I'm sorry but you are wrong unless by "electric car" you are talking about building lines in the road like a trolley. the electric car will NEVER be feasible until we have a MAJOR breakthrough in batteries. the Lithium batteries we have now 1.-weigh too much, 2.-Do NOT take extremes in heat and cold well at all 3.-cost more to replace than the car will frankly be worth.
So i'm sorry but electric cars are horseshit, just a big giant money pit. Now if you want to talk something like bio diesel or fuel cells or something like that? then YES with current technology we could make it work. But the batteries simply make electric cars a non starter for the poor which considering we have a country where nearly half pay no taxes because they fall below the line? Its just another waste of cash.
In fact as i have said before if you REALLY want to change the USA in a big way its not electric cars, its a "people's car" that gets 40MPG+ (if its diesel so it can be run on bio fuels so much the better) that comes in at under $10k. If you look up the stats you'll see the average age of a car on the road now is 11 years and the average MPG is barely 20, so by doubling that and at the same time making it cheap enough most of the working poor could afford one (and if you were to offer a cash for clunkers deal then, again so much the better) you could toss all those big gas hogs practically overnight and cut way the hell down on our need for oil.
But $30K+ electric cars are just toys for those that want to "feel green" and thanks to the battery issue its even doubtful they'll ever end up on the used car market in any real numbers so long term it don't do shit, sorry. Personally i'm all for saving energy but the electric car is just a bad idea all around.
Did you ever think that maybe, just maybe...yahoo mail users LIKE the current UI? The damned "everything is a chat" crap in Gmail is why i only use it for places like this (where the most I will be talking to someone is a single reply and i don't care about spam) while i use my yahoo for family and friends precisely BECAUSE of the UI. Thanks to its classic folders design i can have my mail nicely sorted just the way I like with a minimum of hassle and the same can be said of my customers.
BTW here is something that will bake the noodles of the geeks here, you know what from working on PCs 6 days a week i've found to be the most popular home page by a loooong shot? Yahoo.com, that's right, the web portal page that so many of us hate. The reason why is it has replaced the traditional paper for most folks, hell I even installed a separate browser just for my GF so when she is staying the weekend she can have everything just like at home, with all her bookmarks and her Yahoo portal. She has her little morning ritual where she opens the portal, glances through the headlines, checks her mail before moving on to her FB games.
So frankly I'd say the problem is NOT the mail or the portal at Yahoo and if I were in charge, hell if anybody that had a brain were in charge they could turn it around. How? Advertise. Playing around with the portal i found there is a ton of neat stuff there that frankly most don't know anything about. anybody try yahoo games? they have a ton of time wasters. they have got sports, comedy, a ton of really nice stuff, its just hidden way down on the far left bar in small print. That is STUPID. they should be highlighting a different one on the portal each week and making them easy to see and showing people how to get to them.
They have all the right pieces there, they just need someone to show them how to market all this stuff to the masses and build some buzz. Like I said my GF starts with the portal every morning and even she didn't know they offered a ton of free games, but now that i have showed her where they are she and her GFs all have a blast playing all the little flash games. just advertise Yahoo, show folks what you have.
Uhhh...not there isn't, this is just SOP when it comes to large corps. Look at how when AMD was suing Intel neither company tried to screw up their cross licensing agreements.
The problem friend is you are looking at this like how a person looks at it, where they don't go to court unless they hate someone or they were fucked over and they go to court because they can't do what they REALLY want to do which is go stomp the shit out of the other person.
Whereas the big corps often treat courts like a referee when there is a dispute. It doesn't mean they are gonna quit playing the game, it just means they need a ruling on the field. At the end of the day Samsung has parts that Apple wants and they aren't about to give up those parts and hamstring themselves just to go "Fuck you!" to Samsung. its not like cutting off that money would break Samsung anyway, they got plenty of others to buy from them, all it would do is hurt both in the short term, and probably Apple more considering how hot their consumer devices are ATM. It would be idiotic for Apple to screw up their supply line so they won't, simple as that. I bet after the ruling both companies will just go on like it never happened, that's just the way it works friend.
Chrome might but Comodo Dragon don't, it says in its UI string "AppleWebKit/536.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) " and then it has Chrome Safari and Comodo Dragon. so maybe they are just covering all the bases but at least one does give KHTML credit.
Uh huh...I raised my sister's two boys after she fell ill soon after the second was born and right through her passing and I'm damned proud i have NEVER embarrassed their asses, even when I soooooooo wanted to. to be fair the closest they ever got to doing something unruly in public was when the oldest was 12 and someone's cell went off in the game store and it was the Imperial March and he yelled out "Nerd Alert!". Of course I was too damned busy dying with the rest of the place from laughter to get onto the little guy.
But trust me friend, i know how damned old the kids can make you feel. you don't know how badly i want to scream when the oldest is on the college campus and all the girls are gaga over his "cool retro shirts!" and I just want to scream "That's NOT retro, those are my concert shirts the little shit stole!". You know you are too damned old when your concert shirts are considered retro and they are playing AC/DC as muzak in the local Wally World.
To me the whole Minecraft thing struck me as a video form of Lego but with more ways to put things together and hey! if folks like it why the fuck not. That was the whole fun of Lego when we were kids, just seeing where your imagination could take you and now you can do it as adults without having a big ass mess all over your table for days or weeks.
And as far as mods go? Again why the fuck not, if you have some idea that is cool but not quite doable with minecraft why not mod the thing? it isn't like we haven't seen games made better thanks to mods before. A couple of examples off the top of my head are all the Quake mods which (at least for me) were more fun that quake proper and Freelancer which last i checked STILL has people playing in huge worlds designed by modders.
As for when it turns into just an IDE I would say when it reaches the point you can't actually play the game proper, but just add shit to it. if you can still mine and craft with these mods attached I'd say its still a game, its just a game with more stuff in it. personally I bet the Minecraft designers are just happy people are finding ever more cool things to do with their little game.
Dude as a son whose dad went through the whole midlife crisis thing? Please do it FAR AWAY from your kids, at least a couple of states over. You remember what was hip in say...1975? The big ass medalion and your shirt half open? Yeah my dad was doing that...in 1998!
My GF at the time insisted on meeting my family and I tried my damnedest to keep her away from my father, but she wore me down. We were pulling out of the drive after and she just turned with a grin and said "full blown mid life crisis huh? Where is the sportscar?" and I pointed to the sport truck in the garage. When she saw it she busted out laughing, it was so damned obvious it was a mid life mobile.
So if you go for it, please do it AWAY from your kids, they'll thank you for it. In fact, go for the whole Asian thing, that it, nice and FAR AWAY with lots of exotic girls. Certainly better than seeing your dad dating waitresses young enough to be your sister.
Hey another Dragon user! Nice! Have you tried readability yet? Great extension, takes all those damned websites that spread the article over a dozen pages and just makes it one long page. If you use it with adblock it makes it like the old days, when you could actually read on the web, it even lets you set font size! Give it a spin if you haven't already, you won't regret it.
But I have to agree, since switching I haven't ran into any "IE" only sites, and the only site they gave as an example i couldn't get to load completely was some angry bird nut promo thing...like I really care about the angry birds pushing nuts.
They modded you funny but any musician will tell you for guitar amps you can't beat tubes. as a bassist I prefer my Trace solid state (one of the last Brit made before they got bought by Peavey) because its hard to get a truly clean tone out of a tube but frankly that is what makes them great for guitar as even a "clean" tube tone has a warm slightly compressed midrange that is just better than solid state.
Let us just all hope that Russian Sovtek factory never goes out of business or rock would be screwed. I have heard just about every kind of modeling amp out there but none of them compare to the tone of a Marshall Plexi or a Fender Bassman or Concert, hell even a mid 70s Peavey Mace tube head sounds better than the modeling amps. Sometimes the older tech is just better, that's all.
as for TFA I'd love to see something like that filter its way down to musical applications. Can you imagine a tube amp you could just throw in a rack and that would take as much abuse as a solid state? man that would be like heaven.
Not to mention it depends on what the store displays. I know in my local wally world many of the displays is some small description followed by a number so I have no doubt Star Wars lego would be "LEGO STWRS #(number)" which how many minimum wage earners are 1.-Gonna know what the value of some geek franchise toy is and 2.- Gonna risk pissing everyone off (including her manager) by holding up a line for a price check?
People seem to forget how damned crowded these places get at certain times and how much emphasis is placed on getting people through the lines. Hell my town is only around 15K people but you don't go to Wally World on Fri after 3PM or Sun after church because you can't even move. As long as the scanner dings they are just gonna try to get them through the line.
I think the bigger questions are "WTF was the VP of SAP doing pulling a cheap ass eBay scam like what your average meth head would pull? Is he a kelpto? Is the company in trouble? Is his pay THAT shitty?" These questions sound more relevant to me than how long he was able to pull this shit off.
Because frankly go to any Walmart at rush hour and the checkout girls ain't looking at shit, they are just rushing that shit across the scanner as fast as they can to try to lower the lines. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised that if in most of these chains they probably get bitched at if the line gets too long so looking at what the scanner pulls up is probably the last thing on their minds.
Not to mention the thing that has most likely got MSFT worried which is that....NOBODY CARES, they really don't. This is one thing I have to give Moz credit for, because even though I no longer use their browser (I use a Chromium variant call Dragon) they were the ones that FINALLY got websites away from the "works best in IE" bullshit.
Now it doesn't really matter WHAT you use, its all the same. They all render the same pages, they all have roughly the same behavior, so the only ones that care about this little pissing contest is the corps themselves. as far as the users are concerned they honestly don't give a shit if what they are using is IE, Chrome, FF, dragon, QTWeb, Opera, whatever, it all "just works" and for that I say thank fucking God that it does.
You should be modded up to 11 because THAT is it in a nutshell. Sure you can go cheap, even free, but you ARE going to have a bit of a learning curve and users will have to learn new things as well. If they aren't willing to do this then honestly you really don't have a choice, because if they want it "just like Exchange" well then your only choice is exchange friend, it would be like saying "We want it to be just like photoshop" and then expecting you to pull it off with something like Corel Draw. it just ain't gonna happen unless you have support from on high and the users are willing to learn along with you.
As far as an answer to the question Google apps and Zimbra I've heard good things about but since i know longer do corp I can't tell you how close they are to Exchange. Sadly the best answer I'd found is no longer available, Xandros Server was $500 flat and no user CALs and to the users it felt a hell of a lot like Exchange, they had even bought licenses to a lot of the MSServer APIs so it would function as a member server in a domain. it was about as plug and play with MSFT software as I had ever seen but although their website still exists its just a zombie, the company has been dead since 09.
Yeah and it didn't work which is the whole problem in a nutshell. They have already found roundup resistant weeds growing near fields planted with Monsanto crops so cross infection IS occurring and as for why that is bad? One word...Kudzu. That shit is already damned hard to kill and is spread all over the south like a cancer (you know, where a hell of a lot of the corn is grown?) and all we need is to give that shit resistance to most herbicides. You ever see what happens when kudzu takes over a property? I have, its a total loss. The amount of work it takes to get rid of the shit is just insane and poisonous snakes just love it, so short of killing it with fire or dumping tons of herbicides its a total write off.
Do I think Monsanto is a bunch of douches right up there with Goldman Sachs? Yes but in this case frankly it doesn't matter WHAT you think of the company, all that matters is their changes to the genes is getting into the weed population and with the hot wet summers we have in the south trying to keep the weeds at bay is hard enough without some dipshit company giving the weeds resistance so they can make a buck. Its short sighted and just as dumb as bringing in species that aren't native and expecting it all just to naturally balance out. it don't, they spread, shit gets nasty.
The whole point is moot anyway, because it would be like saying "What if they force Jews and Muslims to eat pork?" because the Christians would go bug fucking nuts if you EVAR even attempted it. For them you might just as well wear a "The antichrist rocks!" T-shirt if you ever try that shit. hell you'd be more likely to get them to go along with putting a camera in everyone's johns than to see this ever happen.
Now if you wanted to argue that sometime in the future we might somehow get rid of all religions? possible but doubtful. No attempt to Godwin but someone tried that once with what would be considered a very minor religion as far as population goes and couldn't pull it off and there are a hell of a lot more Christians and Muslims, plus there is that whole theory that "If God didn't exist we would have to make him up" simply because there are too many in the population that can't accept you only get one shot at it, also the whole "religion is the opiate of the masses" thing because it would be a hell of a lot harder to control the poor if you couldn't convince them they get some reward for being good little poor people.
So in the end you might as well be arguing what would happen if someone could fart their way into space, its just not gonna happen. hell I even doubt you could get it in the military because many of the most religious that I've met has been vets and sure as hell wouldn't have gone along with something right out of revelations.
So, which TM are you going for? The Linux makes me smart TM? Or maybe pay someone to fix it or its free you can't complain aka shit sandwich? From now on before pushing the same bullshit would you please go and pick the appropriate TM (which less than a dozen cover every FOSSie post ever placed here) so we can all save time? Thanks.
Except they WOULD because the new library would be dropped on their ass when they clicked that little "update now' button in the taskbar. BTW I have YET to see that God damned thing work right on ANY system, this is tech that fucking MSFT has gotten right for damned near a decade and you STILL can't even upgrade the thing without software and drivers being shit all over just as the one that bragged about Gentoo, aka Use Distro X because no matter how many broken distros you try they will ALWAYS come up with another answer for X and then in the same breath do as that joker did and say recompiling software is just fine.
Or are you HONESTLY gonna say that Linux is magical and never needs security updates? or that using old version with known vulnerabilities is fine in Linux because...what? RMS spreads magical toe funk? In the end its just the classic circle of the loon because it just goes round and round but it never gets fixed or ever gets better. sure they can do the initial install, but that is a static target, its the updates and upgrades and drivers that are the shit sandwich now and frankly haven't gotten any better in years.
I normally don't reply to ACs but your post intrigued me...WHAT new hardware? I have Win 7 running on a 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM in the shop, I have it in dual boot with XP because frankly as long as XP is getting updates (and the only thing I use the box for is downloading drivers and as a patch server) there really isn't a point in switching that particular box but you know what? it runs fine. I've also tried Win 7 on old P4s and Athlons, old laptops, and frankly as long as you have 1Gb or better (which surfing is so nasty with 512Mb now with all the bloated JS you'd be nuts to use less than 1gb anyway) then it runs just fine. Sure you won't get Aero, but who gives a shit? I turn most of the Aero bling off anyway as all those animations just slow me down. Not really missing anything by tossing Aero and for multimedia especially the stack in Win 7 is head and shoulders better than Xp.
So I really don't know what you are gonna see "break" because the only trouble I had with Win 7 was a CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) TV tuner that frankly didn't want to run on anything but XP Sp2. A quick trip to Woot! and I replaced it with a USB Tuner, problem solved and the new one supported digital which the old one didn't. The only trouble I've had with customers and Win 7 was one that had an OOOOOOOLLLLLLLLDDDDDDD Scanner, we are talking Win98 era crap, that I couldn't find a driver for, that's it. That's all. So I have to give MSFT credit for Win 7 as the amount of hardware that "just works" without even looking for a driver is just insane. So what EXACTLY is breaking?
I should just reply with a facepalm jpeg because honestly? that is all that is required. Did you even read your first fucking sentence before you posted it? All you have to do is RECOMPILE...yeah, because Suzy the checkout girl can FUCKING RECOMPILE SOFTWARE.
It is THIS, this right here, which is why people will gladly pirate Windows than EVAR take Linux, because even the fucking advocates are so damned indoctrinated they think that total bullshit like recompiles should just be ACCEPTED and that EVERYONE CAN DO THIS.
But you know what? it should NOT be accepted, in fact you should be muthafucking PISSED OFF because that is SHITTY DESIGN. it is the classic "shit sandwich" approach where someone says "hey, want a free dinner?" and when you say "Sure!" they plop down a shit sandwich and say "You have NO RIGHT to complain because its free" well bullshit! You have EVERY RIGHT to complain because there is no damned way in hell such Micky Mouse bullshit will ever, in a million fucking years, be tolerated by the general public.
If you can't bring your a game then go the fuck home. that first sentence says it all, broken Micky Mouse bullshit. The fact that you're so indoctrinated to believe that shit is acceptable is frankly fucking sad, just fucking sad.
And don't forget what affects many of us which is family. Sure YOU might not have a problem moving, but could you afford or even get the family members to move as well? in my area its Cox cable or AT&T DSL and that's it but while my GF would love it if I could move closer to her family the simple fact is i have two elderly relatives with health problems as well as a 17 year old child with serious health problems and his older brother is swamped in pre-med. if anything bad were to happen he just wouldn't be able to handle the extra pressure without slaughtering his grades. So i really have no choice but be the "go to" guy if anything goes wrong so I have to stay within a couple of hours distance max.
So it really isn't fair to blame someone for doing business with a douchebag company because many of us simply have no choice. Even if I had the extra funds (which I don't) to move both parents they have been in their homes for nearly 30 years now and good luck getting people in their 70s to give up their homes.
Funny I had the same thing when it came to Steam and games. I mean what is the point of pirating the things if Steam has them so damned cheap? you look in their under $10 section and there is more games than you could ever possibly play, and of course they have Steam sales several times a year that puts the biggest titles in the cheap bin right next to the great indie titles, so why bother?
In the end I still believe piracy is simply the market saying you are charging too much. Whether with piracy or a black market time and time again we have seen that when artificial scarcity is imposed for something that isn't actually scarce then the market simply routes around the problem and that is exactly what i believe piracy is. Does anybody believe that if Windows were $50 and Photoshop $75 that you would have massive piracy of these pieces of software? Of course not, just as I'm sure if the price of most games were cut in half frankly the increased sales would more than make up for any losses while wiping out a good chunk of the pirates. just look at how Valve made 1700% profit off of L4D when they put it at a $2 price point as an experiment. You just can't magically force something that isn't scarce to be scarce and insane prices on non scarce goods simply doesn't work in a market based system. I'm sure that if it weren't for piracy many alternative would spring up tomorrow as companies saw a chance to grab a chunk of the market but by letting the majority walk the big corps can keep the status quo.
Actually that is just another reason why Win 8 will bomb. Vista had nasty DRM to keep from being pirated, even a kill switch and what happened? it bombed. Its the pirates that end up working in the little shops that support their ass, its the pirates that are usually the "tech guy" in the family that the rest go to to find out what to buy, and they ALL avoided Vista like the black death. So along comes Win 7 and the DRM is so damned trivial to bypass that you don't even need a key with the pirate versions AND it gets full Windows updates! So what happened? Win 7 is a hit, all those pirates went all over the net gushing about it, told all their friends and family, who then went out and bought laptops with Win 7.
Maybe after Win 8 flops they'll fire Ballmer and bring in someone who isn't retarded. if they sold Win 7 starter for $35 and Win 7 Home for $50 then piracy of Windows would be nothing but a memory, at those prices nobody would bother. In the end whether they like it or not piracy is the market saying your product costs too much and without the pirates MSFT is in trouble because they all recommend staying with an older version and nobody buys the latest and greatest. Nice to see Ballmer didn't learn a damned thing from Vista, he should win the PHB of the year award for sure!
Then explain how a man growing wheat on his own land to feed his own chickens is covered under INTERSTATE COMMERCE. Go ahead and try, I dare you. It was THAT ruling that FDR pushed through that turned the commerce clause from being just a normal clause into "anything you want it to be" and it is only in the last few years that they have even attempted to reign it in at all.
But go ahead and try to say its not unconstitutional, because i have seen some real doozys trying to weasel word their way through that ruling and they simply can't. FDR wanted power he didn't have, he did an ass pull with the commerce clause and told the court "Rule my way or I'll stack the court until I get my way" and they basically laid down. That was the end of the impartial supreme court friend, it died on that day.
Chinese complain and guess what? Corps are already starting to move to Malaysia. Just as it started here its the cheap plastic items like buckets and trash cans that are currently made in Malaysia but if the Chinese ask for more they will find themselves on the breadlines as well.
And your second point is ENTIRELY GOVERNMENT WORK which can NOT happen if there is no CAPITAL to take from the workers to pay for that work! or sure DC thinks they can keep doing it without any pesky taxes but you get what we have now where our credit ratings slowly goes to shit and our entire system called capitalism collapses because whether you accept it or not China is a communist country with a centrally managed economy, they simply didn't cut themselves off from the west like the USSR did.
And none of your post addresses the central problem which is you can NOT have a capitalist country where the vast majority have no capital or way to make capital and actually survive! Nearly half of this country pays no taxes now because they fall below the poverty level after paying their bills, that simply is NOT sustainable, no matter how you slice it. the government can't magically pay for all that new infrastructure and planes and tanks without the population working so they can pay taxes and as the birth rate climbs you are NOT seeing more appear in the top 5% but damned near all the growth is in the bottom where they aren't making enough to pay taxes as it is. The entire system is designed so that once you are in the system its damned near impossible to get out, such as the relatives I know that are on disability and living hand to mouth. they could work...if they could afford their meds but they can't qualify for a job that would pay their meds and let them eat so they have no choice but to stay where they are at.
In the end, no matter how you slice it, the system is heading for a massive crash. if you are arguing that China will become the USA and the USA will become a big enough shithole that you can dump toxic waste and take all those jobs from China? it might be possible but by then the government will have already collapsed and you will have one of the largest nuclear powers in a state of revolution...not a pleasant thought friend, not pleasant at all. And I highly doubt the USA would end up with an orderly wind down like the USSR had, there are too many factions, too many poor, and simply not enough to go around. And in the end it all comes down to the fact you could wipe out more than 60% of the poor in this country tomorrow and frankly it wouldn't change the day to day of the country one damned bit. and that tells me you have too many people friend, just too many people.
No I'M sorry friend but people would rather pirate Windows than take Linux for free. After all if you pirate Windows you only have to install it once, most distros now will tell you in the forums the only way to upgrade without problems now is clean install which is bi-annually again for most. I have taken bog standard laptops and desktops and tried in place GUIs with every "consumer friendly" version of Linux and have yet to have one come through with 100% functional drivers, Wifi and that damned pulseaudio being the worst offenders. Finally with the vast majority of the software that people want its as simple as 'download and run" on Windows but most of the software people want simply doesn't exist on Linux or you get some ersatz that just isn't nearly as good, Gimp for Photoshop, Calc for Excel, Gnucash for Quickbooks, etc. They just aren't up to the level of the software they are emulating, sorry.
But what both you and the BSA fail to take into consideration is many of these companies WANT PIRACY TO EXIST. Lets take Windows which by mentioning Linux you are obviously trying to make a comparison to. Well Vista was harder to pirate, even had a kill switch, what happened? IT BOMBED. It also didn't run on netbooks which if MSFT wouldn't have dusted off XP and practically gave it away then linux might have had that market instead of being wiped out in less than a year. So what did MSFT do when it came to Win 7? It made its "anti-piracy" so damned trivial that damned near every pirate site had it cracked before RTM and what's more they made it so that pirate versions get full updates! All the pirate has to do is block a single Windows Update (that Windows will then happily hide if you wish and never show again) and Win 7 will get full updates for the life of the OS!
If MSFT wanted to wipe piracy completely off the map in the west they could do so tomorrow, all they have to do is offer Win 7 HP for $50 and Starter for $35. When they had that "Buy Win 7 HP for $50 or $100 for a triple pack" deal going on? I never saw a pirated version of Win 7, never. They were ALL Win 7 HP legits. MSFT killed that program and no every Craigslist is filled with $100 machines running Win 7 Ultimate.
But MSFT knows if they lower the price permanently the stock price will tank because wall street wants iMoney, so instead they just do a "wink wink nudge nudge" and made Win 7 the easiest OS to pirate EVAR, hell you don't even need a fricking key! Of course the one this does hurt is Linux because if piracy was wiped out then some corp might decide it was worth spending the money fixing the problems in Linux so as to undercut MSFT and give them some competition. This of course would not be in MSFT's best interests and since they get the majority of their money from OEMs and not refurbers or DIYers they would rather allow piracy than cut the price. You see the same thing with programs like Photoshop where they could cut the price and eliminate piracy but instead they just let students pirate the thing and then sell it to their employers that hire the kids who learned how to shop on the pirated version.
You mark my words, if the BSA managed to find some way to block piracy tomorrow it would be MSFT and Adobe along with several other corps that would be fighting it. They know that piracy is the market saying their price is too high and that those people would go somewhere else if they couldn't pirate so you have what you have now where piracy is allowed. I'm not sure if the MAFIAA cartel are likewise aware of this but they seem pretty damned worried about alternatives to their media channels and non MAFIAA content so I'm sure if they ever manage to wipe out piracy they too will find out the hard way that rather than pay their fees people will just go elsewhere.
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I'm sorry but you are wrong unless by "electric car" you are talking about building lines in the road like a trolley. the electric car will NEVER be feasible until we have a MAJOR breakthrough in batteries. the Lithium batteries we have now 1.-weigh too much, 2.-Do NOT take extremes in heat and cold well at all 3.-cost more to replace than the car will frankly be worth.
So i'm sorry but electric cars are horseshit, just a big giant money pit. Now if you want to talk something like bio diesel or fuel cells or something like that? then YES with current technology we could make it work. But the batteries simply make electric cars a non starter for the poor which considering we have a country where nearly half pay no taxes because they fall below the line? Its just another waste of cash.
In fact as i have said before if you REALLY want to change the USA in a big way its not electric cars, its a "people's car" that gets 40MPG+ (if its diesel so it can be run on bio fuels so much the better) that comes in at under $10k. If you look up the stats you'll see the average age of a car on the road now is 11 years and the average MPG is barely 20, so by doubling that and at the same time making it cheap enough most of the working poor could afford one (and if you were to offer a cash for clunkers deal then, again so much the better) you could toss all those big gas hogs practically overnight and cut way the hell down on our need for oil.
But $30K+ electric cars are just toys for those that want to "feel green" and thanks to the battery issue its even doubtful they'll ever end up on the used car market in any real numbers so long term it don't do shit, sorry. Personally i'm all for saving energy but the electric car is just a bad idea all around.
Did you ever think that maybe, just maybe...yahoo mail users LIKE the current UI? The damned "everything is a chat" crap in Gmail is why i only use it for places like this (where the most I will be talking to someone is a single reply and i don't care about spam) while i use my yahoo for family and friends precisely BECAUSE of the UI. Thanks to its classic folders design i can have my mail nicely sorted just the way I like with a minimum of hassle and the same can be said of my customers.
BTW here is something that will bake the noodles of the geeks here, you know what from working on PCs 6 days a week i've found to be the most popular home page by a loooong shot? Yahoo.com, that's right, the web portal page that so many of us hate. The reason why is it has replaced the traditional paper for most folks, hell I even installed a separate browser just for my GF so when she is staying the weekend she can have everything just like at home, with all her bookmarks and her Yahoo portal. She has her little morning ritual where she opens the portal, glances through the headlines, checks her mail before moving on to her FB games.
So frankly I'd say the problem is NOT the mail or the portal at Yahoo and if I were in charge, hell if anybody that had a brain were in charge they could turn it around. How? Advertise. Playing around with the portal i found there is a ton of neat stuff there that frankly most don't know anything about. anybody try yahoo games? they have a ton of time wasters. they have got sports, comedy, a ton of really nice stuff, its just hidden way down on the far left bar in small print. That is STUPID. they should be highlighting a different one on the portal each week and making them easy to see and showing people how to get to them.
They have all the right pieces there, they just need someone to show them how to market all this stuff to the masses and build some buzz. Like I said my GF starts with the portal every morning and even she didn't know they offered a ton of free games, but now that i have showed her where they are she and her GFs all have a blast playing all the little flash games. just advertise Yahoo, show folks what you have.
Uhhh...not there isn't, this is just SOP when it comes to large corps. Look at how when AMD was suing Intel neither company tried to screw up their cross licensing agreements.
The problem friend is you are looking at this like how a person looks at it, where they don't go to court unless they hate someone or they were fucked over and they go to court because they can't do what they REALLY want to do which is go stomp the shit out of the other person.
Whereas the big corps often treat courts like a referee when there is a dispute. It doesn't mean they are gonna quit playing the game, it just means they need a ruling on the field. At the end of the day Samsung has parts that Apple wants and they aren't about to give up those parts and hamstring themselves just to go "Fuck you!" to Samsung. its not like cutting off that money would break Samsung anyway, they got plenty of others to buy from them, all it would do is hurt both in the short term, and probably Apple more considering how hot their consumer devices are ATM. It would be idiotic for Apple to screw up their supply line so they won't, simple as that. I bet after the ruling both companies will just go on like it never happened, that's just the way it works friend.
Chrome might but Comodo Dragon don't, it says in its UI string "AppleWebKit/536.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) " and then it has Chrome Safari and Comodo Dragon. so maybe they are just covering all the bases but at least one does give KHTML credit.
Uh huh...I raised my sister's two boys after she fell ill soon after the second was born and right through her passing and I'm damned proud i have NEVER embarrassed their asses, even when I soooooooo wanted to. to be fair the closest they ever got to doing something unruly in public was when the oldest was 12 and someone's cell went off in the game store and it was the Imperial March and he yelled out "Nerd Alert!". Of course I was too damned busy dying with the rest of the place from laughter to get onto the little guy.
But trust me friend, i know how damned old the kids can make you feel. you don't know how badly i want to scream when the oldest is on the college campus and all the girls are gaga over his "cool retro shirts!" and I just want to scream "That's NOT retro, those are my concert shirts the little shit stole!". You know you are too damned old when your concert shirts are considered retro and they are playing AC/DC as muzak in the local Wally World.
To me the whole Minecraft thing struck me as a video form of Lego but with more ways to put things together and hey! if folks like it why the fuck not. That was the whole fun of Lego when we were kids, just seeing where your imagination could take you and now you can do it as adults without having a big ass mess all over your table for days or weeks.
And as far as mods go? Again why the fuck not, if you have some idea that is cool but not quite doable with minecraft why not mod the thing? it isn't like we haven't seen games made better thanks to mods before. A couple of examples off the top of my head are all the Quake mods which (at least for me) were more fun that quake proper and Freelancer which last i checked STILL has people playing in huge worlds designed by modders.
As for when it turns into just an IDE I would say when it reaches the point you can't actually play the game proper, but just add shit to it. if you can still mine and craft with these mods attached I'd say its still a game, its just a game with more stuff in it. personally I bet the Minecraft designers are just happy people are finding ever more cool things to do with their little game.
Dude as a son whose dad went through the whole midlife crisis thing? Please do it FAR AWAY from your kids, at least a couple of states over. You remember what was hip in say...1975? The big ass medalion and your shirt half open? Yeah my dad was doing that...in 1998!
My GF at the time insisted on meeting my family and I tried my damnedest to keep her away from my father, but she wore me down. We were pulling out of the drive after and she just turned with a grin and said "full blown mid life crisis huh? Where is the sportscar?" and I pointed to the sport truck in the garage. When she saw it she busted out laughing, it was so damned obvious it was a mid life mobile.
So if you go for it, please do it AWAY from your kids, they'll thank you for it. In fact, go for the whole Asian thing, that it, nice and FAR AWAY with lots of exotic girls. Certainly better than seeing your dad dating waitresses young enough to be your sister.
Hey another Dragon user! Nice! Have you tried readability yet? Great extension, takes all those damned websites that spread the article over a dozen pages and just makes it one long page. If you use it with adblock it makes it like the old days, when you could actually read on the web, it even lets you set font size! Give it a spin if you haven't already, you won't regret it.
But I have to agree, since switching I haven't ran into any "IE" only sites, and the only site they gave as an example i couldn't get to load completely was some angry bird nut promo thing...like I really care about the angry birds pushing nuts.
They modded you funny but any musician will tell you for guitar amps you can't beat tubes. as a bassist I prefer my Trace solid state (one of the last Brit made before they got bought by Peavey) because its hard to get a truly clean tone out of a tube but frankly that is what makes them great for guitar as even a "clean" tube tone has a warm slightly compressed midrange that is just better than solid state.
Let us just all hope that Russian Sovtek factory never goes out of business or rock would be screwed. I have heard just about every kind of modeling amp out there but none of them compare to the tone of a Marshall Plexi or a Fender Bassman or Concert, hell even a mid 70s Peavey Mace tube head sounds better than the modeling amps. Sometimes the older tech is just better, that's all.
as for TFA I'd love to see something like that filter its way down to musical applications. Can you imagine a tube amp you could just throw in a rack and that would take as much abuse as a solid state? man that would be like heaven.
Not to mention it depends on what the store displays. I know in my local wally world many of the displays is some small description followed by a number so I have no doubt Star Wars lego would be "LEGO STWRS #(number)" which how many minimum wage earners are 1.-Gonna know what the value of some geek franchise toy is and 2.- Gonna risk pissing everyone off (including her manager) by holding up a line for a price check?
People seem to forget how damned crowded these places get at certain times and how much emphasis is placed on getting people through the lines. Hell my town is only around 15K people but you don't go to Wally World on Fri after 3PM or Sun after church because you can't even move. As long as the scanner dings they are just gonna try to get them through the line.
I think the bigger questions are "WTF was the VP of SAP doing pulling a cheap ass eBay scam like what your average meth head would pull? Is he a kelpto? Is the company in trouble? Is his pay THAT shitty?" These questions sound more relevant to me than how long he was able to pull this shit off.
Because frankly go to any Walmart at rush hour and the checkout girls ain't looking at shit, they are just rushing that shit across the scanner as fast as they can to try to lower the lines. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised that if in most of these chains they probably get bitched at if the line gets too long so looking at what the scanner pulls up is probably the last thing on their minds.
Not to mention the thing that has most likely got MSFT worried which is that....NOBODY CARES, they really don't. This is one thing I have to give Moz credit for, because even though I no longer use their browser (I use a Chromium variant call Dragon) they were the ones that FINALLY got websites away from the "works best in IE" bullshit.
Now it doesn't really matter WHAT you use, its all the same. They all render the same pages, they all have roughly the same behavior, so the only ones that care about this little pissing contest is the corps themselves. as far as the users are concerned they honestly don't give a shit if what they are using is IE, Chrome, FF, dragon, QTWeb, Opera, whatever, it all "just works" and for that I say thank fucking God that it does.
You should be modded up to 11 because THAT is it in a nutshell. Sure you can go cheap, even free, but you ARE going to have a bit of a learning curve and users will have to learn new things as well. If they aren't willing to do this then honestly you really don't have a choice, because if they want it "just like Exchange" well then your only choice is exchange friend, it would be like saying "We want it to be just like photoshop" and then expecting you to pull it off with something like Corel Draw. it just ain't gonna happen unless you have support from on high and the users are willing to learn along with you.
As far as an answer to the question Google apps and Zimbra I've heard good things about but since i know longer do corp I can't tell you how close they are to Exchange. Sadly the best answer I'd found is no longer available, Xandros Server was $500 flat and no user CALs and to the users it felt a hell of a lot like Exchange, they had even bought licenses to a lot of the MSServer APIs so it would function as a member server in a domain. it was about as plug and play with MSFT software as I had ever seen but although their website still exists its just a zombie, the company has been dead since 09.
Yeah and it didn't work which is the whole problem in a nutshell. They have already found roundup resistant weeds growing near fields planted with Monsanto crops so cross infection IS occurring and as for why that is bad? One word...Kudzu. That shit is already damned hard to kill and is spread all over the south like a cancer (you know, where a hell of a lot of the corn is grown?) and all we need is to give that shit resistance to most herbicides. You ever see what happens when kudzu takes over a property? I have, its a total loss. The amount of work it takes to get rid of the shit is just insane and poisonous snakes just love it, so short of killing it with fire or dumping tons of herbicides its a total write off.
Do I think Monsanto is a bunch of douches right up there with Goldman Sachs? Yes but in this case frankly it doesn't matter WHAT you think of the company, all that matters is their changes to the genes is getting into the weed population and with the hot wet summers we have in the south trying to keep the weeds at bay is hard enough without some dipshit company giving the weeds resistance so they can make a buck. Its short sighted and just as dumb as bringing in species that aren't native and expecting it all just to naturally balance out. it don't, they spread, shit gets nasty.
The whole point is moot anyway, because it would be like saying "What if they force Jews and Muslims to eat pork?" because the Christians would go bug fucking nuts if you EVAR even attempted it. For them you might just as well wear a "The antichrist rocks!" T-shirt if you ever try that shit. hell you'd be more likely to get them to go along with putting a camera in everyone's johns than to see this ever happen.
Now if you wanted to argue that sometime in the future we might somehow get rid of all religions? possible but doubtful. No attempt to Godwin but someone tried that once with what would be considered a very minor religion as far as population goes and couldn't pull it off and there are a hell of a lot more Christians and Muslims, plus there is that whole theory that "If God didn't exist we would have to make him up" simply because there are too many in the population that can't accept you only get one shot at it, also the whole "religion is the opiate of the masses" thing because it would be a hell of a lot harder to control the poor if you couldn't convince them they get some reward for being good little poor people.
So in the end you might as well be arguing what would happen if someone could fart their way into space, its just not gonna happen. hell I even doubt you could get it in the military because many of the most religious that I've met has been vets and sure as hell wouldn't have gone along with something right out of revelations.
So, which TM are you going for? The Linux makes me smart TM? Or maybe pay someone to fix it or its free you can't complain aka shit sandwich? From now on before pushing the same bullshit would you please go and pick the appropriate TM (which less than a dozen cover every FOSSie post ever placed here) so we can all save time? Thanks.
Except they WOULD because the new library would be dropped on their ass when they clicked that little "update now' button in the taskbar. BTW I have YET to see that God damned thing work right on ANY system, this is tech that fucking MSFT has gotten right for damned near a decade and you STILL can't even upgrade the thing without software and drivers being shit all over just as the one that bragged about Gentoo, aka Use Distro X because no matter how many broken distros you try they will ALWAYS come up with another answer for X and then in the same breath do as that joker did and say recompiling software is just fine.
Or are you HONESTLY gonna say that Linux is magical and never needs security updates? or that using old version with known vulnerabilities is fine in Linux because...what? RMS spreads magical toe funk? In the end its just the classic circle of the loon because it just goes round and round but it never gets fixed or ever gets better. sure they can do the initial install, but that is a static target, its the updates and upgrades and drivers that are the shit sandwich now and frankly haven't gotten any better in years.
I normally don't reply to ACs but your post intrigued me...WHAT new hardware? I have Win 7 running on a 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM in the shop, I have it in dual boot with XP because frankly as long as XP is getting updates (and the only thing I use the box for is downloading drivers and as a patch server) there really isn't a point in switching that particular box but you know what? it runs fine. I've also tried Win 7 on old P4s and Athlons, old laptops, and frankly as long as you have 1Gb or better (which surfing is so nasty with 512Mb now with all the bloated JS you'd be nuts to use less than 1gb anyway) then it runs just fine. Sure you won't get Aero, but who gives a shit? I turn most of the Aero bling off anyway as all those animations just slow me down. Not really missing anything by tossing Aero and for multimedia especially the stack in Win 7 is head and shoulders better than Xp.
So I really don't know what you are gonna see "break" because the only trouble I had with Win 7 was a CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) TV tuner that frankly didn't want to run on anything but XP Sp2. A quick trip to Woot! and I replaced it with a USB Tuner, problem solved and the new one supported digital which the old one didn't. The only trouble I've had with customers and Win 7 was one that had an OOOOOOOLLLLLLLLDDDDDDD Scanner, we are talking Win98 era crap, that I couldn't find a driver for, that's it. That's all. So I have to give MSFT credit for Win 7 as the amount of hardware that "just works" without even looking for a driver is just insane. So what EXACTLY is breaking?
I should just reply with a facepalm jpeg because honestly? that is all that is required. Did you even read your first fucking sentence before you posted it? All you have to do is RECOMPILE...yeah, because Suzy the checkout girl can FUCKING RECOMPILE SOFTWARE.
It is THIS, this right here, which is why people will gladly pirate Windows than EVAR take Linux, because even the fucking advocates are so damned indoctrinated they think that total bullshit like recompiles should just be ACCEPTED and that EVERYONE CAN DO THIS.
But you know what? it should NOT be accepted, in fact you should be muthafucking PISSED OFF because that is SHITTY DESIGN. it is the classic "shit sandwich" approach where someone says "hey, want a free dinner?" and when you say "Sure!" they plop down a shit sandwich and say "You have NO RIGHT to complain because its free" well bullshit! You have EVERY RIGHT to complain because there is no damned way in hell such Micky Mouse bullshit will ever, in a million fucking years, be tolerated by the general public.
If you can't bring your a game then go the fuck home. that first sentence says it all, broken Micky Mouse bullshit. The fact that you're so indoctrinated to believe that shit is acceptable is frankly fucking sad, just fucking sad.
And don't forget what affects many of us which is family. Sure YOU might not have a problem moving, but could you afford or even get the family members to move as well? in my area its Cox cable or AT&T DSL and that's it but while my GF would love it if I could move closer to her family the simple fact is i have two elderly relatives with health problems as well as a 17 year old child with serious health problems and his older brother is swamped in pre-med. if anything bad were to happen he just wouldn't be able to handle the extra pressure without slaughtering his grades. So i really have no choice but be the "go to" guy if anything goes wrong so I have to stay within a couple of hours distance max.
So it really isn't fair to blame someone for doing business with a douchebag company because many of us simply have no choice. Even if I had the extra funds (which I don't) to move both parents they have been in their homes for nearly 30 years now and good luck getting people in their 70s to give up their homes.
Funny I had the same thing when it came to Steam and games. I mean what is the point of pirating the things if Steam has them so damned cheap? you look in their under $10 section and there is more games than you could ever possibly play, and of course they have Steam sales several times a year that puts the biggest titles in the cheap bin right next to the great indie titles, so why bother?
In the end I still believe piracy is simply the market saying you are charging too much. Whether with piracy or a black market time and time again we have seen that when artificial scarcity is imposed for something that isn't actually scarce then the market simply routes around the problem and that is exactly what i believe piracy is. Does anybody believe that if Windows were $50 and Photoshop $75 that you would have massive piracy of these pieces of software? Of course not, just as I'm sure if the price of most games were cut in half frankly the increased sales would more than make up for any losses while wiping out a good chunk of the pirates. just look at how Valve made 1700% profit off of L4D when they put it at a $2 price point as an experiment. You just can't magically force something that isn't scarce to be scarce and insane prices on non scarce goods simply doesn't work in a market based system. I'm sure that if it weren't for piracy many alternative would spring up tomorrow as companies saw a chance to grab a chunk of the market but by letting the majority walk the big corps can keep the status quo.
Actually that is just another reason why Win 8 will bomb. Vista had nasty DRM to keep from being pirated, even a kill switch and what happened? it bombed. Its the pirates that end up working in the little shops that support their ass, its the pirates that are usually the "tech guy" in the family that the rest go to to find out what to buy, and they ALL avoided Vista like the black death. So along comes Win 7 and the DRM is so damned trivial to bypass that you don't even need a key with the pirate versions AND it gets full Windows updates! So what happened? Win 7 is a hit, all those pirates went all over the net gushing about it, told all their friends and family, who then went out and bought laptops with Win 7.
Maybe after Win 8 flops they'll fire Ballmer and bring in someone who isn't retarded. if they sold Win 7 starter for $35 and Win 7 Home for $50 then piracy of Windows would be nothing but a memory, at those prices nobody would bother. In the end whether they like it or not piracy is the market saying your product costs too much and without the pirates MSFT is in trouble because they all recommend staying with an older version and nobody buys the latest and greatest. Nice to see Ballmer didn't learn a damned thing from Vista, he should win the PHB of the year award for sure!
Then explain how a man growing wheat on his own land to feed his own chickens is covered under INTERSTATE COMMERCE. Go ahead and try, I dare you. It was THAT ruling that FDR pushed through that turned the commerce clause from being just a normal clause into "anything you want it to be" and it is only in the last few years that they have even attempted to reign it in at all.
But go ahead and try to say its not unconstitutional, because i have seen some real doozys trying to weasel word their way through that ruling and they simply can't. FDR wanted power he didn't have, he did an ass pull with the commerce clause and told the court "Rule my way or I'll stack the court until I get my way" and they basically laid down. That was the end of the impartial supreme court friend, it died on that day.
Chinese complain and guess what? Corps are already starting to move to Malaysia. Just as it started here its the cheap plastic items like buckets and trash cans that are currently made in Malaysia but if the Chinese ask for more they will find themselves on the breadlines as well.
And your second point is ENTIRELY GOVERNMENT WORK which can NOT happen if there is no CAPITAL to take from the workers to pay for that work! or sure DC thinks they can keep doing it without any pesky taxes but you get what we have now where our credit ratings slowly goes to shit and our entire system called capitalism collapses because whether you accept it or not China is a communist country with a centrally managed economy, they simply didn't cut themselves off from the west like the USSR did.
And none of your post addresses the central problem which is you can NOT have a capitalist country where the vast majority have no capital or way to make capital and actually survive! Nearly half of this country pays no taxes now because they fall below the poverty level after paying their bills, that simply is NOT sustainable, no matter how you slice it. the government can't magically pay for all that new infrastructure and planes and tanks without the population working so they can pay taxes and as the birth rate climbs you are NOT seeing more appear in the top 5% but damned near all the growth is in the bottom where they aren't making enough to pay taxes as it is. The entire system is designed so that once you are in the system its damned near impossible to get out, such as the relatives I know that are on disability and living hand to mouth. they could work...if they could afford their meds but they can't qualify for a job that would pay their meds and let them eat so they have no choice but to stay where they are at.
In the end, no matter how you slice it, the system is heading for a massive crash. if you are arguing that China will become the USA and the USA will become a big enough shithole that you can dump toxic waste and take all those jobs from China? it might be possible but by then the government will have already collapsed and you will have one of the largest nuclear powers in a state of revolution...not a pleasant thought friend, not pleasant at all. And I highly doubt the USA would end up with an orderly wind down like the USSR had, there are too many factions, too many poor, and simply not enough to go around. And in the end it all comes down to the fact you could wipe out more than 60% of the poor in this country tomorrow and frankly it wouldn't change the day to day of the country one damned bit. and that tells me you have too many people friend, just too many people.
No I'M sorry friend but people would rather pirate Windows than take Linux for free. After all if you pirate Windows you only have to install it once, most distros now will tell you in the forums the only way to upgrade without problems now is clean install which is bi-annually again for most. I have taken bog standard laptops and desktops and tried in place GUIs with every "consumer friendly" version of Linux and have yet to have one come through with 100% functional drivers, Wifi and that damned pulseaudio being the worst offenders. Finally with the vast majority of the software that people want its as simple as 'download and run" on Windows but most of the software people want simply doesn't exist on Linux or you get some ersatz that just isn't nearly as good, Gimp for Photoshop, Calc for Excel, Gnucash for Quickbooks, etc. They just aren't up to the level of the software they are emulating, sorry.
But what both you and the BSA fail to take into consideration is many of these companies WANT PIRACY TO EXIST. Lets take Windows which by mentioning Linux you are obviously trying to make a comparison to. Well Vista was harder to pirate, even had a kill switch, what happened? IT BOMBED. It also didn't run on netbooks which if MSFT wouldn't have dusted off XP and practically gave it away then linux might have had that market instead of being wiped out in less than a year. So what did MSFT do when it came to Win 7? It made its "anti-piracy" so damned trivial that damned near every pirate site had it cracked before RTM and what's more they made it so that pirate versions get full updates! All the pirate has to do is block a single Windows Update (that Windows will then happily hide if you wish and never show again) and Win 7 will get full updates for the life of the OS!
If MSFT wanted to wipe piracy completely off the map in the west they could do so tomorrow, all they have to do is offer Win 7 HP for $50 and Starter for $35. When they had that "Buy Win 7 HP for $50 or $100 for a triple pack" deal going on? I never saw a pirated version of Win 7, never. They were ALL Win 7 HP legits. MSFT killed that program and no every Craigslist is filled with $100 machines running Win 7 Ultimate.
But MSFT knows if they lower the price permanently the stock price will tank because wall street wants iMoney, so instead they just do a "wink wink nudge nudge" and made Win 7 the easiest OS to pirate EVAR, hell you don't even need a fricking key! Of course the one this does hurt is Linux because if piracy was wiped out then some corp might decide it was worth spending the money fixing the problems in Linux so as to undercut MSFT and give them some competition. This of course would not be in MSFT's best interests and since they get the majority of their money from OEMs and not refurbers or DIYers they would rather allow piracy than cut the price. You see the same thing with programs like Photoshop where they could cut the price and eliminate piracy but instead they just let students pirate the thing and then sell it to their employers that hire the kids who learned how to shop on the pirated version.
You mark my words, if the BSA managed to find some way to block piracy tomorrow it would be MSFT and Adobe along with several other corps that would be fighting it. They know that piracy is the market saying their price is too high and that those people would go somewhere else if they couldn't pirate so you have what you have now where piracy is allowed. I'm not sure if the MAFIAA cartel are likewise aware of this but they seem pretty damned worried about alternatives to their media channels and non MAFIAA content so I'm sure if they ever manage to wipe out piracy they too will find out the hard way that rather than pay their fees people will just go elsewhere.