" herein lies the problem of your argument. Overt biases against capitalism, when arguing about the merits of capitalism aren't a very persuasive device."
And the problem with your response is that it's a straw man.
"Sponsorship? If you actually pushed yourself away from the computer once in a while, you might notice that the overwhelming majority of hobbyist runners, bikers, and fitness oriented people actually have to BUY their own shoes. "
Another straw man that has no relevance whatsoever to your point about _world class athletes wearing $200 shoes_.
"Everyone does it is an excuse? Then quit picking on just Nike, you freakin' hypocrite. "I answered your post" is not a justification, it's an excuse."
This sad attempt at a clever riposte is a fitting close to a post that had already established such notable intellectual low-points as transparently obvious attempts to build very shaky straw men and a childish proclivity to stereotype people you've never met.
"Become a vegetarian and loose the risk of contracting a scary prion disease from your food."
The incidence of that scary prion disease in humans is extremely low. Even the the UK, where 400,000 infected cattle entered the food chain in the 1980s, has only had 193 cases (suspected and confirmed) over 25 years in a population of over 60 million people, and their figures are more accurate than anyone else's because they're the only country to have instituted mandatory reporting of cases with symptoms that even suggest the disease to a specialist government surveillance unit. To put that in context, the UK had well over a thousand confirmed deaths from salmonella alone during the same period, and the probability of significant under-reporting in these cases is very high indeed (the real incidence is estimated to be _at least_ double the reported incidence).
"No- I'm not a vegetarian, but I am seriously considering dropping all animals from my diet except birds and fish."
There are a wide variety of diseases that can be caught from eating birds and fish, especially if they're not properly cooked (fish and shellfish can for example give you hepatitus-A, and birds and their eggs are a common vector for salmonella). As the recent outbreaks of salmonella from spinach indicate, you're not safe eating vegetables either, so the only way of ensuring you don't get any fatal diseases from food is to avoid eating.
"Have you the slightest idea what goes into the development of, let's say, a high-end running shoe?"
No, but I doubt that its costs show up in the rounding errors of Nike's 3.2 billion dollars of annual revenue.
"There is a reason that world-class atheletes use $200 running shoes (be it Nike, Saucony, whatever) and not $20 Roos."
And that reason is called sponsorship.
"And while it is easy to pick on Nike for oursourcing their manufacturing, you should probably look at, oh, I dunno, the ENTIRE TEXTILES INDUSTRY in the US. "
"Everyone else does it" is an excuse, not a justification. Note also New Balance, who are considered to be the manufacturer of the best running shoes bar none (they don't make any other type of shoe) by athletes who aren't paid to say otherwise still do a great deal of their manufacturing in the US.
"But Nike are the big dogs, so yeah, it's easy to pick on them to try to look all holy and smart and all."
I did not "pick on" Nike. You were the one who answered Slash.Poop's post about a Nike ad, and I answered your post.
"Besides, what's wrong with building an image"
Where did I say that there was anything wrong with it?
"Capacitor issues aside- that sucks. One of my clients has thousands of the affected machines and Dell only did the bare minimum. But I suspect any manufacturer could have been similarly affected and would have dealt with it the same way"
Lots of manufacturers did have the same problems because they all bought caps from the same (previously respected for quality) company. One of these was Apple, who responded by repairing or replacing all affected machines for a period of three years from their dates of purchase.
"Only five years in those technologies? I have over twenty years."
Read my post again, you obtuse purveyor of shite, because I said I spent _five years professionally programming the Atari ST and Amiga_, not that I'd had five years in the industry. The five years in question were 1986 to 1991, when both were commercially viable programming targets; my actual programming career began in 1977 on CP/M 2.2 systems.
"You even ignored the Amiga bridgecards and add on bus adapters that had Intel 80X86 processors in them that worked with the PC-Transformer emulator, slower than a 4.77Mhz 8088 Processor at 1/10th the speed?"
More shite. Neither Sidecar nor the later Bridgeboard (which was Sidecar on an internal card) required emulators such as PC-transformer because they had something called the Janus library that ran MS-DOS software natively in an Amiga window. So my original comment about PC-transformer (which benchmarked as a 300KHz(!!!) 80286) running MS-DOS software extremely slowly stands, despite your pathetic attempts to pretend otherwise.
"most likely you ignored the Video Toaster and other add on devices as well."
I did indeed, because Video Toaster wasn't a method of running MS-DOS software, so it had absolutely no relevance to any of the points being discussed.
"Well, I worked at Nike for a while in college, and all I can say is you don't understand their corporate culture if you think they are just selling an image."
I respectfully disagree, because Nike make their goods in the same third-world sweatshops as the companies who make $20 sports shoes, but are able to charge vastly more because of their carefully cultivates image.
"That's the nature of the clothing industry..it's part functionality, part fashion."
But the difference in price between an expensive brand and a cheap no-name import made at the same factories using the same materials and processes is image.
"Due to the Berne Convention, the US must respect the copyright laws of other nations."
The current Berne Conventions actually says that signatories must treat the copyrights of other signatory countries in precisely the same as their own copyrights unless this produces a situation where a foreign copyright holder gets a longer term than would be the case under their domestic copyright laws.
The minimum permissible terms laid out by the Berne Convention are as follows:
All works except those with specific terms below: 50 years after the death of the author or composer.
Cinematic works (this includes TV stuff): 50 years from first showing, or 50 years from completion in cases where the work hasn't been shown.
Phonorecords (includes all sound recordings); 50 years from release, or 50 years from being recorded if it hasn't been released.
"Considering Nike is selling stuff for the athletic lifestyle."
The fact that you see so many vastly overweight people wearing Nikes while stuffing enough junk food calories to support a small third world nation into their maws is an indication that they're selling the athletic image, not the life style.
"Actually Seinfeld was somewhat unique in *intentionally* creating characters that really didn't have any particular endearing qualities."
Unique in the US maybe, but the British New Wave started making sitcoms with characters that had no redeeming features in the early 1980s, e.g. The Young Ones (1982) and the first series of The Black Adder (sadly, subsequent series gradually changed the formula).
None of the gays I've met would give Gates or Seinfeld a second glance, especially if they're sandwiched between images of big guys in tight lower garments jumping on top of one another.
"My girlfriend who is as far from a techie as you can get told me she doesn't want Vista because she heard it was bad."
It's the same with my wife's two 20-something daughters and their friends: they haven't seen or used Vista (and the more bimboish friends don't seem to have any really clear idea of what it is), but they all "know it's rubbish because everyone says so".
The idea of flowering plants and grasses appearing in the Eocene was widely believed before the 1970s, when new fossil evidence began to push their origins back in time. The latest finds indicate that angiosperms may well have existed as far back as the Jurassic, so even literature written a decade ago is being superseded as new evidence is uncovered.
"If it's not reruns of old stuff from the US, It's knock-offs like [insert country here] Idol"
It's American Idol that's the knock-off of Pop Idol, which debuted in the UK in 2001, whereas American Idol was first shown in 2002. Now you know why guns are outlawed in the UK...
I suggest you read some of the current scientific literature, because tests on DNA from tooth pulp in mass plague graves have revealed no signs of the organisms that causes bubonic plague, so we don't actually have any real idea of what disease wiped out so many people.
We have therefore not figured anything out at all.
"The cheapest way to produce and distribute content isn't pressed media (a tiny fraction of $ per copy) but streaming (absolute 0$ cost for the media, only the bandwith costs)."
It also has the notable advantage from the viewpoint of media companies in cutting out middle-men such as distributors, dealers, and video hire companies, which means more profits for them.
On a slightly more serious note, this highlights the fact that people who say "music was so much better in the (insert decade)" tend to have conveniently forgotten a massive volume of utter shite that was put out during the same decade.
"is it possible then that both Dinosaurs and Mammals survived the K-T extinction, but that both groups lost their larger species as natural selection began favoring smaller body types?"
My personal opinion is that whatever killed off 70% of all life on this planet favoured animals with low metabolic rates that could go for long periods without eating (or in the case of birds, quickly fly to places that had been less severely affected). Many types of mammals, reptiles, and amphibians can do this via hibernation, and there are species of snakes and crocodilians can go for more than a year without eating nowadays, so it's reasonable to assume that this was also true for some of their Cretaceous ancestors.
Insects didn't even need those mechanisms to survive because they're so incredibly resilient that anything capable of wiping them out would have killed everything on land above the microscopic level, and where there are insects, there are also arachnids to prey on them.
Note that my comments here are restricted to land animals despite the fact that 70% of sea life was also wiped out. However, the reasons why some marine species survived while entire groups such as the ammonites disappeared after nearly 400 million years of existence is beyond the scope of this particular discussion.
"Additionally, dinosaurs would not have grown to the large sizes that they did if the O2 content of the atmosphere was anywhere near where it is today."
How then do you explain animals like the steppe mammoth, which lived until 370,000 years ago, and had tusks that weighed 7 tons (by way of context, the biggest of today's African bull elephants weigh 7 tons)? Or the paraceratherum, a mammal which lived until 20 million years ago (i.e. 45 million years after the end of the Creataceous), weighed 20 tons, and was 18 feet at the shoulder?
"placental mammals actively highlighted the egg-layer's weak link in their reproductive cycle by literally eating their eggs to extinction"
Just like they made snakes, crocodilians, turtles, and lizards extinct because they lay their eggs on land where mammals can eat them. Imagine what it would be like if we could see a real living crocodile or snake today instead of having to look at 65 million year-old fossils of them in museums because the placental mammals ate all their eggs.
"that's the best theory of dinosaur extinction"
Now all you need is a theory to explain how placental mammals caused the ammonites to die out along with the dinosaurs.
"Of course, it affected the Flying Reptiles (pternadon, etc.) as well, which weren't Dinosaurs.
And then there's the Marine Reptiles (ichthyosaurs, mososaurs, that lot), which weren't Dinosaurs."
Don't forget the ammonites, which also share the interesting distinction of stubbornly insisting on becoming extinct at the end of the Cretaceous despite not being dinosaurs.
Slashdot Mirror
" herein lies the problem of your argument. Overt biases against capitalism, when arguing about the merits of capitalism aren't a very persuasive device."
And the problem with your response is that it's a straw man.
"Sponsorship? If you actually pushed yourself away from the computer once in a while, you might notice that the overwhelming majority of hobbyist runners, bikers, and fitness oriented people actually have to BUY their own shoes. "
Another straw man that has no relevance whatsoever to your point about _world class athletes wearing $200 shoes_.
"Everyone does it is an excuse? Then quit picking on just Nike, you freakin' hypocrite. "I answered your post" is not a justification, it's an excuse."
This sad attempt at a clever riposte is a fitting close to a post that had already established such notable intellectual low-points as transparently obvious attempts to build very shaky straw men and a childish proclivity to stereotype people you've never met.
"Become a vegetarian and loose the risk of contracting a scary prion disease from your food."
The incidence of that scary prion disease in humans is extremely low. Even the the UK, where 400,000 infected cattle entered the food chain in the 1980s, has only had 193 cases (suspected and confirmed) over 25 years in a population of over 60 million people, and their figures are more accurate than anyone else's because they're the only country to have instituted mandatory reporting of cases with symptoms that even suggest the disease to a specialist government surveillance unit. To put that in context, the UK had well over a thousand confirmed deaths from salmonella alone during the same period, and the probability of significant under-reporting in these cases is very high indeed (the real incidence is estimated to be _at least_ double the reported incidence).
"No- I'm not a vegetarian, but I am seriously considering dropping all animals from my diet except birds and fish."
There are a wide variety of diseases that can be caught from eating birds and fish, especially if they're not properly cooked (fish and shellfish can for example give you hepatitus-A, and birds and their eggs are a common vector for salmonella). As the recent outbreaks of salmonella from spinach indicate, you're not safe eating vegetables either, so the only way of ensuring you don't get any fatal diseases from food is to avoid eating.
"Prions won't ever be classified as "living" unless they can reproduce themselves."
Viruses can't reproduce themselves, yet many scientists reckon they're a form of life.
"You are so very wrong."
If you say so.
"Have you the slightest idea what goes into the development of, let's say, a high-end running shoe?"
No, but I doubt that its costs show up in the rounding errors of Nike's 3.2 billion dollars of annual revenue.
"There is a reason that world-class atheletes use $200 running shoes (be it Nike, Saucony, whatever) and not $20 Roos."
And that reason is called sponsorship.
"And while it is easy to pick on Nike for oursourcing their manufacturing, you should probably look at, oh, I dunno, the ENTIRE TEXTILES INDUSTRY in the US. "
"Everyone else does it" is an excuse, not a justification. Note also New Balance, who are considered to be the manufacturer of the best running shoes bar none (they don't make any other type of shoe) by athletes who aren't paid to say otherwise still do a great deal of their manufacturing in the US.
"But Nike are the big dogs, so yeah, it's easy to pick on them to try to look all holy and smart and all."
I did not "pick on" Nike. You were the one who answered Slash.Poop's post about a Nike ad, and I answered your post.
"Besides, what's wrong with building an image"
Where did I say that there was anything wrong with it?
"Capacitor issues aside- that sucks. One of my clients has thousands of the affected machines and Dell only did the bare minimum. But I suspect any manufacturer could have been similarly affected and would have dealt with it the same way"
Lots of manufacturers did have the same problems because they all bought caps from the same (previously respected for quality) company. One of these was Apple, who responded by repairing or replacing all affected machines for a period of three years from their dates of purchase.
It would be nice if you could actually answer the points you're quoting with something other than transparently obvious straw men...
"Only five years in those technologies? I have over twenty years."
Read my post again, you obtuse purveyor of shite, because I said I spent _five years professionally programming the Atari ST and Amiga_, not that I'd had five years in the industry. The five years in question were 1986 to 1991, when both were commercially viable programming targets; my actual programming career began in 1977 on CP/M 2.2 systems.
"You even ignored the Amiga bridgecards and add on bus adapters that had Intel 80X86 processors in them that worked with the PC-Transformer emulator, slower than a 4.77Mhz 8088 Processor at 1/10th the speed?"
More shite. Neither Sidecar nor the later Bridgeboard (which was Sidecar on an internal card) required emulators such as PC-transformer because they had something called the Janus library that ran MS-DOS software natively in an Amiga window. So my original comment about PC-transformer (which benchmarked as a 300KHz(!!!) 80286) running MS-DOS software extremely slowly stands, despite your pathetic attempts to pretend otherwise.
"most likely you ignored the Video Toaster and other add on devices as well."
I did indeed, because Video Toaster wasn't a method of running MS-DOS software, so it had absolutely no relevance to any of the points being discussed.
"Well, I worked at Nike for a while in college, and all I can say is you don't understand their corporate culture if you think they are just selling an image."
I respectfully disagree, because Nike make their goods in the same third-world sweatshops as the companies who make $20 sports shoes, but are able to charge vastly more because of their carefully cultivates image.
"That's the nature of the clothing industry..it's part functionality, part fashion."
But the difference in price between an expensive brand and a cheap no-name import made at the same factories using the same materials and processes is image.
"Due to the Berne Convention, the US must respect the copyright laws of other nations."
The current Berne Conventions actually says that signatories must treat the copyrights of other signatory countries in precisely the same as their own copyrights unless this produces a situation where a foreign copyright holder gets a longer term than would be the case under their domestic copyright laws.
The minimum permissible terms laid out by the Berne Convention are as follows:
All works except those with specific terms below: 50 years after the death of the author or composer.
Cinematic works (this includes TV stuff): 50 years from first showing, or 50 years from completion in cases where the work hasn't been shown.
Phonorecords (includes all sound recordings); 50 years from release, or 50 years from being recorded if it hasn't been released.
Photographs: 25 years.
"Considering Nike is selling stuff for the athletic lifestyle."
The fact that you see so many vastly overweight people wearing Nikes while stuffing enough junk food calories to support a small third world nation into their maws is an indication that they're selling the athletic image, not the life style.
"Actually Seinfeld was somewhat unique in *intentionally* creating characters that really didn't have any particular endearing qualities."
Unique in the US maybe, but the British New Wave started making sitcoms with characters that had no redeeming features in the early 1980s, e.g. The Young Ones (1982) and the first series of The Black Adder (sadly, subsequent series gradually changed the formula).
Because, like its namesake, it's a shiny shell wrapped around a vicious bastard.
"Was this, perchance, a gay bar?"
None of the gays I've met would give Gates or Seinfeld a second glance, especially if they're sandwiched between images of big guys in tight lower garments jumping on top of one another.
"My girlfriend who is as far from a techie as you can get told me she doesn't want Vista because she heard it was bad."
It's the same with my wife's two 20-something daughters and their friends: they haven't seen or used Vista (and the more bimboish friends don't seem to have any really clear idea of what it is), but they all "know it's rubbish because everyone says so".
The idea of flowering plants and grasses appearing in the Eocene was widely believed before the 1970s, when new fossil evidence began to push their origins back in time. The latest finds indicate that angiosperms may well have existed as far back as the Jurassic, so even literature written a decade ago is being superseded as new evidence is uncovered.
"If it's not reruns of old stuff from the US, It's knock-offs like [insert country here] Idol"
It's American Idol that's the knock-off of Pop Idol, which debuted in the UK in 2001, whereas American Idol was first shown in 2002. Now you know why guns are outlawed in the UK...
I suggest you read some of the current scientific literature, because tests on DNA from tooth pulp in mass plague graves have revealed no signs of the organisms that causes bubonic plague, so we don't actually have any real idea of what disease wiped out so many people.
We have therefore not figured anything out at all.
"Why do gamers prefer 75fps to 24 (regardless of the quality of the display)? The eye can't really discern the difference, right?"
The eye can easily tell the difference when there's no motion blur on individual frames.
"The cheapest way to produce and distribute content isn't pressed media (a tiny fraction of $ per copy) but streaming (absolute 0$ cost for the media, only the bandwith costs)."
It also has the notable advantage from the viewpoint of media companies in cutting out middle-men such as distributors, dealers, and video hire companies, which means more profits for them.
On a slightly more serious note, this highlights the fact that people who say "music was so much better in the (insert decade)" tend to have conveniently forgotten a massive volume of utter shite that was put out during the same decade.
"is it possible then that both Dinosaurs and Mammals survived the K-T extinction, but that both groups lost their larger species as natural selection began favoring smaller body types?"
My personal opinion is that whatever killed off 70% of all life on this planet favoured animals with low metabolic rates that could go for long periods without eating (or in the case of birds, quickly fly to places that had been less severely affected). Many types of mammals, reptiles, and amphibians can do this via hibernation, and there are species of snakes and crocodilians can go for more than a year without eating nowadays, so it's reasonable to assume that this was also true for some of their Cretaceous ancestors.
Insects didn't even need those mechanisms to survive because they're so incredibly resilient that anything capable of wiping them out would have killed everything on land above the microscopic level, and where there are insects, there are also arachnids to prey on them.
Note that my comments here are restricted to land animals despite the fact that 70% of sea life was also wiped out. However, the reasons why some marine species survived while entire groups such as the ammonites disappeared after nearly 400 million years of existence is beyond the scope of this particular discussion.
" That gives a plausable story for how an asteroid / volcanoes could *cause* an explosion in flowering plants."
Not really, because flowering plants had been steadily displacing other types throughout the Cretaceous anyway.
"Additionally, dinosaurs would not have grown to the large sizes that they did if the O2 content of the atmosphere was anywhere near where it is today."
How then do you explain animals like the steppe mammoth, which lived until 370,000 years ago, and had tusks that weighed 7 tons (by way of context, the biggest of today's African bull elephants weigh 7 tons)? Or the paraceratherum, a mammal which lived until 20 million years ago (i.e. 45 million years after the end of the Creataceous), weighed 20 tons, and was 18 feet at the shoulder?
"placental mammals actively highlighted the egg-layer's weak link in their reproductive cycle by literally eating their eggs to extinction"
Just like they made snakes, crocodilians, turtles, and lizards extinct because they lay their eggs on land where mammals can eat them. Imagine what it would be like if we could see a real living crocodile or snake today instead of having to look at 65 million year-old fossils of them in museums because the placental mammals ate all their eggs.
"that's the best theory of dinosaur extinction"
Now all you need is a theory to explain how placental mammals caused the ammonites to die out along with the dinosaurs.
"Of course, it affected the Flying Reptiles (pternadon, etc.) as well, which weren't Dinosaurs.
And then there's the Marine Reptiles (ichthyosaurs, mososaurs, that lot), which weren't Dinosaurs."
Don't forget the ammonites, which also share the interesting distinction of stubbornly insisting on becoming extinct at the end of the Cretaceous despite not being dinosaurs.