I got out of the calibration and comm repair business back in the mid 90's so I don't know the current level of HP's involvement in this area but I believe it was all sold off to Agilent.
Not sold to Agilent, rather HP was split in two and the part making instruments &c was named Agilent. See here for the official version.
There's more to democracy than simple "majority rules". In particular, there usually is and IMHO needs to be some mechanisms for slowing down too drastic changes, if only to force people to think again what it actually is they want.
In particular rules for changing constitution are usually written with that in mind, but also various rights in constitutions themselves strive to make it hard to do too much damage too quickly, even if transient majority so wants. Just about everything in the US Bill of Rights will do as an example, but some (even limited) possibility of anonymity is also important for that reason.
It is not a binary choice between majority and minority rules. It can and should be set up so that majority has more power, but not unlimited, instant power. If the majority wants something bad enough and long enough, they'll get it, sure. But not instantly, and the smaller the majority, the harder it should be to make drastic changes.
"Majority rule" should mean majority over some non-trivial period of time - and in practice it always does, partly or perhaps even primarily because various technical reasons necessarily delay execution of all decisions, by design or by accident. And more drastic changes should and do require more time. That also allows the minority a better change to persuade others of their viewpoint - also IMHO an essential feature of democracy.
[...] I doubt a majority of totally informed people would act against a minority in a punitive way, as this would leave each individual open to punitive acts from a different majority.
You underestimate the shortsightedness of people. Those in a majority hardly ever stop to think they might be in a minority at a later date - and when they do, it just encourages them to (ab)use their majority power while it lasts.
[...] if they bother to go through it and find something encrypted, they'll likely subpoena you for the key. Don't want to turn it over? Can't remember the old password? Contempt of court.
Wonder what they'd do if you told it's company policy that you only get the key by calling home office and assure them the machine has never left your hands?
As a side note, I've crossed Finland-Norway border overland several times and I've never been asked anything - indeed usually I haven't even seen border guards (once I didn't even notice the border). Sometimes the customs building has had a note on its door saying "we're closed, please drive on".:-)
And this is EU's external border (Finland's in EU, Norway isn't).
I've never seen a CFL last anywhere near it's rated life.
I have some that have lasted over 10 years now, and I haven't actually seen a single one die in my current apartment (in 8 years). Maybe they are indeed sensitive to wiring; variation does seem big at any rate.
I have a regular-size laptop and a desktop, too - and I still have and use a netbook, and a Nokia N810 as well. Different situations call for different size devices.
[...] many people in our world may not worship Darwin but they worship science and have science as their object of faith. Science is great but it is not perfect (I mean both that science is not perfect and the scientific method is not perfect).
One of the major features of science is that it can never be perfect, and it is the very opposite of accepting things on faith, so "worshipping" it or having science as an object of faith sounds a bit strange. Then again, people do worship things they don't understand... hmm, actually I'm not sure one can worship and understand the same thing.
Interesting. In Helsinki metro there's pretty perfect coverage. I don't know if they actually have base stations or some kind of repeaters in the trains themselves or in the tunnels or whatever, but it does work.
have you ever thought what life would be like if you had no asshole? Things would get quite miserable, very quickly.
There are animals without an asshole, like anemones, and they don't seem to be particularly miserable. They have just one opening into their body cavity, which handles the functions of both mouth and asshole.
Hmm. Given what comes out of some politicians mouths, maybe they don't have assholes either...
C) 100% of Finland? Or 100% of the INHABITED areas.
About 97% of total area is covered - it is getting seriously hard to find a place without coverage even when hiking in the wilderness areas of Lapland. here is the coverage map of Finland's largest operator.
It's a plan type. You pay $X per month for a plan where all minutes from incoming calls to the phone are free
Interestingly, in Finland and indeed all European countries I know of incoming calls are and have always been free (within one country - roaming abroad is different). I suspect this may have had something to do with the rapid spread of mobile here: there's a psychological effect when you feel you are in control of the cost, you have no financial incentive to turn your phone off.
There are a couple animals in the wild that birth several young at a time, and the siblings kill or eat each other until at the end of the rearing there's only one left. (the strongest) I think they were both birds iirc. Anyone happen to know what critters I'm thinking of?
Several hawks and eagles are like that, and some waterfowls like boobies also routinely end up with just one chick alive (even if they don't actually eat their siblings). It's always the oldest that survives unless it happens to be sick or die young by accident, because of the head start it gets by hatching earlier. In evolutionary sense it might be said the younger siblings are just insurance in case the oldest dies young. (In some species younger siblings occasionally survive when it's an exceptionally good year; in some, two or more normally survive but in bad years older ones eat their siblings, &c.
Other interesting evolutionary designs are certain spiders whose young always eat their mother - not to mention some whose female eats the male during intercourse.:-)
In Finland, just about all such disclaimers are totally worthless. In particular consumer rights are defined in law and can only be extended by warranties, never reduced by disclaimers. Some rights can't even be signed away.
and of course because of this all software sold in Finland is free of bugs.
If only.:-)
Actually, in particular regarding software the "implied warranties" are not much stronger than what you'd get in most US states by disclaiming everything you can. So the end result is just that there's no need to add lots of complex legalese in EULAs: just don't promise anything you can't keep and you're fine. (On the other hand, you can't arbitrarily restrict software buyers' or users' rights with EULAs either, sometimes not even with signed contracts: e.g., law explicitly states that a contract that forbids backups is void.)
"NO WARRANTY OR GUARANTEE IS IMPLIED. USE THIS SOFTWARE AT YOUR OWN RISK" or some combination of that. Even my home server says that every time I SSH into it.
There is no reason that a legislature cannot pass a law saying that this disclaimer is contrary to public policy and won't be respected in the courts.
Indeed. In Finland, just about all such disclaimers are totally worthless. In particular consumer rights are defined in law and can only be extended by warranties, never reduced by disclaimers. Some rights can't even be signed away.
Murdoch far to the left? That is one of the funniest things I have heard for a while. He is a union-busting arch-conservative and always has been.
Without disagreeing in substance, I'd like to point out that "conservative" and "left" are not opposites, but orthogonal. In Soviet Union the hardcore communists were conservatives, for example. (Hmm. Maybe not so different after all, if you think about tolerating any unions not under their control...)
I wasn't talking about phishing, but about scanning network traffic NSA-style to find potentially interesting stuff. "Fishing" has more than one metaphoric meaning.
Please explain when you would want encryption but not trust?
When I want to make life difficult for people who are fishing for information, even though I'm not doing anything worth protecting. Encryption without authentication is definitely better than no encryption, and I don't understand why browsers do not warn about unencrypted connections with even bigger letters than they warn about self-signed certificates.
Encryption is useless if you don't know who is at the other end.
Not true. It is (almost) useless if someone specifically targets you, but it helps a lot against "fishing" attacks, where someone tries to scan lots of traffic in the hope of finding something exploitable.
Here (in Finland) HP (or anybody else at the moment) doesn't offer laptops without Windows (or MacOS). A local dealer told me, however, that they can get most models from HP with FreeDOS, it just incurs an extra handling fee of about US$300 if I remember right - but that's per order, so for sufficiently big order it begins to make sense. For individuals, tough luck.
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Anyone who finds a girlfriend through the internet is a fucking loser.
Is it a mitigating factor that I was living in Saudi Arabia at the time?
I got out of the calibration and comm repair business back in the mid 90's so I don't know the current level of HP's involvement in this area but I believe it was all sold off to Agilent.
Not sold to Agilent, rather HP was split in two and the part making instruments &c was named Agilent. See here for the official version.
There's more to democracy than simple "majority rules". In particular, there usually is and IMHO needs to be some mechanisms for slowing down too drastic changes, if only to force people to think again what it actually is they want. In particular rules for changing constitution are usually written with that in mind, but also various rights in constitutions themselves strive to make it hard to do too much damage too quickly, even if transient majority so wants. Just about everything in the US Bill of Rights will do as an example, but some (even limited) possibility of anonymity is also important for that reason.
It is not a binary choice between majority and minority rules. It can and should be set up so that majority has more power, but not unlimited, instant power. If the majority wants something bad enough and long enough, they'll get it, sure. But not instantly, and the smaller the majority, the harder it should be to make drastic changes.
"Majority rule" should mean majority over some non-trivial period of time - and in practice it always does, partly or perhaps even primarily because various technical reasons necessarily delay execution of all decisions, by design or by accident. And more drastic changes should and do require more time. That also allows the minority a better change to persuade others of their viewpoint - also IMHO an essential feature of democracy.
[...] I doubt a majority of totally informed people would act against a minority in a punitive way, as this would leave each individual open to punitive acts from a different majority.
You underestimate the shortsightedness of people. Those in a majority hardly ever stop to think they might be in a minority at a later date - and when they do, it just encourages them to (ab)use their majority power while it lasts.
I want to use Emacs for my editor boxes in Firefox, notably.
I am doing that right now, via "It's All Text" -plugin to Firefox. The most important FF add-on after Adblock+, IMHO.
Guess it would work best in reverse: people who are *not* afraid are obvious psychopaths...
[...] if they bother to go through it and find something encrypted, they'll likely subpoena you for the key. Don't want to turn it over? Can't remember the old password? Contempt of court.
Wonder what they'd do if you told it's company policy that you only get the key by calling home office and assure them the machine has never left your hands?
As a side note, I've crossed Finland-Norway border overland several times and I've never been asked anything - indeed usually I haven't even seen border guards (once I didn't even notice the border). Sometimes the customs building has had a note on its door saying "we're closed, please drive on". :-)
And this is EU's external border (Finland's in EU, Norway isn't).
I've never seen a CFL last anywhere near it's rated life.
I have some that have lasted over 10 years now, and I haven't actually seen a single one die in my current apartment (in 8 years). Maybe they are indeed sensitive to wiring; variation does seem big at any rate.
I have a regular-size laptop and a desktop, too - and I still have and use a netbook, and a Nokia N810 as well. Different situations call for different size devices.
[...] many people in our world may not worship Darwin but they worship science and have science as their object of faith. Science is great but it is not perfect (I mean both that science is not perfect and the scientific method is not perfect).
One of the major features of science is that it can never be perfect, and it is the very opposite of accepting things on faith, so "worshipping" it or having science as an object of faith sounds a bit strange. Then again, people do worship things they don't understand... hmm, actually I'm not sure one can worship and understand the same thing.
Interesting. In Helsinki metro there's pretty perfect coverage. I don't know if they actually have base stations or some kind of repeaters in the trains themselves or in the tunnels or whatever, but it does work.
The Real Facts:
Wow. Since when Microsoft guarantees that? I'd ask to see that in writing.
have you ever thought what life would be like if you had no asshole? Things would get quite miserable, very quickly.
There are animals without an asshole, like anemones, and they don't seem to be particularly miserable. They have just one opening into their body cavity, which handles the functions of both mouth and asshole.
Hmm. Given what comes out of some politicians mouths, maybe they don't have assholes either...
C) 100% of Finland? Or 100% of the INHABITED areas.
About 97% of total area is covered - it is getting seriously hard to find a place without coverage even when hiking in the wilderness areas of Lapland. here is the coverage map of Finland's largest operator.
It's a plan type. You pay $X per month for a plan where all minutes from incoming calls to the phone are free
Interestingly, in Finland and indeed all European countries I know of incoming calls are and have always been free (within one country - roaming abroad is different). I suspect this may have had something to do with the rapid spread of mobile here: there's a psychological effect when you feel you are in control of the cost, you have no financial incentive to turn your phone off.
Maybe there's something at the EU level that keeps rates similar across member countries?
Nope. Rates vary quite a lot within EU, Finland being the cheapest. Population density doesn't explain it.
There are a couple animals in the wild that birth several young at a time, and the siblings kill or eat each other until at the end of the rearing there's only one left. (the strongest) I think they were both birds iirc. Anyone happen to know what critters I'm thinking of?
Several hawks and eagles are like that, and some waterfowls like boobies also routinely end up with just one chick alive (even if they don't actually eat their siblings). It's always the oldest that survives unless it happens to be sick or die young by accident, because of the head start it gets by hatching earlier. In evolutionary sense it might be said the younger siblings are just insurance in case the oldest dies young. (In some species younger siblings occasionally survive when it's an exceptionally good year; in some, two or more normally survive but in bad years older ones eat their siblings, &c.
Other interesting evolutionary designs are certain spiders whose young always eat their mother - not to mention some whose female eats the male during intercourse. :-)
In Finland, just about all such disclaimers are totally worthless. In particular consumer rights are defined in law and can only be extended by warranties, never reduced by disclaimers. Some rights can't even be signed away.
and of course because of this all software sold in Finland is free of bugs.
If only. :-)
Actually, in particular regarding software the "implied warranties" are not much stronger than what you'd get in most US states by disclaiming everything you can. So the end result is just that there's no need to add lots of complex legalese in EULAs: just don't promise anything you can't keep and you're fine. (On the other hand, you can't arbitrarily restrict software buyers' or users' rights with EULAs either, sometimes not even with signed contracts: e.g., law explicitly states that a contract that forbids backups is void.)
"NO WARRANTY OR GUARANTEE IS IMPLIED. USE THIS SOFTWARE AT YOUR OWN RISK" or some combination of that. Even my home server says that every time I SSH into it.
There is no reason that a legislature cannot pass a law saying that this disclaimer is contrary to public policy and won't be respected in the courts.
Indeed. In Finland, just about all such disclaimers are totally worthless. In particular consumer rights are defined in law and can only be extended by warranties, never reduced by disclaimers. Some rights can't even be signed away.
Murdoch far to the left? That is one of the funniest things I have heard for a while. He is a union-busting arch-conservative and always has been.
Without disagreeing in substance, I'd like to point out that "conservative" and "left" are not opposites, but orthogonal. In Soviet Union the hardcore communists were conservatives, for example. (Hmm. Maybe not so different after all, if you think about tolerating any unions not under their control...)
I wasn't talking about phishing, but about scanning network traffic NSA-style to find potentially interesting stuff. "Fishing" has more than one metaphoric meaning.
Please explain when you would want encryption but not trust?
When I want to make life difficult for people who are fishing for information, even though I'm not doing anything worth protecting. Encryption without authentication is definitely better than no encryption, and I don't understand why browsers do not warn about unencrypted connections with even bigger letters than they warn about self-signed certificates.
Encryption is useless if you don't know who is at the other end.
Not true. It is (almost) useless if someone specifically targets you, but it helps a lot against "fishing" attacks, where someone tries to scan lots of traffic in the hope of finding something exploitable.
You didn't read far enough. Take look at this article and the actual bestseller list at Amazon. In the category "notebooks", first and fifth are Linux machines.
Here (in Finland) HP (or anybody else at the moment) doesn't offer laptops without Windows (or MacOS). A local dealer told me, however, that they can get most models from HP with FreeDOS, it just incurs an extra handling fee of about US$300 if I remember right - but that's per order, so for sufficiently big order it begins to make sense. For individuals, tough luck.