Comment If it involves making MS or the US look bad (Score 1) 749
Slashdot loves to get inaccurate and inflammatory.
Slashdot loves to get inaccurate and inflammatory.
Is that if you do renounce your citizenship, the US gets all spiteful and will blacklist you from coming back.
Obviously you have to evaluate your situation, but just make sure you factor that in. You wouldn't want to say "Ya, don't really need that citizenship anymore," only to find you can't come back and visit family because the government got pissey about it.
The issue with Metro is that the "Only full screen mode," is a deal breaker on desktops. I do not have a 30" screen to run one program at a time, thanks (barring a few exceptions). However they become perfectly usable when they are in a window. Modern Mix for Stardock does that, and apparently Windows 9 will do it natively. Ok well at that point, Metro is just another API you can use alongside Win32 and
Of course that remains to be seen, but a new API that is cross desktop/tablet/phone isn't a horrible idea, forced fullscreen on a desktop is.
Visual people seem to like it often. Mom loves the new start screen because of that (she's an artist/ex-art teacher). However it does have some issues for normal desktop use. Not the OMGWTFBBQ whine fest geeks make it out to be (which is largely MS bashing) but still.
The big issue is that it is clunky to use in a professional setting. Like on my desktop I have a whole lot of applications, and I often run and use many of them. The start menu is good because it doesn't occlude much of the screen. Also everything is nice and hierarchical, making it easy to find things. The start screen becomes a pretty big mess. It goes on for ever, even on my 30" monitor, because I have so much installed and it shows all icons. Yes, I can set up tiles with the most used stuff, but that really doesn't solve the issue since I already have task bar shortcuts for that, I go to the start menu/screen when it is a less used program.
Hence I run a start menu replacer (Start 8 in my case). It isn't that I can't use the start screen, I just find it inferior to what it replaced. It's perfectly usable, the 2012R2 servers at work all use it and that's fine, however a start menu is better/faster for what I do.
On a tablet, it works nicely. You need bigger icons to do finger navigation. However my desktop isn't a tablet, my screen is not and will never be touch (no finger prints please and thanks). So it is sub optimal.
Hence MS really is right to bring back the menu for desktops, and have the screen for tablets. However you are also right that the whiners need to STFU because it is not the dire disaster they like to pretend.
So Clinton wasn't democratically elected because the house and senate didn't confirm him?
Are you intentionally trying very hard to miss the point or did I switch on the chinese keyboard by accident?
Clinton's private life is neither here nor there. But even if you want to bring it on, it was an individual action, not a law passed in parliament. The thing we are talking about here, however, is.
Quite frankly, comparing the passing of a law with a private sex adventure is borderline crazy.
That's why I'm confused as to your assertion that the law is the morality. The law is the law, no more.
I didn't claim the law is the morality. I do claim that it is the expression of the will of society, more or less (i.e. taking imperfections in the system into account). The corporate policies of a multinational corporation, on the other hand, are not.
So then sex with Monica Lewinsky has been decided to be a good thing because Clinton was elected?
Last I checked, neither the House nor the Senate had made a vote asking Clinton to fuck her, so no.
Not every action by an elected government is the will of the people or the "right thing". And given that people are arguing here that it isn't even protectionism, makes me think that it isn't as settled as you assert.
First point: Of course not, but until we have a perfect liquid democracy, it is the closest thing we have, and for the moment, like it or not, it is the modus operandi of our western societies. So taking into account the realities of our lives, it has been decided.
Second point: Of course there will always be discussion in a multi-valued society. In every democratic decision, there's also a minority whose opinion did not win the day, and we allow them to continue voicing it.
Shop at the store to find what you want then order it online for $1 less is a fantasy you made up.
Not at all. I know both customers who do this and shops that had this problem and went belly up (very likely not just because of it, but it contributed).
Your examples are bad examples and they miss the point. We're talking about small, personal book stores, and you come with Best Buy and Fry.
I love cash. You can have it when you pry it from my col... wait... not quite. But for me to stop using cash, you have to make electronic cash work first. That means three things that are absolute requirements and I will not ever negotiate:
As long as even one of these conditions is not met, I will have to carry cash around me anyways, and if I have cash with me, I will use it wherever I can.
But the idea that it's a [good, bad] thing should be agreed first,
It has been. The french government is democratically elected.
simply shrinking the market doesn't radically change things,
The market doesn't shrink. The market is the number of exchanged goods. The market doesn't care if there are 200 merchants or 250 merchants. What changes is the distribution of goods and merchants, and when the number of merchants is very low and their concentration of market power high, we get into situations (oligopoly, monopoly) that we do not want because we know they are bad.
If you want a book that isn't in the bestsellers list, then in your local town there's probably only one or two book shops that stock it at best and most likely none.
For the past 20 years, when I go to a bookstore and I want a book they don't have, they could almost always order it and have it for me the next day.
while it'd be nice to have geographically distributed demand for labour, in practice this has not been true since the invention of cities.
I'm not talking about a perfect equilibrium. I'm talking about the simple fact that if your country has one region with 50% unemployment rates and one region where employers can't find workers, your whole country will destabilze.
Of course there will always be differences. But if they get too extreme, the consequences are much higher and much more expensive then the costs of some small interventions.
What's more once you decide that lots of people deserve to be protected from changing times,
I never said anything like that and my arguments are completely unrelated to technical or other progress. So please burn the strawman somewhere else.
My understanding is that in the old days of 20mb hard drives, storage densities were sufficiently low that even after one pass someone might be able to recover the data with at least some degree of fidelity. Once we entered the world of gigabyte drives, densities are so high that it's all but impossible to recover any data after even a single pass wipe
small local bookshops are inherently worth protecting. Why is that?
Because you need many, many competitors in a market for it to actually be a market. The amount of large corporations any market can support is limited and fairly low, general business wisdom has it that it is around 3-5 with the first 3 being profitable and two or so more being able to just barely make it.
If you want many participants in a market, most of them will be small. That is why small shops are worthy of protection.
You also want to have employment in your country be fairly even, and not have some areas with high demand and low supply and some with low demand and many unemployed, which is why local shops are worthy of protection.
Really, you just need to use your brain a little more and it's all very simple.
Perhaps the space the bookshops used up can be replaced by coffee shops
Maybe, but this is not at all about bookshops being replaced by something else, it's about small competitors being driven out by large competitors, so put the strawman away again.
Protectionism is protectionism,
And sometimes it is needed. The whole "free market über alles" philosophy makes assumptions that are not true in the real world, such as perfect transparency. To come even close to working as it should, the free market needs to be guided. Among other things, protecting small competitors guarantees that it remains a free market and doesn't turn into an oligopol or a monopol.
The ones that actually provide value to the customer will stay due to people actually visiting them.
Unfortunately, they will not. Too many people will use the cozy atmosphere and the good service to make their selection, and then order it online because it costs a dollar less.
Yes, poor buggy whip makers will be out of jobs in the short term, but we can't all be riding carriages into the future...
Except that Amazon has not invented the car. The buggy whip makers are not going to be out of jobs, they are going to be replaced by minimum-wage buggy whip warehouse slaves.
I think the mini-tablet will ultimately reign supreme
Let me guess: You are female, yes?
Us males, we have trouser pockets. My iPhone fits all the pockets on all my trousers perfectly. Something that is bigger by just a few centimeters would be uncomfortable or even impossible to put into some of them.
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
