ISPs have a wide range of customers. Asking an elderly customer or computer illiterate person to switch to webmail is like asking them to convert religions. Is Sky changing their customers' addresses too?
I dunno, I recently bought a Dell with Vista on it, and so far my experiences with it have been mostly positive. Once I shut off UAC I didn't have to grant it permission for everything, and now it's pretty much just XP with a new interface.
See, this is where the problem starts. You'd think they could figure something out by looking at the screen, but some people are actually afraid of computers. They won't read a message that appears on the screen or even try to understand what it means. I've experienced this first hand as a warning or error message pops up and they just click okay and then freak out when something unusual happens.
That's sort of how I feel about my college experience. I sat through all of my courses, learned just enough to pass, and walked away with a diploma.
The problem is that I had a hard time understanding what we were supposed to be learning. Maybe my own study habits (or lack thereof) are to blame, but it always felt like my professors never really bothered to explain why we were learning what we were learning. In some cases, I discovered the purpose for previous classes in my later classes, and found myself wishing I could go back and rebuild my foundation. And now that I've graduated I find myself wanting to go back and do it again properly.
Note: I was pretty tired while I wrote this and it took awhile, but I think I managed to make my point towards the end. I think it's reasonable to expect that someone should be compensated for work they performed. So if an artist goes into a recording studio and plays his music then he should be compensated for giving a performance. However, when someone plays a song on a CD then artist isn't doing anything. The ones who deserve compensation for playing a CD are the ones who made the CD (which may include the artist). I think the problem is that the RIAA wants to consider the music and the disc to be the same thing, so you have to buy the disc to have the music, and nobody can have the music without buying the disc.
What complicates the whole issue is that it's hard to form morals about something that is not ultimately essential to life. Imagine, for a moment, that there was a device which allowed us to duplicate food as easily and as rapidly as we copy files on a computer. Suddenly, food would no longer be a concern for anyone because there would be an unlimited supply. But how would this effect farmers and other professionals who earned a living providing food? Should a farmer be compensated for each ear of corn that gets duplicated by the machine? But why should anyone have to pay for food when there's an unlimited amount of it? Is money even necessary in a situation like this?
With music copying, things are different. Music does not provide sustenance or nutrition, and it's not a vital part of life. In fact, musicians (and other artists) need to receive compensation for their art so that they can buy food and live. The kicker, I think, is that in order to obtain this non-essential product, people have to spend the same money that they would otherwise use to buy food.
I think the solution is to eliminate the little green pieces of paper and just say to the artist, "Give this person an apple. They deserve it!"
Why does Linux have to appeal to anyone but the people who use it? I thought that was the whole point. If you don't feel like paying for software then you've either got to write it yourself or wait for someone to give it to you (or steal it, but that's another topic). And this is exactly what the Linux community has done; as many people here have pointed out you can use an iPod in Linux (to say nothing of using Linux on an iPod).
So the majority of people find using Linux to be too difficult? So what? They can just pay for a simpler OS that does work for them. It's like paying someone to clean your house, wash your car, make you food, or any number of services, and if you're someone who's not willing to pay for those services then you either have to do them yourself, or find someone who will do it voluntarily (or to enslave).
Good point. I suppose if I actually watched American Idol more regularly rather than a few segments while waiting for a pizza I might have a better idea of the show. To be fair, though, I was really trying to pick it out of a barrel of bad reality shows in general.
It just seems unfair to me that TV (or entertainment in general) that I like gets shunted for what the broader public likes. This happens with TV, movies, and games. If it doesn't die out completely then it gets bought up and transformed into something completely different. Take TechTV for example. I think the majority of its programming appealed to a niche market, but it was just one channel out of the hundreds of others that manage to appeal to wider audiences. I don't see why Comcast had to go and merge it with G4 just to wipe it out completely (and make G4 worse than it already was). Just once I'd like to find some entertainment venue that doesn't get screwed over by "the majority".
My point was that people do illegal things all the time without getting punished. When's the last time you saw or heard of someone getting arrested for crossing the street illegaly? True, it's not a very serious offense, but it becomes serious when a jaywalker gets hit by a car or causes a driver to have an accident. Likewise, I'm sure that there are people who get away with much more serious legal offenses that go unnoticed until they actually cause a problem.
People would be more inclined to do a good job if they knew that they'd have to commit seppku if they screwed it up and brought dishonor to their post...
But not before doing everything they could to make sure they wouldn't get caught. I'm not so sure everyone cares more about honor than their lives, although there are definitely some that do.
Having just watched Serenity and all the episodes of Firefly I've come to the conclusion that nobody cares about entertainment that's meaningful, because if the opposite were true then Firefly would still be on TV and nobody would give a shit about American Idol.
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ISPs have a wide range of customers. Asking an elderly customer or computer illiterate person to switch to webmail is like asking them to convert religions. Is Sky changing their customers' addresses too?
I dunno, I recently bought a Dell with Vista on it, and so far my experiences with it have been mostly positive. Once I shut off UAC I didn't have to grant it permission for everything, and now it's pretty much just XP with a new interface.
See, this is where the problem starts. You'd think they could figure something out by looking at the screen, but some people are actually afraid of computers. They won't read a message that appears on the screen or even try to understand what it means. I've experienced this first hand as a warning or error message pops up and they just click okay and then freak out when something unusual happens.
But I'm not paying $200 for my Gmail account, and Google isn't deleting my mail without permission.
That's sort of how I feel about my college experience. I sat through all of my courses, learned just enough to pass, and walked away with a diploma. The problem is that I had a hard time understanding what we were supposed to be learning. Maybe my own study habits (or lack thereof) are to blame, but it always felt like my professors never really bothered to explain why we were learning what we were learning. In some cases, I discovered the purpose for previous classes in my later classes, and found myself wishing I could go back and rebuild my foundation. And now that I've graduated I find myself wanting to go back and do it again properly.
Their sites first post beats our site's first post.
Note: I was pretty tired while I wrote this and it took awhile, but I think I managed to make my point towards the end.
I think it's reasonable to expect that someone should be compensated for work they performed. So if an artist goes into a recording studio and plays his music then he should be compensated for giving a performance. However, when someone plays a song on a CD then artist isn't doing anything. The ones who deserve compensation for playing a CD are the ones who made the CD (which may include the artist). I think the problem is that the RIAA wants to consider the music and the disc to be the same thing, so you have to buy the disc to have the music, and nobody can have the music without buying the disc.
What complicates the whole issue is that it's hard to form morals about something that is not ultimately essential to life. Imagine, for a moment, that there was a device which allowed us to duplicate food as easily and as rapidly as we copy files on a computer. Suddenly, food would no longer be a concern for anyone because there would be an unlimited supply. But how would this effect farmers and other professionals who earned a living providing food? Should a farmer be compensated for each ear of corn that gets duplicated by the machine? But why should anyone have to pay for food when there's an unlimited amount of it? Is money even necessary in a situation like this?
With music copying, things are different. Music does not provide sustenance or nutrition, and it's not a vital part of life. In fact, musicians (and other artists) need to receive compensation for their art so that they can buy food and live. The kicker, I think, is that in order to obtain this non-essential product, people have to spend the same money that they would otherwise use to buy food.
I think the solution is to eliminate the little green pieces of paper and just say to the artist, "Give this person an apple. They deserve it!"
I see news reports about murders all the time, and last time I checked nobody wants murder to be legal.
Why does Linux have to appeal to anyone but the people who use it? I thought that was the whole point. If you don't feel like paying for software then you've either got to write it yourself or wait for someone to give it to you (or steal it, but that's another topic). And this is exactly what the Linux community has done; as many people here have pointed out you can use an iPod in Linux (to say nothing of using Linux on an iPod). So the majority of people find using Linux to be too difficult? So what? They can just pay for a simpler OS that does work for them. It's like paying someone to clean your house, wash your car, make you food, or any number of services, and if you're someone who's not willing to pay for those services then you either have to do them yourself, or find someone who will do it voluntarily (or to enslave).
Good point. I suppose if I actually watched American Idol more regularly rather than a few segments while waiting for a pizza I might have a better idea of the show. To be fair, though, I was really trying to pick it out of a barrel of bad reality shows in general. It just seems unfair to me that TV (or entertainment in general) that I like gets shunted for what the broader public likes. This happens with TV, movies, and games. If it doesn't die out completely then it gets bought up and transformed into something completely different. Take TechTV for example. I think the majority of its programming appealed to a niche market, but it was just one channel out of the hundreds of others that manage to appeal to wider audiences. I don't see why Comcast had to go and merge it with G4 just to wipe it out completely (and make G4 worse than it already was). Just once I'd like to find some entertainment venue that doesn't get screwed over by "the majority".
Hey sure! The sun is sending all that harmful radiation at us, so let's send some right back at it.
Guess it's all aboute taste then. I also liked the Super Mario Bros. movie.
My point was that people do illegal things all the time without getting punished. When's the last time you saw or heard of someone getting arrested for crossing the street illegaly? True, it's not a very serious offense, but it becomes serious when a jaywalker gets hit by a car or causes a driver to have an accident. Likewise, I'm sure that there are people who get away with much more serious legal offenses that go unnoticed until they actually cause a problem.
So is jaywalking.
Having just watched Serenity and all the episodes of Firefly I've come to the conclusion that nobody cares about entertainment that's meaningful, because if the opposite were true then Firefly would still be on TV and nobody would give a shit about American Idol.