Parsing error... this is what happens when you try to post as someone else, APK. Simply keeping your post short and avoiding bold text isn't enough to hide the fact that this is one of your posts, APK. The giveaways include the insulting tone, complete lack of any actual information that might indicate why you are so superior to everyone else (oh, so you wrote a program, yippee), and your liberal use of the same core vocabulary. That's not to say that your vocabulary is limited, it is clearly not, but there is a small dictionary of words that readily identify your posts; and you've managed to stuff a few of them into this one-liner. Also, referring to yourself in the third person, now? So we can add schizophrenia to the list, alongside narcissism.
I know how to read just fine, the problem is that you think I even tried to read your series of off-topic (and yes, they are off-topic in the thread in which they were posted) wall-of-text replies. Let me ask, and you educate, since you're oh so great: if not proxies, what do you use and how do they differ from proxies? That is, how is what you're using not simply a proxy by another name? To put it another way, you are posting more than Slashdot would allow an AC to post from a single IP, so you must be using multiple connections, and a lot of them; either you have a couple hundred IP addresses at your disposal at your home or office and have set up a system that allows you to rapidly switch between them (<sarc>because that would be less complex than using proxies</sarc>), you're paying people to repost your trash (<sarc>because maintaining a network of paid sockpuppets is surely less complex than using a few proxies), or you're using proxies by whatever name you refer to them. And here's the kicker: If you're writing the material and paying others to post it, those people are proxies. So, either I've missed something or you're using proxies. Since you claim to not be using proxies, please, tell me what I've missed.
We're all waiting for you to educate us. You claim to be so great, show us the greatness.
And if that depressing insight is moderated as flamebait rather than insightful, perhaps I should consider that as confirmation. It's been a good run and my karma indicates that I will be missed; perhaps more than some of you realize.
There was actually a study done (Google is your friend) where they asked a group of people one single question: Are you a narcissist? They then gave each of those people a psych evaluation. I forget the exact correlation, but it was something like 90% of those who answered "Yes" were diagnosed as narcissistic by the psych eval and 90% of those who were diagnosed also answered "Yes" (and yes, those are two differing statements; the first indicated that 10% of those who answered "Yes" were not diagnosed as narcissists whole the second indicates that 10% of those who answered "No" were).
A 90% accuracy rate for such a simple test is amazing; it also indicates that your average narcissist knows of their "condition" and is completely fine with it.
In short, if you think bws111 is gonna start therapy on your advice, well... I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
If you can be farther to the right, be there. If someone wants to go faster than you, they WILL; if that means they have to change manes and weave through traffic to do it, you are causing them to have to perform additional, potentially unsafe maneuvers in order to avoid the obstacle (you) in their lane. Sure, speeding isn't exactly safe driving, but you are also driving unsafely by being in the incorrect lane and making yourself an obstacle to speeders who only have to weave through traffic in order to maintain their speed because people can't fucking stay to the right.
The number of times I've been almost clipped by a speeder trying to get by some asshat in the left lane not actively passing someone or even going faster than the traffic in any of the lanes to their right has caused me to be more angry and frustrated at those drivers than the speeders that are almost clipping me! I've taken to getting in front of these "wrong lane" drivers, and taking my foot off the gas while pointing to the right until they get the message. Once they get over, I get back over, and the line of cars behind them typically waves at me or gives me thumbs-up for getting them out of the way.
When did you lose the ability to got back/forward and view page source? Or navigate by typing a URL (or, rather, part of a URL as there's a helpful dropdown that lists past entries) or clicking a bookmark? Or to stop a page from loading? The current version of Firefox does all of these things unless you horribly, horribly break it with add-ons and/or vir(uses|ii). From what I've seen in the developer preview, these features aren't going anywhere, either, and your last complaint will be a thing of the past a couple releases from now.
If you're really having all of these issues, you should take your computer in to the Geek Squad, they're clearly more competent than you.
I could, but history shows that this typically is ineffective. It is only very recently that I have adopted this policy, so I've got plenty of history to go on.
Well, I don't feel that way. Any research that yields something like immortality would necessarily also attack the aging process - which would remove your objections.
It would remove one of my objections.
For reference, here's just one of my (already stated) objections that is not solved by attacking the aging process:
Death is a function of society's immune system; it keeps one person from gaining too much power and keeping it indefinitely
Please note that this was the first objection I made, so it's not even like you can claim you stopped reading after the objection you attacked and began your reply without having read this one.
As I've learned that it is impossible to argue against someone who doesn't acknowledge your responses, I'm out.
For both colds and stupid people driving, the answer is yes. A cold without symptoms is just a parasitic virus. My modern diet has more than enough calories for a parasite here and there.
That only holds up at controlled levels of infection. Unchecked (because you trained your immune system to ignore it and let it just do its thing), the common cold will eventually overtake your body. Before you say it, yes, I know we don't hear of people dying from the common cold; I'll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out why.
If there are stupid people on the road, what do I care if they can't hurt me?
And if that were the only symptom, we might be able to agree on that point. However, their stupidity is not simply limited to one activity, or even a handful; and it is certainly not limited solely to activities where we as a whole would benefit from giving up control. I certainly don't want to lose my right to vote and my ability to dissent from the actions of my government, but if we keep letting stupid people vote that's where we'll end up and it'll be "for our own good". So, how do we stop stupid people from voting? And who decides what's stupid?
The fact is that stupidity infects every facet of society, it soaks into everything we do, and it affects us in ways we simply cannot understand. Death is a function of society's immune system; it keeps one person from gaining too much power and keeping it indefinitely, it keeps society from being overrun with people whose bodies and minds have long grown incapable of productive contribution to humanity, and it should prevent us from being overrun by ignorance, as well. We just have to let it do its job.
As cool as I think self-driving cars are, and don't get me wrong I think they're awesome, they won't solve the problem you think they'll solve; to the contrary, they'll likely make it worse. There are plenty of stupid people out there who drive without a license or insurance, on expired registration. They're out there, everywhere, all day, every day. Even if you are correct and manual-driven vehicles become too expensive to insure, that won't affect these people; and they'll be unlikely to comply with a ban, either. There are simply too many of them for police to bother trying to do anything about it; plus, police and emergency vehicles will still need to be manually driven, as their routes and maneuvers often are based on non-traffic factors, of which the computer driving the car can't possibly have knowledge or understanding. I certainly don't want people without years of experience piloting a manually-driven vehicle behind the wheel of emergency vehicles which, by their very nature, require extremely skilled drivers in order to operate safely
For many of the same reasons I feel we should stop protecting stupid people (and, in fact, we encourage their stupidity, which also needs to stop), I also feel researching immortality and life-extension techniques is immoral; we already live far beyond the usefulness of our minds and bodies and far past our ability to enjoy comfort; at some point, life just becomes uncomfortable, but our society is afraid to just let it end when the time comes for it to end. Bear with me, I'll bring the point back around shortly.
Yes, I understand your argument. I'm familiar with natural selection.
Would it be cool to live forever? On an individual level, and assuming we're able to solve the body/mind degradation issues, yes, it would be. On a societal level, if we removed natural death, we'd have to implement some form of population control; we'd have to kill people off at some point. Who? The poor? The old? The disabled? Who decides? What gives them the right to decide? If nature stops killing us, we'll need natural selection to step in and take over. Probably best not to do away with it, then.
Social Darwinism and other such ideas have been tossed around for a long time. Somet
That's not true. People with compromised immune systems (e.g. smokers) tend to suffer fewer cold symptoms.
So symptoms are worse than illness, now? By subduing your body's natural response, you are making the illness worse, even if you don't feel the symptoms anymore; just like someone with a compromised immune system. You think we disagree, but you actually simply restated my exact point. Someone with a compromised immune system already has subdued natural responses and, thus, fewer symptoms; treating the symptoms by subduing those responses is, as you continue to correctly state, after your following incorrect statement, self-inflicted.
Most of the damage from a cold is your body's overreaction - it's self-inflicted.
And this is where you're wrong. Most of the symptoms of a cold are your body's overreaction, but any damage is the result of the infection. The symptoms of an untreated cold are very much self-inflicted; but, the only time the damage might be considered to be self-inflicted is when you do something to prolong the infection, like subduing your immune response so your body doesn't fight it off..
I'd be all for the natural selection route if it didn't risk the careful drivers as well.
So your solution is to do away with all drivers by automating the whole process? We can't kill off just the bad ones, so let's get rid of the whole lot. Right.
You do realize that, first of all, I was relating to stupidity in general and not just stupidity behind the wheel and, second, so many stupid people are currently endowed with the power to take out a large number of intelligent people with no risk of harm to themselves. Do you not see the value in increasing the risk of stupidity to the stupid? Let me lay it out for you: as the stupid take themselves and each other out, there will be fewer of them to take out the intelligent people.
Having completely missed that bit of obvious logic, though, I can understand why you're on the other side of the fence. You must be one of the rare ones that still has a sense of self preservation.
Right, it's like a cold. There's no cure and taking something that subdues your body's natural response actually makes things worse. Much like a cold, we should stop trying to cure it and stop treating it, as well.
Phrased differently, when you "treat" a cold, you make the cold easier to deal with on a by-moment basis, but you also make the cold last longer; you literally make it easier for the cold to be a cold. Likewise, when you "treat" stupid, you make the stupid easier to deal with on a by-moment basis, but you also make the stupid stupider; you literally make it easier for the stupid to be stupid. Stop treating either condition and the effective symptoms worsen for a short period as natural defenses ramp up and take care of the problem in short order.
A marketing exec once told me that controversy is the best campaign; the more polarizing, the better. People on the supporting side will throw more of their money in the hat to support their cause, and people on the opposing side will be intrigued by that. In short, you may not be wrong.
It takes a lot more than a million papercuts to kill a giant. Just because they're still here the following year doesn't mean they're not dying. Mind you, I'm not saying Apple is dying, merely pointing out the fallacy in your implied argument. If Microsoft is dying, as is also constantly implied here, and has been since shortly before Windows 8 was released, Apple could start their death spiral sometime in the next 5 years and die out at roughly the same time we could expect Microsoft to bite it; that's about a decade from now.
They fare worse than Microsoft in my assessment because Microsoft has historically shown that they will lay people off early on, change CEOs to try and find direction, and cling to their life-giving enterprise contracts above all else, while Apple has historically maintained their workforce in the face of adversity, stuck with the same CEO until they either leave (to come back and save the company at the last moment) or die, and has no enterprise contracts. That first contrast will be expensive to maintain; the second won't work again now that Jobs is dead, and the third, well, when they're circling the drain they'll be wishing they'd kept selling the XServe line and left the Mac Pro in a user-upgradeable tower configuration.
All hypothetical, of course; I don't think either MS or Apple are going anywhere in my lifetime. People are too weak to demand change and will live with whatever abuse a company throws at them out of sheer apathy. The Windows 10 interface is close enough to Windows 7 that most people will accept it and few will take the time to turn off the "spyware features" we keep seeing complaints about on tech sites. And even in tech circles, people are largely blind to the fact that Apple is treating their users increasingly more like their product than their customers.
You are atill missing my point. You CAN NOT fault the consumer for choosing poorly when their choice is based on FALSE INFORMATION and there is NO SOURCE OF CORRECT INFORMATION.
That is the situation we have right now, and the false information sounds plausoble enough that, absent any argument, it sounds right.
Furthermore, complete control implies that all options are available to everyone. I've demonstrated that they are not; some people can not afford unlimited, some don't live or work in the coverage areas of carriers who offer unlimited, some are under contracts and can't afford the ETF. I'm also not talking about years ago, either; as recently as 9mo ago, the MVNOs I looked at only offered 3g. Since most cell contracts run 2 or 3 years, here are plenty of people who are still on contract and can not switch unless they can afford the ETF and, then, only if their carrier is willing to unlock the phone out of a broken contract or they can afford another phone. At that point, it would take years of saved potential overages for them to just break even.
By your logic, it would seem that you think someone being made to do something at gunpoint was in complete control, as well. After all, they can simply not comply and accept getting shot. Wake up caal: that ain't complete control. That, just like most things in life (including choosing a cellular plan), is limited control. There are multiple variables that you DO NOT have control over, and that makes your control incomplete as fuck. Sure, you can not play along, but then you get shot; playing along means you maybe avoid that.
It does matter what the majority of carriers offer if the one that offers what you're looking for doesn't have coverage where you need to use it. You get what you can find or you do without, and most people won't simply do without, they just go with the lesser of the evils they have to choose from. "Ideal, if only there was coverage at work and at home" is functionally equivalent to "Useless", whereas "Has coverage and will work, but with caps" is the best most people can get. The root of the issue is that the carriers lie to people and tell them they can actually control their bill by controlling their data usage; while they can control their data usage (by only requesting the data they want) that doesn't really help control the bill, as the carrier will bill them for all data sent to their phone's IP address, requested or otherwise.
To hear the carriers tell it (and you have to keep in mind that the vast majority have no clue how things actually work, and that includes the carriers themselves for the most part), if you only browse the occasional mobile site you can get by on 200MB/mo, and they're probably right as long as they only bill you for the data you actually request. They don't, however, so you'll probably be fine most months but then, one month, your phone gets assigned (for, say, a few hours) an IP that was targeted by a DDoS meant for someone else (who had that IP at the time) and *BAM*, you've used a few GB.
The vast majority of people don't realize this is possible and the carriers deny it 'til they're blue in the face, but it is possible and you can be certain it does happen. The guy choosing the $10 200MB plan is likely choosing that because he will use Wi-Fi almost all of the time and doesn't want to spend $40 for something he does not plan to use. You can't fault him when every source of information he has available incorrectly tells him he *will* be able to control that data.
As for the indies, they by and far require that you buy a phone outright or already have one that is unlocked (read: off contract). When I say "by and far" I mean I have not encountered one that did not have this requirement. That makes them a non-starter for someone who doesn't have cash available to drop on a new phone (they'd need to finance or have it included in their plan) or for people who have phones locked to another carrier and still under contract. Additionally, if speed and availability is important, it is only fairly recently that the MVNOs were allowed to offer LTE services on the networks on which they ride, so many people would have ended up in contracts with providers who could actually over them what they're looking for in the time before the MVNOs were on that list.
Before T-Mobile started offering unlimited data, my choices were AT&T (with caps) or Verizon (Unlimited for nearly twice what I was paying AT&T). Sprint was out of the question because they didn't have worthwhile coverage in my area at the time and, with the exception of a local MVNO that only serviced my area (they've since expanded nationally, but at the time their footprint was a metro area) the MVNOs were still only offering 3g while AT&T and Verizon were already rolling out LTE and had been offering 4g for several years. That made the MVNOs a non-starter for me as, when I need to use mobile data, I need it to be fast. Doubling my bill was a non-starter, as well, so Verizon was right out the window. That left AT&T and a 4GB cap, which I did manage to stay within by tethering to my wife's grandfathered unlimited (my line was added after AT&T had dropped unlimited data) when I would be using it for any length of time. Sure, I could have gone with a PAYG plan and paid out the ass for everything, which would have given me the ability to control my spending in $10 increments; but AT&T offered a cheaper alternative that was actually something resembling workable for someone who might actually be concerned with controlling their spending in the first place. Have you priced out PAYG pl
Since I have unlimited data and wasn't whining, I'll assume these are your own words and not you sarcastically attempting to put words in my mouth. To that, I say STFU and get unlimited data, then. Or at least push for regulation so there are well-defined measurement methods and standards like there are with utilities; at least then the rates they charge you will be fair.
Slashdot Mirror
Parsing error... this is what happens when you try to post as someone else, APK. Simply keeping your post short and avoiding bold text isn't enough to hide the fact that this is one of your posts, APK. The giveaways include the insulting tone, complete lack of any actual information that might indicate why you are so superior to everyone else (oh, so you wrote a program, yippee), and your liberal use of the same core vocabulary. That's not to say that your vocabulary is limited, it is clearly not, but there is a small dictionary of words that readily identify your posts; and you've managed to stuff a few of them into this one-liner. Also, referring to yourself in the third person, now? So we can add schizophrenia to the list, alongside narcissism.
I know how to read just fine, the problem is that you think I even tried to read your series of off-topic (and yes, they are off-topic in the thread in which they were posted) wall-of-text replies. Let me ask, and you educate, since you're oh so great: if not proxies, what do you use and how do they differ from proxies? That is, how is what you're using not simply a proxy by another name? To put it another way, you are posting more than Slashdot would allow an AC to post from a single IP, so you must be using multiple connections, and a lot of them; either you have a couple hundred IP addresses at your disposal at your home or office and have set up a system that allows you to rapidly switch between them (<sarc>because that would be less complex than using proxies</sarc>), you're paying people to repost your trash (<sarc>because maintaining a network of paid sockpuppets is surely less complex than using a few proxies), or you're using proxies by whatever name you refer to them. And here's the kicker: If you're writing the material and paying others to post it, those people are proxies. So, either I've missed something or you're using proxies. Since you claim to not be using proxies, please, tell me what I've missed.
We're all waiting for you to educate us. You claim to be so great, show us the greatness.
And if that depressing insight is moderated as flamebait rather than insightful, perhaps I should consider that as confirmation. It's been a good run and my karma indicates that I will be missed; perhaps more than some of you realize.
How many proxies do you post through to make so many AC posts in one day? Seriously.
There was actually a study done (Google is your friend) where they asked a group of people one single question: Are you a narcissist? They then gave each of those people a psych evaluation. I forget the exact correlation, but it was something like 90% of those who answered "Yes" were diagnosed as narcissistic by the psych eval and 90% of those who were diagnosed also answered "Yes" (and yes, those are two differing statements; the first indicated that 10% of those who answered "Yes" were not diagnosed as narcissists whole the second indicates that 10% of those who answered "No" were).
A 90% accuracy rate for such a simple test is amazing; it also indicates that your average narcissist knows of their "condition" and is completely fine with it.
In short, if you think bws111 is gonna start therapy on your advice, well... I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
This. And to elaborate:
If you can be farther to the right, be there. If someone wants to go faster than you, they WILL; if that means they have to change manes and weave through traffic to do it, you are causing them to have to perform additional, potentially unsafe maneuvers in order to avoid the obstacle (you) in their lane. Sure, speeding isn't exactly safe driving, but you are also driving unsafely by being in the incorrect lane and making yourself an obstacle to speeders who only have to weave through traffic in order to maintain their speed because people can't fucking stay to the right.
The number of times I've been almost clipped by a speeder trying to get by some asshat in the left lane not actively passing someone or even going faster than the traffic in any of the lanes to their right has caused me to be more angry and frustrated at those drivers than the speeders that are almost clipping me! I've taken to getting in front of these "wrong lane" drivers, and taking my foot off the gas while pointing to the right until they get the message. Once they get over, I get back over, and the line of cars behind them typically waves at me or gives me thumbs-up for getting them out of the way.
feelsgoodman.jpg
I think I might love you.
When did you lose the ability to got back/forward and view page source? Or navigate by typing a URL (or, rather, part of a URL as there's a helpful dropdown that lists past entries) or clicking a bookmark? Or to stop a page from loading? The current version of Firefox does all of these things unless you horribly, horribly break it with add-ons and/or vir(uses|ii). From what I've seen in the developer preview, these features aren't going anywhere, either, and your last complaint will be a thing of the past a couple releases from now.
If you're really having all of these issues, you should take your computer in to the Geek Squad, they're clearly more competent than you.
If this is what passes for news in this crowd, I've been here too long and must be moving on.
Won't work, too much prior art.
I could, but history shows that this typically is ineffective. It is only very recently that I have adopted this policy, so I've got plenty of history to go on.
Well, I don't feel that way. Any research that yields something like immortality would necessarily also attack the aging process - which would remove your objections.
It would remove one of my objections. For reference, here's just one of my (already stated) objections that is not solved by attacking the aging process:
Death is a function of society's immune system; it keeps one person from gaining too much power and keeping it indefinitely
Please note that this was the first objection I made, so it's not even like you can claim you stopped reading after the objection you attacked and began your reply without having read this one.
As I've learned that it is impossible to argue against someone who doesn't acknowledge your responses, I'm out.
For both colds and stupid people driving, the answer is yes. A cold without symptoms is just a parasitic virus. My modern diet has more than enough calories for a parasite here and there.
That only holds up at controlled levels of infection. Unchecked (because you trained your immune system to ignore it and let it just do its thing), the common cold will eventually overtake your body. Before you say it, yes, I know we don't hear of people dying from the common cold; I'll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out why.
If there are stupid people on the road, what do I care if they can't hurt me?
And if that were the only symptom, we might be able to agree on that point. However, their stupidity is not simply limited to one activity, or even a handful; and it is certainly not limited solely to activities where we as a whole would benefit from giving up control. I certainly don't want to lose my right to vote and my ability to dissent from the actions of my government, but if we keep letting stupid people vote that's where we'll end up and it'll be "for our own good". So, how do we stop stupid people from voting? And who decides what's stupid?
The fact is that stupidity infects every facet of society, it soaks into everything we do, and it affects us in ways we simply cannot understand. Death is a function of society's immune system; it keeps one person from gaining too much power and keeping it indefinitely, it keeps society from being overrun with people whose bodies and minds have long grown incapable of productive contribution to humanity, and it should prevent us from being overrun by ignorance, as well. We just have to let it do its job.
As cool as I think self-driving cars are, and don't get me wrong I think they're awesome, they won't solve the problem you think they'll solve; to the contrary, they'll likely make it worse. There are plenty of stupid people out there who drive without a license or insurance, on expired registration. They're out there, everywhere, all day, every day. Even if you are correct and manual-driven vehicles become too expensive to insure, that won't affect these people; and they'll be unlikely to comply with a ban, either. There are simply too many of them for police to bother trying to do anything about it; plus, police and emergency vehicles will still need to be manually driven, as their routes and maneuvers often are based on non-traffic factors, of which the computer driving the car can't possibly have knowledge or understanding. I certainly don't want people without years of experience piloting a manually-driven vehicle behind the wheel of emergency vehicles which, by their very nature, require extremely skilled drivers in order to operate safely
For many of the same reasons I feel we should stop protecting stupid people (and, in fact, we encourage their stupidity, which also needs to stop), I also feel researching immortality and life-extension techniques is immoral; we already live far beyond the usefulness of our minds and bodies and far past our ability to enjoy comfort; at some point, life just becomes uncomfortable, but our society is afraid to just let it end when the time comes for it to end. Bear with me, I'll bring the point back around shortly.
Yes, I understand your argument. I'm familiar with natural selection.
Would it be cool to live forever? On an individual level, and assuming we're able to solve the body/mind degradation issues, yes, it would be. On a societal level, if we removed natural death, we'd have to implement some form of population control; we'd have to kill people off at some point. Who? The poor? The old? The disabled? Who decides? What gives them the right to decide? If nature stops killing us, we'll need natural selection to step in and take over. Probably best not to do away with it, then.
Social Darwinism and other such ideas have been tossed around for a long time. Somet
The whoosh is deafening...
That's not true. People with compromised immune systems (e.g. smokers) tend to suffer fewer cold symptoms.
So symptoms are worse than illness, now? By subduing your body's natural response, you are making the illness worse, even if you don't feel the symptoms anymore; just like someone with a compromised immune system. You think we disagree, but you actually simply restated my exact point. Someone with a compromised immune system already has subdued natural responses and, thus, fewer symptoms; treating the symptoms by subduing those responses is, as you continue to correctly state, after your following incorrect statement, self-inflicted.
Most of the damage from a cold is your body's overreaction - it's self-inflicted.
And this is where you're wrong. Most of the symptoms of a cold are your body's overreaction, but any damage is the result of the infection. The symptoms of an untreated cold are very much self-inflicted; but, the only time the damage might be considered to be self-inflicted is when you do something to prolong the infection, like subduing your immune response so your body doesn't fight it off..
I'd be all for the natural selection route if it didn't risk the careful drivers as well.
So your solution is to do away with all drivers by automating the whole process? We can't kill off just the bad ones, so let's get rid of the whole lot. Right.
You do realize that, first of all, I was relating to stupidity in general and not just stupidity behind the wheel and, second, so many stupid people are currently endowed with the power to take out a large number of intelligent people with no risk of harm to themselves. Do you not see the value in increasing the risk of stupidity to the stupid? Let me lay it out for you: as the stupid take themselves and each other out, there will be fewer of them to take out the intelligent people.
Having completely missed that bit of obvious logic, though, I can understand why you're on the other side of the fence. You must be one of the rare ones that still has a sense of self preservation.
Right, they weren't old at the time, but they are now.
And, of course, these self driving cars will be EVs or hybrids, so plenty of lithium to turn the fuzzy algorithms into "warm" fuzzies when they crash.
You can't cure stupidity
Right, it's like a cold. There's no cure and taking something that subdues your body's natural response actually makes things worse. Much like a cold, we should stop trying to cure it and stop treating it, as well.
Phrased differently, when you "treat" a cold, you make the cold easier to deal with on a by-moment basis, but you also make the cold last longer; you literally make it easier for the cold to be a cold. Likewise, when you "treat" stupid, you make the stupid easier to deal with on a by-moment basis, but you also make the stupid stupider; you literally make it easier for the stupid to be stupid. Stop treating either condition and the effective symptoms worsen for a short period as natural defenses ramp up and take care of the problem in short order.
I disagree...
LMFAO > ROFL because Shots.
A marketing exec once told me that controversy is the best campaign; the more polarizing, the better. People on the supporting side will throw more of their money in the hat to support their cause, and people on the opposing side will be intrigued by that. In short, you may not be wrong.
You mean it's their phone and you can buy if you want to.
It takes a lot more than a million papercuts to kill a giant. Just because they're still here the following year doesn't mean they're not dying. Mind you, I'm not saying Apple is dying, merely pointing out the fallacy in your implied argument. If Microsoft is dying, as is also constantly implied here, and has been since shortly before Windows 8 was released, Apple could start their death spiral sometime in the next 5 years and die out at roughly the same time we could expect Microsoft to bite it; that's about a decade from now.
They fare worse than Microsoft in my assessment because Microsoft has historically shown that they will lay people off early on, change CEOs to try and find direction, and cling to their life-giving enterprise contracts above all else, while Apple has historically maintained their workforce in the face of adversity, stuck with the same CEO until they either leave (to come back and save the company at the last moment) or die, and has no enterprise contracts. That first contrast will be expensive to maintain; the second won't work again now that Jobs is dead, and the third, well, when they're circling the drain they'll be wishing they'd kept selling the XServe line and left the Mac Pro in a user-upgradeable tower configuration.
All hypothetical, of course; I don't think either MS or Apple are going anywhere in my lifetime. People are too weak to demand change and will live with whatever abuse a company throws at them out of sheer apathy. The Windows 10 interface is close enough to Windows 7 that most people will accept it and few will take the time to turn off the "spyware features" we keep seeing complaints about on tech sites. And even in tech circles, people are largely blind to the fact that Apple is treating their users increasingly more like their product than their customers.
Pick one line and stick to it.
Indeed.
As far as using force to make someone choose a plan, I made that argument first.
And I pointed out the logical fallacy of your use of that argument.
Stop mimicking me.
I'd have to be doing so in the first place in order to stop. You might want to stick a pin in that ego before it swells up too much.
You are atill missing my point. You CAN NOT fault the consumer for choosing poorly when their choice is based on FALSE INFORMATION and there is NO SOURCE OF CORRECT INFORMATION.
That is the situation we have right now, and the false information sounds plausoble enough that, absent any argument, it sounds right.
Furthermore, complete control implies that all options are available to everyone. I've demonstrated that they are not; some people can not afford unlimited, some don't live or work in the coverage areas of carriers who offer unlimited, some are under contracts and can't afford the ETF. I'm also not talking about years ago, either; as recently as 9mo ago, the MVNOs I looked at only offered 3g. Since most cell contracts run 2 or 3 years, here are plenty of people who are still on contract and can not switch unless they can afford the ETF and, then, only if their carrier is willing to unlock the phone out of a broken contract or they can afford another phone. At that point, it would take years of saved potential overages for them to just break even.
By your logic, it would seem that you think someone being made to do something at gunpoint was in complete control, as well. After all, they can simply not comply and accept getting shot. Wake up caal: that ain't complete control. That, just like most things in life (including choosing a cellular plan), is limited control. There are multiple variables that you DO NOT have control over, and that makes your control incomplete as fuck. Sure, you can not play along, but then you get shot; playing along means you maybe avoid that.
It does matter what the majority of carriers offer if the one that offers what you're looking for doesn't have coverage where you need to use it. You get what you can find or you do without, and most people won't simply do without, they just go with the lesser of the evils they have to choose from. "Ideal, if only there was coverage at work and at home" is functionally equivalent to "Useless", whereas "Has coverage and will work, but with caps" is the best most people can get. The root of the issue is that the carriers lie to people and tell them they can actually control their bill by controlling their data usage; while they can control their data usage (by only requesting the data they want) that doesn't really help control the bill, as the carrier will bill them for all data sent to their phone's IP address, requested or otherwise.
To hear the carriers tell it (and you have to keep in mind that the vast majority have no clue how things actually work, and that includes the carriers themselves for the most part), if you only browse the occasional mobile site you can get by on 200MB/mo, and they're probably right as long as they only bill you for the data you actually request. They don't, however, so you'll probably be fine most months but then, one month, your phone gets assigned (for, say, a few hours) an IP that was targeted by a DDoS meant for someone else (who had that IP at the time) and *BAM*, you've used a few GB.
The vast majority of people don't realize this is possible and the carriers deny it 'til they're blue in the face, but it is possible and you can be certain it does happen. The guy choosing the $10 200MB plan is likely choosing that because he will use Wi-Fi almost all of the time and doesn't want to spend $40 for something he does not plan to use. You can't fault him when every source of information he has available incorrectly tells him he *will* be able to control that data.
As for the indies, they by and far require that you buy a phone outright or already have one that is unlocked (read: off contract). When I say "by and far" I mean I have not encountered one that did not have this requirement. That makes them a non-starter for someone who doesn't have cash available to drop on a new phone (they'd need to finance or have it included in their plan) or for people who have phones locked to another carrier and still under contract. Additionally, if speed and availability is important, it is only fairly recently that the MVNOs were allowed to offer LTE services on the networks on which they ride, so many people would have ended up in contracts with providers who could actually over them what they're looking for in the time before the MVNOs were on that list.
Before T-Mobile started offering unlimited data, my choices were AT&T (with caps) or Verizon (Unlimited for nearly twice what I was paying AT&T). Sprint was out of the question because they didn't have worthwhile coverage in my area at the time and, with the exception of a local MVNO that only serviced my area (they've since expanded nationally, but at the time their footprint was a metro area) the MVNOs were still only offering 3g while AT&T and Verizon were already rolling out LTE and had been offering 4g for several years. That made the MVNOs a non-starter for me as, when I need to use mobile data, I need it to be fast. Doubling my bill was a non-starter, as well, so Verizon was right out the window. That left AT&T and a 4GB cap, which I did manage to stay within by tethering to my wife's grandfathered unlimited (my line was added after AT&T had dropped unlimited data) when I would be using it for any length of time. Sure, I could have gone with a PAYG plan and paid out the ass for everything, which would have given me the ability to control my spending in $10 increments; but AT&T offered a cheaper alternative that was actually something resembling workable for someone who might actually be concerned with controlling their spending in the first place. Have you priced out PAYG pl
Since I have unlimited data and wasn't whining, I'll assume these are your own words and not you sarcastically attempting to put words in my mouth. To that, I say STFU and get unlimited data, then. Or at least push for regulation so there are well-defined measurement methods and standards like there are with utilities; at least then the rates they charge you will be fair.