Uhh, no actually, your story did not clear anything up at all
Consider rutting ungulates or lekking in other species. What effect does a subordinate bragging have on the alpha male status of the boss or the desired alpha male status of internet trolls.
Now that I'm using Vista I have little need to be so organized. I rarely have to navigate manually to an application folder thanks to the embedded search box on the Start menu. So now my Start menu is a huge clutter, but so what? I see that exercise as futile as dusting the cardboard boxes in the attic. If you were fighting an enemy and wanted to wipe them out, would you want them to be capable of organising shit for themselves or would you want them to think organisation was a futile exercise? It's a lot easy to hunt slipshod hippies with Terminators and Hunter Killers than organised types who know where they hid the ammunition stash. The hippies will type "amuniton" and expect a machine to fix the typo and find it.
Also, if you already know what will people respond to you, why do you ask your, fairly inflammatory, I might add, question, even if you intended it to be a rhetorical one?
Let me tell you a story. Fresh out of university I got my first full time job. I worked in an office. Worked was actually a bit of misnomer, we were all so bored the guy next to me confessed to being so concerned about not having anything to do he typed ps -aux on his Sun occasionally to 'make shit scroll past when the boss walked past'. Someone else said 'you pop a lot of brain cells working here'.
Everyone wore suits to work, no one did any work as far as I could tell, and no one trusted anyone else. One guy came in with a new, slimline and expensive briefcase. All my coworkers crowded around him saying how cool it was. The boss walked in and headed for the middle of the crowd. He looked at the briefcase and said it was pretty cool. Then he looked at the hinges. They were actually a bit shoddy. He said something like 'I'd be happy if I got something like that in a Christmas cracker, but in something this expensive it's a bit of a disappointment'. The guy with the briefcase looked a bit crestfallen and I think he stopped bringing it to work after a couple of weeks. Especially since the only thing he had to put in it was a sandwich for lunch, which didn't fit as the boss pointed out.
SEBanken in Sweden gave out hardtokens. Initially it worked like this. To log on or make a transaction they sent you two 4 digit numbers. You entered a PIN number into the hardtoken to prove to it that you were not an imposter. Then you entered the two numbers and it signed them to give you a four digit number which you then entered into the bank site to make the transation.
Recently they improved it. Rather than two four digit numbers they sent one number which was the amount you were transferring and one which was opaque. So now if a MIM site is intercepting things, they can't change the amount your transferring. And you have to initiate the transfer in the seb site.
Like you say, it's not perfect but it's pretty good.
SSL certificates provide one thing, and one thing only: Encryption between the two ends using the certificate.
They do not, and never been able to, provide any verification of who is on either end. This is because literally one second after they are issued, regardless of the level of effort that goes into validating who is doing the buying, someone else can be in control of the certificate, legitimately or otherwise.
Now, I understand perfectly well that Verisign and its brethren have made a huge industry out of scamming consumers into thinking that identification is indeed something that a certificate provides; but that is marketing illusion and nothing more. Hokum and hand-waving.
SSL certificates provide one thing, and one thing only: Encryption between the two ends using the certificate.
They do not, and never been able to, provide any verification of who is on either end. This is because literally one second after they are issued, regardless of the level of effort that goes into validating who is doing the buying, someone else can be in control of the certificate, legitimately or otherwise.
Now, I understand perfectly well that Verisign and its brethren have made a huge industry out of scamming consumers into thinking that identification is indeed something that a certificate provides; but that is marketing illusion and nothing more. Hokum and hand-waving.
That seems a bit purist to me. I want to go the the bank to transfer some cash. I fire up my browser and the browser checks that the certificate matches the domain. No I guess the bank paid Verisign a fee and Verisign used some secure courier service to send the a CD with the key on it. The bank install it on their servers and stick it in vault.
When I log on I enter a cryptic ID and some data from a hard token and the site shows me my account.
Now for someone to fake this they would need to poison DNS somehow, have a copy of the site certificate, and have access to the database that turns cryptic IDs into bank account numbers. Even then it doesn't help them, because I enter data from a hardtoken, not a pasword. But I've actually seen quite good fakes of sites that only require a password and the only sign they were fake was a warning about the cert not matching the domain.
It's not perfect, but it's not useless. Most real world security is like that actually. If you're alert and your browser warns you that something is hinky, it is useful to you.
Yeah, once you get past the initial hatred phase because of UAC prompts and it whining about being incompatible with Visual Studio 6.0 it's actually OK
VS 6.0 actually works ok too
I suppose in Rainman terms XP is a bit like a pair of old khaki slacks you got from K Mart and wear ever day. When they wore out you went back to K Mart and the new slacks were a slightly different style. You complained and complained and complained but K Mart wouldn't get you the old style. Eventually you get used to the new ones.
Won't matter. Most malware is installed via the user while installing the latest screensavers, emoticon packs, and browser toolbars. Nothing will ever be able to defeat the uneducated user.
So you're saying not to protected the educated users because uneducated ones exist? Bear in mind that most corporate users are probably uneducated by the network admin is anything but, and an uneducated user with no admin rights can't do much damage.
The fact is the customers who know about security are corporate ones and they are quite able to forbid people from installing junk, by a mixture of technological measures like doman security policies and administrative ones like having their boss tell them not to install stuff themselves or they will fired. From the point of view of this sort of organisation, an OS with security features is secure. They don't care about uneducated users, because those users are not admin
Ask a lot of young women of today and they'll tell you much the same (though probably a little less extreme). Ehm, I know single women up to their thirties thinking like this, much like the men. Welcome to the 2000's.:-) WHICH COUNTRY DO YOU LIVE IN?
"...intercourse is meant to be an act performed in private for the two parties that love and care for each other..."
That's your interpretation. It's not everyone's by any means.
Ask most men in their early 20s and you'll find that intercourse is an act performed wherever and whenever they can get away with it with whoever is looking good that day.
Ask a lot of young women of today and they'll tell you much the same (though probably a little less extreme).
Ask polyamourists, swingers, exhibitionists etc, you'll get a different answer every time.
What's "meant to be", that depends on who you ask. To me it sounds like a religious proclamation.
this is not to say I want to see fat people screwing in the streets, just that not everyone thinks the way you do.
People in their early 20's are not looking to have kids I think. Or maybe their bodies are pursuing an instinctive r Selection strategy but their brains play it safe and use birth control.
Why? Because I can objectively judge the reasons for the existence of something without having to resort to emotion? Because I'm honest with myself about the nature of existence?
Especially China, which is mostly non-religious, but strongly prude.
That's interesting. I'm in Taiwan at the moment and people are not really prudish. But women still want relationships rather than one night stands. And I can't imagine them sunbathing topless and the like, unlike in Northern Europe
Actually, I've got a direct counter example to the idea that people's hangups about sex are caused by Christianity. I was at a PC tradeshow in Germany and Germans being Germans decided to have two rather ugly middle aged Germans, one man and one woman, walk naked through the show. What was funny was the looks of absolute disgust on the faces of the Taiwanese women on the booths. Now Germany seems to me to be a more Christian place than Taiwan. But Germans have a rather obnoxious habit of demonstrating their non-prudishness about nudity.
That is interesting reasoning however, you have completely avoided the fact that we have managed to disconnect reproduction from sex?
So afaict by YOUR very reasoning, sex should no longer be a "Big Issue" because it can now be practiced without needing to be concerned for the
needs of offspring because they are only conceived when they are wanted and or ready for.
I thought someone would say that. But disconnecting sex from reproduction is very, very recent. The pill, which allowed women to control their fertility was only available from 1960 onward. Now the seriousness that people, particularly women, attach to sex has been tuned by evolution for thousands of years. So it's not too surprising that they are still cautious. Once we've had thousands of years of sex being zero consequence I guess we'll be like Bonobos. In fact to the extent that the seriousness attached to sex is determined culturally, I guess we'd have already got there but for Aids.
But even in an environment where sex is safe - no possibility of Aids or unwanted pregnancies - it still seems like an evolutionarily correct approach would be to have sex with someone you would be happy having kids with. Which because human children mature so slowly means someone you'd want to spend the next 20 years being faithful to. Otherwise you might waste your fertile period having safe sex with people you don't want to have kids with and miss breeding.
Incidentally I think the fact that women have a hard limit on their reproductive life is another reason for them being pickier than men about who they have sex with. Mind you, if you want to see your kids graduate from that Ivy League university, men have a limited reproductive life too. The limit is a bit softer but it is still there if you accept the K selection argument
If we lived in a world free of religion, chances are sex and nudity would as blase as they are in the rest of the animal kingdom.
Actually I don't believe that. Even in countries like Japan which do not have a Judeo Christian tradition there are taboos about sex and nudity. The fact is, if you're sentient and female sex is a big deal, because it can change your life if you get pregnant. So it's unlikely that women anywhere will be blase about sex because it is very important to them that they have sex with the right man. The right man being one that will support them when they are pregnant, because that is a vulnerable state. And with humans children are helpless for a very long time. Women need someone to protect their kids, and they need a mate to protect them, until those kids are independent. Which is something like 20 years.
I'd say if you're sentient and male and intelligent sex is a big issue too. Because you want to make sure your kids are able to support their kids. Which require you give them a good start in life. And that takes time and money.
The fact is that humans are K selectionspecies par excellence. And that makes sex a big deal.
Actually I think in the absence of some mechanism like genetic memories, you probably need to be a K selection species to spread across the Universe. So if any aliens arrive in starships, I'd expect them not to be blase about sex either. Essentially if they evolved through a Darwinian process like we did, as opposed to some Lamarckian one which allowed genetic memories, the guys that run things will have a small number of offspring and try to get them through the alien equivalent of an Ivy League university
Sexual intercourse is meant to be an act performed in private for the two parties that love and care for each other deeply enough to create a stronger bond. When you put that on public display, the act is reduced to a trite sensuality Never have I met man in more dire need of spending an evening browsing 4chan.
Actually Vista is a Wine killer. I read that originally it would only support DirectX natively and OpenGL would be implemented over DirectX. Which would mean that hardware companies could only write a DirectX driver and the hardware would become even more DirectX oriented.
Bosses only have concern for one thing: Maximizing profits Well yeah, which is why if you release some software that pisses off some customer they will take the customer's side. If they didn't care about profits it would be much easier for them to take your side and agree that the customer was an idiot.
Believer me, I've worked in companies where people are very hard to fire and that was what happened.
Also, just to be pedantic: WINE is not an emulator. It's a reimplementation. Meaning, it doesn't emulate Windows, it is effectively a Windows. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulator#Emulators_in_computer_science
Emulation refers to the ability of a computer program or electronic device to imitate another program or device. Many printers, for example, are designed to emulate Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printers because so much software is written for HP printers. By emulating an HP printer, a printer can work with any software written for a real HP printer. Emulation "tricks" the running software into believing that a device is really some other device.
Sure sounds like Wine's Win32 reimplementation to me. It tricks the games into thinking they are running on Windows.
Some people mean by that that Wine must emulate each processor instruction of the Windows application. This is plain wrong. As Wine's name says: "Wine Is Not an Emulator": Wine does not emulate the Intel x86 processor.
But as to the "it must emulate x86 instructions to run a Win32 application on x86 Linux" theory as someone once put it, "only an idiot would think that".
Mind you there is a flaw to Wine. Consider a DirectX game running on Windows. DirectX is thin veneer over the driver which is probably a thin veneer over the hardware. NVidia and ATI know that the biggest market for fast graphics cards in PCs is DirectX games on Windows. It makes sense to optimize their hardware for this - ideally the hardware should implement DirectX functions more or less directly. Abstraction layers cost time, and they want to get the best 3dMark200x score, not be 3D API independent.
Now run the same game on Wine. Wine needs to map DirectX to OpenGL. And at best call into the NVidia or ATI OpenGL accelerated binary driver. But if the hardware is basically implementing DirectX directly, the driver needs to map OpenGL back into DirectX before it can pass stuff to it. Note the worst case, where the users use the open source driver is worse than this, because that doesn't know enough about the hardware to accelerate things optimally.
ATI are planning to drop support for accelerated OpenGL on Windows as of Vista. Which makes you wonder how well future ATI hardware will support OpenGL
Seriously, I'm sick of Americans/Canadians and people from capitalist countries whining on about how the profit motive corrupts things without having experienced a world where it is severely attenuated. Move to Sweden, work in a company there for a while and see how well it works.
So true. Not necessarily the targeting of certain North American countries, but still true nonetheless.
Actually people who work for the NHS or the BBC say the same sort of thing in the UK. And the Guardian and left wing papers will tend to sympathize with them, so it's not purely an American thing. But that doesn't annoy me as much as self described socialists from North America saying it, because at least the English people actually know what it means.
Then again, if you get all your news from the Guardian and BBC and work in the public sector you arguably don't know the downside of a missing profit motive because you have chosen friends and media that won't tell you it.
It's actually quite scary how easy it is for anyone, regardless of political beliefs, to live their whole lives in a free society without seeing those opinions challenged just by avoiding media which annoys them or that their friends regard as Right or Left wing propaganda. The media that they enjoy reading is essentially karma whoring - amplifying the facts that fit their preconceptions and attenuating the facts that don't. It certainly doesn't want to annoy its readers.
However, it'd be your responsibility to make sure that the original archive could be reproduced from those floppies, meaning that you'd have to test for bad sectors and everything else likely to strike more than 1:350 disks. "Bad sector eh? It worked fine here"
The worst thing about it is that quite often the profit motive is what makes people's bosses call them out on their self serving bullshit. If you look at companies where people can't be fired their bosses have much less ability to do that. And the end result is that people can talk their way out of doing anything except for their pet project which doesn't have any customers, or any users except for them and their friends. Everyone knows that it's bullshit, but because they can't be fired people know it's a bad idea to say anything.
Much like academia, really.
Seriosly, I'm sick of Americans/Canadians and people from capitalist countries whining on about how the profit motive corrupts things without having experienced a world where it is severly attenuated. Move to Sweden, work in a company there for a while and see how well it works.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider rutting ungulates or lekking in other species. What effect does a subordinate bragging have on the alpha male status of the boss or the desired alpha male status of internet trolls.
Let me tell you a story. Fresh out of university I got my first full time job. I worked in an office. Worked was actually a bit of misnomer, we were all so bored the guy next to me confessed to being so concerned about not having anything to do he typed ps -aux on his Sun occasionally to 'make shit scroll past when the boss walked past'. Someone else said 'you pop a lot of brain cells working here'.
Everyone wore suits to work, no one did any work as far as I could tell, and no one trusted anyone else. One guy came in with a new, slimline and expensive briefcase. All my coworkers crowded around him saying how cool it was. The boss walked in and headed for the middle of the crowd. He looked at the briefcase and said it was pretty cool. Then he looked at the hinges. They were actually a bit shoddy. He said something like 'I'd be happy if I got something like that in a Christmas cracker, but in something this expensive it's a bit of a disappointment'. The guy with the briefcase looked a bit crestfallen and I think he stopped bringing it to work after a couple of weeks. Especially since the only thing he had to put in it was a sandwich for lunch, which didn't fit as the boss pointed out.
Now do you understand?
SEBanken in Sweden gave out hardtokens. Initially it worked like this. To log on or make a transaction they sent you two 4 digit numbers. You entered a PIN number into the hardtoken to prove to it that you were not an imposter. Then you entered the two numbers and it signed them to give you a four digit number which you then entered into the bank site to make the transation.
Recently they improved it. Rather than two four digit numbers they sent one number which was the amount you were transferring and one which was opaque. So now if a MIM site is intercepting things, they can't change the amount your transferring. And you have to initiate the transfer in the seb site.
Like you say, it's not perfect but it's pretty good.
SSL certificates provide one thing, and one thing only: Encryption between the two ends using the certificate.
They do not, and never been able to, provide any verification of who is on either end. This is because literally one second after they are issued, regardless of the level of effort that goes into validating who is doing the buying, someone else can be in control of the certificate, legitimately or otherwise.
Now, I understand perfectly well that Verisign and its brethren have made a huge industry out of scamming consumers into thinking that identification is indeed something that a certificate provides; but that is marketing illusion and nothing more. Hokum and hand-waving.
SSL certificates provide one thing, and one thing only: Encryption between the two ends using the certificate.
They do not, and never been able to, provide any verification of who is on either end. This is because literally one second after they are issued, regardless of the level of effort that goes into validating who is doing the buying, someone else can be in control of the certificate, legitimately or otherwise.
That seems a bit purist to me. I want to go the the bank to transfer some cash. I fire up my browser and the browser checks that the certificate matches the domain. No I guess the bank paid Verisign a fee and Verisign used some secure courier service to send the a CD with the key on it. The bank install it on their servers and stick it in vault.Now, I understand perfectly well that Verisign and its brethren have made a huge industry out of scamming consumers into thinking that identification is indeed something that a certificate provides; but that is marketing illusion and nothing more. Hokum and hand-waving.
When I log on I enter a cryptic ID and some data from a hard token and the site shows me my account.
Now for someone to fake this they would need to poison DNS somehow, have a copy of the site certificate, and have access to the database that turns cryptic IDs into bank account numbers. Even then it doesn't help them, because I enter data from a hardtoken, not a pasword. But I've actually seen quite good fakes of sites that only require a password and the only sign they were fake was a warning about the cert not matching the domain.
It's not perfect, but it's not useless. Most real world security is like that actually. If you're alert and your browser warns you that something is hinky, it is useful to you.
O/T but have you noticed how if you post sensitive information like your password here SlashCode filters it to X's. Very nice idea.
Yeah, once you get past the initial hatred phase because of UAC prompts and it whining about being incompatible with Visual Studio 6.0 it's actually OK
VS 6.0 actually works ok too
I suppose in Rainman terms XP is a bit like a pair of old khaki slacks you got from K Mart and wear ever day. When they wore out you went back to K Mart and the new slacks were a slightly different style. You complained and complained and complained but K Mart wouldn't get you the old style. Eventually you get used to the new ones.
So you're saying not to protected the educated users because uneducated ones exist? Bear in mind that most corporate users are probably uneducated by the network admin is anything but, and an uneducated user with no admin rights can't do much damage.
The fact is the customers who know about security are corporate ones and they are quite able to forbid people from installing junk, by a mixture of technological measures like doman security policies and administrative ones like having their boss tell them not to install stuff themselves or they will fired. From the point of view of this sort of organisation, an OS with security features is secure. They don't care about uneducated users, because those users are not admin
Evolution is hardly a fairy tale, and you have failed as an organism.
"...intercourse is meant to be an act performed in private for the two parties that love and care for each other..."
That's your interpretation. It's not everyone's by any means.
Ask most men in their early 20s and you'll find that intercourse is an act performed wherever and whenever they can get away with it with whoever is looking good that day.
Ask a lot of young women of today and they'll tell you much the same (though probably a little less extreme).
Ask polyamourists, swingers, exhibitionists etc, you'll get a different answer every time.
What's "meant to be", that depends on who you ask. To me it sounds like a religious proclamation.
this is not to say I want to see fat people screwing in the streets, just that not everyone thinks the way you do.
People in their early 20's are not looking to have kids I think. Or maybe their bodies are pursuing an instinctive r Selection strategy but their brains play it safe and use birth control.Why? Because I can objectively judge the reasons for the existence of something without having to resort to emotion? Because I'm honest with myself about the nature of existence?
iawtcThat's interesting. I'm in Taiwan at the moment and people are not really prudish. But women still want relationships rather than one night stands. And I can't imagine them sunbathing topless and the like, unlike in Northern Europe
Actually, I've got a direct counter example to the idea that people's hangups about sex are caused by Christianity. I was at a PC tradeshow in Germany and Germans being Germans decided to have two rather ugly middle aged Germans, one man and one woman, walk naked through the show. What was funny was the looks of absolute disgust on the faces of the Taiwanese women on the booths. Now Germany seems to me to be a more Christian place than Taiwan. But Germans have a rather obnoxious habit of demonstrating their non-prudishness about nudity.
Hmm,
That is interesting reasoning however, you have completely avoided the fact that we have managed to disconnect reproduction from sex?
So afaict by YOUR very reasoning, sex should no longer be a "Big Issue" because it can now be practiced without needing to be concerned for the needs of offspring because they are only conceived when they are wanted and or ready for.
I thought someone would say that. But disconnecting sex from reproduction is very, very recent. The pill, which allowed women to control their fertility was only available from 1960 onward. Now the seriousness that people, particularly women, attach to sex has been tuned by evolution for thousands of years. So it's not too surprising that they are still cautious. Once we've had thousands of years of sex being zero consequence I guess we'll be like Bonobos. In fact to the extent that the seriousness attached to sex is determined culturally, I guess we'd have already got there but for Aids.
But even in an environment where sex is safe - no possibility of Aids or unwanted pregnancies - it still seems like an evolutionarily correct approach would be to have sex with someone you would be happy having kids with. Which because human children mature so slowly means someone you'd want to spend the next 20 years being faithful to. Otherwise you might waste your fertile period having safe sex with people you don't want to have kids with and miss breeding.
Incidentally I think the fact that women have a hard limit on their reproductive life is another reason for them being pickier than men about who they have sex with. Mind you, if you want to see your kids graduate from that Ivy League university, men have a limited reproductive life too. The limit is a bit softer but it is still there if you accept the K selection argument
Is symbian devel environment still considered as form of S/M or has it evolved into something usable during last 3 years? Haven't tried it since.
I'm sorry my code crashes on Arm with a KERN-EXEC 3 or sometimes a KERN-EXEC 0. I'll have to get back to you on that.Actually I don't believe that. Even in countries like Japan which do not have a Judeo Christian tradition there are taboos about sex and nudity. The fact is, if you're sentient and female sex is a big deal, because it can change your life if you get pregnant. So it's unlikely that women anywhere will be blase about sex because it is very important to them that they have sex with the right man. The right man being one that will support them when they are pregnant, because that is a vulnerable state. And with humans children are helpless for a very long time. Women need someone to protect their kids, and they need a mate to protect them, until those kids are independent. Which is something like 20 years.
I'd say if you're sentient and male and intelligent sex is a big issue too. Because you want to make sure your kids are able to support their kids. Which require you give them a good start in life. And that takes time and money.
The fact is that humans are K selectionspecies par excellence. And that makes sex a big deal.
Actually I think in the absence of some mechanism like genetic memories, you probably need to be a K selection species to spread across the Universe. So if any aliens arrive in starships, I'd expect them not to be blase about sex either. Essentially if they evolved through a Darwinian process like we did, as opposed to some Lamarckian one which allowed genetic memories, the guys that run things will have a small number of offspring and try to get them through the alien equivalent of an Ivy League university
Don't fine them, just announce extra holidays in really small print.
Actually Vista is a Wine killer. I read that originally it would only support DirectX natively and OpenGL would be implemented over DirectX. Which would mean that hardware companies could only write a DirectX driver and the hardware would become even more DirectX oriented.
Believer me, I've worked in companies where people are very hard to fire and that was what happened.
Sure sounds like Wine's Win32 reimplementation to me. It tricks the games into thinking they are running on Windows.
If you look at faq
http://www.winehq.org/site/myths#slow
Some people mean by that that Wine must emulate each processor instruction of the Windows application. This is plain wrong. As Wine's name says: "Wine Is Not an Emulator": Wine does not emulate the Intel x86 processor.But as to the "it must emulate x86 instructions to run a Win32 application on x86 Linux" theory as someone once put it, "only an idiot would think that".
Mind you there is a flaw to Wine. Consider a DirectX game running on Windows. DirectX is thin veneer over the driver which is probably a thin veneer over the hardware. NVidia and ATI know that the biggest market for fast graphics cards in PCs is DirectX games on Windows. It makes sense to optimize their hardware for this - ideally the hardware should implement DirectX functions more or less directly. Abstraction layers cost time, and they want to get the best 3dMark200x score, not be 3D API independent.
Now run the same game on Wine. Wine needs to map DirectX to OpenGL. And at best call into the NVidia or ATI OpenGL accelerated binary driver. But if the hardware is basically implementing DirectX directly, the driver needs to map OpenGL back into DirectX before it can pass stuff to it. Note the worst case, where the users use the open source driver is worse than this, because that doesn't know enough about the hardware to accelerate things optimally.
ATI are planning to drop support for accelerated OpenGL on Windows as of Vista. Which makes you wonder how well future ATI hardware will support OpenGL
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?ForumId=46&TopicId=11123
I read that NVidia don't support accelerated OpenGL on Linux. So if you have a game running on Wine 3D won't be accelerated at all.
And Microsoft will obviously do everything it can to kill accelerated OpenGL partly because it makes things like Wine pointless.
Actually people who work for the NHS or the BBC say the same sort of thing in the UK. And the Guardian and left wing papers will tend to sympathize with them, so it's not purely an American thing. But that doesn't annoy me as much as self described socialists from North America saying it, because at least the English people actually know what it means.
Then again, if you get all your news from the Guardian and BBC and work in the public sector you arguably don't know the downside of a missing profit motive because you have chosen friends and media that won't tell you it.
It's actually quite scary how easy it is for anyone, regardless of political beliefs, to live their whole lives in a free society without seeing those opinions challenged just by avoiding media which annoys them or that their friends regard as Right or Left wing propaganda. The media that they enjoy reading is essentially karma whoring - amplifying the facts that fit their preconceptions and attenuating the facts that don't. It certainly doesn't want to annoy its readers.
The worst thing about it is that quite often the profit motive is what makes people's bosses call them out on their self serving bullshit. If you look at companies where people can't be fired their bosses have much less ability to do that. And the end result is that people can talk their way out of doing anything except for their pet project which doesn't have any customers, or any users except for them and their friends. Everyone knows that it's bullshit, but because they can't be fired people know it's a bad idea to say anything.
Much like academia, really.
Seriosly, I'm sick of Americans/Canadians and people from capitalist countries whining on about how the profit motive corrupts things without having experienced a world where it is severly attenuated. Move to Sweden, work in a company there for a while and see how well it works.
Unions were formed to keep people from being essentially slave labor, and they depended on people actually believing in the oaths they took.
If you're 'slave labour' without a union then a union won't do you much good.