Analysis of Media bias, consumer advocate, political shenanigans this election, religion from a progressive viewpoint. Oh. And science fiction in all its forms. Books, movies, TV and radio. Email: spockosemail at gmail com
2) Microsoft will charge YOU to fix THEIR buggy software.
3) Third party companies that make crap like "Error Guard" or "Search Assistant" can mess up a computer and get nary a slap on the wrist. These aren't teens in a basement creating these products to cause havok. These companies can be found, they have assets. Somewhere money is changing hands to make and sell these products.
4) Hardware and software manufacturers have pushed the support of their products further and further down the responsibility chain. They know that as long as they can get someone else to take the responsibility to fix the problem they are off the hook.
Over the years we have come to accept these practices as the norm. Why is it okay for Microsoft to charge money to fix their broken product? Yes you can come up with all sorts of reasons WHY it is okay, but ask yourself, "Why am I defending this practice?" Are you so worried that Microsoft will lose money and you will stop getting calls to fix your families’ computers? 
Last time a company took responsiblity for fixing bad software (photo circ 1977)
Do you work in an industry that makes money fixing broken computer software and hardware?
Or have you accepted the premise offered by so many EULAs ‘even if it breaks it’s not our fault’.
Companies are not rewarded by the marketplace or Wall Street for taking responsibility for their products. They are rewarded for passing the buck, charging money to fix their problems, doing it as cheaply as possible and using tech support desks of major companies and a legion of "free" technical support people to do their dirty work for them.
Lately I've become disappointed in the power of the media to accurately grasp and address these issues. They too have bought into the Microsoft paradigm "Our product breaks, you fix it!"(maybe because they don't have to fix their own computers!). Would a campaign from someone like Walt Mossberg yelling at companies about this issue make a difference?
"No I won't pay YOU to fix YOUR product!"
We can't use Walt because he is no long a befuddled person facing paying $35 bucks a shot for technical support at Microsoft or getting the run around from Dell in India. Additionally, a high level person who will talk about this probably won't admit to bursting into tears at the thought of opening his computer. And if he did, would he get sympathy or scorn?
Yet these people clearly are out there. They are our fathers and mothers, our Aunt Mary and our Uncle Jim. They are the ones who taught us about personal responsibility and how to balance our own checkbook and own up to our mistakes.
Who speaks for those people?
Is Elliot Spitzer our only hope? He seems to be the only person on the national scene who is looking out for the needs of the people first and not the needs of the companies. People create “if cars were like computers” jokes all the time. Maybe it is because nobody dies if a computer crashes. Is that what it will take for companies to financially and philosophically take responsibility for their own mistakes? Will they need to be sued and punished by some force other than a rigged “free market place” or a corrupt political system?
L.A.Times reports on the California Medical Association's vote this week in which 449 of 450 physician delegates voted to express "emergency outrage" at Bush administration maneuvering on the Schiavo case - Link from the American Journal of Bioethics
Have a reoccurrence of your cancer after your insurance was cut?Their view is that it isn't their fault that you got sick. They take care of their own. You are not their own. They didn't tell you to take that job in Information Technology, manufacturing, technical support or telecommunications that got outsourced --unless of course they did, in that case as Bluto would say, "Hey, you fucked up, you trusted us!". Like Molly Ivins says, Vote against equal rights for gays, get a soul crushing bankruptcy bill.
Not. Our. Problem. It's between you, God and your family.
Couldn't get insurance because of your pre-existing condition? Too damn bad. Insurance companies shouldn't be told who to cover. Marketplace rules trump all baby. You should have saved more money.
God didn't cover it? You clearly didn't pray hard enough.
Family can’t help? Why should we help? You aren’t our kid.
Want Government help? What are you, a welfare queen? Fixing your problem isn’t the government’s job. If you wanted government to help you should have voted for the other guy. Now suck it. America, you missed your chance.
Empathy Ain’t Us.
The credit card companies (and the hospitals) shouldn't have to pay the price for your choice to have cancer, your choice to loose your job and your choice to save too little. You are either lazy, stupid or both. You must have chosen your investments poorly. Did you listen to lying analystsor
an executive from MCI, Enron, or Tyco? Idiot.
Smarter, better people like us put aside money for their cancer treatments, or we picked a rich family to be born into. You probably got that cancer from being lazy. Maybe you didn't work hard enough to retrain yourself so you could get a good job after yours was outsourced. You chose not to see the writing on the wall and got fired.
Smart people don't get fired. Or if they do they bounce back to a higher paying job in this great economy we have created. Hard workers don't get fired. We all know that people with friends and family keep their jobs. You must be stupid, lazy or most important; you didn't hook up with the right family or friends. You want sympathy? Go to church.
This is the underlying attitude of this bill. Of course we won’t say it out loud, but this is how we see you and your money problems. Your problems aren’t our problems. You are not our priority. We do what we are told by the people who really pay us.
Karl Rove trick number 17.Two other friends are leaving the Star Fleet area. Multiple colleagues are doing the equilivant of scrubbing plasma tubes because it is steady work. It lacks the inspirational quality of exploring new worlds and new civilizations, but it does pay the replicator bill.
Statistics that aren't seen don’t count. Don’t like the statistic? Change how it is counted. Example, the unemployed after their 18 weeks of unemployment runs out. The underemployed, the "independent contractors" scrambling for meager project work from companies that laid them off two years ago to look more attractive to Wall Street.
No careful reader of the Gospels can fail to be struck by the difference between the largeheartedness of such passages and the bitter, badgering tone of some of the passages added by the early church. It is not only the polemical element in the Gospels, the belief in devils, the flashy miracles, and the resurrection itself that readers like Jefferson, Tolstoy, and Gandhi have felt are unworthy of Jesus, but most of all, the direct antitheses to the authentic teaching that were put into “Jesus” mouth, doctrines and attitudes so offensive that they “have caused good men to reject the whole in disgust.” Jesus teaches us, in his sayings and by his actions, not to judge (in the sense of not to condemn), but to keep our hearts open to all people; the later “Jesus” is the archetypal judge, who will float down terribly on the clouds for the world’s final rewards and condemnations. Jesus cautions against anger and teachers the love of enemies; “Jesus” calls his enemies “children of the Devil” and attacks them with the utmost vituperation and contempt. Jesus talks of God as a loving father, even to the wicked; “Jesus” preaches a god who will cast the disobedient into everlasting flames.
The epitome of this narrowhearted, sectarian consciousness is a saying which a second-century Christian scribe put into the mouth of the resurrected Savior at the end of Mark: "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever doesn't believe will be damned."
Executive in charge of pickle products
Vlasic Foods, Inc.
Camden, NJ
08103 -1701
Dear Vlasic product managers:
I know how the new product marketing game works. You try and extend your brand by creating new products and selling consumers on the idea that they need this new product. So you sacrifice some of your shelf space for your current products in order to build a market for a new products.
But guess what? This consumer hates your new product, the "Stacker" chip. Unfortunately, it has totally taken up the shelf space that was devoted to your original hamburger dill chips. Even if I wanted to buy the original hamburger dill chips, I could not. I have been to three different stores in the San Francisco Bay area trying to find regular old hamburger dill chips. All of them have been replaced by your "stacker" chips.
Most recently in a store I saw rows and rows of "Stackers" not a single regular hamburger dill chip jar from Vlasic. So I bought another brand from called Springfield (let me guess, you are the maker of those chips for too.) that I didn’t like as much, but at least the chips were round.
Yes, I did try the stacker chips but I did not like them. You can only mess around with brand loyalty for so long until people get pissed. I don't know how long you are going to try and force the stacker chips down people's throats, no pun intended, until you realize that you are losing whatever market share of the pickle business that you originally had.
Wake up and smell the coffee, do some current market research, check how your products are moving (or NOT moving) in the local stores and change your strategy. If we are not buying them (and I'm guessing I'm not the only one who isn't) stop trying to force us to buy them by ONLY offering one configuration of the chips on the shelves. If it is the stores that are screwing up and filling the shelves incorrectly, let them know it is annoying to the consumer. I would much rather have a choice to try a new product based on a discount or a promotion rather then removing my regular brand to force me to chose the new brand. Frankly, it's a stupid move.
Now maybe you think I'm a nut to get so worked up over pickle shapes, but I'm tired of being ignored when it comes to foods I like getting phased out based on some focus group testing done in some other state, or marketing and sales strategies that ignore the wishes of consumers. Most people won't write a letter, but will simply stop buying your products. Don't be the New Coke of the pickle industry.
Sincerely ,
Spocko.
Photoshop from fellow farker veganarian
In 1838 a scholar in Leipzig, Germany, Christian Hermann Weisse, detected a collection of Jesus' sayings used by Matthew and Luke in composing their Gospels. ...it was commonly referred to as a source of the canonical Gospels, scholars came to call it simply "the source," in German, Quelle, abbreviated Q.
The Christianity that step-by-step won over the ancient world, until the Roman Empire became the Christian Byzantine Empire, was primarily the Matthean rather than the Pauline kind of Christianity. It was a Christianity of mercy and philanthropy, which won the allegiance of the underprivileged and suppressed, that is to say, the mass of the population, more so than the Pauline theology that ultimately flowed into Neoplatonic philosophical theology of the educated minority (with literacy standing at about 15 percent).
"Hell, I voted for George W. Bush, and I'm a Christian Republican, but if all my troubles had happened to me under the new proposed rules I would become an indebted servant to credit card companies and the Humana Hospital chain. Mary didn't choose to get Leukemia, I had medical insurance, it still wasn't enough. I mortgaged my house, is it still wasn't enough. Should we end up on the street so that the First Card and Humana executive can get an additional 5 million dollar bonus? "
We've learned the difference between mistreating, which is wrong, and atrocities. Because this is an atrocity what they did to this guy (Berg).Oliver North uses the "it's just a few bad apples" positioning method favored by President Bush.
"These prisoners, you know they're not there for traffic violations. If they're in cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists,they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals."
