Sorry, but I have to laugh. You really should take off your glasses with one lense tinted rosey, and they other completely blocked out. Real linux software doesn't "just work", especially hardware.
The subset of 'software' that is 'hardware' is pretty small. In fact, no software is hardware.
Actual software, however, works fine. Companies don't have any problems producing commercial software that will work on any distribution.
And as for actual hardware (Not software that is hardware, whatever that is.), it works just fine. As I said, Linux sometimes doesn't support the newest hardware. You have to check before you buy.
OTOH, it supports a heck of a lot older hardware, stuff there will never be a Vista or Windows 7 or any 64-bit Windows driver for. And Linux will eventually get drivers for new stuff, whereas those OSes won't for the old stuff. (As the hardware manufacturers have no incentive to make drivers for hardware they don't sell anymore.)
Again, pretty funny. Sorry, but even open source companies can't get stuff to install consistently across even the most popular versions of linux without resorting to custom install work.
Erm...did you just argue that companies need to use installers to install things? Also, Linux companies need to resort to CD burners to burn CDs! Why didn't I mention that?!
Um, yeah. You need write an 'installer', or set up a third party one, to, you know, install. As opposed to Windows, where you need to, um, do the same thing. Hrm.
A lot of the stuff you'd have to set up in the installer for a Windows program, you simply set it up in the package, and it's all handled as part of the OS instead of the installer having stub programs it installs to, for example, uninstall the program. So all you really need is a fancy dialog box saying 'Install blah? Yes/No' and, if Yes, run a single command based on the distribution.
I.e, instead of a myriad of third party installers like in Windows that handle a bunch of stuff automatically, Linux distros come with that built in, for free, and it's got more features like 'automatic updates' also.
Granted, there are two competing ones of those, the 'rpm' system and the 'deb' system, but it is trivially easy to convert a package back and forth, or make it for both, or, heck, there are tools that let you directly install one sort of package under the other system.
Of course, who knows what's happening in your imaginary universe, where the instructions to install Linux software probably start with 'mount your CD', which you probably think Linux users still do.
There is no 'ELF' and there's no way to arrange an alliance with them.
I wish slashdot would explain what 'ELF' is a little better when posting articles about it. They are a front. Something that exists solely so that people can attribute their actions to it. That is what 'front' means.
Usually, the fact a group is a front is a secret, but when it's in the name of the group, it means the organization doesn't officially exist, hence anyone can claim to be working for it. Groups spring up that claim they're part of it, because they share the same goals, and they attribute their actions to it, which keep them from having to expose themselves and state their goals. They can use the other, nonexistent group as a 'front'.
And there's a press office in DC that is not ELF, but the 'ELF press office', which will just simply repeat whatever message you send it. You don't have to actually work for 'ELF' to get them to repeat your message, because there is no actual 'ELF' to work for. (And they, quite deliberately, are operated with no knowledge of people actually doing the things, so have no way to confirm this stuff.)
The 'press office' is not the organization. The organization does not, in fact, actually exist.
ELF is just a bunch of people calling themselves 'ELF' all over the place.
The press office just republishes anonymous messages it gets in press release form to journalists (and law enforcement) that have asked for it. Any idiot can send anything there and get them to dutifully repeat it.
PETA literally argues that any use of animals, at all, is the equivalent of slavery.
PETA believe in 'animal rights', not some water-down version of that where they have the right not to be beaten, but they have the right not even to be 'used' by humanity at all. That is why they kill animals in their 'animal shelters', to keep people from 'using' them.
That is why they are fucking wackjobs. They are standing there arguing you have enslaved your dog, and you should let it go 'free'. Which means not feeding it and kicking it out, and then, I guess, shooting it when it goes feral or something.
There are plenty of sane organizations fighting various abuses of animals. PETA is not one of those groups. PETA is not fighting horrible slaughterhouses, they are fighting seeing eye dogs.
Yes, and anyone with a bit of sense doesn't fucking support PETA either! They're worse than the damn ELF!
'ELF' at least limits their harm to property, whereas PETA constantly harms animals, and them reaching their goal in life would end up with cows dying all over the place and people having to shoot feral cats and dogs.
And, perhaps more to the point, 'ELF' does not actually exist. There is no organization named 'ELF' that goes around doing things. There is a 'press office' that supposedly reprints messages from them, but there is no actual 'them', there is just a bunch of people doing whatever they want.
You have no idea how 'Linux drivers' even slightly work, do you?
No piece of hardware ever comes with Linux drivers. Maybe a few barely-supported things a decade ago, but not any recent stuff.
This is because, unlike Windows, Linux doesn't expect hardware manufacturers to make their own shitty drivers that crash all the time because they're a hardware company and don't know how to write software.
Something like 90% of Windows blue screens post-Windows 98 are because of third-party hardware drivers. XP onwards stopped applications from being able to crash Windows, but there's not a damn thing it can do about shitty drivers. Now they have this 'certification' thing that works somewhat, but hardware companies are not software companies, and still cannot write good software.
This is why Linux drivers come with the kernel, and why kernel developers write them. Of course, the company is free to write their own and submit it to the kernel devs, but that's the distribution point, not some driver CD.
There is nothing stopping hardware manufacturers from saying, in the requirements, 'Linux kernel 2.6.4 or greater', and many, of course, actually do.
In fact, Linux is basically the only OS that you can be sure hardware devices that worked on a version of it in 2000 still work on modern version, which makes your entire premise absurdly idiotic. Linux may sometimes suffer by not having the absolutely newest hardware support, but it has about 10x the backwards compatibility that Windows has. The devices that used to be supported under Linux but are not anymore are probably countable on two hands, whereas there's plenty of XP stuff out there that will never get signed Vista drivers, just like there was plenty of stuff under 98 that never got XP drivers.
This is because the company is in charge of updating them, and they don't give a flying fuck about supporting hardware they don't sell anymore. In fact, they'd rather that old hardware didn't work, because they've got some new stuff to sell you. Whereas with Linux, the kernel people are in charge of keeping the driver updated, and hardware will only stop working if some kernel APIs change enough to break it and no one bothers fix it so it gets removed. (Recently, Linux lost the ability, as it redid its entire IDE/PATA/SATA/SCSI support to be in one unified driver, to read MFM hard drives. Aka, pre-IDE. No one seemed to mind.)
It's somewhat hilarious to hear anyone talk about a 'kernel ABI' on Linux. Man, the Windows kernel ABI and API changes every release, making all hardware manufacturers update, or not, their drivers. Whereas 99% of Linux drivers are already in the kernel, and just change along with it and keep working. It's only the companies that insist on releasing their own drivers that have problems.
Now, WRT to software ABI, there's a valid concern. Or, at least, it was. A long time ago. Nowadays it's trivially easy to release commercial software for Linux that works fine. You put an install script on a CD, you have that either use the package manager (either dpkg or rpm, you can include both on the CD and use whichever one the OS is) or you don't bother with that and just put it in it's own/opt/ directory. Then you stick icons in the right place for Gnome and KDE to pick them up.
If the libaries it needs aren't found, you can install your own, either compat libs for the entire OS, or just in your own directory.
Anyone who can't package software for Linux and have it work on any full-fledged Linux distro made in the last five years shouldn't be writing software.
Once a policy commitment is made, they don't have a choice but to cover you, barring negligent activity, which is a high bar.
By 'high bar', I suspect you mean 'They'll suddenly discover the fact you didn't report a sinus infection when you were twelve and cancel your policy for that'.
They can fiddle with policy terms, but you can sue them and most likely win in most environments.
Man, in your universe filing lawsuits must be in an incredibly easy thing. You're filing 'policy suits' here and 'suits' there.
What's more, you appear to be winning against multi-billion dollar companies.
Most people would have to pay hundreds of dollars to a lawyer just to file any suit, with hundreds or thousands of dollars more in legal fees, with no assurance to win, to get the insurance company to pay for a thousand dollars worth of care.
I guess you have some sort of magical lawsuit-filing genie somewhere.
But, hey, I'll freely admit I'm just repeating what I've heard about insurance companies, as I have very little interaction with them. Insurance companies do not stoop to the level of actually allowing me to purchase insurance from them. Perhaps someone they actually will sell insurance to could chime in?
Also, the ads predict things that already happened. Like paying tolls automatically, which happened at the end of the 80s.
Of course, in their universe, you paid tolls automatically using a computer screen in your car via some sort of AT&T communication system (Dangerous much?), instead of just buying a damn tiny radio transceiver and putting money in an account. 'How unwieldy can we make it so that AT&T gets a cut of the pie.'
And that link, despite the incorrect name, cracks me up. 'Romeo, hey, it's Juliet. Um, listen, I'm going to fake my own death tonight, so don't freak out or anything.'
Someone coming from 1989 probably wouldn't believe his eyes on any of those except the trains.
Despite all the precursors of those existing at that time, you show him an cell with a 20 hours of TV shows on a miniSD card and a web browser that lets him read about anything that ever happened, he'd be amazed.
...have talked about what has happened, I'm going to predict what's about to happen:
The end of a lot of crime.
We've got a nationwise communication network. We have the ability to transmit audio and video over it in real time. We have devices that can monitor heartrate and other contextual clues to determine when someone is in danger.
It really just takes someone doing the math and putting all this in a cellphone, so that it alerts the authorities, or a monitoring company who then alerts authorities, when someone is in danger.
Or think of this way: It is entirely possible, right now, to easily hitchhike safely in this country. All you have to do is take a picture of the car's license plate and the driver using your cell, and send them to someone you trust.
What happens when that starts happening automatically, that whenever you interacted with someone it got recorded somewhere at your house?
We're inches away from having a revolution in stopping crime, where people set up systems to monitor themselves and record who they interact with and where they are, with manual and automatic triggers to summon the police.
And once just a few normal people start doing that, it's like concealed weapons...just a few people who might have them make the job of a criminal much more tricky.
You don't have 'significantly more options'. You have one.
In a car you can brake, swerve left, or swerve right.
Flying, you can swerve left, right, up, or down, but presumably you can't just brake in midair. (Even if this was some sort of magic hover-car or something that can actually stand in midair, you can't quickly brake, because you don't have friction.)
But even with one more option to to avoid a collision, it's very silly to argue this would be safer. At almost any height, any collision is going to be 100% for all people involved, as opposed to ground collisions, where even very high-speed ones can have some people walking away.
There is not such thing as a 'policy suit', you loon.
You can, in theory, sue an insurance company if they fail to cover a procedure and you can demonstrate they should have covered it under their policy.
But a) that's going to be very hard and expensive to do, and b) won't stop them from ending your policy with them, it would just make them pay for expenses you incurred before they kicked you off their insurance rolls.
I.e., if you appear to have lung cancer, and they refuse to test you, and you go and pay for a test yourself and can demonstrate that, under your own policy with them, they should have paid for said test...you can sue them for the cost of the test, and maybe recover it, although they have a whole army of lawyers so it's an interesting trick to recover it for less than the cost of the test.
Actually, probably not. You need to sue them in advance to make them approve the test...the scenario I just laid out is rather unlikely.
But, regardless, you can't magically make them keep you as a customer, though, if you have cancer.
Oh, and the reason the shareholders care about them is solely because shareholders don't care about how much money the company makes, they care about their stock price, and would like to see it move up and down in predictable patterns so that they can make a profit from selling and purchasing stock.
The 'first week' concept is exceptionally stupid, and only showed up because publishers of crap wanted to look successful, so started measuring the only thing they could control with advertising. 'How many people can we sucker into seeing this movie based on ads before they realize it's crap and stop coming?'
A much better judge of how well made something, and, hell, a better judge of how much it's going to sell in total, is second week sales, at least for movies. Once the word of mouth actually gets around. (With games it might be even longer, might want to look at second month sales, or even 'first six months'.)
Just because a company fails a penetration test and got caught doesn't mean it sucked. It might mean the company they were hired to test didn't suck.
The only person who 'sucked' here was the company that alerted the NCUA without realizing that they had, in fact, hired someone to do that. I suspect some over-eager security officer who not only discovered the attack, but alerted both his bosses and the NCUA before his bosses could inform him that this was, in fact, a penetration test.
In a sense, this was a good thing, for all anyone knew those CDs had been sent out to a dozen banks and right now they were sitting in the incoming mail or even already being inserted in computers. With something like this, it really could be a few hours that make the difference between two banks successfully attacked and twenty.
But, annoyingly, it was just a test. Thus demonstrating one of the problems of penetration testings...it might cause needless alarm and expense when detected, and that might even spread outside the organization. (The police, especially, get pissy when someone calls them.)
Not that warning people of intrusion vectors is a bad thing, but the NCUA presumed this was some actual attack and got pretty specific about a threat that no other bank is going to see, at least not in that specific manner, thus rather wasting people's times.
It sorta defeats the point of a penetration test if the president is sitting right there. Especially as the president is probably going to be in on it. You're supposed to test the most vulnerable staffer, as that is who would actually be attacked.
I know what you mean, though. In any sort of problem, they'd personally contact someone who has the ability to make decisions and override the rules, in addition to just following the rules.
Typical for today's corporations, concerned only for short-term profits.
Actually, no. Corporations concerned about any profits would be step up from now.
Currently, corporations, or at least the people leading them, are only concerned about short-term stock prices. Which is only slightly vaguely linked to actual profits.
The people who own companies now make their money off stock price rising, not actual dividends and shares of the profits. Thus, they reward CEOs for that.
If they cared even slightly about profits, one of them would have caught on to actually producing good niche shows that they could promote the hell out of to advertisers in that niche. Someone would be doing that.
This way, they can, instead, promote the hell out of their 'new' shows to their stockholders, and bump the price up, sell, and then slowly buy back during the year. (Or not, and the new owners do the same thing the next year.)
In my experience, average people still do watch a lot of TV, but it seems they're becoming more focused, viewing TV as a means of accessing specific shows rather than as a general leisure activity ("I want to watch the next episode of X" vs. "I think I'll relax in front of the TV").
Bingo. I haven't 'incidentally' watched an episode of a TV show in eight years. I have about a dozen well-produced TV series I'm working my way through, two or three at a time (Depending on my mood.), plus five or six still-produced ones. I just finished Arrested Development over the last month, for example.
Of course, I download all my TV shows from copyright-violating places, because I don't do streaming either.
I am personally standing right here, ready to watch ads or even pay money to support a TV show I like, but I don't have that option except via exceptionally lame and jerky Hulu streaming that I can't control on my XBMC device, and over a 150kps streaming is a fraction of quality of the lowest quality downloads. (Which ironically are about 150kps, so it takes about X minutes to download X minutes of video.)
Yes, I buy the DVD of shows I'm going to watch more than once, but there aren't that many of them. No, I'm not buying the DVD of shows I'm watching once.
I've considered Netflix for those DVDs, but consider that more paying for a service I can actually do myself than paying for the 'show'. Yes, wear and tear, and thus replacement, of the DVD's might mean that the studio gets a tiny profit, on average, of each and every Netflix DVD rentals.
But it hardly seems worth my while to pay a large amount of money to a third party, and spend all that gas hauling DVDs around, just so they get a tiny fraction of the money. So anyone suggesting 'Netflix' to do it legally is being a bit silly...that might make it legal, but it's hardly supporting the producers of the show, except in some statistical sense that I 'bought' 1/300th of the DVD.
If, right now, the 'Chuck' people (A great show) approached me with a 'Download high quality versions of each episode as it comes out, and get a DVD shipped to you when the season is over, for $40 dollars', I'd send them the money right now. Or maybe I'd go for the $20 option and have commercials, but still get a DVD at the end. Or maybe I'd just go for the 'watch them with commercials, and no DVD, for free'...you know, how we do over the air. Except on my computer.
But the setup between television studios and television networks is too broken to allow stuff like that.
Not to mention, current climate models predict possible lowering of temperature in various areas.
For example, no one's quite sure when the Atlantic ocean circular current will shut down, but most scientists expect it to at some temperature.
At which point, the British Isles will end up looking like Sweden, Norway, Alaska, Siberia, all the other areas in the same latitude. Especially as the ice cap continues to melt next to them. That ocean current flowing past the British Isles is the only reason they have the weather they do.
If everything was just getting 'warmer', we'd really have no problems at all. Some especially hot areas might get too hot, but we'd essentially be fine.
Heck, if it was just everything getting warmer and the oceans rising, we might not have much of a problem...they'd do it slowly enough that we could move and barricade.
The problem is that, essentially, a lot of weather patterns, at different temperatures, will behave extremely differently. Places will stop getting any rain and turn into deserts, other places will get flooded, ocean temperatures will change as ocean flow changes, which will result in different operations of hurricanes and ocean effects on the climate, etc, etc.
Global Climate Change is essentially 'Global Climate Randomization'. It's like God is going to reroll the climate modifiers on the planet.
If you maintain CO2 is pollution; then, you need to stop breathing!
Just because things naturally occur doesn't mean they can't be pollutants. I mean, enough arsenic can, and has, ended up in the groundwater to poison people, naturally. (Well, from disturbed soil, apparently, so halfway naturally in this case...but things like typhoons can disturb as much soil.)
That doesn't mean we shouldn't regulate arsenic as a pollutant, which we do.
Likewise, there are places in the world contaminated with uranium and unlivable without trucking in water. Not because of any human activity, but because that's where uranium comes from! Do you scoff at regulations keeping uranium out of your water?
When the housing market collapsed, they still won, because they were insured against losses, which is why AIG almost collapsed.
Incidentally, the AIG mess is the largest bit of fucktardary in existence.
Okay, it's possible that we couldn't stand to have AIG's insurance policies all become bogus. A lot of people have life insurance with them, they're a huge company.
But, unlike the banks, which need to keep operating, we don't need to have AIG keep operating...we need to have their existing policies keep operating.
So we should have just guaranteed their policies: You have AIG insurance, in any field, you can keep paying for it for another year until you get a new company, and if you haven't picked one by then the government will pick a mostly-equivalent policy from a responsible insurance company. In the mean time,if AIG collapses, the government would cover their payout to you. (And collect your payments to them to attempt to migrate the cost.)
Of course, AIG would essentially immediately collapse, but that's hardly the taxpayer's fault. If an insurance company insure hundreds of millions of dollars in bad policies, it should fucking fail. That's how damn insurance works! (And if a company plays a roll in taking down the US economy by enabling companies to pretend that their bad debt was 'insured', it should be subject to the fucking corporate death penalty anyway, but I don't really have to make a case for that because AIG killed itself.)
Anyway, all the shit we have burned means that there is more than simple correlation to point at, there is an explanatory mechanism available.
The CO2 we put in the air doesn't even require any scientific study to determine.
The fact we are burning stuff that we know releases CO2 isn't a scientific hypothesis, it is a starting premise. It's not a theory...we know roughly how much gasoline and coal and oil are purchased to burn, and unless someone's screwing with the statistics by buying that stuff and burying it, we know roughly how much of it turns into CO2.
Ergo, we know how much CO2 we're putting in the air. It is not even possible to debate it.
Temperature changes of this size have already occured in the course of human history and were non-fatal.
If by 'non-fatal' you mean 'didn't kill all humans, then yes.
Likewise, why should we be worried about diseases that might kill 80% of the population? We've already had multiple ones of those, and we're still here!
I swear, it's like you think we're worried all people might cease to exist. Um, no. We could get hit by a damn dinosaur-killing asteroid and there would be people living through it!
However, unlike you, we have a problem with a huge amount of the population dying, and all of the civilization collapsing, even if humanity makes it through it.
Or, in short: Humans will exist in a post-apocalyptic world. That does not mean we shouldn't worry about the apocalypse.
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Sorry, but I have to laugh. You really should take off your glasses with one lense tinted rosey, and they other completely blocked out. Real linux software doesn't "just work", especially hardware.
The subset of 'software' that is 'hardware' is pretty small. In fact, no software is hardware.
Actual software, however, works fine. Companies don't have any problems producing commercial software that will work on any distribution.
And as for actual hardware (Not software that is hardware, whatever that is.), it works just fine. As I said, Linux sometimes doesn't support the newest hardware. You have to check before you buy.
OTOH, it supports a heck of a lot older hardware, stuff there will never be a Vista or Windows 7 or any 64-bit Windows driver for. And Linux will eventually get drivers for new stuff, whereas those OSes won't for the old stuff. (As the hardware manufacturers have no incentive to make drivers for hardware they don't sell anymore.)
Again, pretty funny. Sorry, but even open source companies can't get stuff to install consistently across even the most popular versions of linux without resorting to custom install work.
Erm...did you just argue that companies need to use installers to install things? Also, Linux companies need to resort to CD burners to burn CDs! Why didn't I mention that?!
Um, yeah. You need write an 'installer', or set up a third party one, to, you know, install. As opposed to Windows, where you need to, um, do the same thing. Hrm.
A lot of the stuff you'd have to set up in the installer for a Windows program, you simply set it up in the package, and it's all handled as part of the OS instead of the installer having stub programs it installs to, for example, uninstall the program. So all you really need is a fancy dialog box saying 'Install blah? Yes/No' and, if Yes, run a single command based on the distribution.
I.e, instead of a myriad of third party installers like in Windows that handle a bunch of stuff automatically, Linux distros come with that built in, for free, and it's got more features like 'automatic updates' also.
Granted, there are two competing ones of those, the 'rpm' system and the 'deb' system, but it is trivially easy to convert a package back and forth, or make it for both, or, heck, there are tools that let you directly install one sort of package under the other system.
Of course, who knows what's happening in your imaginary universe, where the instructions to install Linux software probably start with 'mount your CD', which you probably think Linux users still do.
There is no 'ELF' and there's no way to arrange an alliance with them.
I wish slashdot would explain what 'ELF' is a little better when posting articles about it. They are a front. Something that exists solely so that people can attribute their actions to it. That is what 'front' means.
Usually, the fact a group is a front is a secret, but when it's in the name of the group, it means the organization doesn't officially exist, hence anyone can claim to be working for it. Groups spring up that claim they're part of it, because they share the same goals, and they attribute their actions to it, which keep them from having to expose themselves and state their goals. They can use the other, nonexistent group as a 'front'.
And there's a press office in DC that is not ELF, but the 'ELF press office', which will just simply repeat whatever message you send it. You don't have to actually work for 'ELF' to get them to repeat your message, because there is no actual 'ELF' to work for. (And they, quite deliberately, are operated with no knowledge of people actually doing the things, so have no way to confirm this stuff.)
The 'press office' is not the organization. The organization does not, in fact, actually exist.
ELF is just a bunch of people calling themselves 'ELF' all over the place.
The press office just republishes anonymous messages it gets in press release form to journalists (and law enforcement) that have asked for it. Any idiot can send anything there and get them to dutifully repeat it.
Windmills do cause cancer.
Assuming you're using them to grind coal into dust, that is.
PETA literally argues that any use of animals, at all, is the equivalent of slavery.
PETA believe in 'animal rights', not some water-down version of that where they have the right not to be beaten, but they have the right not even to be 'used' by humanity at all. That is why they kill animals in their 'animal shelters', to keep people from 'using' them.
That is why they are fucking wackjobs. They are standing there arguing you have enslaved your dog, and you should let it go 'free'. Which means not feeding it and kicking it out, and then, I guess, shooting it when it goes feral or something.
There are plenty of sane organizations fighting various abuses of animals. PETA is not one of those groups. PETA is not fighting horrible slaughterhouses, they are fighting seeing eye dogs.
Yes, and anyone with a bit of sense doesn't fucking support PETA either! They're worse than the damn ELF!
'ELF' at least limits their harm to property, whereas PETA constantly harms animals, and them reaching their goal in life would end up with cows dying all over the place and people having to shoot feral cats and dogs.
And, perhaps more to the point, 'ELF' does not actually exist. There is no organization named 'ELF' that goes around doing things. There is a 'press office' that supposedly reprints messages from them, but there is no actual 'them', there is just a bunch of people doing whatever they want.
You have no idea how 'Linux drivers' even slightly work, do you?
No piece of hardware ever comes with Linux drivers. Maybe a few barely-supported things a decade ago, but not any recent stuff.
This is because, unlike Windows, Linux doesn't expect hardware manufacturers to make their own shitty drivers that crash all the time because they're a hardware company and don't know how to write software.
Something like 90% of Windows blue screens post-Windows 98 are because of third-party hardware drivers. XP onwards stopped applications from being able to crash Windows, but there's not a damn thing it can do about shitty drivers. Now they have this 'certification' thing that works somewhat, but hardware companies are not software companies, and still cannot write good software.
This is why Linux drivers come with the kernel, and why kernel developers write them. Of course, the company is free to write their own and submit it to the kernel devs, but that's the distribution point, not some driver CD.
There is nothing stopping hardware manufacturers from saying, in the requirements, 'Linux kernel 2.6.4 or greater', and many, of course, actually do.
In fact, Linux is basically the only OS that you can be sure hardware devices that worked on a version of it in 2000 still work on modern version, which makes your entire premise absurdly idiotic. Linux may sometimes suffer by not having the absolutely newest hardware support, but it has about 10x the backwards compatibility that Windows has. The devices that used to be supported under Linux but are not anymore are probably countable on two hands, whereas there's plenty of XP stuff out there that will never get signed Vista drivers, just like there was plenty of stuff under 98 that never got XP drivers.
This is because the company is in charge of updating them, and they don't give a flying fuck about supporting hardware they don't sell anymore. In fact, they'd rather that old hardware didn't work, because they've got some new stuff to sell you. Whereas with Linux, the kernel people are in charge of keeping the driver updated, and hardware will only stop working if some kernel APIs change enough to break it and no one bothers fix it so it gets removed. (Recently, Linux lost the ability, as it redid its entire IDE/PATA/SATA/SCSI support to be in one unified driver, to read MFM hard drives. Aka, pre-IDE. No one seemed to mind.)
It's somewhat hilarious to hear anyone talk about a 'kernel ABI' on Linux. Man, the Windows kernel ABI and API changes every release, making all hardware manufacturers update, or not, their drivers. Whereas 99% of Linux drivers are already in the kernel, and just change along with it and keep working. It's only the companies that insist on releasing their own drivers that have problems.
Now, WRT to software ABI, there's a valid concern. Or, at least, it was. A long time ago. Nowadays it's trivially easy to release commercial software for Linux that works fine. You put an install script on a CD, you have that either use the package manager (either dpkg or rpm, you can include both on the CD and use whichever one the OS is) or you don't bother with that and just put it in it's own /opt/ directory. Then you stick icons in the right place for Gnome and KDE to pick them up.
If the libaries it needs aren't found, you can install your own, either compat libs for the entire OS, or just in your own directory.
Anyone who can't package software for Linux and have it work on any full-fledged Linux distro made in the last five years shouldn't be writing software.
Once a policy commitment is made, they don't have a choice but to cover you, barring negligent activity, which is a high bar.
By 'high bar', I suspect you mean 'They'll suddenly discover the fact you didn't report a sinus infection when you were twelve and cancel your policy for that'.
They can fiddle with policy terms, but you can sue them and most likely win in most environments.
Man, in your universe filing lawsuits must be in an incredibly easy thing. You're filing 'policy suits' here and 'suits' there.
What's more, you appear to be winning against multi-billion dollar companies.
Most people would have to pay hundreds of dollars to a lawyer just to file any suit, with hundreds or thousands of dollars more in legal fees, with no assurance to win, to get the insurance company to pay for a thousand dollars worth of care.
I guess you have some sort of magical lawsuit-filing genie somewhere.
But, hey, I'll freely admit I'm just repeating what I've heard about insurance companies, as I have very little interaction with them. Insurance companies do not stoop to the level of actually allowing me to purchase insurance from them. Perhaps someone they actually will sell insurance to could chime in?
Also, the ads predict things that already happened. Like paying tolls automatically, which happened at the end of the 80s.
Of course, in their universe, you paid tolls automatically using a computer screen in your car via some sort of AT&T communication system (Dangerous much?), instead of just buying a damn tiny radio transceiver and putting money in an account. 'How unwieldy can we make it so that AT&T gets a cut of the pie.'
And that link, despite the incorrect name, cracks me up. 'Romeo, hey, it's Juliet. Um, listen, I'm going to fake my own death tonight, so don't freak out or anything.'
10 years ago, we all would have been thoroughly shocked to walk into a store and get a 1TB drive for our PC's for under $100.
I actually think it would be more shocking to get a 16G microSD card that is the size of a fingernail for $50.
Oddly enough, your '1969' is a bit silly.
Someone coming from 1989 probably wouldn't believe his eyes on any of those except the trains.
Despite all the precursors of those existing at that time, you show him an cell with a 20 hours of TV shows on a miniSD card and a web browser that lets him read about anything that ever happened, he'd be amazed.
...have talked about what has happened, I'm going to predict what's about to happen:
The end of a lot of crime.
We've got a nationwise communication network. We have the ability to transmit audio and video over it in real time. We have devices that can monitor heartrate and other contextual clues to determine when someone is in danger.
It really just takes someone doing the math and putting all this in a cellphone, so that it alerts the authorities, or a monitoring company who then alerts authorities, when someone is in danger.
Or think of this way: It is entirely possible, right now, to easily hitchhike safely in this country. All you have to do is take a picture of the car's license plate and the driver using your cell, and send them to someone you trust.
What happens when that starts happening automatically, that whenever you interacted with someone it got recorded somewhere at your house?
We're inches away from having a revolution in stopping crime, where people set up systems to monitor themselves and record who they interact with and where they are, with manual and automatic triggers to summon the police.
And once just a few normal people start doing that, it's like concealed weapons...just a few people who might have them make the job of a criminal much more tricky.
You don't have 'significantly more options'. You have one.
In a car you can brake, swerve left, or swerve right.
Flying, you can swerve left, right, up, or down, but presumably you can't just brake in midair. (Even if this was some sort of magic hover-car or something that can actually stand in midair, you can't quickly brake, because you don't have friction.)
But even with one more option to to avoid a collision, it's very silly to argue this would be safer. At almost any height, any collision is going to be 100% for all people involved, as opposed to ground collisions, where even very high-speed ones can have some people walking away.
There is not such thing as a 'policy suit', you loon.
You can, in theory, sue an insurance company if they fail to cover a procedure and you can demonstrate they should have covered it under their policy.
But a) that's going to be very hard and expensive to do, and b) won't stop them from ending your policy with them, it would just make them pay for expenses you incurred before they kicked you off their insurance rolls.
I.e., if you appear to have lung cancer, and they refuse to test you, and you go and pay for a test yourself and can demonstrate that, under your own policy with them, they should have paid for said test...you can sue them for the cost of the test, and maybe recover it, although they have a whole army of lawyers so it's an interesting trick to recover it for less than the cost of the test.
Actually, probably not. You need to sue them in advance to make them approve the test...the scenario I just laid out is rather unlikely.
But, regardless, you can't magically make them keep you as a customer, though, if you have cancer.
Oh, and the reason the shareholders care about them is solely because shareholders don't care about how much money the company makes, they care about their stock price, and would like to see it move up and down in predictable patterns so that they can make a profit from selling and purchasing stock.
The 'first week' concept is exceptionally stupid, and only showed up because publishers of crap wanted to look successful, so started measuring the only thing they could control with advertising. 'How many people can we sucker into seeing this movie based on ads before they realize it's crap and stop coming?'
A much better judge of how well made something, and, hell, a better judge of how much it's going to sell in total, is second week sales, at least for movies. Once the word of mouth actually gets around. (With games it might be even longer, might want to look at second month sales, or even 'first six months'.)
Um, who said these consultants sucked.
Just because a company fails a penetration test and got caught doesn't mean it sucked. It might mean the company they were hired to test didn't suck.
The only person who 'sucked' here was the company that alerted the NCUA without realizing that they had, in fact, hired someone to do that. I suspect some over-eager security officer who not only discovered the attack, but alerted both his bosses and the NCUA before his bosses could inform him that this was, in fact, a penetration test.
In a sense, this was a good thing, for all anyone knew those CDs had been sent out to a dozen banks and right now they were sitting in the incoming mail or even already being inserted in computers. With something like this, it really could be a few hours that make the difference between two banks successfully attacked and twenty.
But, annoyingly, it was just a test. Thus demonstrating one of the problems of penetration testings...it might cause needless alarm and expense when detected, and that might even spread outside the organization. (The police, especially, get pissy when someone calls them.)
Not that warning people of intrusion vectors is a bad thing, but the NCUA presumed this was some actual attack and got pretty specific about a threat that no other bank is going to see, at least not in that specific manner, thus rather wasting people's times.
It sorta defeats the point of a penetration test if the president is sitting right there. Especially as the president is probably going to be in on it. You're supposed to test the most vulnerable staffer, as that is who would actually be attacked.
I know what you mean, though. In any sort of problem, they'd personally contact someone who has the ability to make decisions and override the rules, in addition to just following the rules.
Typical for today's corporations, concerned only for short-term profits.
Actually, no. Corporations concerned about any profits would be step up from now.
Currently, corporations, or at least the people leading them, are only concerned about short-term stock prices. Which is only slightly vaguely linked to actual profits.
The people who own companies now make their money off stock price rising, not actual dividends and shares of the profits. Thus, they reward CEOs for that.
If they cared even slightly about profits, one of them would have caught on to actually producing good niche shows that they could promote the hell out of to advertisers in that niche. Someone would be doing that.
This way, they can, instead, promote the hell out of their 'new' shows to their stockholders, and bump the price up, sell, and then slowly buy back during the year. (Or not, and the new owners do the same thing the next year.)
In my experience, average people still do watch a lot of TV, but it seems they're becoming more focused, viewing TV as a means of accessing specific shows rather than as a general leisure activity ("I want to watch the next episode of X" vs. "I think I'll relax in front of the TV").
Bingo. I haven't 'incidentally' watched an episode of a TV show in eight years. I have about a dozen well-produced TV series I'm working my way through, two or three at a time (Depending on my mood.), plus five or six still-produced ones. I just finished Arrested Development over the last month, for example.
Of course, I download all my TV shows from copyright-violating places, because I don't do streaming either.
I am personally standing right here, ready to watch ads or even pay money to support a TV show I like, but I don't have that option except via exceptionally lame and jerky Hulu streaming that I can't control on my XBMC device, and over a 150kps streaming is a fraction of quality of the lowest quality downloads. (Which ironically are about 150kps, so it takes about X minutes to download X minutes of video.)
Yes, I buy the DVD of shows I'm going to watch more than once, but there aren't that many of them. No, I'm not buying the DVD of shows I'm watching once.
I've considered Netflix for those DVDs, but consider that more paying for a service I can actually do myself than paying for the 'show'. Yes, wear and tear, and thus replacement, of the DVD's might mean that the studio gets a tiny profit, on average, of each and every Netflix DVD rentals.
But it hardly seems worth my while to pay a large amount of money to a third party, and spend all that gas hauling DVDs around, just so they get a tiny fraction of the money. So anyone suggesting 'Netflix' to do it legally is being a bit silly...that might make it legal, but it's hardly supporting the producers of the show, except in some statistical sense that I 'bought' 1/300th of the DVD.
If, right now, the 'Chuck' people (A great show) approached me with a 'Download high quality versions of each episode as it comes out, and get a DVD shipped to you when the season is over, for $40 dollars', I'd send them the money right now. Or maybe I'd go for the $20 option and have commercials, but still get a DVD at the end. Or maybe I'd just go for the 'watch them with commercials, and no DVD, for free'...you know, how we do over the air. Except on my computer.
But the setup between television studios and television networks is too broken to allow stuff like that.
Not to mention, current climate models predict possible lowering of temperature in various areas.
For example, no one's quite sure when the Atlantic ocean circular current will shut down, but most scientists expect it to at some temperature.
At which point, the British Isles will end up looking like Sweden, Norway, Alaska, Siberia, all the other areas in the same latitude. Especially as the ice cap continues to melt next to them. That ocean current flowing past the British Isles is the only reason they have the weather they do.
If everything was just getting 'warmer', we'd really have no problems at all. Some especially hot areas might get too hot, but we'd essentially be fine.
Heck, if it was just everything getting warmer and the oceans rising, we might not have much of a problem...they'd do it slowly enough that we could move and barricade.
The problem is that, essentially, a lot of weather patterns, at different temperatures, will behave extremely differently. Places will stop getting any rain and turn into deserts, other places will get flooded, ocean temperatures will change as ocean flow changes, which will result in different operations of hurricanes and ocean effects on the climate, etc, etc.
Global Climate Change is essentially 'Global Climate Randomization'. It's like God is going to reroll the climate modifiers on the planet.
If you maintain CO2 is pollution; then, you need to stop breathing!
Just because things naturally occur doesn't mean they can't be pollutants. I mean, enough arsenic can, and has, ended up in the groundwater to poison people, naturally. (Well, from disturbed soil, apparently, so halfway naturally in this case...but things like typhoons can disturb as much soil.)
That doesn't mean we shouldn't regulate arsenic as a pollutant, which we do.
Likewise, there are places in the world contaminated with uranium and unlivable without trucking in water. Not because of any human activity, but because that's where uranium comes from! Do you scoff at regulations keeping uranium out of your water?
When the housing market collapsed, they still won, because they were insured against losses, which is why AIG almost collapsed.
Incidentally, the AIG mess is the largest bit of fucktardary in existence.
Okay, it's possible that we couldn't stand to have AIG's insurance policies all become bogus. A lot of people have life insurance with them, they're a huge company.
But, unlike the banks, which need to keep operating, we don't need to have AIG keep operating...we need to have their existing policies keep operating.
So we should have just guaranteed their policies: You have AIG insurance, in any field, you can keep paying for it for another year until you get a new company, and if you haven't picked one by then the government will pick a mostly-equivalent policy from a responsible insurance company. In the mean time,if AIG collapses, the government would cover their payout to you. (And collect your payments to them to attempt to migrate the cost.)
Of course, AIG would essentially immediately collapse, but that's hardly the taxpayer's fault. If an insurance company insure hundreds of millions of dollars in bad policies, it should fucking fail. That's how damn insurance works! (And if a company plays a roll in taking down the US economy by enabling companies to pretend that their bad debt was 'insured', it should be subject to the fucking corporate death penalty anyway, but I don't really have to make a case for that because AIG killed itself.)
Anyway, all the shit we have burned means that there is more than simple correlation to point at, there is an explanatory mechanism available.
The CO2 we put in the air doesn't even require any scientific study to determine.
The fact we are burning stuff that we know releases CO2 isn't a scientific hypothesis, it is a starting premise. It's not a theory...we know roughly how much gasoline and coal and oil are purchased to burn, and unless someone's screwing with the statistics by buying that stuff and burying it, we know roughly how much of it turns into CO2.
Ergo, we know how much CO2 we're putting in the air. It is not even possible to debate it.
Temperature changes of this size have already occured in the course of human history and were non-fatal.
If by 'non-fatal' you mean 'didn't kill all humans, then yes.
Likewise, why should we be worried about diseases that might kill 80% of the population? We've already had multiple ones of those, and we're still here!
I swear, it's like you think we're worried all people might cease to exist. Um, no. We could get hit by a damn dinosaur-killing asteroid and there would be people living through it!
However, unlike you, we have a problem with a huge amount of the population dying, and all of the civilization collapsing, even if humanity makes it through it.
Or, in short: Humans will exist in a post-apocalyptic world. That does not mean we shouldn't worry about the apocalypse.