Many Gentoo users only use Gentoo for their personal computers. Those same users would recommend distributions like Debian to anyone who approached them and said "hey, I'm new to this Linux thing and I want to run a server, what would you suggest?" Gentoo is for users who a) know their way around Linux and b) love to tinker. It doesn't pretend to be for anyone else. I use Gentoo and very much enjoy it, but I would not recommend it to someone who's new to Linux and switching away from Windows. It's about what you like and believe to be appropriate for the job. It's not a religious cause.
Actually one of the reasons I got into Gentoo in the first place is that I wanted to know more about how a distribution is put together. As a learning tool its manual installation is one of the best. As a "I just want it to work, ASAP" tool it's one of the worst. Again it doesn't pretend to be otherwise. If Gentoo claimed to be the be-all and end-all, the Ultimate Linux Distribution, superior in every way to all others, then maybe I'd understand why it's so trendy to slam Gentoo whenever it comes up in a discussion. Or if I frequently visited the Gentoo Forums and saw the users talking about how lame binary distributions are, maybe then I'd understand it too, but they don't do this.
Since that isn't the case, this looks to me like another religious issue. Like when you have one sect of Christianity going to war against another sect of Christianity because they disagree on whether to drink wine or grape juice for Communion. Naturally the grape-juice drinkers think they have irreconcilable differences with the wine-drinkers and vice-versa. Each side thinks the other is composed of total idiots and assholes. Neither appreciates that what they're arguing over is a trivial matter of taste. Don't like a distro? Good, use something else. That should be the end of it, but it isn't, because it's not good enough that you use what you like, the other guy must also use what you like, right?
There's already online versions of music. You can buy tracks for $0.99 from Amazon with no DRM whatsoever. They come in a nearly universal (mp3) format that is easily converted to other formats and which can run on just about anything. For slightly more you can purchase the same product from the Apple Store. Yet people continue to pirate music in fairly significant numbers. Could it just be that free > pay?
Movies are trickier. Not aware of any online movie distribution systems that aren't laced with DRM or locked into a specific vendors product. But if the music example is telling it wouldn't matter if there were -- people would keep right on pirating them.
The industry did miss the boat with online distribution but I can't be the only one that thinks that excuse is wearing thin as a justification for piracy.
The industry also earned itself a great deal of ill will, which definitely has a non-zero contribution towards piracy. Lots of people who would not pirate from a more respectable organization have no qualms about doing it to a cartel that was willing to subject minor children to interrogation and various other legal proceedings as part of an intimidation campaign. Right or wrong.
Also note, I said an online product that people want to buy. That may or may not mean buying songs and albums. It may also mean a subscription where you can access a certain amount of music for a flat monthly fee. It could mean some innovation we have not yet thought of. What that consists of is the problem of the media companies.
But really, we have some bad priorities. It would be better for all record companies to go bankrupt than to have our legal system compromised in such a wholesale fasion by some narrow interests that don't represent most Americans.
As a person who was continually modded down for saying there was (and will be) no difference between Obama and McCain before and during the election I find your statement very funny.
It's not about the candidates, for they are like puppets. It's about the monied interests who finance their campaigns and put them into office. That's where the real power is, and it's not up for a vote. It's more of a plutocracy. Whether it's Obama or McCain who won the election, either of them has a career in politics only because they know better than to piss off the people who had the clout to put them into office. Therefore, those people always have their interests represented in Washington. Every candidate from either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party is elected only because those interests have carefully vetted him/her and are convinced that he/she is not going to rock that boat.
The individual either understands this reality or chooses to believe in the fantasy that the popular vote for major-party candidates has the potential to change the status quo. That popular vote is the direct result of mass media, which in turn is the result of advertising dollars that the candidates receive from those monied interests. The only change permitted under this system is of the "becoming more so" variety. Using copyright law as an example, that's why it becomes more and more restrictive over time (becoming more of what it is) and it's why those restrictions are never reversed.
People who can't understand this and people who are in denial about the fundamental brokenness of this system are going to get upset when you criticize a particular candidate. They can't imagine anything outside of the "Democrat or Republican" duality, and that's the real (and terrible) triumph of our current system. To those people, any negative statement about Candidate A must be equivalent to a positive statement about Candidate B. Asking them to see the fallacy of that kind of thinking is also a request to confront all of their insecurities that revolve around an extreme sense that "something's not right here", a task for which they may lack courage. In the absence of such courage, it's much easier for them to mod you down or insult you. Unfortunately neither response is very surprising when you consider the source.
yeah that organized crime commited by pirates is really bad for your nation.
It is if your nation makes billions of dollars developing movies and music. Anyone find it interesting that we routinely run massive trade deficits with China but stand mute while their Government tacitly condones piracy on an industrialized scale? As much as I despise the mafia there are real people working in these industries. It's a safe assumption they don't want to work for free. Can't we find some balance on this issue somewhere between "some teenagers downloaded Britney Spears, lock 'em up!" and "information wants to be free"?
We will have that balance the moment our social and governmental attitude towards the media companies consists of: "adapt your business model to the 21st century and create an online product that people want to buy, or go bankrupt. Your choice." Until then we're trying to make sure that buggy whip manufacturers still have jobs after the advent of the automobile.
Wouldn't that allow them to open almost anything in these times when 100ml of liquid or a nail file could be and sometimes are considered weapons?
I think that's the idea. We already have so many laws on the books that each citizen routinely breaks at least some of them some of the time. To complete this, now anything and everything is a "weapon" anytime an official needs an excuse to search you. The reason why you have basically unenforcable laws like this, is so that you can enforce them anytime you want against anyone. I'm sure it's quite "handy" for political opponents or anyone who is an outspoken critic or otherwise a nuisance to whoever is in power or is otherwise well-connected.
We have this situation because the average American is a hell of a lot more concerned about football, the Top 40 charts, and American Idol than they are about their own freedom and well-being. That saying about how our system causes us to get the government we deserve probably has some truth to it.
Oh well, if it helps in making Mr(/s). Causality realize his/her fallacy, here's some additional information he might wish to see: http://slashdot.org/~causality
A person really paranoid about privacy is not going to use the same slashdot account over and over again accumulating personal opinions, and perhaps inadvertently disclosing personal information. I'm pretty sure those comments contain much more private data than what Google could gather from searches and whatnot (except perhaps gmail).
That's cute that you went the extra mile and pulled up my publically-accessible userpage. Maybe this was intended to strengthen your point, but it only tells me that you are clutching at straws. Knowing that it's publically available, I don't post anything there that I would wish to keep secret. So what was your point?
Nothing gets on my userpage that I didn't personally put there. That gives me full control. If you wanna compare an apple to an apple, convince Google to never collect data on me that I don't personally and deliberately upload to them. That would represent a comparable degree of control. Until then, you are comparing two things which have irreconcilable differences.
Now, see if you can get the concept here. One entity, Slashdot, never has data on me that I don't personally and deliberately hand over to them. It's opt-in. Another entity, Google, collects data on me in various surreptitious ways, as a side-effect of simply browsing the Web. They do so whether or not I decide that I want to submit that data to them. They are opt-out. Guess which one is intrusive? Guess which one I block?
I wish I could have a conversation like this without having to go back over basic things, over and over again. Things that you could determine on your own, like the difference between a site that has no data except what I give to it, versus a site that tries to take data whether I want to give it or not. It's a bit of a nuisance to have to tell people that yes, there is a difference between those.
However, that was not the point of the paragraph where that sentence appeared, nor is it related to my argument as a whole. The fact that you see this tidbit three paragraphs in should be testament to that.
Oh please, the rest of your post is devoted to hyperbole about it being impossible to avoid the generic crawl. I didn't bother to address that exaggeration because it is silly on the face of it.
However, no one has yet to explain how this data is actually detrimental to you, beyond the stuff I already mentioned.
You haven't been thinking about the issue enough else you could come up with plenty of examples all on your own. For example -- Do some searches about condoms and the linkage causes you to get free samples in the mail. Except you are snipped and married... Accidental disclosure of private information to friends and family is an entire class of detriment.
But even more importantly - privacy is like Pandora's box - people with your attitude open the box wide because they aren't able to conceive of how loosing (and that's spelled correctly) their personal information out into the world could ever hurt them. Then, down the line, something they never thought of, but someone else has be it an id thief, a political opponent, or even someone wishing to do them physical harm, becomes a means to hurt you and the only thing you've got left to protect yourself with is hope.
It boils down to one very simple fact - giving away that information does nothing to benefit you. At the very best it can never be better than neutral. So taking reasonable steps to protect yourself is the obvious course of action.
Thanks, I believe you have saved me some time by succinctly explaining this.
It's funny how talking about the impersonal, generic data-mining of the sort done by Google gets you responses that pretend like you are talking about evading the NSA or something. The responses along the lines of "you really think you are so interesting to spy on" were particularly amusing. Google gets all the data they can on all the people for whom they can do so, there is nothing personal about it. That's why a few simple measures will defeat Google's tracking.
It's obvious that a real investigator who is personally targeting you would not be so easily deterred. It's so obvious that it goes without saying. There is no genuine reason to point out something obvious like that except to confuse the issue. The confusion comes from the idea that what a good investigator would do with a specific target is anything like what Google is doing, which is patently false.
It's almost like people don't want you to maintain privacy merely because they have given up on the idea. So they will (subconsciously?) say almost anything, however irrelevant, to make it look like some infeasible pipe dream. It's demagoguery at its finest. I suspect it isn't even intended to be demagoguery, but comes from an unwillingness to really examine the issue. The effect is the same either way: a really simple, easily-researched, easily-verified issue becomes confused and is made out to be some complex impossible deal. Naturally no opportunity to portray privacy advocates as stupid, unrealistic, paranoid, egotistical, etc. can be allowed to go to waste during this process.
are you prepared to move out into the jungle and live outside civilization? I assume no, since you're sitting in front of a computer? then you're going to have to compromise.
Ah yes, my favorite recurring Slashdot fallacy. I'll put it this way:
<sarcasm>Right, because we all know that you must either voluntarily submit to having your every last move logged and recorded, or, live in the jungle as a hermit and give up all civilization and all technology. Yup, no middle ground anywhere.</sarcasm>
Look, just because Google wants me to load their redirection links and accept their cookies and execute their JS doesn't mean that my browser must do those things. To the degree that obtaining my private data requires my participation, I choose not to participate. The only Google service I ever use is their search engine, so for me a reasonable level of privacy is quite easy to achieve. I wonder what you thought you were telling me that was non-trivial, as I can't find anything.
Now, can you guys maybe study argumentation and a little logic so you can stop committing these easily-refuted fallacies? It would make your contributions much more interesting and meaningful. Although, the bright side is that people like you have given me a great deal of practice at exposing and rejecting such erroneous techniques.
They arn't publishing your search history in the newspaper..
They are keeping it, and sharing it with secretive agencies. You may think you have nothing to hide, but you don't know which way the political wind will blow in the future. Maybe you'll be a dissident to those agencies later on...
Anyone who has studied history and actually learned from it would come to the same conclusion. I'm amazed that there is anything resembling controversy over this.
Okay I suppose my question would then be; why don't we have the reverse situation, where laser printers are cheap, but the toner is expensive, and where inkjet printers are expensive, but where the ink is cheap?
On that I can only offer speculation.
My guess would be that it's because laser printers are usually purchased by people who have a decent volume of printing to do. Such people are not the most casual users of printers and are likely to put some thought into their purchases. Many times, laser printers are favored by businesses, and businesses have accountants and others who are expected to make good purchasing decisions.
By contrast, most ink-jet printers are aimed at "consumers" and intended for home use. This is a crowd much more likely to be composed of casual users, to impulse-buy, and otherwise to be enticed by the sticker price without considering the long-term cost of consumables like ink and paper. It's a different market; therefore, different marketing is used.
while your correct on the ink jet printers, on the 2 60 month car loans i ahve had in my life, by the time I hit 30 months I am not only on the upside I am easily there. Now in those 30 months I usually make 2-3 extra payments which help. however modern cars not only hold their value longer, but hold together better over time. with minimal maintenance in 5 years you still have a car that can go another 5 years before it can't hold together anymore. A car that was worth it's value some 7.5 years earlier.
I appreciate what you're saying, but please note that I said "many car loans" not "all car loans without exception." I generally try to be very, very careful about using words like "all" for just this reason. I mean no offense, but knowing that you're one of those exceptions doesn't really change or add to the point that I was making.
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The only way you would ever have a free market is if the average person always fully understood both the product/service that is being sold AND any contract that goes along with it. Even that wouldn't be enough. You would then need for all people, as individuals, to be willing to boycott a company (even in the absence of a competitor) and bring it to its financial knees and to be willing to do this over even minor abuses. They must do this individually and not as the result of some organization's decision, and nearly all of them must do so. Then if a corporation even remotely looks like maybe it is screwing someone over, it gets faced with its own bankruptcy and made an example of. This will put other corporations on notice, proving to them that anything resembling bad-faith or malfeasance absolutely will not be tolerated and will be punished at all costs.
This model would not result in more bankrupt companies. It would result in companies complying with the wishes of the people in order to make a profit, just like everything they do now is for profit. The only thing that would change are the particular behaviors that lead to profitability. This would radically change the way citizens relate to corporations. It would fundamentally alter the balance of power. Right now that balance of power favors the corporations -- they are the major players in the market, and most customers cannot truly negotiate with them but must instead accept contracts of adhesion. They have the money and the lawyers and the political clout, meaning they can alter laws in their favor RIAA-style.
Until and unless people come to see it this way, we will indeed need government regulation. Government is about the only thing big enough and powerful enough to deal with corporations that are often larger than many nations. Even then we have the problem of well-funded lobbyists that were not sent to Washington by average citizens, but by monied interests. That's why I think this is ultimately only a partial better-than-nothing solution, as it merely relocates the problem from the marketplace to the realm of public policy.
Ah, right. Reading comprehension? Never touch the stuff. :P ;)
Hahah, the ability to take a joke. Man, that's a refreshing thing to see. Really, no sarcasm intended.
I know of no tenet of Libertarianism which states that these things are forbidden. Some people who call themselves Libertarians may believe that these have no place in government, but you'd have to take it up with those people, for that is their personal interpretation of the concept. The only other thing I'll say is that if you study the works of folks like John Taylor Gatto, the assumption that government education is the only effective education is shown to be the farce that it is. Gatto affirms that it takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and mathematics skills; from that point on, the person is capable of educating themselves. In this era of personal helplessness and the decline of self-sufficiency, that sounds unreasonable, though this was the way things were done in the USA until right about the late 1800s.
To that I say: live within your means, spend less money than you make, and put away savings. Anyone who does that won't be ruined by an illness or an accident. No massive social spending programs are necessary to achieve this. They only seem necessary when conspicuous consumption is our first priority and people refuse to live within their means. People who do this really would need a government to come along and bail them out of their poor financial decision-making. That doesn't mean that government intervention is the only possible way.
The AC was responding to this line of mine: "though personally one thing that would make a smaller, less-powerful device like this appeal to me would be ..." In other words, a price of under $300 would make such a device appeal to him. As this netbook sells for about $500, it fails to appeal to him on that basis. Reading comprehension FTW! (sorry, couldn't help it)
So would anarchy.
The problem with libertarianism is it professes to draw a distinct line in where government should and should not intervene where none exists.
Even communists and fascists see limits to government. Only anarchists can legitimately claim to objectively hold claim to limiting the scope of government.
I'm not sure why you seem to equate Libertarianism to Anarchism in response to my post. Sure, anarchy would reduce the size and power of government, but its ultimate goal would be to eliminate government entirely. With no government of any kind, what you can expect next is that a few warlords would establish local dictatorships. They would protect their territory against other warlords much like street gangs do against rival gangs. A perfect implementation of Anarchism would quickly lead to the average person having both less freedom and less security than they have now.
The perfect implementation of Libertarianism would include a government that is at least strong enough to provide effective law enforcement, as this is viewed as a basic and legitimate function of government. What would be against the law are any activities which deprive another person of their natural rights (such as property, life, and freedom) against that person's will. Anything consenting adults do would be legal. No one would be protected by the government from the consequences of their poor decision-making. The state would only use its law-enforcement powers to curtail activities that use force, fraud, or the threat of force to coerce others. Such an implementation would lead to the average person having both more freedom and more security than they have now.
So no, they are not equal. Any similarity of effect is superficial in nature.
is the claimed 5-hour battery life. Not bad, on par with many full-size laptops and notebooks, though personally one thing that would make a smaller, less-powerful device like this appeal to me would be a longer battery life than standard laptops.
The thing is, on /. you get to see some of the crazy left, and some of the crazy right. But the craziest motherfuckers you see here? All self-professed libertarians.
Honestly I haven't seen too many crazy Libertarians here and I'm no stranger to the site, but for the sake of argument let's assume that many of them fit this description.
It's still up to the reader to determine whether these folks actually represent what they claim to represent. It always was and has always been this way for as long as humans have communicated with one another. If I saw a Christian talking about how much he loves to worship Satan, I have two choices: I can assume all Christians are just like him, or I can look into the teachings of Christianity and decide whether what he says is consistent with them. The former option is myopic at best, naive and stupid at worst. It's the same with Libertarianism.
There never was, is not, and never will be any substitute for thoroughly investigating a thing to your own satisfaction. It would be nice if everyone were always exactly what they claim to be, and if they always had a perfect understanding of what they are claiming to be. That's not the case and we do not live in such a world. Any desire to pretend that we do is little more than a thinly-veiled excuse for being too lazy to look into things before opinions are formed about them, or for being too ignorant to realize the importance of doing so. Of course such people are going to be misled; how can it be otherwise?
So really, I don't care how many crazy people claim to be Libertarian. I don't care if they think that anarchy or anarco-capitalism is the same thing as Libertarianism. The true definition of Libertarian thought was embodied in the Founding Fathers. Not only did they tolerate the idea of having a government, they created one! What was Libertarian about this was that they advocated a relatively weak State, and advised us that freedom can only truly be honored when the State is kept weak enough that it can only focus on its essential functions ("that government is best which governs least" etc.). I can do my own research and see that for myself no matter how a bunch of fools wish to exercise their freedom of speech.
People who probably won't give you the time of day unless your beliefs are not too different from theirs. Hence the problem with reforming the Democrat/Republican system or otherwise introducing pro-freedom elements into it. Both of them function to get people as helpless and dependent on government as possible. One does this with social programs and financial security (i.e. Social Security), while the other does it with the military and physical security (i.e War on Terror). Both take turns blaming each other for any problems while never actually addressing those problems, or doing so only in a superficial and reactive way, for they derive their perception of usefulness from having such problems to solve.
It was never about who has the best ideas or whose principles, if implemented, would lead to the best government. Not for a moment. Major political parties do for politics what trade guilds once did for professions. Their only function is to raise the barriers to entry as high as possible in order to lock out competitors for the sake of protecting an entrenched hierarchy.
But why do you hate the ideas? I'm a weak libertarian myself and find that personal liberty is important. Don't generalize and say all libertarians are extremists. We don't all want to abolish the government. I'm curious about your ideas since I feel a decentralized government that helps those who truly need it, while not having ideas to force upon you about religion and ethics (marriage, alcohol, etc) would be the best deal. This is libertarianism for you.
Libertarianism is one of those few ideas that, if implemented and accepted, really would reverse the current trend of ever-expanding intrusive government and the general decline of personal liberty. For just that reason, it cannot be tolerated by anyone who stants to profit from this status quo. Such people include powerful politicians and influential members of the media. These are people who can influence the society and the prevailing opinions of the day quite a bit more than most people would like to admit.
It's no surprise to me that denigrating Libertarianism is another trendy bandwagon. That bandwagon is intended for people who won't personally investigate it and see what it's about on their own. If they did that, they'd quickly find that the Founding Fathers are some of the truest Libertarians who ever lived, except that back then it did not have such a name. They'd also see that throwing out those freedoms for any reason and with them the traditions of this nation is always a mistake, no matter how tempting.
Such people who form strong opinions and beliefs about things they have not investigated are sometimes called "useful idiots." They are extremely useful anytime you want to deceptively campaign against something. They are so useful because they will accept ideas from others and adopt them as if they independently came up with those ideas on their own. Look at the methods used here. The negative portrayal of Liberterianism is based almost exclusively on pretending like its most extreme form is its only form, and so anyone who calls himself a Libertarian is immediately equated with an anarchist or anarco-capitalist. This is a classic example of straw-man or red-herring demagoguery in the media. It's so easily refuted that there can be nothing accidental about it.
If they succeed in getting you to download, install, and execute untrusted and unvetted code, that's your fault. I really consider any "threat" that requires my active participation to be a complete and total non-issue.
I can see what they are getting at but it is a real douche thing for them to be all "shame on you!" for downloading and using software that they themselves created, provided, and handed out. I can't see a whole lot of people taking them seriously, as a result.
The lesson here is that serious security software is not a black box. It's something you can audit and verify. And yes, shame on anyone who thought otherwise and fell for this. They should consider themselves fortunate that this one was rather benign. It could have easily done real damage.
I really think the EU is missing the point in this "anti-trust" case: the fact that the consumer doesn't have a choice in what OS comes with his computer doesn't bother anyone?
I think the reasoning is that it's not illegal to have this sort of monopoly (on OSes), but it's illegal to abuse it in such a way that you leverage it in order to dominate other markets, like browsers. Since they leveraged the Windows monopoly to make IE a dominant browser, the government is focusing their anti-trust efforts on browser choice specifically. At least that's what I think their reasoning is, though I'm no lawyer.
There are two friends of mine whom I introduced to Linux. What I really want for both of them is just as you describe there. I strongly believe in that saying about giving a man a fish and feeding him for one day, versus teaching him how to fish so he can always feed himself.
It really enriches the whole experience when you have an understanding of how the system works and why it works that way. That's especially true for an open, transparent system like Linux, where you can look under the hood and see for yourself how it is put together. I have emphasized to both of my friends that a large volume of memorized knowledge is not nearly so important as holistic understanding, good problem-solving skills, and the ability to quickly and accurately find information whenever it is needed.
I started both of them with Gentoo. I believe that for both of them, it was their first experience with anything other than Windows. While Gentoo now has an automated installer, we always used the manual installation. From the very beginning, at each step in the process, I did my best to carefully explain to them what they were doing, why they were doing it, what effects and implications it will have, and which options were available. I offered suggestions but tried not to influence their decisions too much.
I also went over basic Unix design principles, how and why they differed from Windows, and general things like filesystem layouts and how Unix-like systems handle networking. We then moved on to distribution-specific topics like "emerge" and package management in general, what USE flags are and how they work, source compilation and CFLAGS, the INIT system, that sort of thing. My approach was always to focus on the principles and concepts, for a foundation of understanding solidly based on those gives one the ability to quickly reference any details that are needed. I like to explain things first in abstract, and then follow-up with concrete examples to demonstrate how those abstract ideas have real effects on the system.
Gentoo was a great choice for this, quite possibly the best I could have made. This is the case because I am willing to be actively involved, to take the time to share the knowledge that has brought me a great deal of enjoyment. It's my way of trying to give something back, by sharing with others what has benefitted me. This made it easy for me to communicate a real appreciation for the solid design and overall elegance (even beauty) of the system as a whole. It's as simple as possible, but no simpler, and any complexity comes from various permutations of those simple designs.
It would have been quite a mistake to just hand them a Gentoo installation CD and say "ok, I'm done now, have fun." Doing that with Gentoo may have turned them off to Linux entirely. For that kind of instant-gratification usage, Kubuntu would have been a much better choice. But had I done that, I would have missed out on all the enjoyment of teaching and sharing something I truly appreciate. I mean, think about it, we have large communities of dedicated volunteers around the world who put together and maintain some really high-quality systems and generally ask for nothing in return. Passing on the benefits I have received from that is not a duty or an obligation; it's quite a privilege.
Linux From Scratch and Gentoo users > Ubuntu and Fedora users. When something breaks on your Linux system and you don't know how to fix it, guess which one you'd rather hear from? A LFS user, or someone who uses Ubuntu because he's scared of the command line? Yeah, that's what I thought. Pwnd.
I disagree. A LFS user or other advanced user may not fix things "the proper way". Just because you know a lot about Linux, doesn't mean that you've read what the distributions way is for doing something like setting up wireless. Sure, you may get it setup by tinkering directly iwconfig and some config files, but if you're not doing it the way the distribution expects, your changes may get clobbered pretty quickly.
I myself have been caught by this trap, where I moved to a different distribution and tried to do things the way I knew how, but then somebody told me on some forum later that I wasn't doing it the right way.
I've definitely had to spend extra time learning a distro's particular way of doing things for just that reason. I use Gentoo on my own computer and one of my friends uses OpenSUSE. When I help him to i.e. set up a new server, I am more used to just directly editing a configuration file. I start doing that only to find that the config file is auto-generated by a GUI utility, and will get clobbered if I directly edit it. Ah well, at least they usually tell you that up-front by commenting the config file.
Still, it can be a bit annoying. You may not always have a GUI utility (or even a GUI) available. It also seems possible in my mind that you can have a GUI utility for modifying a configuration file without also throwing out hand-edited settings. But regardless of my opinions on it, you're right that this is a reality that needs to be accounted for. It's just about knowing the distribution you're working with.
Many Gentoo users only use Gentoo for their personal computers. Those same users would recommend distributions like Debian to anyone who approached them and said "hey, I'm new to this Linux thing and I want to run a server, what would you suggest?" Gentoo is for users who a) know their way around Linux and b) love to tinker. It doesn't pretend to be for anyone else. I use Gentoo and very much enjoy it, but I would not recommend it to someone who's new to Linux and switching away from Windows. It's about what you like and believe to be appropriate for the job. It's not a religious cause.
Actually one of the reasons I got into Gentoo in the first place is that I wanted to know more about how a distribution is put together. As a learning tool its manual installation is one of the best. As a "I just want it to work, ASAP" tool it's one of the worst. Again it doesn't pretend to be otherwise. If Gentoo claimed to be the be-all and end-all, the Ultimate Linux Distribution, superior in every way to all others, then maybe I'd understand why it's so trendy to slam Gentoo whenever it comes up in a discussion. Or if I frequently visited the Gentoo Forums and saw the users talking about how lame binary distributions are, maybe then I'd understand it too, but they don't do this.
Since that isn't the case, this looks to me like another religious issue. Like when you have one sect of Christianity going to war against another sect of Christianity because they disagree on whether to drink wine or grape juice for Communion. Naturally the grape-juice drinkers think they have irreconcilable differences with the wine-drinkers and vice-versa. Each side thinks the other is composed of total idiots and assholes. Neither appreciates that what they're arguing over is a trivial matter of taste. Don't like a distro? Good, use something else. That should be the end of it, but it isn't, because it's not good enough that you use what you like, the other guy must also use what you like, right?
There's already online versions of music. You can buy tracks for $0.99 from Amazon with no DRM whatsoever. They come in a nearly universal (mp3) format that is easily converted to other formats and which can run on just about anything. For slightly more you can purchase the same product from the Apple Store. Yet people continue to pirate music in fairly significant numbers. Could it just be that free > pay?
Movies are trickier. Not aware of any online movie distribution systems that aren't laced with DRM or locked into a specific vendors product. But if the music example is telling it wouldn't matter if there were -- people would keep right on pirating them.
The industry did miss the boat with online distribution but I can't be the only one that thinks that excuse is wearing thin as a justification for piracy.
The industry also earned itself a great deal of ill will, which definitely has a non-zero contribution towards piracy. Lots of people who would not pirate from a more respectable organization have no qualms about doing it to a cartel that was willing to subject minor children to interrogation and various other legal proceedings as part of an intimidation campaign. Right or wrong.
Also note, I said an online product that people want to buy. That may or may not mean buying songs and albums. It may also mean a subscription where you can access a certain amount of music for a flat monthly fee. It could mean some innovation we have not yet thought of. What that consists of is the problem of the media companies.
But really, we have some bad priorities. It would be better for all record companies to go bankrupt than to have our legal system compromised in such a wholesale fasion by some narrow interests that don't represent most Americans.
It's not about the candidates, for they are like puppets. It's about the monied interests who finance their campaigns and put them into office. That's where the real power is, and it's not up for a vote. It's more of a plutocracy. Whether it's Obama or McCain who won the election, either of them has a career in politics only because they know better than to piss off the people who had the clout to put them into office. Therefore, those people always have their interests represented in Washington. Every candidate from either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party is elected only because those interests have carefully vetted him/her and are convinced that he/she is not going to rock that boat.
The individual either understands this reality or chooses to believe in the fantasy that the popular vote for major-party candidates has the potential to change the status quo. That popular vote is the direct result of mass media, which in turn is the result of advertising dollars that the candidates receive from those monied interests. The only change permitted under this system is of the "becoming more so" variety. Using copyright law as an example, that's why it becomes more and more restrictive over time (becoming more of what it is) and it's why those restrictions are never reversed.
People who can't understand this and people who are in denial about the fundamental brokenness of this system are going to get upset when you criticize a particular candidate. They can't imagine anything outside of the "Democrat or Republican" duality, and that's the real (and terrible) triumph of our current system. To those people, any negative statement about Candidate A must be equivalent to a positive statement about Candidate B. Asking them to see the fallacy of that kind of thinking is also a request to confront all of their insecurities that revolve around an extreme sense that "something's not right here", a task for which they may lack courage. In the absence of such courage, it's much easier for them to mod you down or insult you. Unfortunately neither response is very surprising when you consider the source.
yeah that organized crime commited by pirates is really bad for your nation.
It is if your nation makes billions of dollars developing movies and music. Anyone find it interesting that we routinely run massive trade deficits with China but stand mute while their Government tacitly condones piracy on an industrialized scale? As much as I despise the mafia there are real people working in these industries. It's a safe assumption they don't want to work for free. Can't we find some balance on this issue somewhere between "some teenagers downloaded Britney Spears, lock 'em up!" and "information wants to be free"?
We will have that balance the moment our social and governmental attitude towards the media companies consists of: "adapt your business model to the 21st century and create an online product that people want to buy, or go bankrupt. Your choice." Until then we're trying to make sure that buggy whip manufacturers still have jobs after the advent of the automobile.
Wouldn't that allow them to open almost anything in these times when 100ml of liquid or a nail file could be and sometimes are considered weapons?
I think that's the idea. We already have so many laws on the books that each citizen routinely breaks at least some of them some of the time. To complete this, now anything and everything is a "weapon" anytime an official needs an excuse to search you. The reason why you have basically unenforcable laws like this, is so that you can enforce them anytime you want against anyone. I'm sure it's quite "handy" for political opponents or anyone who is an outspoken critic or otherwise a nuisance to whoever is in power or is otherwise well-connected.
We have this situation because the average American is a hell of a lot more concerned about football, the Top 40 charts, and American Idol than they are about their own freedom and well-being. That saying about how our system causes us to get the government we deserve probably has some truth to it.
I wish I had mod points.
Oh well, if it helps in making Mr(/s). Causality realize his/her fallacy, here's some additional information he might wish to see: http://slashdot.org/~causality
A person really paranoid about privacy is not going to use the same slashdot account over and over again accumulating personal opinions, and perhaps inadvertently disclosing personal information. I'm pretty sure those comments contain much more private data than what Google could gather from searches and whatnot (except perhaps gmail).
That's cute that you went the extra mile and pulled up my publically-accessible userpage. Maybe this was intended to strengthen your point, but it only tells me that you are clutching at straws. Knowing that it's publically available, I don't post anything there that I would wish to keep secret. So what was your point?
Nothing gets on my userpage that I didn't personally put there. That gives me full control. If you wanna compare an apple to an apple, convince Google to never collect data on me that I don't personally and deliberately upload to them. That would represent a comparable degree of control. Until then, you are comparing two things which have irreconcilable differences.
Now, see if you can get the concept here. One entity, Slashdot, never has data on me that I don't personally and deliberately hand over to them. It's opt-in. Another entity, Google, collects data on me in various surreptitious ways, as a side-effect of simply browsing the Web. They do so whether or not I decide that I want to submit that data to them. They are opt-out. Guess which one is intrusive? Guess which one I block?
I wish I could have a conversation like this without having to go back over basic things, over and over again. Things that you could determine on your own, like the difference between a site that has no data except what I give to it, versus a site that tries to take data whether I want to give it or not. It's a bit of a nuisance to have to tell people that yes, there is a difference between those.
However, that was not the point of the paragraph where that sentence appeared, nor is it related to my argument as a whole. The fact that you see this tidbit three paragraphs in should be testament to that.
Oh please, the rest of your post is devoted to hyperbole about it being impossible to avoid the generic crawl. I didn't bother to address that exaggeration because it is silly on the face of it.
However, no one has yet to explain how this data is actually detrimental to you, beyond the stuff I already mentioned.
You haven't been thinking about the issue enough else you could come up with plenty of examples all on your own. For example -- Do some searches about condoms and the linkage causes you to get free samples in the mail. Except you are snipped and married... Accidental disclosure of private information to friends and family is an entire class of detriment.
But even more importantly - privacy is like Pandora's box - people with your attitude open the box wide because they aren't able to conceive of how loosing (and that's spelled correctly) their personal information out into the world could ever hurt them. Then, down the line, something they never thought of, but someone else has be it an id thief, a political opponent, or even someone wishing to do them physical harm, becomes a means to hurt you and the only thing you've got left to protect yourself with is hope.
It boils down to one very simple fact - giving away that information does nothing to benefit you. At the very best it can never be better than neutral. So taking reasonable steps to protect yourself is the obvious course of action.
Thanks, I believe you have saved me some time by succinctly explaining this.
It's funny how talking about the impersonal, generic data-mining of the sort done by Google gets you responses that pretend like you are talking about evading the NSA or something. The responses along the lines of "you really think you are so interesting to spy on" were particularly amusing. Google gets all the data they can on all the people for whom they can do so, there is nothing personal about it. That's why a few simple measures will defeat Google's tracking.
It's obvious that a real investigator who is personally targeting you would not be so easily deterred. It's so obvious that it goes without saying. There is no genuine reason to point out something obvious like that except to confuse the issue. The confusion comes from the idea that what a good investigator would do with a specific target is anything like what Google is doing, which is patently false.
It's almost like people don't want you to maintain privacy merely because they have given up on the idea. So they will (subconsciously?) say almost anything, however irrelevant, to make it look like some infeasible pipe dream. It's demagoguery at its finest. I suspect it isn't even intended to be demagoguery, but comes from an unwillingness to really examine the issue. The effect is the same either way: a really simple, easily-researched, easily-verified issue becomes confused and is made out to be some complex impossible deal. Naturally no opportunity to portray privacy advocates as stupid, unrealistic, paranoid, egotistical, etc. can be allowed to go to waste during this process.
What a sorry substitute for real discussion.
are you prepared to move out into the jungle and live outside civilization? I assume no, since you're sitting in front of a computer? then you're going to have to compromise.
Ah yes, my favorite recurring Slashdot fallacy. I'll put it this way:
<sarcasm>Right, because we all know that you must either voluntarily submit to having your every last move logged and recorded, or, live in the jungle as a hermit and give up all civilization and all technology. Yup, no middle ground anywhere.</sarcasm>
Look, just because Google wants me to load their redirection links and accept their cookies and execute their JS doesn't mean that my browser must do those things. To the degree that obtaining my private data requires my participation, I choose not to participate. The only Google service I ever use is their search engine, so for me a reasonable level of privacy is quite easy to achieve. I wonder what you thought you were telling me that was non-trivial, as I can't find anything.
Now, can you guys maybe study argumentation and a little logic so you can stop committing these easily-refuted fallacies? It would make your contributions much more interesting and meaningful. Although, the bright side is that people like you have given me a great deal of practice at exposing and rejecting such erroneous techniques.
They arn't publishing your search history in the newspaper ..
They are keeping it, and sharing it with secretive agencies. You may think you have nothing to hide, but you don't know which way the political wind will blow in the future. Maybe you'll be a dissident to those agencies later on...
Anyone who has studied history and actually learned from it would come to the same conclusion. I'm amazed that there is anything resembling controversy over this.
Okay I suppose my question would then be; why don't we have the reverse situation, where laser printers are cheap, but the toner is expensive, and where inkjet printers are expensive, but where the ink is cheap?
On that I can only offer speculation.
My guess would be that it's because laser printers are usually purchased by people who have a decent volume of printing to do. Such people are not the most casual users of printers and are likely to put some thought into their purchases. Many times, laser printers are favored by businesses, and businesses have accountants and others who are expected to make good purchasing decisions.
By contrast, most ink-jet printers are aimed at "consumers" and intended for home use. This is a crowd much more likely to be composed of casual users, to impulse-buy, and otherwise to be enticed by the sticker price without considering the long-term cost of consumables like ink and paper. It's a different market; therefore, different marketing is used.
while your correct on the ink jet printers, on the 2 60 month car loans i ahve had in my life, by the time I hit 30 months I am not only on the upside I am easily there. Now in those 30 months I usually make 2-3 extra payments which help. however modern cars not only hold their value longer, but hold together better over time. with minimal maintenance in 5 years you still have a car that can go another 5 years before it can't hold together anymore. A car that was worth it's value some 7.5 years earlier.
I appreciate what you're saying, but please note that I said "many car loans" not "all car loans without exception." I generally try to be very, very careful about using words like "all" for just this reason. I mean no offense, but knowing that you're one of those exceptions doesn't really change or add to the point that I was making.