It's very much like the Tesla, even uses the same technologies. But it's much less efficient, cheaply made, has a much lower range, needs to be replaced 3 times more often, has a much better marketing department and only costs 60% as much if you buy RIGHT NOW (note: price subject to increase after promotional period).
Oh, it's also not so much a car as a shiny metal box that makes whirring noises and hits you in the crotch with a hammer... but it also bounces a little, so eventually you might bounce where you're trying to go.
Except that you fail reading comprehension, so to help you and a few of the other people who couldn't quite grasp the problem on round one, I'll yell it for you:
NEITHER APPLE NOR AMAZON WILL ALLOW YOU TO SELL YOUR E-BOOK AT A LOWER PRICE THROUGH ANOTHER VENDOR
You can't price the Apple version lower because Amazon won't let you, and you can't set the Apple price to anything that doesn't end with.99. Now I will yell out the summary vís-a-vís your proposed solution:
NEITHER PRICE IS ALLOWED TO BE LOWER THAN THE OTHER, SO YOUR POINT IS COMPLETELY INVALID
Given those are nearly the precise relationships they seem to foster with their paying customers... yes, I would imagine so. Part of me is truly, deeply joyful that the iPhone isn't on VZW, because I just don't think that I could bear that kind of pretentious condescension from one product and business relationship.
Given that there was no implication that he had unlawfully or unethically gained access to restricted systems or information, i doubt that would be applied to him. His crime, as it was, had less to do with breaking in than locking out. It would just be silly and vindictive to forbid him from using a computer or silly device, since repetition of the crime would only serve to keep others from accessing his machine.
As for future employers... I'm sure he could find somebody in a position of authority who is either oblivious, naive, an admirer, or some combination of the three to hire him into IT. Maybe not for a big IT house with strict HR policies and corporate overlords, but some smaller shop could ignore or reward his past if they were so inclined. I'm not about to shed any tears for his lost career just yet.
Except that it does. I am running 7 on the EXACT SAME hardware that I was running XP on, and 7 is faster. By which, of course, I mean other apps run faster and better... I couldn't care any less if Windows itself is actually faster, because I don't use it for anything beyond running other apps.
"If they even manage to decrease the decline from 4% to 3%, they've succeeded in saving a lot of people's jobs."
Broken windows.
I would rather see those people get work in manufacturing things that are actually useful... most of the skills along that chain are entirely transferable. Of course, then we might have to retake some of our manufacturing from China, and the only way that could be made viable is to raise tariffs such that they are equivalent to the drain on our economy caused by shipping the work overseas in the first place. I ain't holding my breath.
Union membership is the lowest it has been in a century, and declining. Our standard of living, median real income and overall economic situation are also deteriorating... there is negative correlation between unions and degrading worker conditions, regardless of what the corporate HR wonks would have you believe.
Not to say that some unions aren't abusive leeches that shouldn't be suffered to live, but that's because the rules for forming and maintaining them have been written such that only the scum of the earth can do it, and they are better incentivized to cut deals with management than to actually negotiate for the members.
Unions are not the whipping boy you're looking for.
Full disclosure: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a union member, representative, delegate, employee or other agent.
Sorry to pop your bubble, but 7 is legitimately faster than XP. I had XP installed on my current machine... without a single hardware upgrade, I saw performance increase under 7. It IS legitimately better than not only Vista, but XP.
Step 1 is still "reduce", as in use less, as in do precisely the opposite of what these paper vendors are suggesting.
Are people honestly arguing that we should use more paper because the people who stand to financially benefit from using more paper said so? Have we gotten to be that stupid? The reduction in paper usage has come from a lot of places, and the "environmentalist" movement might be the loudest, but absolutely is not the most important. There are immediate and obvious economic benefits to printing less, benefits which actually grow geometrically with the size of the organization in question... I'd suggest that the single largest sector of reduction has been from large companies streamlining their processes to replace paper with electrons, the latter is monumentally cheaper and more efficient to store (especially since it would likely be stored electronically anyway, effectively making it a sunk cost), transport, produce, reproduce, track, edit, distribute and dispose of.
The USPS has seen declines in business for most of the same reasons... it's just cheaper to send a file across the internet than it is to send a physical piece of paper with the same information.
No no no! This is politics, you are supposed to choose an algorithm where you loose the least elections. Learn the rules or get crushed, because *they* are playing for keeps.
Of course that Republican president was Gerald Ford, a hold-over moderate from the Eisenhower era, not a modern Republican neo-con.
The sad part is that Stevens' views haven't actually changed all that much, but what was once considered to be middle-right is now considered far-left by the authoritarian corporatists who define our current political spectrum.
having had many scanners flashed in my eyes, and flashed scanners into the eyes of many others... seriously, you're a tool. Most of them flicker, or have fixed flash durations of only a few seconds, and all you have to do is blink... something that people already do on an involuntary basis as a response to virtually everything.
And that one was bad enough... but more importantly, what the hell does your strategy have to do with conservatives (who aren't actually what you want, actual conservatives are against changes to the status quo -which means they would be against shrinking government- you actually mean neo-liberals)? How, exactly, is a smaller government more able or likely to massively subsidize low-income families sending their children to high quality private schools (which would now basically be public schools with corporate profits... how fiscally responsible)?
As to vouchers themselves... why? Are you really so deluded to believe that all private schools are better than all public schools? Do you really think that would remain the case if there were a sudden and massive influx of inner-city students? Transportation is a frequent issue for these students, and most private schools are located outside of urban centers, do you have a rational plan for getting these students to school? How do we determine which students get them? How do we compensate for the students who do not, and are now being sent back to a public school which is completely underfunded, understaffed, has had most of the well-behaved and intellectually apt peers removed, and is populated entirely by students who know they have been deemed too stupid to be of worth? How is actually doing this going to be cheaper, easier or require less government oversight and interference (if only to make sure that nobody scams the system by, say, opening up a boarding school for girls and charging the State room, board and tuition for students who they then force into prostitution... extreme example, I admit, but you're kidding yourself if you don't think anyone would do it) than running effective public schools?
I've heard this trope before, and I've never, not even once, heard ANYONE actually give any serious, workable answers to those questions. The ONLY real effect that this plan would have would be to completely gut the public education system and feed it to the private one... an idea that only appeals to the criminally stupid (ie. people who are pissed off because public schools teach actual science, or because they believe that government serves no purpose and we'd all be better off hiding in fortified compounds with stockpiles of guns and canned goods, or because they've actually taken seriously somebody who thinks either of those things and haven't pieced together that they aren't all there) or private school operators (who would stand to make enormous personal profits from such a plan).
I agree that our education system needs a lot of work, but school vouchers are, at best, a small part of a much larger fix... and frankly I'm inclined to say that our government should be getting out of the habit of writing blank checks to private corporations, especially ones that are explicitly intended to compete with said government.
Thank goodness there's no forced PvP. Some of us prefer not to play games where walking out of the starting town means that some max-level fuckwad will slay us just because they can. I'm all for keeping it limited to tavern brawls or CTF matches (although I've never once been able to actually do one...) and keeping it out of my gameplay. As far as I'm concerned, anybody who cries about the limit on PvP is just upset that they can't randomly kill any other player they happen to see regardless of whether or not they have any interest whatsoever in doing PvP themselves, and they can blow me.
Anyway... ditto that on PnP, it's definitely the best option. Kids today just don't realize what they're missing by actually being in a physical room with their game friends. I sometimes legitimately fear for the future of the species.
I think the term you're looking for is "compulsory consumerism". It's not socialism unless you buy from the government, and last I checked they aren't selling media or health care/insurance (obviously I'm talking about the US on that count). Now that we have to buy health insurance from private corporations in order to keep them solvent, how long before we have to buy media from private corporations in order to keep them solvent?
I can envision a future where all Americans are required to buy into some sort of ASCAP-like program (and there would be several "competing" providers so that you could shop around for the "best" rates, and different plans for different consumption levels: you know better than some bureaucrat whether you'll listen to 1 song this month, or 100) for an astronomical fee, or else be subject to fines for "pirating" media content... just hearing a song on the radio -even someone else's radio- or seeing an ad on a TV in a storefront would qualify.
Republicans would of course sabotage any attempt to provide a government-run option, knowing that private industry is always better at everything and always provides services at lower prices, and because of deep and entirely valid concerns that operating a business which involves receiving a sum of money and disbursing a smaller sum of money would drive the government into bankruptcy or require a rise in tax levels, thus ensuring that these private corporations would never have to fear competition from an entity at least nominally beholden to anything except for profits. Democrats would allow them to do so, on the condition that they can still force people to buy things whether they want them or not, and provided that they could make the announcement that they are the Good Guys (tm) who defeated the pirates and will now guarantee that no American ever goes bankrupt from buying movie tickets or being sued by the RIAA again.
"Almost nothing, relative to the cost of the employee sitting at the workstation. Productivity is far more important than base licence cost."
You must do government budgets... Simply put, no, it doesn't work that way. The employees are a sunk cost, you need to pay them either way, but if you can avoid a few hundred dollars worth of licenses for each desk without compromising productivity too much, then you will. Simply saying that the cost doesn't matter because other things cost more anyway is a surefire way to make sure you are never in management. I mean heck, why not install solid gold toilets, since the people sitting on them and the building they're in would surely cost more, what difference does it make?
"Almost none, relevant to a well configured Office install. And none recent are as bad as the one big risk that is having your plaintext on an anonymous server accessible to various foreign corporations and governments."
I don't think anyone has suggested that a substantial corporation should use the public Docs installation. The little guys would likely be in no more or less danger either way (since they lack the resources to provide their own meaningful security or the exposure to absolutely need it), and the big guys would stand to save an enormous amount of money by setting up their own secured network and buying a server license from Google.
You also seem to think that all offices have the same needs and priorities. They don't. I would speculate that there are a lot of businesses out there who really don't need or want full installations of Office on every workstation, and would be happy to save money on both the licenses AND the cost of maintaining them if there were an alternative that did so and still met their needs. And by speculate, I mean that my employer has at least a few dozen such workstations that I am absolutely sure of, and I would be shocked if there weren't a few dozen more scattered around the main office.
"the city might use some (possibly random) method of prioritizing repairs that is still doing something but might be less immediately useful to the population."
Random? You mean like "everybody hand me a random amount of money, and whoever hands me the most gets their problem fixed"? Or random like "I will randomly prioritize these issues according to how close I am with somebody directly affected by it"? Those seem to be the two most popular "random selection" methods I've seen.
"1) You seem to think that the current administration ISN'T corrupt.'
I've seen nothing to credibly indicate that it is particularly corrupt. Corruption is nearly universal to social constructs, including governments, businesses, clubs, schools, consortiums, and even informal groups of friends... it is, in some form, almost omnipresent. The question isn't whether or not the current administration is corrupt, it is to what extent it is corrupt, and to what extent it is more or less corrupt than others. In my opinion, there is insufficient credible evidence to conclude that it is notably more corrupt than other presidential administrations I can recall. This is not even remotely the same thing as concluding that there is no corruption.
"2) The political news media types jump on any potential issue, no matter how trivial, and no matter who it's about, because scandal brings ratings"
Yes, that was pretty much what I said... How am I fooling myself again?
On the contrary, doing that in a public, official way IS making such an accusation. Reporting it in this way is a means of making the current administration look corrupt. The entire thing is most likely going to come to naught (but hey, if it turns out the guy is dirty, great), but any time it can be stuck into the back of people's minds that "Obama is corrupt", there are many people who will attempt to do so. If there is nothing to it, nobody will ever hear about it again anyway.
This is not new, nor is it unique to Obama. For some reason people seem much more eager to jump on any potential issue, no matter how trivial, with him than most, but the principle is the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and the script writing is typically a bit better, especially in the "believability" department.
It's very much like the Tesla, even uses the same technologies. But it's much less efficient, cheaply made, has a much lower range, needs to be replaced 3 times more often, has a much better marketing department and only costs 60% as much if you buy RIGHT NOW (note: price subject to increase after promotional period).
Oh, it's also not so much a car as a shiny metal box that makes whirring noises and hits you in the crotch with a hammer... but it also bounces a little, so eventually you might bounce where you're trying to go.
Except that you fail reading comprehension, so to help you and a few of the other people who couldn't quite grasp the problem on round one, I'll yell it for you:
NEITHER APPLE NOR AMAZON WILL ALLOW YOU TO SELL YOUR E-BOOK AT A LOWER PRICE THROUGH ANOTHER VENDOR
You can't price the Apple version lower because Amazon won't let you, and you can't set the Apple price to anything that doesn't end with .99. Now I will yell out the summary vís-a-vís your proposed solution:
NEITHER PRICE IS ALLOWED TO BE LOWER THAN THE OTHER, SO YOUR POINT IS COMPLETELY INVALID
Given those are nearly the precise relationships they seem to foster with their paying customers... yes, I would imagine so. Part of me is truly, deeply joyful that the iPhone isn't on VZW, because I just don't think that I could bear that kind of pretentious condescension from one product and business relationship.
Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl.
Given that there was no implication that he had unlawfully or unethically gained access to restricted systems or information, i doubt that would be applied to him. His crime, as it was, had less to do with breaking in than locking out. It would just be silly and vindictive to forbid him from using a computer or silly device, since repetition of the crime would only serve to keep others from accessing his machine.
As for future employers... I'm sure he could find somebody in a position of authority who is either oblivious, naive, an admirer, or some combination of the three to hire him into IT. Maybe not for a big IT house with strict HR policies and corporate overlords, but some smaller shop could ignore or reward his past if they were so inclined. I'm not about to shed any tears for his lost career just yet.
Except that it does. I am running 7 on the EXACT SAME hardware that I was running XP on, and 7 is faster. By which, of course, I mean other apps run faster and better... I couldn't care any less if Windows itself is actually faster, because I don't use it for anything beyond running other apps.
I didn't even add RAM.
It is legitimately better.
Apparently you've not dealt with Charter.
Paying more for less service sucks. Getting even worse customer service also sucks.
I would take Comcast, er, X-Finity, back in a minute.
"If they even manage to decrease the decline from 4% to 3%, they've succeeded in saving a lot of people's jobs."
Broken windows.
I would rather see those people get work in manufacturing things that are actually useful... most of the skills along that chain are entirely transferable. Of course, then we might have to retake some of our manufacturing from China, and the only way that could be made viable is to raise tariffs such that they are equivalent to the drain on our economy caused by shipping the work overseas in the first place. I ain't holding my breath.
Union membership is the lowest it has been in a century, and declining. Our standard of living, median real income and overall economic situation are also deteriorating... there is negative correlation between unions and degrading worker conditions, regardless of what the corporate HR wonks would have you believe.
Not to say that some unions aren't abusive leeches that shouldn't be suffered to live, but that's because the rules for forming and maintaining them have been written such that only the scum of the earth can do it, and they are better incentivized to cut deals with management than to actually negotiate for the members.
Unions are not the whipping boy you're looking for.
Full disclosure: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a union member, representative, delegate, employee or other agent.
Sorry to pop your bubble, but 7 is legitimately faster than XP. I had XP installed on my current machine... without a single hardware upgrade, I saw performance increase under 7. It IS legitimately better than not only Vista, but XP.
Now pardon me while I reboot back into Linux...
Step 1 is still "reduce", as in use less, as in do precisely the opposite of what these paper vendors are suggesting.
Are people honestly arguing that we should use more paper because the people who stand to financially benefit from using more paper said so? Have we gotten to be that stupid? The reduction in paper usage has come from a lot of places, and the "environmentalist" movement might be the loudest, but absolutely is not the most important. There are immediate and obvious economic benefits to printing less, benefits which actually grow geometrically with the size of the organization in question... I'd suggest that the single largest sector of reduction has been from large companies streamlining their processes to replace paper with electrons, the latter is monumentally cheaper and more efficient to store (especially since it would likely be stored electronically anyway, effectively making it a sunk cost), transport, produce, reproduce, track, edit, distribute and dispose of.
The USPS has seen declines in business for most of the same reasons... it's just cheaper to send a file across the internet than it is to send a physical piece of paper with the same information.
Also, you have spent your entire life in the psych ward of a supermax prison, so your standards might be a tad bit skewed.
Shatner + gaping holes = DO NOT WANT
No no no! This is politics, you are supposed to choose an algorithm where you loose the least elections. Learn the rules or get crushed, because *they* are playing for keeps.
I'll bet her brother would know.
Of course that Republican president was Gerald Ford, a hold-over moderate from the Eisenhower era, not a modern Republican neo-con.
The sad part is that Stevens' views haven't actually changed all that much, but what was once considered to be middle-right is now considered far-left by the authoritarian corporatists who define our current political spectrum.
having had many scanners flashed in my eyes, and flashed scanners into the eyes of many others... seriously, you're a tool. Most of them flicker, or have fixed flash durations of only a few seconds, and all you have to do is blink... something that people already do on an involuntary basis as a response to virtually everything.
You'd get over it.
And that one was bad enough... but more importantly, what the hell does your strategy have to do with conservatives (who aren't actually what you want, actual conservatives are against changes to the status quo -which means they would be against shrinking government- you actually mean neo-liberals)? How, exactly, is a smaller government more able or likely to massively subsidize low-income families sending their children to high quality private schools (which would now basically be public schools with corporate profits... how fiscally responsible)?
As to vouchers themselves... why? Are you really so deluded to believe that all private schools are better than all public schools? Do you really think that would remain the case if there were a sudden and massive influx of inner-city students? Transportation is a frequent issue for these students, and most private schools are located outside of urban centers, do you have a rational plan for getting these students to school? How do we determine which students get them? How do we compensate for the students who do not, and are now being sent back to a public school which is completely underfunded, understaffed, has had most of the well-behaved and intellectually apt peers removed, and is populated entirely by students who know they have been deemed too stupid to be of worth? How is actually doing this going to be cheaper, easier or require less government oversight and interference (if only to make sure that nobody scams the system by, say, opening up a boarding school for girls and charging the State room, board and tuition for students who they then force into prostitution... extreme example, I admit, but you're kidding yourself if you don't think anyone would do it) than running effective public schools?
I've heard this trope before, and I've never, not even once, heard ANYONE actually give any serious, workable answers to those questions. The ONLY real effect that this plan would have would be to completely gut the public education system and feed it to the private one... an idea that only appeals to the criminally stupid (ie. people who are pissed off because public schools teach actual science, or because they believe that government serves no purpose and we'd all be better off hiding in fortified compounds with stockpiles of guns and canned goods, or because they've actually taken seriously somebody who thinks either of those things and haven't pieced together that they aren't all there) or private school operators (who would stand to make enormous personal profits from such a plan).
I agree that our education system needs a lot of work, but school vouchers are, at best, a small part of a much larger fix... and frankly I'm inclined to say that our government should be getting out of the habit of writing blank checks to private corporations, especially ones that are explicitly intended to compete with said government.
Thank goodness there's no forced PvP. Some of us prefer not to play games where walking out of the starting town means that some max-level fuckwad will slay us just because they can. I'm all for keeping it limited to tavern brawls or CTF matches (although I've never once been able to actually do one...) and keeping it out of my gameplay. As far as I'm concerned, anybody who cries about the limit on PvP is just upset that they can't randomly kill any other player they happen to see regardless of whether or not they have any interest whatsoever in doing PvP themselves, and they can blow me.
Anyway... ditto that on PnP, it's definitely the best option. Kids today just don't realize what they're missing by actually being in a physical room with their game friends. I sometimes legitimately fear for the future of the species.
I think the term you're looking for is "compulsory consumerism". It's not socialism unless you buy from the government, and last I checked they aren't selling media or health care/insurance (obviously I'm talking about the US on that count). Now that we have to buy health insurance from private corporations in order to keep them solvent, how long before we have to buy media from private corporations in order to keep them solvent?
I can envision a future where all Americans are required to buy into some sort of ASCAP-like program (and there would be several "competing" providers so that you could shop around for the "best" rates, and different plans for different consumption levels: you know better than some bureaucrat whether you'll listen to 1 song this month, or 100) for an astronomical fee, or else be subject to fines for "pirating" media content... just hearing a song on the radio -even someone else's radio- or seeing an ad on a TV in a storefront would qualify.
Republicans would of course sabotage any attempt to provide a government-run option, knowing that private industry is always better at everything and always provides services at lower prices, and because of deep and entirely valid concerns that operating a business which involves receiving a sum of money and disbursing a smaller sum of money would drive the government into bankruptcy or require a rise in tax levels, thus ensuring that these private corporations would never have to fear competition from an entity at least nominally beholden to anything except for profits. Democrats would allow them to do so, on the condition that they can still force people to buy things whether they want them or not, and provided that they could make the announcement that they are the Good Guys (tm) who defeated the pirates and will now guarantee that no American ever goes bankrupt from buying movie tickets or being sued by the RIAA again.
I give it 15 years or so.
Sorry champ, that wasn't a whoosh.. it was just a crap joke.
Better luck next time.
"Almost nothing, relative to the cost of the employee sitting at the workstation. Productivity is far more important than base licence cost."
You must do government budgets... Simply put, no, it doesn't work that way. The employees are a sunk cost, you need to pay them either way, but if you can avoid a few hundred dollars worth of licenses for each desk without compromising productivity too much, then you will. Simply saying that the cost doesn't matter because other things cost more anyway is a surefire way to make sure you are never in management. I mean heck, why not install solid gold toilets, since the people sitting on them and the building they're in would surely cost more, what difference does it make?
"Almost none, relevant to a well configured Office install. And none recent are as bad as the one big risk that is having your plaintext on an anonymous server accessible to various foreign corporations and governments."
I don't think anyone has suggested that a substantial corporation should use the public Docs installation. The little guys would likely be in no more or less danger either way (since they lack the resources to provide their own meaningful security or the exposure to absolutely need it), and the big guys would stand to save an enormous amount of money by setting up their own secured network and buying a server license from Google.
You also seem to think that all offices have the same needs and priorities. They don't. I would speculate that there are a lot of businesses out there who really don't need or want full installations of Office on every workstation, and would be happy to save money on both the licenses AND the cost of maintaining them if there were an alternative that did so and still met their needs. And by speculate, I mean that my employer has at least a few dozen such workstations that I am absolutely sure of, and I would be shocked if there weren't a few dozen more scattered around the main office.
"the city might use some (possibly random) method of prioritizing repairs that is still doing something but might be less immediately useful to the population."
Random? You mean like "everybody hand me a random amount of money, and whoever hands me the most gets their problem fixed"? Or random like "I will randomly prioritize these issues according to how close I am with somebody directly affected by it"? Those seem to be the two most popular "random selection" methods I've seen.
"1) You seem to think that the current administration ISN'T corrupt.'
I've seen nothing to credibly indicate that it is particularly corrupt. Corruption is nearly universal to social constructs, including governments, businesses, clubs, schools, consortiums, and even informal groups of friends... it is, in some form, almost omnipresent. The question isn't whether or not the current administration is corrupt, it is to what extent it is corrupt, and to what extent it is more or less corrupt than others. In my opinion, there is insufficient credible evidence to conclude that it is notably more corrupt than other presidential administrations I can recall. This is not even remotely the same thing as concluding that there is no corruption.
"2) The political news media types jump on any potential issue, no matter how trivial, and no matter who it's about, because scandal brings ratings"
Yes, that was pretty much what I said... How am I fooling myself again?
On the contrary, doing that in a public, official way IS making such an accusation. Reporting it in this way is a means of making the current administration look corrupt. The entire thing is most likely going to come to naught (but hey, if it turns out the guy is dirty, great), but any time it can be stuck into the back of people's minds that "Obama is corrupt", there are many people who will attempt to do so. If there is nothing to it, nobody will ever hear about it again anyway.
This is not new, nor is it unique to Obama. For some reason people seem much more eager to jump on any potential issue, no matter how trivial, with him than most, but the principle is the same.