This isn't a glib statement. A business transaction is about more than coming to agreement about the price of a thing or service. It's also about creating and maintaining incentives for both sides.
I pay slicehost for a VPS. They get $50/month from me in return for disk space, CPU cycles, uptime and support. Our incentives are aligned.
With Joyent/Textdrive, every month you get hosting and every month they get nothing. The incentives are not aligned. In fact, from Joyent's perspective, the incentive to provide any meaningful service diminishes over time. No about of cajoling or complaining or threatening Joyent will change this imbalance. Sure, it's 54 hours of downtime today - but I can guarantee that a year from now the outages will be far longer and far more frequent.
"But we had a deal!" Yes, you did. And you were a fool to enter into it.
Here's the bottom line:
Your customers don't care what's causing the downtime. It's still your fault.
Website users don't care that the deal has soured. It's still your responsibility.
Joyent doesn't care that they're providing cr@ppy service to Textdrive users, despite the postings on HN by Jason Hoffman (hey Jason, instead of wasting time posting on some internet forum, why not spend that time fixing the actual problem?)
Seriously - Joyent doesn't give a sh?t about the lifetime accounts. If they did, then why are you experiencing 54 hours of downtime? If they do care, and are applying resources to solve the problem, then why is it taking so long? 54 HOURS TO FIX A SERVER. That, to me, is evidence of a shocking level of incompetence. In either case I would get the hell out of there.
> All of you criticizing this need to open up your minds
This type of attitude is infuriating - if a claim can survive the crucible of peer review then it we can be much, much more certain that it is true and correct. If humans were to posses a limited form of precognition that would be awesome - but before we can claim to posses a thing we must be sure that it is real.
As a fellow skeptic, I would advise we avoid outright rejection. After all, part of the mantra is to question our own world view, right?
Disease existed long before we figured out causes and targeted treatments; people possessed it, and people applied treatments with varying degrees of success and failure, including death. One of the more interesting inaccuracies of medical history is that of humors (random site - http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/herbs/WomenMed.html). How we treated disease changed over time and is still changing as we learn new things.
My point? It is important to continue to apply rigid scientific study to all manners of phenomena, not only to validate its existence but also to figure out how to repeat or avoid said phenomena, depending on the need, the positives and the negatives of said phenomena. However, we should not turn a blind eye towards what people think they experience just because we have not yet come up with the right tool for measuring or the right study for identifying. There is always some reason behind the claim (even if the reason is "snake oil salesman").
Whatever is behind precognition (to take your example), people claim to experience it and always have made those claims. There is a certain burden of proof required, sure. How do you convince someone born deaf that there is a thing like sound that is experienced the way the hearing experience it? In the case of precognition, it tends to be self-validating (sometimes self-fulfilling), and yet it is still useful for precogs or those who believe in them, whether it is illusion or real, whether we have proven it concretely or not.
That bears a quick repeat... The information is somehow useful. These people who are shouting "open your mind" find their precognitive information useful; in their minds, challenges to this useful information are silly. In the name of understanding, the real focus should be on figuring out how that information is obtained. Is it psychic phenomena, a ghost whispering in the ear, great subconscious brain processing, or something else?
So if the response to an outright simple rejection is "open your minds", I think it is warranted. If the response is to indicate disagreement, however, I always thought that to be a useless response, as useless as the simple rejection.
