Wow, I don't think you understand the responsibilities of mortgages and other sources of credit.
1 2 & 3: They made mortgage payments for 6 months, in addition to their car payments, credit card payments, etc. People that do things like this also tend to eat out a lot, which gets expensive. There's more money going out than there is coming in, so that's where their savings goes until they have no savings left, at which point, they start missing bills or paying them with credit cards, thus creating more debt, and eventually creditors come after them.
4 5 & 6: If they declare bankruptcy, which they will probably have to do after taking on so much debt, that pretty much stops them from getting a home (or any other type of loan) for the next 7 years. Even after the 7 years, the fact that they declared bankruptcy will still come up, they will never really be free from it.
Not to mention the fact that money problems put a huge strain on a marriage. Money problems this bad will very likely lead to a divorce unless the husband and wife make an extraordinary effort to grow up really fast, and make major sacrifices. Normally people get into this kind of debt because they're not grown up and they don't know how to make sacrifices. That's an incredibly hard change to make.
In your silk dress analogy, you act as if there wouldn't be any repercussions from not paying for the dress. The dressmaker would not take the dress back, it's already been worn and used for 6 months. The dress maker wants money, so the buyer gets turned over to collections, where agents call and harass the buyer and the buyer's spouse, and they're not nice about it. Collections agents will use insults, question the strength of the marriage and try to pit the buyer and the buyer's spouse against each other. Also, the buyer's credit suffers, so the buyer has a harder time getting loans, and the loans the buyer gets come at a higher interest rate. This is all assuming the buyer doesn't just report the buyer to the police for theft, which is more likely.
To say that they got a free ride is far from the truth. They will suffer quite a bit, even if they did "get to" skip very few months of paying any of their bills before it caught up with them.
I'm married and have children. I make a respectable amount of money and own a decent home. I also have more debt than I'd like, but I've never ever missed a payment on anything. Even so, the debt is a very real burden that I'd rather be free of. If I stopped making payments the burden would turn into a crushing weight, not a free ride.
Come back to the discussion after you've taken on some responsibility.
Some people (read:ISPs) say that laws protecting Net Neutrality are regulation which will stifle innovation and mess up everything, but laws which exist to safeguard freedom still need to exist...
Like the Bill of rights... Maybe Net Neutrality shouldn't be a regular law, maybe it should be an ammendment.
engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems.
If the problem was only an engineering problem, I might agree... but since this has vast political, economical, and social consequences, and could undermine the entire Internet as we know it, I think governments should step in and pass a law that simply states "don't discriminate against traffic based on the source/destination."
I know government regulation can make things messy, but I don't know why it has to be any more complicated than that.
Dude, it was Ben that moved it. Locke didn't do anything useful except to sit by and get confused. In fact, now that I think of it, why did Ben even give Locke vague instructions on how to go down and do it? Not only could he not find the right flower, but he never would have known to blow up the back wall of the chamber, put on a coat, grab a crowbar and push the frozen donkey wheel!
Actually his name is Dash, and when the line comes up again later on, it's worded slightly differently... Syndrome talks about how he's making inventions to rival the Supers, then he's going to give them away to everyone when he gets old, because "when everyone is Super... Noone will be".
In Dash's case, he's complaining about having to lower himself to the level of regular people (and thus competing on regular human terms), while Syndrome is talking about raising regular people to the level of superheroes through technology, thus competing with the Supers based on powers.
In the end, Dash learns that family and being a regular kid (but still having his unique personality) is more important than showing off and being the fastest runner.
That message doesn't bother me much, as I think it's secondary to the story, and the characters themselves are extraordinarily well done. I find it to be is immersive enough that I'm not thinking about the environment of consumerism as I watch it.
The regular merchandising doesn't bother me either, since that's a staple of any succesful kid's show. What does bother me, when I'm not watching the show, is the fact that they handed out cheap, totally piece-of-crap watches to all the kids that went to see it. In our case, my wife and I got them, too. The watches were almost impossible to set, don't work reliably, and look like they cost about 15 cents to make. So as they hand these out in promoting the movie, they're guaranteeing that thousands of these junky watches will be thrown in the garbage within about 2 weeks. Nice one.
I understand that the people in marketing are just looking for new ways to promote the movie, and that they work for a different part of the company than the people who wrote it, but you'd think that they would consider the context of their giveaway and save it for a different show.
Actually, I have to disagree, I've taken my kids to see all of the Pixar movies since Finding Nemo (when my oldest was about 14 months old). I'd have to say that Ratatouille was by far the most adult-oriented Pixar movie. I mean a rat... in a fancy French restaurant?
Most kids don't dream of eating fine cuisine in a 5 start restaurant, but they do play with toys, imagine monsters, play with bugs, dream of exploring the ocean, obsess over superheroes, play with cars, and aspire to go to space. The only thing that was really kid-friendly in Rat was the sappy "you can be anything you want to be" moral lesson, and the fact that it's a cartoon about a nerd and his rat. The setting and the plot didn't really involve anything that kids are really into. Even all of the artwork, backgrounds and animation, as visually stunning as they were, still seemed kind of high-brow and adult-ish for a kids show. When we left the theater after Rat, my kids weren't quoting it or talking about it, I think they liked it, but nothing was really memorable to them. I really liked Ratatouille, but I didn't feel like it was one for kids to really enjoy.
We went to Wall-E on opening night after my kids had been watching the trailers for months, and they loved it. My daughter giggled uncontrollably through about half of the movie, whenever the robots would talk, or whenever Wall-E would do something silly. We'll be sure to buy this one when it's released on DVD. But Ratatouille is one that we're ok with just seeing once in our lifetimes.
The look of the people in The Incredibles was definitely different than in previous Pixar movies, but they were less about trying to look realistic (which I think was the attempt it Toy Story, where it ends up looking somewhat creepy), and more about making the characters look like action figures. Because hey, they're super heroes. If they wanted to try to make the people really realistic, I'm sure the look would have been vastly different.
And now, in Wall*E, the people (for the most part) have a very cartoony bubbly look, which is obviously intentional to represent how far the human race has degenerated during the time it has been waited on hand and foot by robots in space. The obviousness of that intent is highlighted by the fact that in the line up of photos of all of the previous captains, the first one was very realistic looking, and they gradually get more cartoony and fat from there. Also, all of the videos of Fred Willard are actual videos of the actor, not animations. That serves to further show the contrast between what humans were and what they have become.
I think when Toy Story came out, they were focused on showing off this new medium and how realistic it can be, so they tried to even make the people lifelike, which was hard to do. So in subsequent movies, they've avoided the Uncanny Valley by making the humans cartoonish in different ways, depending on the theme of the movie.
I thought it was interesting how he says that for some of the technical things, like Pulse Audio, Firefox, etc., it would be better to use the newest stuff, even if it wasn't *quite* ready, and fix it all in a service pack, so that the latest software would be there for the long haul.
But when it came to artwork, they considered changing it, but he though an LTS was the wrong time to mess with it, because then they'd be stuck with new artwork for a long time.
Does that seem backwards to anyone? I mean, the people who are using an LTS want stability and software that's proven and that will get the job done, even if it is a little older. They know they're not on the bleeding-edge. Whereas with the artwork, I would think that an LTS is a great time to start off in a new direction so that a new theme can really come to be associated with the distro. Especially given how many people complain about the brown and orange they use now (although I actually prefer the brown and orange).
The thing is if you have teenage kids you want to be able to text them, so you can find out where they are, who they're with, what they're doing, when they'll be home, etc., without having to bother them with a nerdy phone call from the folks. It's a lot easier for a kid to discreetly text back to their parents than to discreetly talk on the phone.
So if you have teenagers with cell phones, I don't think the answer is to disable texting, but even if you can somehow train your kid to not send a lot of texts, he/she will probably still get a lot. So in the end, you pretty much will get screwed by artificially high SMS rates, and the "easiest" option would be to get the carriers to lower their rates... which is probably next to impossible.
If customers had any idea about the true cost of things to the companies that they purchase from, they wouldn't buy at the prices that things are being sold at.
Then what would they buy? I text occasionally because sometimes that's the only way to get out a quick message to someone without having to get into a full-blown conversation, or interrupt a meeting. If there were a better alternative, I would use it, but there is no better alternative that I can use wherever I go, short of making an actual phone call.
I do try to make sure that family and friends are aware of facts like those presented in TFA, but in the end, what good is it if there are no less expensive yet equally convenient options?
In the end, even though the price of SMS is outrageous for what you get, I think that the cell companies are relying on that to some degree to make up for low rate plans and subsidized phones, and that may be the reason SMS prices continue to climb.
Either that, or they are totally trying to screw us all. I guess the latter is more probable.
And to add to the USPS comparison: Have you ever sent a text message, then found out that it didn't get to the recipient until the next day? For crying out loud, if you're going to charge an arm and a leg for me to send a message, and again for someone else to receive it, all in the name of "convenience", then just make sure it gets there within a minute or two!
they music and sell it to people who want to buy it.
Wow, I didn't know music could be a verb. But I think that's a great idea. I'm going to music my cubicle as I work this morning. Then when I go home tonight, I'll music with my guitar for a while. I remember that party I went to last weekend... They really musiced up the place!
When every citizen is forced to listen to RIAA music every minute of the day, and is paying for each minute. No, wait... then they would just plateau, and there wouldn't be any new ways left to gouge the "consumers" (I hate that word, by the way, but it is the perfect embodiment of how they view their customers).
Sorry, no, that was my (mis)understanding of what was in there. But then, I'm a non-Mac user (not anti-Mac, though), so I don't claim to have first hand experience.
I believe he's referring to the Trusted Platform Module, which is not the same as EFI, it does exist in the hardware, and it's at least part of the reason why you can't just run an OS X installer on a generic Intel PC and expect it to install.
That sounds optimistic to me. Several years ago I worked in an inbound call center doing tech support for PCs, and some of the most common phrases I heard were variants on "My neighbor, who knows a lot about computers, tried to fix it and now it won't start..."
I don't think relying on the NFCG is a good strategy, unless you know them well enough to be sure they know what the hell they are doing.
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Wow, I don't think you understand the responsibilities of mortgages and other sources of credit.
1 2 & 3: They made mortgage payments for 6 months, in addition to their car payments, credit card payments, etc. People that do things like this also tend to eat out a lot, which gets expensive. There's more money going out than there is coming in, so that's where their savings goes until they have no savings left, at which point, they start missing bills or paying them with credit cards, thus creating more debt, and eventually creditors come after them.
4 5 & 6: If they declare bankruptcy, which they will probably have to do after taking on so much debt, that pretty much stops them from getting a home (or any other type of loan) for the next 7 years. Even after the 7 years, the fact that they declared bankruptcy will still come up, they will never really be free from it.
Not to mention the fact that money problems put a huge strain on a marriage. Money problems this bad will very likely lead to a divorce unless the husband and wife make an extraordinary effort to grow up really fast, and make major sacrifices. Normally people get into this kind of debt because they're not grown up and they don't know how to make sacrifices. That's an incredibly hard change to make.
In your silk dress analogy, you act as if there wouldn't be any repercussions from not paying for the dress. The dressmaker would not take the dress back, it's already been worn and used for 6 months. The dress maker wants money, so the buyer gets turned over to collections, where agents call and harass the buyer and the buyer's spouse, and they're not nice about it. Collections agents will use insults, question the strength of the marriage and try to pit the buyer and the buyer's spouse against each other. Also, the buyer's credit suffers, so the buyer has a harder time getting loans, and the loans the buyer gets come at a higher interest rate. This is all assuming the buyer doesn't just report the buyer to the police for theft, which is more likely.
To say that they got a free ride is far from the truth. They will suffer quite a bit, even if they did "get to" skip very few months of paying any of their bills before it caught up with them.
I'm married and have children. I make a respectable amount of money and own a decent home. I also have more debt than I'd like, but I've never ever missed a payment on anything. Even so, the debt is a very real burden that I'd rather be free of. If I stopped making payments the burden would turn into a crushing weight, not a free ride.
Come back to the discussion after you've taken on some responsibility.
But what's your reason? (I'm not the GPP, by the way.)
Some people (read:ISPs) say that laws protecting Net Neutrality are regulation which will stifle innovation and mess up everything, but laws which exist to safeguard freedom still need to exist...
Like the Bill of rights... Maybe Net Neutrality shouldn't be a regular law, maybe it should be an ammendment.
engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems.
If the problem was only an engineering problem, I might agree... but since this has vast political, economical, and social consequences, and could undermine the entire Internet as we know it, I think governments should step in and pass a law that simply states "don't discriminate against traffic based on the source/destination."
I know government regulation can make things messy, but I don't know why it has to be any more complicated than that.
sorry to be pedantic, but how could he bring back something that's missing?
Dude, it was Ben that moved it. Locke didn't do anything useful except to sit by and get confused. In fact, now that I think of it, why did Ben even give Locke vague instructions on how to go down and do it? Not only could he not find the right flower, but he never would have known to blow up the back wall of the chamber, put on a coat, grab a crowbar and push the frozen donkey wheel!
What? Offtopic? What do you mean?
Actually his name is Dash, and when the line comes up again later on, it's worded slightly differently... Syndrome talks about how he's making inventions to rival the Supers, then he's going to give them away to everyone when he gets old, because "when everyone is Super... Noone will be".
In Dash's case, he's complaining about having to lower himself to the level of regular people (and thus competing on regular human terms), while Syndrome is talking about raising regular people to the level of superheroes through technology, thus competing with the Supers based on powers.
In the end, Dash learns that family and being a regular kid (but still having his unique personality) is more important than showing off and being the fastest runner.
That message doesn't bother me much, as I think it's secondary to the story, and the characters themselves are extraordinarily well done. I find it to be is immersive enough that I'm not thinking about the environment of consumerism as I watch it.
The regular merchandising doesn't bother me either, since that's a staple of any succesful kid's show. What does bother me, when I'm not watching the show, is the fact that they handed out cheap, totally piece-of-crap watches to all the kids that went to see it. In our case, my wife and I got them, too. The watches were almost impossible to set, don't work reliably, and look like they cost about 15 cents to make. So as they hand these out in promoting the movie, they're guaranteeing that thousands of these junky watches will be thrown in the garbage within about 2 weeks. Nice one.
I understand that the people in marketing are just looking for new ways to promote the movie, and that they work for a different part of the company than the people who wrote it, but you'd think that they would consider the context of their giveaway and save it for a different show.
Actually, I have to disagree, I've taken my kids to see all of the Pixar movies since Finding Nemo (when my oldest was about 14 months old). I'd have to say that Ratatouille was by far the most adult-oriented Pixar movie. I mean a rat... in a fancy French restaurant?
Most kids don't dream of eating fine cuisine in a 5 start restaurant, but they do play with toys, imagine monsters, play with bugs, dream of exploring the ocean, obsess over superheroes, play with cars, and aspire to go to space. The only thing that was really kid-friendly in Rat was the sappy "you can be anything you want to be" moral lesson, and the fact that it's a cartoon about a nerd and his rat. The setting and the plot didn't really involve anything that kids are really into. Even all of the artwork, backgrounds and animation, as visually stunning as they were, still seemed kind of high-brow and adult-ish for a kids show. When we left the theater after Rat, my kids weren't quoting it or talking about it, I think they liked it, but nothing was really memorable to them. I really liked Ratatouille, but I didn't feel like it was one for kids to really enjoy.
We went to Wall-E on opening night after my kids had been watching the trailers for months, and they loved it. My daughter giggled uncontrollably through about half of the movie, whenever the robots would talk, or whenever Wall-E would do something silly. We'll be sure to buy this one when it's released on DVD. But Ratatouille is one that we're ok with just seeing once in our lifetimes.
The look of the people in The Incredibles was definitely different than in previous Pixar movies, but they were less about trying to look realistic (which I think was the attempt it Toy Story, where it ends up looking somewhat creepy), and more about making the characters look like action figures. Because hey, they're super heroes. If they wanted to try to make the people really realistic, I'm sure the look would have been vastly different.
And now, in Wall*E, the people (for the most part) have a very cartoony bubbly look, which is obviously intentional to represent how far the human race has degenerated during the time it has been waited on hand and foot by robots in space. The obviousness of that intent is highlighted by the fact that in the line up of photos of all of the previous captains, the first one was very realistic looking, and they gradually get more cartoony and fat from there. Also, all of the videos of Fred Willard are actual videos of the actor, not animations. That serves to further show the contrast between what humans were and what they have become. I think when Toy Story came out, they were focused on showing off this new medium and how realistic it can be, so they tried to even make the people lifelike, which was hard to do. So in subsequent movies, they've avoided the Uncanny Valley by making the humans cartoonish in different ways, depending on the theme of the movie.
Nothing more unusual than a human keeping a chimpanzee as a pet.
Michael is that you? How's Bubbles?
I thought it was interesting how he says that for some of the technical things, like Pulse Audio, Firefox, etc., it would be better to use the newest stuff, even if it wasn't *quite* ready, and fix it all in a service pack, so that the latest software would be there for the long haul.
But when it came to artwork, they considered changing it, but he though an LTS was the wrong time to mess with it, because then they'd be stuck with new artwork for a long time.
Does that seem backwards to anyone? I mean, the people who are using an LTS want stability and software that's proven and that will get the job done, even if it is a little older. They know they're not on the bleeding-edge. Whereas with the artwork, I would think that an LTS is a great time to start off in a new direction so that a new theme can really come to be associated with the distro. Especially given how many people complain about the brown and orange they use now (although I actually prefer the brown and orange).
good call.
How about Hydro? Not much solar influence there, just the Earth's gravity.
Isn't that saying that Nina's friend was the translator?
The thing is if you have teenage kids you want to be able to text them, so you can find out where they are, who they're with, what they're doing, when they'll be home, etc., without having to bother them with a nerdy phone call from the folks. It's a lot easier for a kid to discreetly text back to their parents than to discreetly talk on the phone.
So if you have teenagers with cell phones, I don't think the answer is to disable texting, but even if you can somehow train your kid to not send a lot of texts, he/she will probably still get a lot. So in the end, you pretty much will get screwed by artificially high SMS rates, and the "easiest" option would be to get the carriers to lower their rates... which is probably next to impossible.
If customers had any idea about the true cost of things to the companies that they purchase from, they wouldn't buy at the prices that things are being sold at.
Then what would they buy? I text occasionally because sometimes that's the only way to get out a quick message to someone without having to get into a full-blown conversation, or interrupt a meeting. If there were a better alternative, I would use it, but there is no better alternative that I can use wherever I go, short of making an actual phone call.
I do try to make sure that family and friends are aware of facts like those presented in TFA, but in the end, what good is it if there are no less expensive yet equally convenient options?
In the end, even though the price of SMS is outrageous for what you get, I think that the cell companies are relying on that to some degree to make up for low rate plans and subsidized phones, and that may be the reason SMS prices continue to climb.
Either that, or they are totally trying to screw us all. I guess the latter is more probable.
And to add to the USPS comparison:
Have you ever sent a text message, then found out that it didn't get to the recipient until the next day? For crying out loud, if you're going to charge an arm and a leg for me to send a message, and again for someone else to receive it, all in the name of "convenience", then just make sure it gets there within a minute or two!
they music and sell it to people who want to buy it.
Wow, I didn't know music could be a verb. But I think that's a great idea. I'm going to music my cubicle as I work this morning. Then when I go home tonight, I'll music with my guitar for a while. I remember that party I went to last weekend... They really musiced up the place!
When every citizen is forced to listen to RIAA music every minute of the day, and is paying for each minute. No, wait... then they would just plateau, and there wouldn't be any new ways left to gouge the "consumers" (I hate that word, by the way, but it is the perfect embodiment of how they view their customers).
For me it's been QuickTime, but I second your plugin-protection request... That is, I would, if this were actually the place to make the requests.
Sorry, no, that was my (mis)understanding of what was in there. But then, I'm a non-Mac user (not anti-Mac, though), so I don't claim to have first hand experience.
I believe he's referring to the Trusted Platform Module, which is not the same as EFI, it does exist in the hardware, and it's at least part of the reason why you can't just run an OS X installer on a generic Intel PC and expect it to install.
we would of course insult you endlessly for buying a Mac and investing into the rape that comes with it.
I guess friendly (as in neighborhood friendly computer geek) doesn't mean what it used to mean.
That sounds optimistic to me. Several years ago I worked in an inbound call center doing tech support for PCs, and some of the most common phrases I heard were variants on "My neighbor, who knows a lot about computers, tried to fix it and now it won't start..."
I don't think relying on the NFCG is a good strategy, unless you know them well enough to be sure they know what the hell they are doing.