Cuba openly supports a violent over-throw of Capitalist economies, and vows to not rest until world wide communism has been achieved.
Yeah, that kind of comes with revolutionary communism, kind of like how some people consider it perfectly justified to kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in order to "free" them from "communism", drugs or "terrorists".
In the 1970's, the popular thing for upwardly mobile Communists was to hijack US airliners and divert them to Cuba.
Indeed, but note how most of these hijackings were quite non-violent, some guy pulls a gun, demands to be flown to Cuba and either gets arrested or makes it to Cuba. Also, note how there were more than a couple of hijackers who were in fact mentally ill, I don't think you can blame that on communism (although from the tone of your post I'm sure you'd love to).
Cuban refugees living in the US charter small air-craft to fly between Cuba and the US, for the purpose of finding/assisting refugees fleeing Cuba in small boats. These flights have been shot down in international airspace.
You're talking about the pro-Batista crackpots in Florida, right? The ones who constantly scream about the horrible horrible evils of the Cuban government since Batista and his cronies were thrown out. Yeah, no bias or wishes to make the Cuban government look evil (not saying the Cuban government is a bunch of pink fluffy kittens but if everything that these Cubans living in Florida are screaming about was true then Fidel Castro would be a 40ft cyborg with eyes that shoot lasers, gigantic chainsaws for fingers and he'd have a large amount of ICBMs mounted to his head).
Dude, life is not a multiple choice test. Most teachers program students to think it is, since to them "teaching" means feeding students simplistic factoids and rewarding them when they regurgitate them upon demand. Such students tend to get all peevish when they encounter a real teacher, one who tries to teach actual thinking skills. Guess what? These teachers are not out to humiliate you. You're doing that to yourself.
Why are you talking about multiple choice tests? I pointed out that you asked an open-ended question which had a "proper" answer long enough that it seemed you were deliberately trying to make it hard to "properly" answer it. This resulted in that you could step in and point out that the person who answered you "missed" some tiny detail. Of course in most cases a knowledgeable individual answering your post would be likely to deliberately omit certain information in order not to get too long-winded. And I've had plenty of teachers (from junior high up through university) and bosses who would use questions like that to seemingly "demonstrate" how the student/employee had gaps in his/her knowledge or as a jumping-off point (while simultaneously giving everyone the impression that the person answering the question knew less than the person asking the question).
... is usually an extension of ASCII, and which varies depending on your locale and platform.
And I'm guessing a lot of people who read your post, me included, knew that damn well but didn't feel like launching into aforementioned long-winded explanation of every detail of ASCII, EASCII, UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 and their respective histories.
Conclusion: You're acting like a pompous ass who's trying to cover up the fact that you're being a dick and trying to belittle those answering you.
I see, as I suspected this is like one of those questions that some teachers in high school used to love asking random students in front of the whole class, you're deliberately trying to make sure that no matter what answer you get there's always some little detail they left out (because they thought it was obvious or too far from the original question) that you can "correct" them on.
Also, please note that I phrased my answer as a question, this was also deliberate as I suspected you were being vague to ensure that any answer given would "miss" something.
When you wrote "define ASCII", did you then mean define as in, explain that it's a way of encoding characters (a character-encoding scheme) with an expanded explanation about what a character-encoding scheme is or did you really mean "do you know what ASCII is an abbreviation of?" (American Standard Code for Information Interchange btw)?
If I'm charging $50 per ounce for onions and I'm the only source of onions in a city and getting an "onion reseller license" ("building infrastructure") is really expensive (but I got mine since I used to runt the government-owned onion store wouldn't you say that my onions are overpriced?
And good luck trying to boycott someone who's got a regional monopoly, that's like when guys complain about always having to make the first move and some woman says "well why don't you guys get together and stop hitting on women? then we'd have to hit on you guys.", any sane person understands that it doesn't work.
Except that Psystar's computers are being sold as being capable of running OS X and to the average user (and I deal with these average users every day) will go "Hey this mac oh-sex thing is from that mac company" and when Apple's tech support tells said average user that they don't support OS X on Psystar computers and that he needs to call Psystar he'll most likely just get angry with Apple and start telling anyone who will listen what a shitty company Apple is for not helping him (even though anyone with even basic understanding of the situation will understand why it's perfectly reasonable of Apple not to support said combination of hardware and software a lot of regular people who view computers as magic boxes that let you click a blue e to download the internets will gladly listen to the cheapskate who's pissed with Apple).
The problem isn't with the legality of refusing to support OS X on non-Apple hardware, the problem is that when some dipshit buys a Psystar machine, OS X refuses to work as it's supposed to (on Apple hardware) and he/she is told by Apple that they won't provide support. All of sudden a few of these people will start screaming loudly about what a horrible company Apple is for not providing people who aren't using their products with support. Trust me, it happens to other companies all the time, "But I'm using $RANDOM_CRAP with $YOUR_PRODUCT!!!!11one YOU MUST SUPPORT IT!! I DEMAND RETRIBUTION!!! YOU ARE EVIL!!! MOMMY!!! WAAAAAHMBULANCE!!!11one".
No, appfolders as in, the Application "file" (like Mail.app, Safari.app, Photoshop CS4.app and every other app for OS X) is actually a directory and to install it you just drag the "file" to wherever you want it installed. (Yes, I'm aware of all the stuff that ends up in ~/Library/Application Support and other places when you run the app, that's not the point).
instant sleep...? a feature I turn off because I'm not an idiot.
So you like it when your laptop keeps running even when you close the lid?
I deal with end users every day, lots of them think "the blue e" is "the windows", "the internet", "windows internet", "microsoft outlook" and so on. These are people who don't care and even if you carefully explain why maybe they should care just a little they become irate and lash out since "it's your job to make sure my internets work!"; try pulling that one on your mechanic after you just drove your car into a river because "well cars SHOULD float, now fix it and stop telling me how to drive!"...
In a sense that could be seen as starting from scratch as they essentially dumped their old codebase and built a new system (albeit from older well-tried components, but these components are not from the previous Mac OS).
What are you talking about? GNOME and KDE were both considered ugly as fuck back in those days, if you wanted eyecandy you looked elsewhere.
As for Mandrake, it didn't "rule" anything, there may have been a bit of buzz about it but most people seemed to run Debian, Red Hat, Slackware or some other minor distro.
There are plenty of unlimited business options, it's just that they cost a shitload even if it's the exact same service as the residential DSL, and if you buy a "real" unlimited connection for your business then it'll cost loads. I know the ISP I'm using has several tiers for connections; "Residential" (dynamic IP, one IP-address), "Business Light" (which is residential but for businesses), "Business" (Optional static IP), "Business Pro" (You get your own subnet and a real SLA).
If I can recall, every time I've seen a story about slashdot before today, there were 100 comments saying "They need to just have a firm cap." Now everyone is complaining about the firm cap.
Every time I've commented in one of these stories I know my attitude has been that there's no need for caps, I have never had an ISP with any kind of bandwidth cap (except for my current 3G ISP that reserves the right to limit the speed of my connection if I somehow manage to transfer more than x GB in a month (I think it's 5 or 15 GB, I can't remember), this has yet to happen as I don't download large amounts of data with my cellphone).
In fact, I think most/. users oppose bandwidth caps but when choosing between "we'll cap you whenever we see fit" and "The cap is x GB per month" the latter is obviously the lesser evil.
Actually, I'm pretty sure all three of those could be justified by most people under the right circumstances, and if it wasn't for the risk of having their homes burned to the ground by people like yourself you probably wouldn't have much trouble finding people in your own neighborhood who disagree with you about at least one of those right now, today.
I couldn't download a browser with more than 40-bit encryption at the time due to export regulations. Yes I was an American citizen, but I wasn't in the united states.
Actually, the law you would've broken was a US law, there's a reason lots of software that contained encryption was written in a way that allowed it to ship without the encryption, so that europeans and others could use the encryption module/plugin/component coded outside the US.
Also, I think this move is partly to stop non-americans from getting US iTunes accounts so that they can buy movies and TV shows (yeah, are you listening Apple? We're still waiting!).
You want me to quote my own post to prove I wrote what was mis-replied to?
Residual THC non-psychoactive metabolites are stored in fat and get released into the urine slowly. While the (psychoactive) d9-THC is in your bloodstream you are under influence of it, later the aforementioned metabolites get stored in fat.
Hey Mr. Troll. If you had bothered reading my comment you would have noticed that the part you quoted was about blood tests, I also mentioned urine tests in another part of my comment.
"Protected mode" in Internet explorer breaks stuff, lots of stuff. Sure in an ideal world people would work around the quirks of "Protected mode" but it's easier to just put "Disable protected mode" in the manual.
Actually, if you have THC in your blood then chances are you're stoned, most of the time you can't find THC in the bloodstream after 24 hours or so. Urine and hair tests OTOH can be used to detect use several weeks after the fact but if you smoked your first joint in six months about ten minutes ago and the police grab you there's a pretty big chance it won't show up in a urine test...
This is something used by marijuana users btw, if they get busted right after smoking they go for the urine test, if they get busted some other time they demand a blood test because it's more expensive, has to be done by a doctor/nurse and won't show anything if they haven't smoked in the last couple of days.
I know perfectly well what the dangers of self-signed certs is, I also know (from spending way too many years interacting with users) that security information is considered "boring" and gets ignored no matter how many hoops the user has to jump through, so it just ends up bugging me.
If I really need security when accessing a site with a self-signed cert then I'll make sure I can verify the authenticity of the cert, but when I stumble upon some guy's website I'm not in the mood to have my web browser force me to jump through hoops.
Conclusion: I know the dangers, the users who don't know about the dangers generally don't care no matter how hard you try to inform them.
You keep talking about failing usability yet I don't see how Safari/WebKit is worse than the horrible mess that Internet Explorer is, and Firefox certainly isn't free of issues. If anything I'd say that the user experience with Safari/WebKit is much more pleasant than both IE and FF. Or maybe you simply don't like how they're not filled with retarded crap like IE's "protected mode"? Or maybe you like how FF makes you jump through a bunch of hoops every time it encounters a self-signed SSL cert? (A warning I can understand and support but when I stumble upon someone's personal website that happens to use a self-signed cert I end up jumping through a bunch of hoops because they're assuming the average user will somehow read the warnings and not just click randomly until they see the website (or give up and call someone (me) to help them deal with the "problem").
I'm sorry but I just don't see these usability issues you're talking about, and I like having a browser that's actually follows the standards.
I take it from your comment that you feel that Safari somehow provides the user with an inferior experience of using the software? If so then I have to disagree, I regularly use Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox (2 & 3 due to a couple of annoying bugs in FF3), WebKit and Opera, and generally speaking I actually find Safari/WebKit to be the most pleasant ones, there's also the fact that unlike Internet Explorer they understand the application/xhtml+xml MIME-type and are able to display SVG images without installing 3rd party plugins, and unlike Firefox they actually comprehend embedded fonts in SVG images...
I have a much better idea. We need to stop perverts from filming people in secret and in order to accomplish this I suggest all video recording devices be equipped with a loud siren that causes permanent damage to the ears of anyone within 100 feet. That'll teach those damn perverts! And anyone who disagrees with me is clearly a pervert!
Slashdot Mirror
Cuba openly supports a violent over-throw of Capitalist economies, and vows to not rest until world wide communism has been achieved.
Yeah, that kind of comes with revolutionary communism, kind of like how some people consider it perfectly justified to kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in order to "free" them from "communism", drugs or "terrorists".
In the 1970's, the popular thing for upwardly mobile Communists was to hijack US airliners and divert them to Cuba.
Indeed, but note how most of these hijackings were quite non-violent, some guy pulls a gun, demands to be flown to Cuba and either gets arrested or makes it to Cuba. Also, note how there were more than a couple of hijackers who were in fact mentally ill, I don't think you can blame that on communism (although from the tone of your post I'm sure you'd love to).
Cuban refugees living in the US charter small air-craft to fly between Cuba and the US, for the purpose of finding/assisting refugees fleeing Cuba in small boats. These flights have been shot down in international airspace.
You're talking about the pro-Batista crackpots in Florida, right? The ones who constantly scream about the horrible horrible evils of the Cuban government since Batista and his cronies were thrown out. Yeah, no bias or wishes to make the Cuban government look evil (not saying the Cuban government is a bunch of pink fluffy kittens but if everything that these Cubans living in Florida are screaming about was true then Fidel Castro would be a 40ft cyborg with eyes that shoot lasers, gigantic chainsaws for fingers and he'd have a large amount of ICBMs mounted to his head).
/Mikael
Dude, life is not a multiple choice test. Most teachers program students to think it is, since to them "teaching" means feeding students simplistic factoids and rewarding them when they regurgitate them upon demand. Such students tend to get all peevish when they encounter a real teacher, one who tries to teach actual thinking skills. Guess what? These teachers are not out to humiliate you. You're doing that to yourself.
Why are you talking about multiple choice tests? I pointed out that you asked an open-ended question which had a "proper" answer long enough that it seemed you were deliberately trying to make it hard to "properly" answer it. This resulted in that you could step in and point out that the person who answered you "missed" some tiny detail. Of course in most cases a knowledgeable individual answering your post would be likely to deliberately omit certain information in order not to get too long-winded. And I've had plenty of teachers (from junior high up through university) and bosses who would use questions like that to seemingly "demonstrate" how the student/employee had gaps in his/her knowledge or as a jumping-off point (while simultaneously giving everyone the impression that the person answering the question knew less than the person asking the question).
... is usually an extension of ASCII, and which varies depending on your locale and platform.
And I'm guessing a lot of people who read your post, me included, knew that damn well but didn't feel like launching into aforementioned long-winded explanation of every detail of ASCII, EASCII, UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 and their respective histories.
Conclusion: You're acting like a pompous ass who's trying to cover up the fact that you're being a dick and trying to belittle those answering you.
/Mikael
I see, as I suspected this is like one of those questions that some teachers in high school used to love asking random students in front of the whole class, you're deliberately trying to make sure that no matter what answer you get there's always some little detail they left out (because they thought it was obvious or too far from the original question) that you can "correct" them on.
Also, please note that I phrased my answer as a question, this was also deliberate as I suspected you were being vague to ensure that any answer given would "miss" something.
/Mikael
When you wrote "define ASCII", did you then mean define as in, explain that it's a way of encoding characters (a character-encoding scheme) with an expanded explanation about what a character-encoding scheme is or did you really mean "do you know what ASCII is an abbreviation of?" (American Standard Code for Information Interchange btw)?
/Mikael
If I'm charging $50 per ounce for onions and I'm the only source of onions in a city and getting an "onion reseller license" ("building infrastructure") is really expensive (but I got mine since I used to runt the government-owned onion store wouldn't you say that my onions are overpriced?
And good luck trying to boycott someone who's got a regional monopoly, that's like when guys complain about always having to make the first move and some woman says "well why don't you guys get together and stop hitting on women? then we'd have to hit on you guys.", any sane person understands that it doesn't work.
/Mikael
(Why do I even bother replying to AC trolls?)
Except that Psystar's computers are being sold as being capable of running OS X and to the average user (and I deal with these average users every day) will go "Hey this mac oh-sex thing is from that mac company" and when Apple's tech support tells said average user that they don't support OS X on Psystar computers and that he needs to call Psystar he'll most likely just get angry with Apple and start telling anyone who will listen what a shitty company Apple is for not helping him (even though anyone with even basic understanding of the situation will understand why it's perfectly reasonable of Apple not to support said combination of hardware and software a lot of regular people who view computers as magic boxes that let you click a blue e to download the internets will gladly listen to the cheapskate who's pissed with Apple).
/Mikael
The problem isn't with the legality of refusing to support OS X on non-Apple hardware, the problem is that when some dipshit buys a Psystar machine, OS X refuses to work as it's supposed to (on Apple hardware) and he/she is told by Apple that they won't provide support. All of sudden a few of these people will start screaming loudly about what a horrible company Apple is for not providing people who aren't using their products with support. Trust me, it happens to other companies all the time, "But I'm using $RANDOM_CRAP with $YOUR_PRODUCT!!!!11one YOU MUST SUPPORT IT!! I DEMAND RETRIBUTION!!! YOU ARE EVIL!!! MOMMY!!! WAAAAAHMBULANCE!!!11one".
/Mikael
Convenient upgrades is my guess. No product keys or other silliness, just pop in the disc and install.
/Mikael
appfolders... program files?
No, appfolders as in, the Application "file" (like Mail.app, Safari.app, Photoshop CS4.app and every other app for OS X) is actually a directory and to install it you just drag the "file" to wherever you want it installed. (Yes, I'm aware of all the stuff that ends up in ~/Library/Application Support and other places when you run the app, that's not the point).
instant sleep...? a feature I turn off because I'm not an idiot.
So you like it when your laptop keeps running even when you close the lid?
/Mikael
Windows 3.11 for workgroups is from the days when Microsoft didn't believe in the internet.
Remember Windows 95 and how they tried to push their own proprietary network instead of the internet?
/Mikael
I deal with end users every day, lots of them think "the blue e" is "the windows", "the internet", "windows internet", "microsoft outlook" and so on. These are people who don't care and even if you carefully explain why maybe they should care just a little they become irate and lash out since "it's your job to make sure my internets work!"; try pulling that one on your mechanic after you just drove your car into a river because "well cars SHOULD float, now fix it and stop telling me how to drive!"...
/Mikael
In a sense that could be seen as starting from scratch as they essentially dumped their old codebase and built a new system (albeit from older well-tried components, but these components are not from the previous Mac OS).
/Mikael
What are you talking about? GNOME and KDE were both considered ugly as fuck back in those days, if you wanted eyecandy you looked elsewhere.
As for Mandrake, it didn't "rule" anything, there may have been a bit of buzz about it but most people seemed to run Debian, Red Hat, Slackware or some other minor distro.
/Mikael
There are plenty of unlimited business options, it's just that they cost a shitload even if it's the exact same service as the residential DSL, and if you buy a "real" unlimited connection for your business then it'll cost loads. I know the ISP I'm using has several tiers for connections; "Residential" (dynamic IP, one IP-address), "Business Light" (which is residential but for businesses), "Business" (Optional static IP), "Business Pro" (You get your own subnet and a real SLA).
/Mikael
If I can recall, every time I've seen a story about slashdot before today, there were 100 comments saying "They need to just have a firm cap." Now everyone is complaining about the firm cap.
Every time I've commented in one of these stories I know my attitude has been that there's no need for caps, I have never had an ISP with any kind of bandwidth cap (except for my current 3G ISP that reserves the right to limit the speed of my connection if I somehow manage to transfer more than x GB in a month (I think it's 5 or 15 GB, I can't remember), this has yet to happen as I don't download large amounts of data with my cellphone).
In fact, I think most /. users oppose bandwidth caps but when choosing between "we'll cap you whenever we see fit" and "The cap is x GB per month" the latter is obviously the lesser evil.
/Mikael
Child Porn? Morally wrong. Murder? Morally wrong. Stealing? Morally wrong.
Actually, I'm pretty sure all three of those could be justified by most people under the right circumstances, and if it wasn't for the risk of having their homes burned to the ground by people like yourself you probably wouldn't have much trouble finding people in your own neighborhood who disagree with you about at least one of those right now, today.
/Mikael
I couldn't download a browser with more than 40-bit encryption at the time due to export regulations. Yes I was an American citizen, but I wasn't in the united states.
Actually, the law you would've broken was a US law, there's a reason lots of software that contained encryption was written in a way that allowed it to ship without the encryption, so that europeans and others could use the encryption module/plugin/component coded outside the US.
Also, I think this move is partly to stop non-americans from getting US iTunes accounts so that they can buy movies and TV shows (yeah, are you listening Apple? We're still waiting!).
/Mikael
You want me to quote my own post to prove I wrote what was mis-replied to?
Residual THC non-psychoactive metabolites are stored in fat and get released into the urine slowly. While the (psychoactive) d9-THC is in your bloodstream you are under influence of it, later the aforementioned metabolites get stored in fat.
This is all freely available information.
/Mikael
Hey Mr. Troll. If you had bothered reading my comment you would have noticed that the part you quoted was about blood tests, I also mentioned urine tests in another part of my comment.
/Mikael
"Protected mode" in Internet explorer breaks stuff, lots of stuff. Sure in an ideal world people would work around the quirks of "Protected mode" but it's easier to just put "Disable protected mode" in the manual.
/Mikael
Actually, if you have THC in your blood then chances are you're stoned, most of the time you can't find THC in the bloodstream after 24 hours or so. Urine and hair tests OTOH can be used to detect use several weeks after the fact but if you smoked your first joint in six months about ten minutes ago and the police grab you there's a pretty big chance it won't show up in a urine test...
This is something used by marijuana users btw, if they get busted right after smoking they go for the urine test, if they get busted some other time they demand a blood test because it's more expensive, has to be done by a doctor/nurse and won't show anything if they haven't smoked in the last couple of days.
/Mikael
I know perfectly well what the dangers of self-signed certs is, I also know (from spending way too many years interacting with users) that security information is considered "boring" and gets ignored no matter how many hoops the user has to jump through, so it just ends up bugging me.
If I really need security when accessing a site with a self-signed cert then I'll make sure I can verify the authenticity of the cert, but when I stumble upon some guy's website I'm not in the mood to have my web browser force me to jump through hoops.
Conclusion: I know the dangers, the users who don't know about the dangers generally don't care no matter how hard you try to inform them.
/Mikael
You keep talking about failing usability yet I don't see how Safari/WebKit is worse than the horrible mess that Internet Explorer is, and Firefox certainly isn't free of issues. If anything I'd say that the user experience with Safari/WebKit is much more pleasant than both IE and FF. Or maybe you simply don't like how they're not filled with retarded crap like IE's "protected mode"? Or maybe you like how FF makes you jump through a bunch of hoops every time it encounters a self-signed SSL cert? (A warning I can understand and support but when I stumble upon someone's personal website that happens to use a self-signed cert I end up jumping through a bunch of hoops because they're assuming the average user will somehow read the warnings and not just click randomly until they see the website (or give up and call someone (me) to help them deal with the "problem").
I'm sorry but I just don't see these usability issues you're talking about, and I like having a browser that's actually follows the standards.
/Mikael
I take it from your comment that you feel that Safari somehow provides the user with an inferior experience of using the software? If so then I have to disagree, I regularly use Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox (2 & 3 due to a couple of annoying bugs in FF3), WebKit and Opera, and generally speaking I actually find Safari/WebKit to be the most pleasant ones, there's also the fact that unlike Internet Explorer they understand the application/xhtml+xml MIME-type and are able to display SVG images without installing 3rd party plugins, and unlike Firefox they actually comprehend embedded fonts in SVG images...
/Mikael
I have a much better idea. We need to stop perverts from filming people in secret and in order to accomplish this I suggest all video recording devices be equipped with a loud siren that causes permanent damage to the ears of anyone within 100 feet. That'll teach those damn perverts! And anyone who disagrees with me is clearly a pervert!
/Mikael