Yeah, I expect a major revolt against this -- like we saw in the past when it came to watch batteries and car batteries. History has shown us that blood will be shed. I feel bad for the Genius Bar pawns who'll die in the name of larger batteries with better charge time that aren't swappable, because Apple is clearly in the wrong. Give me shorter charge times for the sake of swappability that I've never used in my life, or give me death!

Obviously you posted AC because your argument's shit. Laptop batteries *elsewhere* are generally piss-easy trivial to change out. Get some experience and crank up those comprehension skills, or go back to drawing dicks on your comp book.

Yes, because economics is a zero sum equation right? While I concede the insensitiity to the poor, the thought that one person's success necessitates another's failure is a fallacy.

You're looking for another argument. I'm saying, "The assumption that everyone who couldn't afford such a box is a lazy P.O.S. beneath the 'real job' folks is bullshit, and I seriously question how many self-procliamed 'real job' people are themselves working jobs that could be taken by the people in lower-skilled positions, as deciding to ignore unique individual circumstances as to *why* people are in those jobs says fuck all about the actual skills or qualifications of those people."

not so pissed that they don't upgrade to a new powerbook next cycle anyways.

I never suggested they weren't stupid, hypocritical, etc.

not everyone cares whether or not they can change the battery themselves. you think most people swap out the (easily user replaceable) battery in their car when it dies? shit, my mom can barely replace the batteries in her remote control.

Your mom's likely not buying the hotshit new Apple products! We're not talking about her and her fumble-fingers and techno fear, we're talking about people already predisposed to buying a premium laptop or notebook computer. This category ranges from Macbook Pro-needing professionals making informed decisions to clueless dickheads with money to burn looking for a status symbol to wing around the coffee shop or board room (if you don't think there an awful lot of these people, you're walking around with a blindfold on). It's likely these people have had contact with a notebook before and have engaged in the rather simple process of undoing or sliding a latch mechanism and popping out the battery.

the vast majority of users have zero interest in doing any sort of service themselves. when i did HP phone tech support, we'd get users wanting us to send them a tech to open tray one and clear a paper jam. most consumers want to consume, not tinker. apple is betting that their target audience will appreciate the design choice. i'm betting they did their homework. don't like it? don't buy one.

You want to talk about people not being interested in self-service and then you go on about people appreciating design choices? Get a fucking grip. The "clueless rube" category of people who can't fathom one can't wrap their heads around the other, they're just capable of affording teh shiny. And when these people learn that an operation that, in other brand portable computers, requires just as much skill as switching the batteries in their TV remote, they're not going to go, "Oh, well, Steve & Co. made this clever design choice that yields X Y and Z," they're going to go "That's fucking stupid, I could change the battery on my old [brand of choice here] and this expensive bastard doesn't let me at all. I have to sink time into getting someone else to do it for me, which likely means time away from my precious device. What a waste."

Robbed? That doesn't make any sense. This person clearly didn't have the job, so how could I have robbed it from them?

Jobs are earned based on merit, not owed.

They are *sometimes* earned based on merit. Executive existants, for instance, are a often a fine example of low-skill employees who are exalted into "real job" category. Anyone who can afford to look marginally presentable, kiss ass, be decently cordial, and type 60-70wpm can swing it. The only "skill" or "merit" there is decent communications savvy and typing. There are plenty of people who *could* do this job but didn't have the connections or the right set of clothes.

As for "owed" jobs, that's you taking liberty with interpretation and setting up strawmen. You likely damn well know this already. Anonymous and cowardly in the extreme.

You don't have the right to a job. You have a job at the pleasure and expense of the person who made enough money to hire you, and they don't owe you anything.

Again: owed? Fuck off. You're bleeding all over the place here. "[P]leasure and expense" is indeed it. That means needs, whims, and financial considerations. It's not about qualifications per se, but competition. Who sells themself better.

I'm constantly nervous around my boss because it impresses me so much that he built the company at which I work.

If you're constantly nervous, you're either a fraud with suspect qualifications expecting to be axed at any moment, or your boss is an extremist ass-head who makes ill-advised snap judgements, in case you're better off seeking employment in a place run by someone more reasonable and stable. People like that tend to make poor decisions.

Show some respect for your employer for creating an organization with the resources to pay for you and stop acting like an entitled American.

Stop assuming fear and respect are equivalent to each other, quit being such a complete peon about everything, and stop being such an absolutist dipshit. I'm an presently employed by a company started by a person who worked hard, but the company's success has not been contingent solely upon their efforts, it's everyone working there, and my boss would be the first to admit it. I've also worked places whose success had fuck-all to do with my employer's hard work and were completely undeserving of my respect. I was smart enough to get out of those places and look elsewhere.

If you're not up for filing down a few points on a torx driver, you have no business fiddling around inside a laptop anyhow.

Fuck the filing. If the battery were removable, you wouldn't be fiddling around inside a laptop to begin with. Something simple and routine has been made needlessly complex. People can argue "but road warriors are a niche!" and such all they want - 1.5 years out, ordinary people who like using laptop computers as laptop computers suddenly finding themselves having to go to the damned Genius Bar to change out a battery are going to be pissed.

All i can say to that is, i grew up extremely dirt poor living most of the time in an industrial space and sleeping on shelf in my dads workshop, and coincidentally we didn't have a TV for most of my life. amazingly enough i grew up to be very smart and figured out how to be successfull. I don't think its a coincidence that i had no TV, rather i think its the CAUSE of my success. Yes i have the luxury of being lazy now because i didn't have the luxury of TV when i was young.

The absence of a TV did not make you smart or successful - if it was that easy, it would be a simple to raise a person to be smart and succeful by taking away the TV. I came from a fairly poor background myself, but my family went out of their way in my younger days to foster curiousity and interest in learning, I was lucky to have some teachers who gave a damn, and then that's it. The neighboring kids on either side whose parents were beating them and had all varieties of substance abuse problems in their families didn't fare so well because they were coming up through hostile environments that didn't promote learning, did nothing but struggle in school, and their early failures dissuaded them from trying to achieve later in life. Bad hand scenarios do happen, and it's mostly through external intervention that the ones that get straightened out get straightened out. People who pull themselves up are rare, and that still usually involves some outside inspiration or catalyst that has to be damned strong and powerful. So fuck off with the "the absence of a TV made me smart" - that's complete bullshit.

And to answer your first question, No you don't have a real job if all you are doing is flipping burgers, if you are fool enough to think that you can survive your whole life with that kind of mentality then i feel sorry for you. And yes i have taken a job away from another "lazy" person, but every 40 year old, career burger flipper has also taken away a job from the young enterprising teen who should be doing that job to pay his way through college.

You and everyone else who has ever pulled the "real job" tirade refuses to think about circumstance, period. Yes, some people never try. Lots more are sidelined by circumstance and don't manage to move beyond those low-skill jobs. You're neglecting points such as "it's tough to make time for education or career building when you work three shitty jobs" or "regardless of skill and qualifications, it's impossible to go interview for and receive a 'proper' job when not having dental care for your early life has left you with a mouth of rotted and missing teeth" or whatever else could be named. You assume, because you came from a poor background but still somehow managed to have someone tip you in the right direction and nothing catastrophically interrupted your push towards success, that this is the way it goes for everyone, and that everyone's got a fighting chance in they just put their back into it. You're wrong. Just the right sequence of bad events can doom someone to never moving beyond being a sanitation worker, and only getting there if they're fortunate. Suggesting these people just didn't bother is short sighted, irresponsible, and downright fucking stupid.

TV is a distraction from reality and NOT a necessity.

Right, because TV is about sitcoms, not news, and besides, everyone has internet or can read newspapers and can receive vital information about the world around them through these channels. Right? Oh, wrong again.

Here's a wake up call to all those who are watching regular TV and can't afford to get a box. Perhaps they should stop watching so much TV and get a real job.

Because anyone who can't work such a box into a tight budget obviously hasn't got a real job, right? Because your baseless judgement of other people's situations relative to your own just flat out reign supreme? Here's a wake up call to you and every last fake Libertarian shitbag who modded you insightful: yes, we know you've managed to obtain jobs just good enough to afford a few luxuries, not struggle vary hard, and yet, between all that exalted 80+ hours a week "real job" time, find time to bitch about the failings of the poor and lazy on Slashdot, and tip us off to the truth: you just robbed another lazy sad sack of a position, and if not for you, one more person could've bought the box already, or even cable, and done what you've done here.

..... well then it's not a real package manager in the sense that a package manager is being described. Plus, in Windows 7 (and I believe Windows Vista too), it's just called "Uninstall A Program". Windows 7 has a link to the "Windows Marketplace", but that opens in, of all things, a browser.

So let Microsoft fix it and have it work in a sensible, useful fashion and get the EU off their backs while simultaneously providing the sort of functionality enjoyed in many other operating systems.

Dear stuck-up elitist Linux user, how the hell am I going to find a package manager if I don't have a browser installed?

The package manager is a pre-installed application which is used for adding and removing other applications and anything upon which they may be dependent, as well as retrieving said applications and related pieces of information from a remote location (such as out somewhere on the internet; being its own application, it doesn't require a browser. Fuck you, too, and you're welcome.

It's also interesting (I guess this makes #3) to point out that not allowing gay marriage doesn't mean gays can't live together; it means the government doesn't recognize it as a marriage. Which is, by this time, almost a name-only thing. I am guessing it has similar arguments (the non-legalizing it) as not allowing polygamy and bestiality to be legal marriage unions. Except homosexuals can be domestic partners, polygamists cannot be domestic partners with 2+ others, and you can't be a domestic partner of a cat.

The obvious solution here would be for the government to not have these various categories of relationships and have one generic "life partner" heading (for things like hospital visitation rights), and leave the marriage/whatever bit up to whatever ritual house or other sort of whim to define it within their own respective pool.

This would also be great because the whole "tax breaks for the married" bit is ridiculous. What, you pay less because you won the love sweepstakes? You pay more back in when you lose and get divorced? Assinine.

The fact that there's 350 comments debating the issue is another case in point. You may want free software. I may not care as long as it works. The guy next door doesn't seem to mind paying. So having a "unified vision of an ideal" just isn't going to happen.

Unless of course the unified vision is having tons of options, which is the direction it seems to be heading in again. Somehow, though, people tend to get really pissed and reject ideological offerings that don't fit them personally, while simultaneously running at the mouth about how true choice is "not so restrictive" as that with which they disagree --sentiment that itself promotes restriction and choice reduction. And in that case, you absolutely need the hard-liners preaching, because a well-reasoned decision has to be made considering several points of view.

You're free to reject that, of course, but don't suggest anybody who disagrees with you is wacky. They're looking at it from the point of view of different needs.

What with RELFEXIVELY CONTRARIAN TWATS* like yourself out there, it's no wonder they can't see the sense in arbitrarily satiating the whims of a few pissants. Your problem is you're looking for a unified gospel when you're being granted options from which to pick and choose. If you're serious about someone else telling you The Right Way for your desktop, you're looking in the wrong place.

*see? it's not nice!

The problem with Stallman's approach is the assumption that most people want the free software ideal. The reality is that most people are not even knowledgeable enough about their computers to even understand what free software is all about, why it matters, and why they should care.

I would imagine that this is why he regularly makes a very vocal big stink about it. Just think: sixty-odd years ago, most people didn't know what a carcinogen was, why it was bad, or that it could be found in ordinary, presumed-to-be-harmless things like lead paint and cigarette smoke. Now of course, people who knew could always go, "Nobody cares about this! People die every day! Don't interrupt people's lives with this scary, annoying information!" Historically speaking, though, I'd wager quite a few people are glad people bothered to speak up and do something about it.

Most people do not care about the legal or technical issues surrounding their software, they just want to get online and do stuff. Stallman insists that when somebody sends you a .doc file, you should refuse to open it and insist that they send you a PDF or ODT file instead. Great when you are dealing with engineers and programmers, but not so great when you are dealing with people who think you need to create a .doc file in order to attach an image to an email.

I doubt many people gave a damn about things like anti-virus software on their Windows machines when the internet started to get popular with the masses. Somehow over time, though, a fair number of these laypeople wound up learning (likely a combination of the hard way and word-of-mouth) that they're probably a decent idea. Sure, lots don't know how they work, or where those little bits of nastiness came from, or that most such problems could be avoided by other means, but they know they're important and do bother with them, slightly.

Really, I get what you're saying, but there's a point where it goes from "not everyone wants to know how the car goes" to "people can't and won't ever change a flat!" Give some people potentially useful information and it *does* stand a chance of getting filed and used somewhere someday.

I fear greatly for the future of the show. Please get that man a haircut.

You watch Doctor Who for hair styles?