Yes, but I'm not buying an iPhone; higher price for a worse phone? You have to be kidding.
this isn't some youth movement where it makes sense to say "when I was young it was all better."
Most things weren't better; the environment, health care, tech, most things have improved. But corporations at least pretended to be honest, and mostly were to their customers.
Anyway, the examples you list are very minor and not even a big deal
Deliberately installing malware that cripples your customer's computer is no big deal? Removing features after your customer paid for the product is no big deal? Sony has done both, IMO only an accredited idiot would buy anything from them. Oracle refusing to patch gaping holes is no big deal?
You've been frog boiled, son. Wake up. Stop giving your money to people who fuck you over!
I like windows 8 fine, although I use a Mac
Yeah, same here, I like W8 fine too, because I don't and won't use it either; one box runs Linux, one XP, and one W7 (which in many ways is less functional than XP).
They pale in comparison to products that actually hurt people, like cars with known, dangerous design flaws or amphetamine diet pills or watches with Radium.
Notice that the Pinto and Vega both died? When the flaws were revealed, the products bombed (well, the Pinto bombed, they couldn't sell Vegas). Amphetamines were prescripton-only since the fifties. And watches haven't had radium since long before I was born; glow in the dark watches weren't radioactive.
Surely when you were young there were products which changed in ways that many people didn't particularly care for, but were ultimately not considered important and still sold. For instance, a '72 Mustang doesn't look as cool as a '71 Mustang.
The US auto industry almost died because they took customers for granted, when the customers started buying Japanese cars instead. That just doesn't happen these days.
Unfortunately most measures to legalize also involve heavy taxation as a selling point that will probably continue to artificially inflate the price of cannabis.
State tax in Illinois is $1.98 per pack, plus a $1.01 federal tax, plus local and sales taxes. You can get a pack of generics here for $5, so 2/3ds (more because there's sales tax) of the price is tax.
There is an ounce of tobacco in a pack of cigarettes. How much is an ounce of weed?
Of course, there aren't any studies of whether smoking pot causes the same instances of emphysema, cancer, and other diseases that can happen from smoking anything.
Studies have been done. More than one showed a solid correlation between smoking pot and COPD (the linked article doesn't mention it) and what I read was short on details, but a Washington Post article was detailed. Excerpt:
The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.
"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."
Earlier work established that marijuana does contain cancer-causing chemicals as potentially harmful as those in tobacco, he said. However, marijuana also contains the chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous.
Tashkin's study, funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Drug Abuse, involved 1,200 people in Los Angeles who had lung, neck or head cancer and an additional 1,040 people without cancer matched by age, sex and neighborhood.
How is an insurance agency supposed to do something about your health?
That's exactly the point. Sheesh, reading problems, AC? The insurance companies are leeches who don't do anything to make you well. Your "Exercise, eat healthy, don't smoke, don't drink, don't do drugs" is just stupid. Take Rocky, a construction worker I knew who didn't smoke or do drugs (and there are no fat construction workers) died of a heart attack at age 42.
PEOPLE ARE DYING FROM LACK OF HEALTH CARE. We as a nation should be ashamed.
I'm a veteran and know a lot of veterans (mostly vietnam veterans). I'm very glad that veteran homelessness is dropping, applaud WalMart for saying they'll hire any veteran that applies, but the US treats its veterans abysmally. One fellow I know needs viagra to make love to his wife, but the VA will only prescribe cialis, which doesn't work for him. I hear worse stories all the time.
I'm troubled by the new statistic that says more Afghanistan soldiers deaths are by their own hand rather than by enemy fire. Why aren't these men and women diagnosed and treated before they become casualties?
As to "there's plenty of work", that's bullshit. We still have high unemployment; the jobs aren't there.
Get some perspective! Windows 8 look like a stupid tablet, whine whine whine!
I'm 60, in my day corporations couldn't get away with this nonsense because they knew we wouldn't stand for it. I can't understand why you kids have no immunity to advertising and propaganda.
If the new iPhone had come out when we were your age it would have bombed badly, but your generation gives all sorts of excuses to sociopaths. I find it both sad and hilarious.
I don't need a lot of the "functionality" that seems to important to web developers these days.
Indeed, and newspapers are the worst. All the ads and other crap like javascript "toolbars" make their sites a royal pain. My monitor is widescreen, so USA Toady's TWO "toolbars" are especially egregious. The local paper (SJ-R) has an "up to the minute news" popunder. Good way to run off prospective readers! Are these idiots all on crack? A newspaper should need nothing but plain vanilla HTML. Their "tools" just get in the user's way. It's worse at work (I'm home sick today) where they use IE7 and often content is covered by ads!
I find it to be a decent example of how not to treat your users.
In their defense, the 20th century is over. What company doesn't shit on their customers these days? From MS's W8 to Sony's XCP and otherOS, Apple's "you're holding it wrong" and its replacing Google Maps with a turd sandwich, Oracle's refusal to fix Java bugs until the government gets involved... fucking over your customer is the new normal.
It's one of many downsides to a global economy. With seven billion prospective customers you can afford to target only those who are stupid and lack self-respect. The rest of us are boned, all we can do is bitch, and refuse to go along with the stupidity.
Whenever I see users act like this, it gives me hope. I'd be more hopeful if Instagram died, maybe it would give other companies pause.
In case that wasn't a joke and for those who didn't click the wikipedia link:
The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that is a surprise (to the observer), has a major effect, and after the fact is often inappropriately rationalized with the benefit of hindsight.
The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:
The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology
The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities)
The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs
Unlike the earlier philosophical "black swan problem," the "black swan theory" refers only to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.[1]
Nothing is rational or sane about suicide. It is the ultimate selfish act for cowards.
The first sentence is true, the second only half true; I see you've never had the misfortune of knowing anyone with clinical depression. You can no more blame a suicide's death on the suicide victim than you can blame the victim of a heart attack for his. It's a disease; clinically depressed people can't just shrug it off any more than you can shrug off cancer. It needs professional treatment, and like cancer treatments, sometimes they fail.
One word: emulation. Programs would run slower than non-native ARM code, but they would still run. It's laziness on MS's part.
MS is like AT&T before they were broken up, immortalized by Lilly Tomlin's "Ernestine the telephone operator" -- "We're the phone company. We don't have to."
I still think it was an absurdly foolish decision not to make Windows 8 and Windows RT obviously and distinctly separate products.
I thought the whole idea for W8 was to have a single interface for different devices? So having two distinct, largely incompatible products that look the same sounds like insanity to me. I just don't get it. Why RT at all?
Hey, this is slashdot. It's refreshing to see a real nerd among all the high school dropouts who have infested this place lately. Notice that whenever some dufus is corrected, the correction gets modded down but not the idiocy that's being corrected?
I missed that one completely; by then I was at Beale, a SAC base in Northern California and no TV signals, twenty or more miles to the nearest town. I was two months away from the end of my enlistment. Prior to that I'd spent a year at Utapao, Thailand (another SAC base) so it was almost two years since I'd seen a newspaper or TV show.
In summer 1952, a Remington Rand executive approached CBS News chief Sig Mickelson and said the Univac might be able to plot early election-night returns against past voting patterns and spit out a predicted winner. Mickelson and anchor Walter Cronkite thought the claim was a load of baloney but figured it would at least be entertaining to try it on the air.
Eckert and Mauchly sought help from a University of Pennsylvania statistician, Max Woodbury. He and Mauchly wrote one of the first algorithms for computing, working at Mauchly's house because Mauchly had been blacklisted as pro-communist. "John wasn't allowed into the company anymore," says Mauchly's widow, Kay Mauchly Antonelli.
On election night, the 16,000-pound Univac remained at its home in Philadelphia. In the TV studio, CBS set up a fake computer â" a panel embedded with blinking Christmas lights and a teletype machine. Cronkite sat next to it. Correspondent Charles Collingwood and a camera crew set up in front of the real Univac.
As polls began to close, clerks typed the data into the Univac using three Unityper machines, which punched holes in a paper tape that would be fed into the computer.
By 8:30 p.m. ET â" long before news organizations of the era knew national election outcomes â" Univac spit out a startling prediction. It said Eisenhower would get 438 electoral votes to Stevenson's 93 â" a landslide victory. Because every poll had said the race would be tight, CBS didn't believe the computer and refused to air the prediction.
"Mauchly was at home getting telephone calls all the time about what was happening," Antonelli says. "All he could say was, 'Sit tight, we've done the best we could.' We sat there all night in front of the TV set with bated breath."
"It was essentially a live demo, on national TV," says Jim Senior, historian at Unisys, the computer giant that traces its roots to Remington Rand and Univac. "That took a lot of daring."
Under pressure, Woodbury rejiggered the algorithms. Univac then gave Eisenhower 8-to-7 odds over Stevenson. At 9:15 p.m., Cronkite reported that on the air. But Woodbury kept working and found he'd made a mistake. He ran the numbers again and got the original results â" an Eisenhower landslide.
Late that night, as actual results came in, CBS realized Univac had been right. Embarrassed, Collingwood came back on the air and confessed to millions of viewers that Univac had predicted the results hours earlier.
Journalistic integrity? CBS has no clue such a thing ever existed, and it seems they were always that way. I remember as a teenager that CBS was the Fox of the 1960s. Except unlike Fox, their bias and propaganda extended to its entertainment as well as "news". Remember "Matlock"?
I didn't see the one about the restaurant, maybe they deleted it. The rest (only nine of them) are pretty much a stretch. The church child porn one was about an incredibly stupid lawyer.
I can't see myself breaking any of those, although the Lacy Act one was a bit chilling. But three a day? Three a decade, maybe.
First off, the human-like creatures in star wars are canonically human
Your source is incorrect. It says "Humans were the galaxy's most numerous and politically dominant sentient species with millions of major and minor colonies galaxywide. Believed to have originated on the galactic capital of Coruscant..." but it's supposed to be set "in a galaxy far, far away." Interstellar travel is enough of a stretch, intergalactic is WAY out of bounds. It might have been plausable if set in the Milky Way, but...
The thing that turned me off about the Ewoks were the cheesy costumes. Honestly, I've seen little kids dressed up for Halloween with better costumes. Odd that they didn't fix this in the digital remastering; that would have made it palatable. Instead they just added whiz-bang to the space scenes and Aniken at the end. Lame.
Don't get me started on how Lucas raped EPIV when they remastered that one. Not only the "Han shot first" bullshit (and Han shooting first was the least of the damage done to that scene; in the theater it cut to outside and you saw smoke and it looked like Greedo had killed Han. Plus adding that Jabba the Hut scene. Glad I still have the original, unraped tape.
DOH! Stupid fingers, I do that in English, too. Somehow I spelled "change" as "chenge". But yeah, you got me pegged. Also, I haven't used Spanish in decades, It's a wonder I remember any at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't 60 year olds buy things?
Yes, but I'm not buying an iPhone; higher price for a worse phone? You have to be kidding.
this isn't some youth movement where it makes sense to say "when I was young it was all better."
Most things weren't better; the environment, health care, tech, most things have improved. But corporations at least pretended to be honest, and mostly were to their customers.
Anyway, the examples you list are very minor and not even a big deal
Deliberately installing malware that cripples your customer's computer is no big deal? Removing features after your customer paid for the product is no big deal? Sony has done both, IMO only an accredited idiot would buy anything from them. Oracle refusing to patch gaping holes is no big deal?
You've been frog boiled, son. Wake up. Stop giving your money to people who fuck you over!
I like windows 8 fine, although I use a Mac
Yeah, same here, I like W8 fine too, because I don't and won't use it either; one box runs Linux, one XP, and one W7 (which in many ways is less functional than XP).
They pale in comparison to products that actually hurt people, like cars with known, dangerous design flaws or amphetamine diet pills or watches with Radium.
Notice that the Pinto and Vega both died? When the flaws were revealed, the products bombed (well, the Pinto bombed, they couldn't sell Vegas). Amphetamines were prescripton-only since the fifties. And watches haven't had radium since long before I was born; glow in the dark watches weren't radioactive.
Surely when you were young there were products which changed in ways that many people didn't particularly care for, but were ultimately not considered important and still sold. For instance, a '72 Mustang doesn't look as cool as a '71 Mustang.
The US auto industry almost died because they took customers for granted, when the customers started buying Japanese cars instead. That just doesn't happen these days.
In my experience (which is not extensive), the theoretical physicists smoke a lot more WOOSH than the engineers.
Unfortunately most measures to legalize also involve heavy taxation as a selling point that will probably continue to artificially inflate the price of cannabis.
State tax in Illinois is $1.98 per pack, plus a $1.01 federal tax, plus local and sales taxes. You can get a pack of generics here for $5, so 2/3ds (more because there's sales tax) of the price is tax.
There is an ounce of tobacco in a pack of cigarettes. How much is an ounce of weed?
You might find this interesting. It more than backs up your point.
Of course, there aren't any studies of whether smoking pot causes the same instances of emphysema, cancer, and other diseases that can happen from smoking anything.
Studies have been done. More than one showed a solid correlation between smoking pot and COPD (the linked article doesn't mention it) and what I read was short on details, but a Washington Post article was detailed. Excerpt:
How is an insurance agency supposed to do something about your health?
That's exactly the point. Sheesh, reading problems, AC? The insurance companies are leeches who don't do anything to make you well. Your "Exercise, eat healthy, don't smoke, don't drink, don't do drugs" is just stupid. Take Rocky, a construction worker I knew who didn't smoke or do drugs (and there are no fat construction workers) died of a heart attack at age 42.
PEOPLE ARE DYING FROM LACK OF HEALTH CARE. We as a nation should be ashamed.
I'm a veteran and know a lot of veterans (mostly vietnam veterans). I'm very glad that veteran homelessness is dropping, applaud WalMart for saying they'll hire any veteran that applies, but the US treats its veterans abysmally. One fellow I know needs viagra to make love to his wife, but the VA will only prescribe cialis, which doesn't work for him. I hear worse stories all the time.
I'm troubled by the new statistic that says more Afghanistan soldiers deaths are by their own hand rather than by enemy fire. Why aren't these men and women diagnosed and treated before they become casualties?
As to "there's plenty of work", that's bullshit. We still have high unemployment; the jobs aren't there.
Get some perspective! Windows 8 look like a stupid tablet, whine whine whine!
I'm 60, in my day corporations couldn't get away with this nonsense because they knew we wouldn't stand for it. I can't understand why you kids have no immunity to advertising and propaganda.
If the new iPhone had come out when we were your age it would have bombed badly, but your generation gives all sorts of excuses to sociopaths. I find it both sad and hilarious.
I don't need a lot of the "functionality" that seems to important to web developers these days.
Indeed, and newspapers are the worst. All the ads and other crap like javascript "toolbars" make their sites a royal pain. My monitor is widescreen, so USA Toady's TWO "toolbars" are especially egregious. The local paper (SJ-R) has an "up to the minute news" popunder. Good way to run off prospective readers! Are these idiots all on crack? A newspaper should need nothing but plain vanilla HTML. Their "tools" just get in the user's way. It's worse at work (I'm home sick today) where they use IE7 and often content is covered by ads!
I find it to be a decent example of how not to treat your users.
In their defense, the 20th century is over. What company doesn't shit on their customers these days? From MS's W8 to Sony's XCP and otherOS, Apple's "you're holding it wrong" and its replacing Google Maps with a turd sandwich, Oracle's refusal to fix Java bugs until the government gets involved... fucking over your customer is the new normal.
It's one of many downsides to a global economy. With seven billion prospective customers you can afford to target only those who are stupid and lack self-respect. The rest of us are boned, all we can do is bitch, and refuse to go along with the stupidity.
Whenever I see users act like this, it gives me hope. I'd be more hopeful if Instagram died, maybe it would give other companies pause.
In case that wasn't a joke and for those who didn't click the wikipedia link:
Why not? Paint won't stick to carbon fiber?
The hatred is by no means blind. And it isn't hatred so much as simple disgust.
Just do what bartenders do: keep beer mugs in the freezer.
"Work is the curse of the drinking class" -- Oscar Wilde
Nothing is rational or sane about suicide. It is the ultimate selfish act for cowards.
The first sentence is true, the second only half true; I see you've never had the misfortune of knowing anyone with clinical depression. You can no more blame a suicide's death on the suicide victim than you can blame the victim of a heart attack for his. It's a disease; clinically depressed people can't just shrug it off any more than you can shrug off cancer. It needs professional treatment, and like cancer treatments, sometimes they fail.
If they ignored ARM, they'd get shit for that.
One word: emulation. Programs would run slower than non-native ARM code, but they would still run. It's laziness on MS's part.
MS is like AT&T before they were broken up, immortalized by Lilly Tomlin's "Ernestine the telephone operator" -- "We're the phone company. We don't have to."
I still think it was an absurdly foolish decision not to make Windows 8 and Windows RT obviously and distinctly separate products.
I thought the whole idea for W8 was to have a single interface for different devices? So having two distinct, largely incompatible products that look the same sounds like insanity to me. I just don't get it. Why RT at all?
sorry for the nerding-out here
Hey, this is slashdot. It's refreshing to see a real nerd among all the high school dropouts who have infested this place lately. Notice that whenever some dufus is corrected, the correction gets modded down but not the idiocy that's being corrected?
don't forget the Operation Babylift crash
I missed that one completely; by then I was at Beale, a SAC base in Northern California and no TV signals, twenty or more miles to the nearest town. I was two months away from the end of my enlistment. Prior to that I'd spent a year at Utapao, Thailand (another SAC base) so it was almost two years since I'd seen a newspaper or TV show.
I don't think they ever did. There was the incident with Dan Rather in 2004, but worse was six decades ago when Walter Cronkite lied on air during coverage of the 1952 Presidential election.
Journalistic integrity? CBS has no clue such a thing ever existed, and it seems they were always that way. I remember as a teenager that CBS was the Fox of the 1960s. Except unlike Fox, their bias and propaganda extended to its entertainment as well as "news". Remember "Matlock"?
Wow... 40% modded that bit of abysmal ignorance as "interesting". Amazing.
this can't be dismissed just because simple physics says that it has no mechanical advantage.
What can one possible say to that? Sheesh! I'd mod it "funny". So, hawguy, how's that perpetual motion machine coming?
I didn't see the one about the restaurant, maybe they deleted it. The rest (only nine of them) are pretty much a stretch. The church child porn one was about an incredibly stupid lawyer.
I can't see myself breaking any of those, although the Lacy Act one was a bit chilling. But three a day? Three a decade, maybe.
First off, the human-like creatures in star wars are canonically human
Your source is incorrect. It says "Humans were the galaxy's most numerous and politically dominant sentient species with millions of major and minor colonies galaxywide. Believed to have originated on the galactic capital of Coruscant..." but it's supposed to be set "in a galaxy far, far away." Interstellar travel is enough of a stretch, intergalactic is WAY out of bounds. It might have been plausable if set in the Milky Way, but...
The thing that turned me off about the Ewoks were the cheesy costumes. Honestly, I've seen little kids dressed up for Halloween with better costumes. Odd that they didn't fix this in the digital remastering; that would have made it palatable. Instead they just added whiz-bang to the space scenes and Aniken at the end. Lame.
Don't get me started on how Lucas raped EPIV when they remastered that one. Not only the "Han shot first" bullshit (and Han shooting first was the least of the damage done to that scene; in the theater it cut to outside and you saw smoke and it looked like Greedo had killed Han. Plus adding that Jabba the Hut scene. Glad I still have the original, unraped tape.
DOH! Stupid fingers, I do that in English, too. Somehow I spelled "change" as "chenge". But yeah, you got me pegged. Also, I haven't used Spanish in decades, It's a wonder I remember any at all.