Actually, I spent six months or so fighting a similar deal to what you describe with the utility. I had a cell phone with CellOne (now Cingular), and they billed me incorrectly one month, to the tune of about $150. The refused to correct the bill or to send an itemized bill, but I paid the portion I believed I owed (I hadn't used the phone all month, so I just paid the basic charges). The continued to bill me for the rest. It was next to impossible to talk to a living person, so I just kept leaving voice mail. The started slapping me with $50+ a month late fees. I continued to refuse to pay. They cut off my service, but continued to bill me each month as though I was still receiving service. My contract ran out, but they kept it going, saying that I couldn't cancel it until I had paid off my debts in full. By the end the amount they claimed I owed them had reached $800+.
I started searching around and calling whatver non-customer-service numbers I could find at CellOne and complaining to those people, and then, one day, in the strangest twist yet, I got a phone call at 8am on a Sunday morning at my parents (how they got the number I'll never know...I just happened to be visiting) saying they'd settle the debt for $75. I paid it and that was the end of it. None of it ever wound up on any credit report.
My wife had a similar, though less horrific, experience with Verzion, which is why we both use Tracfones now.
I had the renewing Wired subscription issue...I ignored the letters until some one called, at which point I told them I wasn't interested in renewing and I didn't appreciate being harassed, and that was it. Haven't heard anything in three or four months.
Just because this is a change of direction doesn't mean it was a mistake to go with PPC in the first place. The PPC did very well for quite a long while. Now the IBM and the PPC line aren't delivering, so Apple has chosen another option.
No matter how zealous the zealot, most would admit that the PPC line is/was only superior to the x86 as long as it keeps progressing in a usable way. Lots of us have been questioning whether its been doing that for a while now.
I'm not wild about the switch, but I think it makes sense, and Apple is a business, not a cult, despite appearances.
For what its worth, my Mac user friends buy a hell of a lot more software than my PC using ones, for one major reason: fewer users = less opportunity to pirate.
Pretty much every major PC software title I would be interested in I could get a copy of with only a little asking. If I depended on this to provide Mac software, I'd wait a long, long time to get most things.
I know not every one pirates software, but it's a rare user who doesn't do it to some extent.
Of course, when considering where people will actually campagin, the top six feature only two worth campaigning seriously in, FL and PA. CA, NY, and IL are pretty safe Democratic states, TX is a safe Republican state. In the bottom seven include at least four swing states (WV, ME, AR, NV) maybe five (MT is looking swingier these days). So while the electoral college may allow the state the least voting power, the individual voter in these states has more actual power to influence a national election.
The keyboard and mouse that "goes" with the Mac Mini? The idea here is that there isn't a keybaord and mouse that "goes" with it. You can use whatever you want. If you want, and I think you'd be foolish to, you can buy those from Apple. And if you want, you can spend $4 for a USB keyboard and $1 for a USB mouse (both prices on PriceWatch right now). That's $5 not $58.
And you don't need the speakers from Apple. You don't need the speakers at all. There's a perfectly adequate one in the computer. The speakers that come packaged with the WalMart PC may be a separate item, but they're still crap.
So that leaves us with $5 plus a monitor. As far as I'm concerned, the monitor is a non-issue, because used CRTs are a dime a dozen these days. You can't honestly tell me you could get ahold of a monitor for this thing with minimal effort.
So we're basically left with $5. Plus shipping, so say $10. I'll even give you the $100 CRT. So $110. But you also get a smaller footprint. And a computer which is virtually silent (something no $499 PC is anywhere close to...the one a friends parents' recently purchased at Walmart sounds like a 747 warming up). It's also not sinfully ugly. You also get some decent bundled software, and the security of living in a virus and spyware free (or virtually so) world, and a more stable operating system. And you get a system for which 95% of hardware just works when you plug it in, without fiddling with drivers or configurations.
Regardless, you could always go buy a $4 USB keyboard (there was one for that price over on PriceWatch 30 seconds ago) if you're too overwhelmed by the complexities of the PS2/USB adapter. I find it hard to imagine there is a person in this country who doesn't know some one with an extra USB keyboard or two laying around anyway.
I find it endlessly amusing that the same people who have for years touted the "mix and match" flexibility of PCs now gripe about the fact the Mac Mini doesn't include a keyboard in its price.
The Slashdot crowd may be heavily into games, but I'm not sure the average PC user is. My father-in-law, for example, who turned down a 17" PowerBook because "It's not a Microsoft computer". This is a guy who thinks nothing of spending $3-5k on a computer, on which he will work with three things: Office, AOL, and Quicken.
An awful lot of people I know play no games. Even those that do don't play them at work, which is where an awful lot of Windows computers are. I've got three Macs and a Linux box at home, and every one of them, including the eight year old Mac, does everything I do at work better than the Windows machines I use there, which are maybe a year and half, two years old. And they essentially need to be wiped clean and everything re-installed once a year or they cease functioning at even their current half-assed level.
The reason Windows is still the standard is that it is perceived as the standard...nothing more. People get it because they don't want to get something that isn't the norm. They want to be able to talk to people about their computer without having to explain to people what it is. They use Windows at work, or grew up with it at home, and they don't want to learn another OS.
I've eased about half a dozen people through transitions to Macs and Linux, and not one of them has expressed any regret or desire to go back (That said, I think Linux still takes more than the average user can stomach, but it's getting there.)
I hope I haven't come off as too hostile, because really the difference between your view and mine is very small. (Mostly it's a matter of my cynicism vs. your idealism). These are issues I've wrestled with for a long time, both the private/public divide in agricultural research and the dilemma of how a breeder balances the need to pay for his research and the need for the research to be utilized.
I hope I don't come off as pro-Monsanto at all, because I'm not. I think they have overwhelmingly been a negative force in the world, not least because they have utilitzed the amazing potential of transgenic crops in such a way as to increase the outcry against, thereby perhaps preventing the development and/or acceptance of technologies which could feed millions. I see Monsanto's rise as a symptom of the Reagan-era gutting of public breeding in this country (it has never been as well funded in the rest of the world as it was here up to that point).
Monsanto fills the role those programs would have, but it does it with the goal of making money, not serving the needs of people. There still are public breeding programs, of course, but they are now basically tasked with paying for themselves. I've worked in a number of breeding programs at land-grant universities, and the norm is now to patent varieties and charge royalties. And people are always saying "But my tax dollars paid for this...why can't I have it for free?" And I have to explain to them that their tax dollars barely pay to keep the lights on, let alone pay workers or maintain fields. So we charge for it because if we don't, the program wouldn't exist. If we release something like that into a developing country where no structure exists to enforce our patents, they can then propagate it and sell it to the other countries, thoroughly eroding the value of our work, and of the money invested by other royalty-payers and tax-payers.
(By the way, I mis-typed above, when I said I was headed into the "unpaid" field...it should be "underpaid". For doing the same thing at Monsanto I could easily make into the six figures, while odds are decent I'll retire before I make that working for the USDA or a state agricultural experiment station.)
Americans, for the most part, are way too far divorced from the idea of where their food comes from, and from the idea of what it's like to not have any (which is not to say there aren't Americans starving today...I could (and do) walk a few blocks from where I work and talk to them.) I'd like to think if people understood what it's like to be hungry and have NO way, short of crime or violence, to fix it, they'd be less cavalier about sentencing others to experience that every day.
The fact that a product is necessary on a daily basis for a healthy life cannot be seen to require it's producers to give it away. Are we going to ask farmers to give away their crops because we all need to eat?
Your drug analogy is flawed, because drugs are not self-replicating, and plants are. If drugs were self-replicating, every company that produced them would take steps to keep people buying them, and we wouldn't think twice about it.
The fact is, Monsanto is a corporation, and as a corporation, it has only two obligations: to make money as well as it can and to follow the law. We cannot expect it to do anything beyond that (indeed, even that may be a bit much). Look to corporations for moral examples and you'll be searching for a long time. That's not their purpose.
If you find Monsanto's action be outrageous, there's an easy solution...get your government (or some sufficiently large organization) to either pay for the seeds or for the rights to the technology, and give it to the starving. Or you could get said entity to fund the research necessary, and allow free use of the product. You could likely buy Monsanto outright for what the U.S. has spent in Iraq so far, with change to spare.
Monsanto is doing what Monsanto was designed to do: making money for its shareholders. Don't fault it for not giving things away any more than you would a car for not flying or a toaster for not doing your laundry. The fault lies with us, the people who have far, far, more than we need to survive, for failing to require the instruments of our collective will, our governments and other institutions, to provide for these people. By our failure as a group to do so, we DID make that decision. We decided we'd rather pay lower taxes, or not give to charity, and have a little more money for ourselves, than to see these people fed. While perhaps you and I do not bear as much individual blame far this, we are still saddled with our share of the collective guilt until such a time as we can sway the minds of our fellows.
I totally believe in the responsibility of mankind to care for the least fortunate of our species. I give from what I have, not as much as I could, but certainly more than many in this country. I am going into the unpaid, under-appreciated field of government-funded plant breeding specifically because I believe such work is important, and I believe working to allow people to fulfill this most basic of need is among the noblest things I could do with my life. Am I doing everything I possibly could? No, but neither are you or anyone else in the first world.
Let's get something straight here: These are people who have been growing the same landraces of crops for hundreds of years, saving the seeds each year, and replanting them the next. And they can keep doing that if they want. It'd be next to impossible to stop them from doing this even if people wanted to, short of preventing them from farming altogether.
Monsanto is very reluctant to market its varieties in developing nations because there's no good way to retain control of them. The terminator technology takes care of that issue. If people want to grow Monsanto's improved cultivars, they'll have to buy the seeds new each year. Most people in the developing world, and certainly not the subsistence farmers, do not buy their seeds at all, let alone from Monsanto.
It just baffles me how this has been blown all out of proportion, mostly by vehement anti-GMO advocates. Yes, Monsanto is slime. That I agree with wholeheartedly. Do they sue innocent people? Sure do. Do they take unwise chances with transgenic plants? Arguably, yes? Are they more concerned with the bottom line than with feeding people or even allowing farmers to make a profit? Hell, yes (to the extent that this is does not prevent them from selling more seeds). Are they exploiting starving people? No more than the rest of us in the developed world (which is to say, sadly, yes, somewhat.)
Actually, in the current case, the man DID sign an agreement, I believe.
That's not to say that there aren't cases where people didn't and still got sued. Those cases are a legal grey area as far as I'm concerned, but Monsanto has thus far been successful in prosecuting them, which I think is unfortunate, both for the legal precedents it sets, for Monsanto's sake (not that I really care) their image.
Really I think the legal responsibility and therefor blame should fall on the farmer who planted them and allowed them to spread off his property, not the farmer on whose property the landed. The agreements with Monsanto people sign generally have a clause requiring them to take actions to limit the spread of seed and pollen. Monsanto would rather blame the person on whose land they wound up, of course, because they're alot easier to identify, and because they don't want to set a precedent of people just saying "I didn't plant it, it just landed there".
Legally, I think Monsanto is on very shaky ground if they are actually forcibly entering and confiscating crop plants. More likely is testing of seed being sold, which, if Monsanto either buys it or has an agreement with the buyer, would be fine (I know they've done this in some cases.) This is much more likely to be what's happening in cases where people are claiming it "just blew onto their land". One out of every five plants in your field being Roundup Ready is demonstrably useless, one out of every five seeds in your soybean harvest might mean you grew one acre of Roundup Ready and four normal and mixed them together and hoped no one would notice.
All that said, the sad truth is that in this day and age, with its army of lawyers, Monsanto can probably forcibly confiscate crop for testing, legal or not, and get off scot free.
An alternative to this mess would be to fund public plant breeding to the extent that varieties could be released free of restrictions, and that would end the hold of monster companies like Monsanto and assure equal access for all farmers to new varieties.
It wouldn't fix the problem of transgenes spreading, but, well...you can't make everybody happy.
I'm not a lawyer, but I can tell you right now that you are committing patent infringement.
While there are some pretty sleazy, marginal things going on with Monsanto and their patent enforcement, this case is not the big deal people here are making it out to be. The man violated his agreement to use some one else's intellectual property. This is every bit as illegal as software piracy, and should be. You don't like, it don't buy the seeds and don't sign the agreement. Claiming you didn't read it carefully enough doesn't hold much water.
As some one who has been intimately associated with plant breeding for roughly a decade (the traditional sort of plant breeding, not transgenics, mostly) I really hate the public's attitude regarding variety protection. Improved plants represent the hardwork, money, and creativity of some one, frequently a lot of some ones, every bit as much as a piece of software, a book, a new mousetrap, a rocket engine, or a microchip. People seem to have no problem understanding copyrights and patents on these sorts of things, yet have difficulty accepting that people can "own" living organisms.
If you have moral issues with that, I'm not going to be able to argue with them. However there are plenty of practical reasons why plant patents and plant variety protection are good things to have, and they are the same ones that apply for other sorts of patents:
1) It provides incentive for people to invest the time and effort to produce new varieties. It wasn't that long ago that most new plant varieties came from publicly funded breeders at land grant universities (in the U.S., anyway), and were released free of restrictions. This is a fine system, and I'd happily go back to it, but the powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, no longer provide significant funding for that sort of thing (public breeding programs are fewer, and those that exist are funded much less and encouraged to patent their varieties in order to fund themselves). So the bulk of breeding today (in the big crops anyway) is done by private companies. It's not an easy job, and there'd be absolutely no reason for them to do it if some one could walk off with a handful of seed or a few cuttings and effectively steal years of work.
2) Patents encourage people to make things public. If you want your invention patented, you've got to document said invention with the patent office. In exchange for patent protection for a finite amount of time, plant patents provide other breeders with important information about the origins of a new variety (although the patent office is disturbingly lax lately in what it lets people get away with in this part of the application...some are nearly useless now), thus preventing the accumulation expertise in one person or companies hands.
Plant patents come in lots of different flavors, which I could go into, but seeing as this topic is likely to be pushed off the bottom of Slashdot soon anyhow, seems like a lot of work for something no one will read...
Even though people do routinely use Roundup anyway, people aren't spraying Roundup on non-Roundup Ready plants at times when it will make a difference whether the plants are transgenic...you don't spray something on your plants that could kill them unless you have good reason to expect that it won't kill them. The advantage of Roundup Ready is that you can go ahead and blast away at the weeds with it long after your crop plants have come up.
And since Monsanto owns Roundup, if you're not patronizing Monsanto, then you have no use for the transgenic anyhow.
Any one who thinks of farmers as "traditionally non-tech-savvy" hasn't talk to to many farmers in the last decade or two. As some one who has had a fair amount of contact with farmers in a number of a crops over the years, I can say with confidence that the average American farmer is easily more tech savvy than the average American in general. They have to be. Two reasons:
1) Margins are slim, and farmers need any advantage they can get. Most farmers today stay highly informed about advances in agriculture (the average farmer is much better informed and rational about transgenic crops than his non-farmer counterpart), and more and more are moving to a precision agriculture model, depending on GPS, lasers, in-field temperature and humidity monitors, and modern planting and harvest equipment.
2) Farmers are running a business. Generally by themselves, or with help only from family members. In this day and age, running a business involves running a computer, and if you're doing that yourself, you're going to be your own IT department, too.
I really resent the fact that people persist in this idea that farmers are ignorant bumpkins...
We already have a national ID program in the US...it's just a horrible piecemeal mess. 50 states issuing drivers licenses (plus probably Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, etc.) plus Social Security Cards, the single worst form of ID ever. Sure, you don't HAVE to have either of these things, but just try functioning without them. A national ID could fill all these functions and do it well.
The mess that this whole system, coupled with the farce that is voter registration, has made out of our democracy is just appalling.
I'm generally a big time "privacy advocate", but this one of the issues that I really don't get that group's stance on. Everything that could be done with a National ID card as far as intruding on people's privacy could be (and, in general, is) done now. Everything done legitimately with our variety of IDs now, could be done better with a National ID.
National IDs are the norm in many, many countries with speech at least as free as ours and democratic processes that function a whole lot better.
Whether or not using Macs annoys the support people (in general this hasn't been my experience, though there are probably exceptions) the fact is that excluding calls to Apple (who, oddly is not terribly surprised to learn I have a Mac) I have had to call support people on a grand total of three issues in 13 years of owning Macs (one issue was with a Microsoft game, which NEVER worked, despite their halfhearted efforts). I work on PCs at work (when I'm not on my own iBook) and they require relatively routine visits from support personnel. And that doesn't count all the issues we just live with because its too much effort for something small.
Actually, it is virtually never worth explaining anything to a police officer who is hassling you for doing something completely legal, unless he is threatening to actually arrest you or stop you from doing something vitally important. If the policeman is hassling you, then he's already worked out some logic for doing so that is satisfactory to him, and anything you present is unlikely to convince him.
That's not to say there aren't reasonable cops out there...there are plenty. But in general these aren't the folks hassling innocent people for no good reason. If you're just sitting somewhere minding your own business, then the odds are the guy who comes over and bugs you is just an asshole, and no matter what you do, he has the upper hand. Comply, then write a letter to the newspaper and post a lot of complaints about him online.
Half the time it's made next to impossible to call the police without calling 911. A year back, I got rear-ended by some idiot girl. The police stopped, took all the requisite notes, statements etc. However, I'd forgotten to put my new insurance card in the glove compartment. The police officer said it wasn't a problem, since I wasn't at fault, but that I needed to provide some sort of documentation, and said that I should just drop it off at the police station some time when he was there and he'd take care of it.
So I go home, find the insurance info, and the next day I go to call to find out if he's there. There is absolutely no listing for the police in the phone book for the police station except 911. I try online. 911. I call information. 911. I even called the city hall, figuring they would having dealings with the police. They told me 911. I told them it wasn't an emergency. Oh, well then don't call 911. Well, what should I call? They didn't know.
Eventually I just drove down there, paid a fortune in parking fees, and stood around forever while they tried to figure out if Officer Whatever was there.
The best is I got to do it all again a month later, when my garbage can was stolen. The trash pick-up people wouldn't give us another one of the super-special trash receptacles until we got a police report. Of course, they didn't have a number. This time I just called 911 about it and got a lecture. And the best is, the 911 operator, after lecturing me, didn't know what number I should have called.
While I agree with with you for the most part on your classification of ABA, I don't entirelly discount it, although I feel it has been grossly misused with shocking frequency. I'm the father of an autistic spectrum child, and so I've spent an awful lot of time looking at these things. I also come from a family of psychologists, so I've received many varied opinions on the topic of autism therapy.
ABA, in my opinion, is really only suitable for the most profoundly autistic individuals, those who have zero chance of becoming remotely functional. The fact that you posted a completely normal, coherent message suggest to me that you were probably not a good candidate for it. ABA is essentially what you say: just learning a series of mindless "tricks". But for some individuals this may be better functionality than they'd otherwise manage. Of course, truly "better" depends as much on the emotional state of the person, and obviously that suffers if the therapy is abusive.
Tales of abusive treatment in ABA are shockingly common, but it isn't necessarily the case...I know very good, kind, gentle people who do it, and seem to be well-liked (to the extent it is visible/possible among the severely autistic) by those they work with. Part of the problem is of course that the severely autistic are not, in general anyway, easy to work with, particularly as adults, and frustration runs high among therapists, even good ones. That doesn't excuse abuse, but it does go a little ways towards explaining it.
I'm very uncomfortable with the way autistics are frequently medicated...and I am, on the whole, very much in favor of psychiatric medication. However, I must agree that many autistic people are given medication with very little consideration of what is best for them personally and more towards simply keeping them "manageable."
The therapy that we have settled on for my daughter is called "Floor Time". I don't know that it is done with adults, and I don't think the most autistic kids would get much out of it, but it really has worked wonders in mere months with my daughter. It's a sort of play-based therapy, and depends on the idea of making "circles" of communication. My daughter, in just a few months, has become much more interactive, she makes eye contact, she follows us, mimics our actions, she sits in our laps, she says a few words, and clearly comprehends some speech. Four months ago she did none of those things.
While I sincerely hope that my daughter will one day become a "normal" adult, I think what is most important is that people in this world become more tolerant of different people. Honestly, if she's happy, I wouldn't care if she was the weirdest person on earth, except that the way weird people get treated in our society makes it difficult to be happy.
It's not as if global warming is the only thing that's been going on in the last 50 years. There's been tons of research into new cultural methods for growing grapes, not to mention new grape varieties and new winemaking techniques. This progress has been especially pronounced in what would normally have been thought of as rather marginal sites, particularly those too cold to do well under standard viticultural practices. Most of the work that's been done on trellis designs has been done in that time period...that alone could probably account for most of the difference in quality.
One might as well say that the creation of the New York Mets brought on better wine quality. Or the Allied victory in WWII, or the election of Dwight Eisenhower as President, or the birth of my father. All those things happened about 50 years ago, and wine quality has improved since.
I guess I don't see why people get so hyped up about the whole database-as-file-system concept. They got excited about it in BeOS, they were excited about it when the word was it was going to be in Copland, they're excited about it in Longhorn. Nobody ever adequately explained to me just why it's so darn exciting. I just don't see what it would get me that a somewhat enhanced search function wouldn't. I even used BeOS, and I didn't see it as particularly exciting, although the OS was decent enough.
There are a lot of good reasons behind a hierarchical system, too. For one thing, the whole metaphor of the icon-based operating system is objects. Objects have locations. And that effects the way we think about documents on our computer, even if their physical locations all basically boil down to "somewhere on the inner surfaces of a hard drive somewhere inside my computer", we think of them in terms of "where".
I've never written a file system or anything that much like it before, but a hierarchical system would seem to have certain performance advantages, too.
Besides, there are so many other things much more wrong with the current selection of operating systems, why bother fixing something that isn't that broken to begin with?
I'm 99% sure this is the same thing. The projected arrival date after its difficulties in 1998 was 2004, if I recall, so it seems unlikely they'd launch another one right before the first one arrives...one would think you'd at least want to wait and see if it works, at this point.
While clones were a good thing for PC USERS (arguably), they were a very bad thing for IBM, who went from being the dominant force in the industry to hardly even a player in the personal computer market (yeah, people still use ThinkPads, but compare that to the proportion of people who had PCs or XTs). The last thing Apple wants is clones.
Linux has its purposes (I have a Linux machine at home, although I am writing this on an iBook), but it's still a long way from even making a dent in the average consumer desktop market.
Apple is not significantly less profitable than the average computer company, and the fact they manage to do this while remaining outside the mainstream in terms of OS and hardware is even more impressive. How would allowing clones increase their profitablility?
Apple has 3.8% of the marketshare in terms of new computer sales (a misleading indicator in some ways, because studies have shown Mac users replace their machines less frequently), which while not terribly impressive sounding, places it solidly among the top five computer manufacturers, roughly in the same ballpark as Dell. They do this while splitting their focus between software and hardware, and selling more expensive computers. Why would they change what they're doing?
That said, this guy will never amount to anything. Why would I pay $650 for a computer, plus another $120 for the OS, for an non-expandable machine based on old technology, supported by a company that may not exist any longer than it takes me to buy the thing. For $999 I can get a brand new eMac, with OS and a monitor, which is a modern (although not cutting edge...but something tells me the $650 model of the iBox isn't either) computer, from the company that makes the OS, a company which has been around for ages and generally does a fairly good job of support.
Remind me where it was I denounced anything you said as "hate speech"? The right uses the terms "unamerican" and "unpatriotic" just as freely for the same purpose. There are plenty on the left who entirely believe in the freedom of speech and thought, no matter what the content. Far more, in my experience, than I on the right, though I do not deny their presence there as well. I quite fervently believe in your right to spout whatever it is you wish to spout, even hiding behind the guise of Anonymous Coward. Both left and right have been guilty of attempting to silence free speech, but suggesting that those who happen to enjoy reading a particular website should be booted out of the country is not particularly compatible with the idea that free speech or free thought are of any real value to you.
You're free to say it, mind you. You'll just sound like a hypocrite.
Yes, the flock to academia where their "gibberish" turns into the ideas the conservatives were too close-minded to ever come up with...but are more than happy to capitalize on.
Apparently I need to be deported to Afghanistan. As far as you, I don't particularly care where you send you, but I think your ideas about freedom of thought and speech would be better suited to a country which preached less lofty ideals than this one.
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Actually, I spent six months or so fighting a similar deal to what you describe with the utility. I had a cell phone with CellOne (now Cingular), and they billed me incorrectly one month, to the tune of about $150. The refused to correct the bill or to send an itemized bill, but I paid the portion I believed I owed (I hadn't used the phone all month, so I just paid the basic charges). The continued to bill me for the rest. It was next to impossible to talk to a living person, so I just kept leaving voice mail. The started slapping me with $50+ a month late fees. I continued to refuse to pay. They cut off my service, but continued to bill me each month as though I was still receiving service. My contract ran out, but they kept it going, saying that I couldn't cancel it until I had paid off my debts in full. By the end the amount they claimed I owed them had reached $800+.
I started searching around and calling whatver non-customer-service numbers I could find at CellOne and complaining to those people, and then, one day, in the strangest twist yet, I got a phone call at 8am on a Sunday morning at my parents (how they got the number I'll never know...I just happened to be visiting) saying they'd settle the debt for $75. I paid it and that was the end of it. None of it ever wound up on any credit report.
My wife had a similar, though less horrific, experience with Verzion, which is why we both use Tracfones now.
I had the renewing Wired subscription issue...I ignored the letters until some one called, at which point I told them I wasn't interested in renewing and I didn't appreciate being harassed, and that was it. Haven't heard anything in three or four months.
Just because this is a change of direction doesn't mean it was a mistake to go with PPC in the first place. The PPC did very well for quite a long while. Now the IBM and the PPC line aren't delivering, so Apple has chosen another option.
No matter how zealous the zealot, most would admit that the PPC line is/was only superior to the x86 as long as it keeps progressing in a usable way. Lots of us have been questioning whether its been doing that for a while now.
I'm not wild about the switch, but I think it makes sense, and Apple is a business, not a cult, despite appearances.
For what its worth, my Mac user friends buy a hell of a lot more software than my PC using ones, for one major reason: fewer users = less opportunity to pirate.
Pretty much every major PC software title I would be interested in I could get a copy of with only a little asking. If I depended on this to provide Mac software, I'd wait a long, long time to get most things.
I know not every one pirates software, but it's a rare user who doesn't do it to some extent.
Of course, when considering where people will actually campagin, the top six feature only two worth campaigning seriously in, FL and PA. CA, NY, and IL are pretty safe Democratic states, TX is a safe Republican state. In the bottom seven include at least four swing states (WV, ME, AR, NV) maybe five (MT is looking swingier these days). So while the electoral college may allow the state the least voting power, the individual voter in these states has more actual power to influence a national election.
The keyboard and mouse that "goes" with the Mac Mini? The idea here is that there isn't a keybaord and mouse that "goes" with it. You can use whatever you want. If you want, and I think you'd be foolish to, you can buy those from Apple. And if you want, you can spend $4 for a USB keyboard and $1 for a USB mouse (both prices on PriceWatch right now). That's $5 not $58.
And you don't need the speakers from Apple. You don't need the speakers at all. There's a perfectly adequate one in the computer. The speakers that come packaged with the WalMart PC may be a separate item, but they're still crap.
So that leaves us with $5 plus a monitor. As far as I'm concerned, the monitor is a non-issue, because used CRTs are a dime a dozen these days. You can't honestly tell me you could get ahold of a monitor for this thing with minimal effort.
So we're basically left with $5. Plus shipping, so say $10. I'll even give you the $100 CRT. So $110. But you also get a smaller footprint. And a computer which is virtually silent (something no $499 PC is anywhere close to...the one a friends parents' recently purchased at Walmart sounds like a 747 warming up). It's also not sinfully ugly. You also get some decent bundled software, and the security of living in a virus and spyware free (or virtually so) world, and a more stable operating system. And you get a system for which 95% of hardware just works when you plug it in, without fiddling with drivers or configurations.
Also, it's not crap.
Regardless, you could always go buy a $4 USB keyboard (there was one for that price over on PriceWatch 30 seconds ago) if you're too overwhelmed by the complexities of the PS2/USB adapter. I find it hard to imagine there is a person in this country who doesn't know some one with an extra USB keyboard or two laying around anyway.
I find it endlessly amusing that the same people who have for years touted the "mix and match" flexibility of PCs now gripe about the fact the Mac Mini doesn't include a keyboard in its price.
The Slashdot crowd may be heavily into games, but I'm not sure the average PC user is. My father-in-law, for example, who turned down a 17" PowerBook because "It's not a Microsoft computer". This is a guy who thinks nothing of spending $3-5k on a computer, on which he will work with three things: Office, AOL, and Quicken.
An awful lot of people I know play no games. Even those that do don't play them at work, which is where an awful lot of Windows computers are. I've got three Macs and a Linux box at home, and every one of them, including the eight year old Mac, does everything I do at work better than the Windows machines I use there, which are maybe a year and half, two years old. And they essentially need to be wiped clean and everything re-installed once a year or they cease functioning at even their current half-assed level.
The reason Windows is still the standard is that it is perceived as the standard...nothing more. People get it because they don't want to get something that isn't the norm. They want to be able to talk to people about their computer without having to explain to people what it is. They use Windows at work, or grew up with it at home, and they don't want to learn another OS.
I've eased about half a dozen people through transitions to Macs and Linux, and not one of them has expressed any regret or desire to go back (That said, I think Linux still takes more than the average user can stomach, but it's getting there.)
I hope I haven't come off as too hostile, because really the difference between your view and mine is very small. (Mostly it's a matter of my cynicism vs. your idealism). These are issues I've wrestled with for a long time, both the private/public divide in agricultural research and the dilemma of how a breeder balances the need to pay for his research and the need for the research to be utilized.
I hope I don't come off as pro-Monsanto at all, because I'm not. I think they have overwhelmingly been a negative force in the world, not least because they have utilitzed the amazing potential of transgenic crops in such a way as to increase the outcry against, thereby perhaps preventing the development and/or acceptance of technologies which could feed millions. I see Monsanto's rise as a symptom of the Reagan-era gutting of public breeding in this country (it has never been as well funded in the rest of the world as it was here up to that point).
Monsanto fills the role those programs would have, but it does it with the goal of making money, not serving the needs of people. There still are public breeding programs, of course, but they are now basically tasked with paying for themselves. I've worked in a number of breeding programs at land-grant universities, and the norm is now to patent varieties and charge royalties. And people are always saying "But my tax dollars paid for this...why can't I have it for free?" And I have to explain to them that their tax dollars barely pay to keep the lights on, let alone pay workers or maintain fields. So we charge for it because if we don't, the program wouldn't exist. If we release something like that into a developing country where no structure exists to enforce our patents, they can then propagate it and sell it to the other countries, thoroughly eroding the value of our work, and of the money invested by other royalty-payers and tax-payers.
(By the way, I mis-typed above, when I said I was headed into the "unpaid" field...it should be "underpaid". For doing the same thing at Monsanto I could easily make into the six figures, while odds are decent I'll retire before I make that working for the USDA or a state agricultural experiment station.)
Americans, for the most part, are way too far divorced from the idea of where their food comes from, and from the idea of what it's like to not have any (which is not to say there aren't Americans starving today...I could (and do) walk a few blocks from where I work and talk to them.) I'd like to think if people understood what it's like to be hungry and have NO way, short of crime or violence, to fix it, they'd be less cavalier about sentencing others to experience that every day.
The fact that a product is necessary on a daily basis for a healthy life cannot be seen to require it's producers to give it away. Are we going to ask farmers to give away their crops because we all need to eat?
Your drug analogy is flawed, because drugs are not self-replicating, and plants are. If drugs were self-replicating, every company that produced them would take steps to keep people buying them, and we wouldn't think twice about it.
The fact is, Monsanto is a corporation, and as a corporation, it has only two obligations: to make money as well as it can and to follow the law. We cannot expect it to do anything beyond that (indeed, even that may be a bit much). Look to corporations for moral examples and you'll be searching for a long time. That's not their purpose.
If you find Monsanto's action be outrageous, there's an easy solution...get your government (or some sufficiently large organization) to either pay for the seeds or for the rights to the technology, and give it to the starving. Or you could get said entity to fund the research necessary, and allow free use of the product. You could likely buy Monsanto outright for what the U.S. has spent in Iraq so far, with change to spare.
Monsanto is doing what Monsanto was designed to do: making money for its shareholders. Don't fault it for not giving things away any more than you would a car for not flying or a toaster for not doing your laundry. The fault lies with us, the people who have far, far, more than we need to survive, for failing to require the instruments of our collective will, our governments and other institutions, to provide for these people. By our failure as a group to do so, we DID make that decision. We decided we'd rather pay lower taxes, or not give to charity, and have a little more money for ourselves, than to see these people fed. While perhaps you and I do not bear as much individual blame far this, we are still saddled with our share of the collective guilt until such a time as we can sway the minds of our fellows.
I totally believe in the responsibility of mankind to care for the least fortunate of our species. I give from what I have, not as much as I could, but certainly more than many in this country. I am going into the unpaid, under-appreciated field of government-funded plant breeding specifically because I believe such work is important, and I believe working to allow people to fulfill this most basic of need is among the noblest things I could do with my life. Am I doing everything I possibly could? No, but neither are you or anyone else in the first world.
Let's get something straight here: These are people who have been growing the same landraces of crops for hundreds of years, saving the seeds each year, and replanting them the next. And they can keep doing that if they want. It'd be next to impossible to stop them from doing this even if people wanted to, short of preventing them from farming altogether.
Monsanto is very reluctant to market its varieties in developing nations because there's no good way to retain control of them. The terminator technology takes care of that issue. If people want to grow Monsanto's improved cultivars, they'll have to buy the seeds new each year. Most people in the developing world, and certainly not the subsistence farmers, do not buy their seeds at all, let alone from Monsanto.
It just baffles me how this has been blown all out of proportion, mostly by vehement anti-GMO advocates. Yes, Monsanto is slime. That I agree with wholeheartedly. Do they sue innocent people? Sure do. Do they take unwise chances with transgenic plants? Arguably, yes? Are they more concerned with the bottom line than with feeding people or even allowing farmers to make a profit? Hell, yes (to the extent that this is does not prevent them from selling more seeds). Are they exploiting starving people? No more than the rest of us in the developed world (which is to say, sadly, yes, somewhat.)
Actually, in the current case, the man DID sign an agreement, I believe.
That's not to say that there aren't cases where people didn't and still got sued. Those cases are a legal grey area as far as I'm concerned, but Monsanto has thus far been successful in prosecuting them, which I think is unfortunate, both for the legal precedents it sets, for Monsanto's sake (not that I really care) their image.
Really I think the legal responsibility and therefor blame should fall on the farmer who planted them and allowed them to spread off his property, not the farmer on whose property the landed. The agreements with Monsanto people sign generally have a clause requiring them to take actions to limit the spread of seed and pollen. Monsanto would rather blame the person on whose land they wound up, of course, because they're alot easier to identify, and because they don't want to set a precedent of people just saying "I didn't plant it, it just landed there".
Legally, I think Monsanto is on very shaky ground if they are actually forcibly entering and confiscating crop plants. More likely is testing of seed being sold, which, if Monsanto either buys it or has an agreement with the buyer, would be fine (I know they've done this in some cases.) This is much more likely to be what's happening in cases where people are claiming it "just blew onto their land". One out of every five plants in your field being Roundup Ready is demonstrably useless, one out of every five seeds in your soybean harvest might mean you grew one acre of Roundup Ready and four normal and mixed them together and hoped no one would notice.
All that said, the sad truth is that in this day and age, with its army of lawyers, Monsanto can probably forcibly confiscate crop for testing, legal or not, and get off scot free.
An alternative to this mess would be to fund public plant breeding to the extent that varieties could be released free of restrictions, and that would end the hold of monster companies like Monsanto and assure equal access for all farmers to new varieties.
It wouldn't fix the problem of transgenes spreading, but, well...you can't make everybody happy.
I'm not a lawyer, but I can tell you right now that you are committing patent infringement.
While there are some pretty sleazy, marginal things going on with Monsanto and their patent enforcement, this case is not the big deal people here are making it out to be. The man violated his agreement to use some one else's intellectual property. This is every bit as illegal as software piracy, and should be. You don't like, it don't buy the seeds and don't sign the agreement. Claiming you didn't read it carefully enough doesn't hold much water.
As some one who has been intimately associated with plant breeding for roughly a decade (the traditional sort of plant breeding, not transgenics, mostly) I really hate the public's attitude regarding variety protection. Improved plants represent the hardwork, money, and creativity of some one, frequently a lot of some ones, every bit as much as a piece of software, a book, a new mousetrap, a rocket engine, or a microchip. People seem to have no problem understanding copyrights and patents on these sorts of things, yet have difficulty accepting that people can "own" living organisms.
If you have moral issues with that, I'm not going to be able to argue with them. However there are plenty of practical reasons why plant patents and plant variety protection are good things to have, and they are the same ones that apply for other sorts of patents:
1) It provides incentive for people to invest the time and effort to produce new varieties. It wasn't that long ago that most new plant varieties came from publicly funded breeders at land grant universities (in the U.S., anyway), and were released free of restrictions. This is a fine system, and I'd happily go back to it, but the powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, no longer provide significant funding for that sort of thing (public breeding programs are fewer, and those that exist are funded much less and encouraged to patent their varieties in order to fund themselves). So the bulk of breeding today (in the big crops anyway) is done by private companies. It's not an easy job, and there'd be absolutely no reason for them to do it if some one could walk off with a handful of seed or a few cuttings and effectively steal years of work.
2) Patents encourage people to make things public. If you want your invention patented, you've got to document said invention with the patent office. In exchange for patent protection for a finite amount of time, plant patents provide other breeders with important information about the origins of a new variety (although the patent office is disturbingly lax lately in what it lets people get away with in this part of the application...some are nearly useless now), thus preventing the accumulation expertise in one person or companies hands.
Plant patents come in lots of different flavors, which I could go into, but seeing as this topic is likely to be pushed off the bottom of Slashdot soon anyhow, seems like a lot of work for something no one will read...
Even though people do routinely use Roundup anyway, people aren't spraying Roundup on non-Roundup Ready plants at times when it will make a difference whether the plants are transgenic...you don't spray something on your plants that could kill them unless you have good reason to expect that it won't kill them. The advantage of Roundup Ready is that you can go ahead and blast away at the weeds with it long after your crop plants have come up.
And since Monsanto owns Roundup, if you're not patronizing Monsanto, then you have no use for the transgenic anyhow.
Any one who thinks of farmers as "traditionally non-tech-savvy" hasn't talk to to many farmers in the last decade or two. As some one who has had a fair amount of contact with farmers in a number of a crops over the years, I can say with confidence that the average American farmer is easily more tech savvy than the average American in general. They have to be. Two reasons:
1) Margins are slim, and farmers need any advantage they can get. Most farmers today stay highly informed about advances in agriculture (the average farmer is much better informed and rational about transgenic crops than his non-farmer counterpart), and more and more are moving to a precision agriculture model, depending on GPS, lasers, in-field temperature and humidity monitors, and modern planting and harvest equipment.
2) Farmers are running a business. Generally by themselves, or with help only from family members. In this day and age, running a business involves running a computer, and if you're doing that yourself, you're going to be your own IT department, too.
I really resent the fact that people persist in this idea that farmers are ignorant bumpkins...
We already have a national ID program in the US...it's just a horrible piecemeal mess. 50 states issuing drivers licenses (plus probably Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, etc.) plus Social Security Cards, the single worst form of ID ever. Sure, you don't HAVE to have either of these things, but just try functioning without them. A national ID could fill all these functions and do it well.
The mess that this whole system, coupled with the farce that is voter registration, has made out of our democracy is just appalling.
I'm generally a big time "privacy advocate", but this one of the issues that I really don't get that group's stance on. Everything that could be done with a National ID card as far as intruding on people's privacy could be (and, in general, is) done now. Everything done legitimately with our variety of IDs now, could be done better with a National ID.
National IDs are the norm in many, many countries with speech at least as free as ours and democratic processes that function a whole lot better.
Whether or not using Macs annoys the support people (in general this hasn't been my experience, though there are probably exceptions) the fact is that excluding calls to Apple (who, oddly is not terribly surprised to learn I have a Mac) I have had to call support people on a grand total of three issues in 13 years of owning Macs (one issue was with a Microsoft game, which NEVER worked, despite their halfhearted efforts). I work on PCs at work (when I'm not on my own iBook) and they require relatively routine visits from support personnel. And that doesn't count all the issues we just live with because its too much effort for something small.
Actually, it is virtually never worth explaining anything to a police officer who is hassling you for doing something completely legal, unless he is threatening to actually arrest you or stop you from doing something vitally important. If the policeman is hassling you, then he's already worked out some logic for doing so that is satisfactory to him, and anything you present is unlikely to convince him.
That's not to say there aren't reasonable cops out there...there are plenty. But in general these aren't the folks hassling innocent people for no good reason. If you're just sitting somewhere minding your own business, then the odds are the guy who comes over and bugs you is just an asshole, and no matter what you do, he has the upper hand. Comply, then write a letter to the newspaper and post a lot of complaints about him online.
Half the time it's made next to impossible to call the police without calling 911. A year back, I got rear-ended by some idiot girl. The police stopped, took all the requisite notes, statements etc. However, I'd forgotten to put my new insurance card in the glove compartment. The police officer said it wasn't a problem, since I wasn't at fault, but that I needed to provide some sort of documentation, and said that I should just drop it off at the police station some time when he was there and he'd take care of it.
So I go home, find the insurance info, and the next day I go to call to find out if he's there. There is absolutely no listing for the police in the phone book for the police station except 911. I try online. 911. I call information. 911. I even called the city hall, figuring they would having dealings with the police. They told me 911. I told them it wasn't an emergency. Oh, well then don't call 911. Well, what should I call? They didn't know.
Eventually I just drove down there, paid a fortune in parking fees, and stood around forever while they tried to figure out if Officer Whatever was there.
The best is I got to do it all again a month later, when my garbage can was stolen. The trash pick-up people wouldn't give us another one of the super-special trash receptacles until we got a police report. Of course, they didn't have a number. This time I just called 911 about it and got a lecture. And the best is, the 911 operator, after lecturing me, didn't know what number I should have called.
While I agree with with you for the most part on your classification of ABA, I don't entirelly discount it, although I feel it has been grossly misused with shocking frequency. I'm the father of an autistic spectrum child, and so I've spent an awful lot of time looking at these things. I also come from a family of psychologists, so I've received many varied opinions on the topic of autism therapy.
ABA, in my opinion, is really only suitable for the most profoundly autistic individuals, those who have zero chance of becoming remotely functional. The fact that you posted a completely normal, coherent message suggest to me that you were probably not a good candidate for it. ABA is essentially what you say: just learning a series of mindless "tricks". But for some individuals this may be better functionality than they'd otherwise manage. Of course, truly "better" depends as much on the emotional state of the person, and obviously that suffers if the therapy is abusive.
Tales of abusive treatment in ABA are shockingly common, but it isn't necessarily the case...I know very good, kind, gentle people who do it, and seem to be well-liked (to the extent it is visible/possible among the severely autistic) by those they work with. Part of the problem is of course that the severely autistic are not, in general anyway, easy to work with, particularly as adults, and frustration runs high among therapists, even good ones. That doesn't excuse abuse, but it does go a little ways towards explaining it.
I'm very uncomfortable with the way autistics are frequently medicated...and I am, on the whole, very much in favor of psychiatric medication. However, I must agree that many autistic people are given medication with very little consideration of what is best for them personally and more towards simply keeping them "manageable."
The therapy that we have settled on for my daughter is called "Floor Time". I don't know that it is done with adults, and I don't think the most autistic kids would get much out of it, but it really has worked wonders in mere months with my daughter. It's a sort of play-based therapy, and depends on the idea of making "circles" of communication. My daughter, in just a few months, has become much more interactive, she makes eye contact, she follows us, mimics our actions, she sits in our laps, she says a few words, and clearly comprehends some speech. Four months ago she did none of those things.
While I sincerely hope that my daughter will one day become a "normal" adult, I think what is most important is that people in this world become more tolerant of different people. Honestly, if she's happy, I wouldn't care if she was the weirdest person on earth, except that the way weird people get treated in our society makes it difficult to be happy.
It's not as if global warming is the only thing that's been going on in the last 50 years. There's been tons of research into new cultural methods for growing grapes, not to mention new grape varieties and new winemaking techniques. This progress has been especially pronounced in what would normally have been thought of as rather marginal sites, particularly those too cold to do well under standard viticultural practices. Most of the work that's been done on trellis designs has been done in that time period...that alone could probably account for most of the difference in quality.
One might as well say that the creation of the New York Mets brought on better wine quality. Or the Allied victory in WWII, or the election of Dwight Eisenhower as President, or the birth of my father. All those things happened about 50 years ago, and wine quality has improved since.
I guess I don't see why people get so hyped up about the whole database-as-file-system concept. They got excited about it in BeOS, they were excited about it when the word was it was going to be in Copland, they're excited about it in Longhorn. Nobody ever adequately explained to me just why it's so darn exciting. I just don't see what it would get me that a somewhat enhanced search function wouldn't. I even used BeOS, and I didn't see it as particularly exciting, although the OS was decent enough.
There are a lot of good reasons behind a hierarchical system, too. For one thing, the whole metaphor of the icon-based operating system is objects. Objects have locations. And that effects the way we think about documents on our computer, even if their physical locations all basically boil down to "somewhere on the inner surfaces of a hard drive somewhere inside my computer", we think of them in terms of "where".
I've never written a file system or anything that much like it before, but a hierarchical system would seem to have certain performance advantages, too.
Besides, there are so many other things much more wrong with the current selection of operating systems, why bother fixing something that isn't that broken to begin with?
I'm 99% sure this is the same thing. The projected arrival date after its difficulties in 1998 was 2004, if I recall, so it seems unlikely they'd launch another one right before the first one arrives...one would think you'd at least want to wait and see if it works, at this point.
While clones were a good thing for PC USERS (arguably), they were a very bad thing for IBM, who went from being the dominant force in the industry to hardly even a player in the personal computer market (yeah, people still use ThinkPads, but compare that to the proportion of people who had PCs or XTs). The last thing Apple wants is clones.
Linux has its purposes (I have a Linux machine at home, although I am writing this on an iBook), but it's still a long way from even making a dent in the average consumer desktop market.
Apple is not significantly less profitable than the average computer company, and the fact they manage to do this while remaining outside the mainstream in terms of OS and hardware is even more impressive. How would allowing clones increase their profitablility?
Apple has 3.8% of the marketshare in terms of new computer sales (a misleading indicator in some ways, because studies have shown Mac users replace their machines less frequently), which while not terribly impressive sounding, places it solidly among the top five computer manufacturers, roughly in the same ballpark as Dell. They do this while splitting their focus between software and hardware, and selling more expensive computers. Why would they change what they're doing?
That said, this guy will never amount to anything. Why would I pay $650 for a computer, plus another $120 for the OS, for an non-expandable machine based on old technology, supported by a company that may not exist any longer than it takes me to buy the thing. For $999 I can get a brand new eMac, with OS and a monitor, which is a modern (although not cutting edge...but something tells me the $650 model of the iBox isn't either) computer, from the company that makes the OS, a company which has been around for ages and generally does a fairly good job of support.
Remind me where it was I denounced anything you said as "hate speech"? The right uses the terms "unamerican" and "unpatriotic" just as freely for the same purpose. There are plenty on the left who entirely believe in the freedom of speech and thought, no matter what the content. Far more, in my experience, than I on the right, though I do not deny their presence there as well. I quite fervently believe in your right to spout whatever it is you wish to spout, even hiding behind the guise of Anonymous Coward. Both left and right have been guilty of attempting to silence free speech, but suggesting that those who happen to enjoy reading a particular website should be booted out of the country is not particularly compatible with the idea that free speech or free thought are of any real value to you.
You're free to say it, mind you. You'll just sound like a hypocrite.
Yes, the flock to academia where their "gibberish" turns into the ideas the conservatives were too close-minded to ever come up with...but are more than happy to capitalize on.
Apparently I need to be deported to Afghanistan. As far as you, I don't particularly care where you send you, but I think your ideas about freedom of thought and speech would be better suited to a country which preached less lofty ideals than this one.