You're saying Americans are each individually promoting the current system because they *like* the fact that some people are denied or can't afford healthcare. Rather than care about their own health care, they are concerned with other people's lack of it. You follow this thought to its logical conclusion, that we are an entire nation of sociopaths, as well as an unrelated conclusion, that Europeans aren't.
If I am reading this right then you are a huge fucking troll. By the way, Americans are regular people. We're warm-blooded and we don't eat each other for sustenance. We happen to have a shitty health care system and (surprise!) it's one of the important issues in the election this year, with both the Republican and Democratic party candidates pledging to work to change things.
Obviously there's no shortage of posts like these here. Here's what bothers me: who the hell modded this obvious flamebait up?
If a company wanted to do assign avatar gender based on name in a program, the safe route for them is to avoid it altogether, rather than give IBM the opportunity to sue. But in this case, it's something incredibly obvious and someone else could have come up with independently (and probably did).
As of today, the situation is that a company like Microsoft with plenty of its own patents can afford to risk it, or easily convince IBM to let them license this for free. A startup does not have that luxury.
Patenting obvious things removes those obvious things from the pool of useful technology, and hurts the entire tech industry in the USA and in places that respect US patents.
To use a somewhat silly analogy: if I held a loaded gun to someone's head and told them not to do something, they probably wouldn't do it. If I was telling them not to do something they should, like voting, I'd still be wrong whether or not I pulled the trigger. I'm not going to blame IBM for the USPTO's idiocy here, but I will blame them for actively contributing to this nonsense, and the hypocrisy that results from pledging not to.
Well, while he's doing that, he might look down and notice there's people running for other offices besides President, and he might have an opinion about one of them.
On the other hand, maybe it *is* better that people this lazy aren't voting, they'd just pick the wrong guy!
voting is merely the exercise of what little power you might posess with in it
For whatever reason this reminded me of the end of Kafka's The Trial. In it, K. is so powerless that he has been reduced to a single choice: he can either kill himself, or the state will do it for him. The outcome would have been the same in a practical sense. But K. does not have the strength to take his own life, and so he dies without dignity, "like a dog".
The universe is depressingly unfair. So is the state of American politics. We have very little actual power over many things in our lives. Yet, we stand to gain something by getting off the couch and voting.:D
People are not telling you to vote because they're conspiring to take away your right to bitch and moan. Honestly, they're either (a) trying to get you to vote for the person they favor, or (b) realize that getting people involved in the process benefits the country as a whole *no matter what*.
What if, as often happens, the "shit hits the fan" because of a campaign promise that wasn't kept? Or what if the number of viable candidates is so severely limited that you know you have to make some compromises going in? Just because you voted for someone doesn't mean you are 100% complicit in their screw-ups.
Also--though it's crazy to have to point this out--you're not going to agree with any candidate for any office on every issue. They will do things you don't like. You still get to complain about those things (in fact you even get to feel let down), so don't worry.
The answer is not to stick your head in the sand. You can, of course, but seriously your opinion does not matter to the rest of us once you do that.
Not at all. I was trying to make a joke about creating a contract that essentially ask a foreign country nicely "don't spy on us" while having them write code for your communications infrastructure. No disrespect meant.
And yet, if more people "endorsed" (that is, saw past themselves long enough to give a crap about) this corrupt system, it wouldn't be so corrupt.
While the sheep keeps his mouth shut in protest, some wildcats (industry lobbyists) keep banging on the door, originally uninvited, but they will be let in if it turns out the sheep can be relied upon to stay silent.
Much of the corruption comes from having only two parties. I suppose, then, that "the only option which makes sense" is to vote for a third party. Which is what a lot of us will be doing a few hours from now, instead of rationalizing the selfish act of refusing to vote. It is selfish. I'm sorry for being so blunt, but I'm sick of the excuses.
I don't vote on every ballot that comes my way. Nor do I don't have the platforms of everyone on all of today's ballots memorized. Believe me, I wish I did. But I have eyes to see that if only half of us vote for the highest office we have, then the politicians are not wrong for only half-expecting to get called out on the shit they do wrong.
That change might affect other countries, who would need to adopt the new standard in order to stay compatible.
They might route around us, too. If we're talking about US national security and who gets to spy on whom, it's better that we keep as much traffic as possible going through backbone, and having root servers on American soil. Instead of essentially blacklisting ourselves:D
They'll outsource it to India. India won't be able to use their knowledge of the code to spy on us, however, because there will be language in the NDA forbidding this.
This would probably be doable if RFC 3514 was implemented. In that case, you'd simply flip the evil bit to 0 if you are the USAF, 1 if you are not. Still with me? Then you update everyone's router firmware allow tracing of packets back to individuals. *But* the router will only do it if the packets in question have the evil bit on, and the packets for the request came with the evil bit off.
Then again, getting everyone to flash their routers might take some work, so I dunno. But if we are really serious about securing the internet, we could probably all pull together and get it done.
I know what *I'd* consider suspicious: an N'Sync bumper sticker, but "Backstreet's Back" pumping inside. Also if the license plate was registered to a man living at 123 Fake St.
If my neighbor blamed me for his house getting robbed because I had an alarm and he didn't, then he basically deserved to get robbed for being such an ass.
The differences may be minimal from a technical standpoint, but I think from a business standpoint they are large. That is, people who only want the desktop functionality shouldn't have to subsidize the design and maintenance the extra features that the server version has. For instance, Server runs on Itanium. I think the fact that you can get IIS going on XP or Vista closes the gap somewhat, ADAM even further. But someone's gotta pay for the R&D, and it may as well be the people buying the server versions. Just my opinion...you're right, it's striking how close they've become.
Perhaps internally they are treating it as "Windows kernel + desktop stuff" vs "Windows kernel + server stuff". They're just making a clear distinction at the marketing phase, as you point out, but I don't really think that's a bad thing, especially when people are looking for something that "just works" and historically MS takes the blame for the crappy builds the OEMs cook up.
(Being pedantic: I think most people's definition of a monolithic OS is one that uses a monolithic kernel. That includes Linux.)
Yes, they could probably (with a fair amount of work) merge the two systems. But what do they stand to gain? It will be much harder for them to provide support this way. Also, if it's one SKU then they should charge one price. Those who purchase Windows Server expect more features (a lot more), and are willing to pay more.
Most home users do not need AD, a DNS server, and so on. They are not going to want to pay for it. But it has to be paid for by someone, since it costs money to create and maintain. That leaves micropayments. I won't say they're automatically bad. But for most of the server market (businesses), it's probably better to get the whole thing and write it off. Then you're on a single supported platform and there's no suprises w/r/t features. As opposed to sending Microsoft $25 to turn on the DNS server, etc.
In short: they're different products, with different markets. There's some crossover but just because they're running the same kernel doesn't mean it's smart to combine them.
But I agree with everyone's sentiment here...they way they packaged Vista was out of hand. Plus they have SBS and Home Server. I think the way Apple does it is fine: desktop version, server version. At the very least, the server version should be a separate product.
There's plenty of fanless PCs out there that are cooled with just a heatsink. They tend to be based on VIA chipsets, Pentium Ms, Atoms, etc.
I don't have an idea of what the minimum specs should be for a myth box, though. There's nice ready-made ones at Cappuccino PC, mini-itx, and other places. Even if they'd make bad DVRs, I'm sure they'd do okay as a basic media center.
Loud hard drives do exist, even in the 7200 RPM range. Consider yourself lucky if you've never hard to make the decision of whether or not to swap out an otherwise decent drive simply because the thing won't shut up. We have some 5+ year old Dells at work with hard drives that chatter annoyingly, and I don't know if it's age or they were just always that loud.
You're still correct though. Hopefully if someone was building a DVR, they'd know enough to find a quiet drive. This is doubly true for the ready-made ones. I never considered my TiVo to be noisy.
That's a recent modification of the original troll. Most likely some 4chan copypasta. People use it instead of saying first post. They don't realize that trolling doesn't achieve the same effect when everyone's expecting it, or that the board employs a sophisticated moderation system to deal with it.
The nice thing about it is that the poster will likely alone -- having been rejected decades earlier by friends and family for being a mouth-breathing tool -- with only his virginity to keep him company.
In cmd.exe, if you right click on the title bar and select "Properties" and the "Layout" tab, you can change the number of rows and columns. Unfortunately changing the columns doesn't affect scrollback, but you can set whatever you want to be the default for next time.
The Employee Fair Choice Act scares the living daylights out of me. I'm biased there, and I tend to avoid bringing it up with people since they act like I'm evil for thinking employers should have a say on whether or not a union comes in. I feel like it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, and it's bad news for lots of American businesses, or at least those in two categories: 1. The ones that don't work on the sort of margins necessary to pay for all of the back-and-forth lawyering that a union creates. 2. The ones in fast-moving industries that can't afford to hire based on seniority rather than merit.
All the nice words like "fair choice" and "fair chance" belie the fact that it's still pretty easy to get bring a union into a shop if the majority of employees want it. I'm sure people will take issue with that statement but whatever, that's the experience I had with it. I'm not against collective bargaining. Quite the opposite. But it's not a cure-all and bringing unions into places is not always the best course of action.
So...had the OP said something like "the USA is still less socialized than other industrialized nations, and we should examine what is positive about that before we blindly throw it away in an effort to play catch-up with Europe" I would have agreed 100%. Instead he made it sound like we need to make sure our neighbors aren't "pink". I was picturing guys with thick beards and Russian accents talking into big army cell phones about which newspaper to subvert and saying "comrade" a lot (in the OP's defense, at least he didn't say "Amerika").
So I pointed out the alternative: maybe more social welfare is what Americans really want? Especially now, when the economy's in the toilet.
But keep in mind that I'm not saying Americans are smart enough to make those decisions responsibly. We went to school in the US, after all. I do fear for the future, but it's not because of pinkos lurking among us. It's because as important as these issues are, and even though this is a *presidential* election, half of us aren't even going to vote.
Can't argue with that, I definitely exaggerated on the cost part. They charged for a while (not the whole time, even) but it wasn't like you couldn't get it for free. Even so, IE was always both cheaper and easier to get going with.
I still view the Netscape of those days as a traditional software company, trying to make money with commercial software. In the same way that Norton retails but the majority of purchases come from OEMs tie-ins. And MS does have the power to crush software of this sort by creating an incompatible alternative and shipping it with Windows.
But honestly, I see the extent to which they tried to embrace and extend the web as crazy even for them. Active Channels (in your screen saver, on the desktop, and more), ActiveX, ASP, MSJVM (which admittedly was sort of tangential). All of this was way easier to do with IIS and using authoring tools like FrontPage and VB that were Windows-only.
I wouldn't hold their ability to come up with new solutions against them. Even if they're Windows-only, which not all of those are. I'm sure there are redeeming things about everything I've listed. But combine them with a browser that rendered HTML differently than everyone else's and perhaps you can see why the assertion that "IE won because Netscape was bad" annoyed me. To the point of hyperbole, even:)
I think you're describing the difference between addictions and compulsive behavior. A real addiction is a chemical dependency. The ONDCP et al like to play with the fact that colloquially (as you mentioned) people can be "addicted" to gambling, which AFAIK doesn't involve introducing foreign chemicals into your body. Unless you're in a nice casino and they're bringing you drinks.
The ones making the arguments know that ID is unfalsifiable. So by asking for it to be put in science class (unfalsifiable means not science), they'd have to be liars.
The everyday people who repeat the arguments (but usually unfashionably old ones, there's a very Emerald City vibe to the whole thing) are perhaps sincere and misguided.
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You're saying Americans are each individually promoting the current system because they *like* the fact that some people are denied or can't afford healthcare. Rather than care about their own health care, they are concerned with other people's lack of it. You follow this thought to its logical conclusion, that we are an entire nation of sociopaths, as well as an unrelated conclusion, that Europeans aren't.
If I am reading this right then you are a huge fucking troll. By the way, Americans are regular people. We're warm-blooded and we don't eat each other for sustenance. We happen to have a shitty health care system and (surprise!) it's one of the important issues in the election this year, with both the Republican and Democratic party candidates pledging to work to change things.
Obviously there's no shortage of posts like these here. Here's what bothers me: who the hell modded this obvious flamebait up?
If a company wanted to do assign avatar gender based on name in a program, the safe route for them is to avoid it altogether, rather than give IBM the opportunity to sue. But in this case, it's something incredibly obvious and someone else could have come up with independently (and probably did).
As of today, the situation is that a company like Microsoft with plenty of its own patents can afford to risk it, or easily convince IBM to let them license this for free. A startup does not have that luxury.
Patenting obvious things removes those obvious things from the pool of useful technology, and hurts the entire tech industry in the USA and in places that respect US patents.
To use a somewhat silly analogy: if I held a loaded gun to someone's head and told them not to do something, they probably wouldn't do it. If I was telling them not to do something they should, like voting, I'd still be wrong whether or not I pulled the trigger. I'm not going to blame IBM for the USPTO's idiocy here, but I will blame them for actively contributing to this nonsense, and the hypocrisy that results from pledging not to.
Well, while he's doing that, he might look down and notice there's people running for other offices besides President, and he might have an opinion about one of them.
On the other hand, maybe it *is* better that people this lazy aren't voting, they'd just pick the wrong guy!
voting is merely the exercise of what little power you might posess with in it
For whatever reason this reminded me of the end of Kafka's The Trial. In it, K. is so powerless that he has been reduced to a single choice: he can either kill himself, or the state will do it for him. The outcome would have been the same in a practical sense. But K. does not have the strength to take his own life, and so he dies without dignity, "like a dog".
The universe is depressingly unfair. So is the state of American politics. We have very little actual power over many things in our lives. Yet, we stand to gain something by getting off the couch and voting. :D
People are not telling you to vote because they're conspiring to take away your right to bitch and moan. Honestly, they're either (a) trying to get you to vote for the person they favor, or (b) realize that getting people involved in the process benefits the country as a whole *no matter what*.
What if, as often happens, the "shit hits the fan" because of a campaign promise that wasn't kept? Or what if the number of viable candidates is so severely limited that you know you have to make some compromises going in? Just because you voted for someone doesn't mean you are 100% complicit in their screw-ups.
Also--though it's crazy to have to point this out--you're not going to agree with any candidate for any office on every issue. They will do things you don't like. You still get to complain about those things (in fact you even get to feel let down), so don't worry.
The answer is not to stick your head in the sand. You can, of course, but seriously your opinion does not matter to the rest of us once you do that.
The more I read that, the more profound it becomes. Happy Election Day.
Not at all. I was trying to make a joke about creating a contract that essentially ask a foreign country nicely "don't spy on us" while having them write code for your communications infrastructure. No disrespect meant.
And yet, if more people "endorsed" (that is, saw past themselves long enough to give a crap about) this corrupt system, it wouldn't be so corrupt.
While the sheep keeps his mouth shut in protest, some wildcats (industry lobbyists) keep banging on the door, originally uninvited, but they will be let in if it turns out the sheep can be relied upon to stay silent.
Much of the corruption comes from having only two parties. I suppose, then, that "the only option which makes sense" is to vote for a third party. Which is what a lot of us will be doing a few hours from now, instead of rationalizing the selfish act of refusing to vote. It is selfish. I'm sorry for being so blunt, but I'm sick of the excuses.
I don't vote on every ballot that comes my way. Nor do I don't have the platforms of everyone on all of today's ballots memorized. Believe me, I wish I did. But I have eyes to see that if only half of us vote for the highest office we have, then the politicians are not wrong for only half-expecting to get called out on the shit they do wrong.
That change might affect other countries, who would need to adopt the new standard in order to stay compatible.
They might route around us, too. If we're talking about US national security and who gets to spy on whom, it's better that we keep as much traffic as possible going through backbone, and having root servers on American soil. Instead of essentially blacklisting ourselves :D
Also, it'd be pretty bad for American businesses.
They'll outsource it to India. India won't be able to use their knowledge of the code to spy on us, however, because there will be language in the NDA forbidding this.
I think the GP was referring to the /. account twitter. That guy's definitely a terrorist, and maybe a tool.
This would probably be doable if RFC 3514 was implemented. In that case, you'd simply flip the evil bit to 0 if you are the USAF, 1 if you are not. Still with me? Then you update everyone's router firmware allow tracing of packets back to individuals. *But* the router will only do it if the packets in question have the evil bit on, and the packets for the request came with the evil bit off.
Then again, getting everyone to flash their routers might take some work, so I dunno. But if we are really serious about securing the internet, we could probably all pull together and get it done.
I know what *I'd* consider suspicious: an N'Sync bumper sticker, but "Backstreet's Back" pumping inside. Also if the license plate was registered to a man living at 123 Fake St.
If my neighbor blamed me for his house getting robbed because I had an alarm and he didn't, then he basically deserved to get robbed for being such an ass.
The differences may be minimal from a technical standpoint, but I think from a business standpoint they are large. That is, people who only want the desktop functionality shouldn't have to subsidize the design and maintenance the extra features that the server version has. For instance, Server runs on Itanium. I think the fact that you can get IIS going on XP or Vista closes the gap somewhat, ADAM even further. But someone's gotta pay for the R&D, and it may as well be the people buying the server versions. Just my opinion...you're right, it's striking how close they've become.
Perhaps internally they are treating it as "Windows kernel + desktop stuff" vs "Windows kernel + server stuff". They're just making a clear distinction at the marketing phase, as you point out, but I don't really think that's a bad thing, especially when people are looking for something that "just works" and historically MS takes the blame for the crappy builds the OEMs cook up.
(Being pedantic: I think most people's definition of a monolithic OS is one that uses a monolithic kernel. That includes Linux.)
Yes, they could probably (with a fair amount of work) merge the two systems. But what do they stand to gain? It will be much harder for them to provide support this way. Also, if it's one SKU then they should charge one price. Those who purchase Windows Server expect more features (a lot more), and are willing to pay more.
Most home users do not need AD, a DNS server, and so on. They are not going to want to pay for it. But it has to be paid for by someone, since it costs money to create and maintain. That leaves micropayments. I won't say they're automatically bad. But for most of the server market (businesses), it's probably better to get the whole thing and write it off. Then you're on a single supported platform and there's no suprises w/r/t features. As opposed to sending Microsoft $25 to turn on the DNS server, etc.
In short: they're different products, with different markets. There's some crossover but just because they're running the same kernel doesn't mean it's smart to combine them.
But I agree with everyone's sentiment here...they way they packaged Vista was out of hand. Plus they have SBS and Home Server. I think the way Apple does it is fine: desktop version, server version. At the very least, the server version should be a separate product.
There's plenty of fanless PCs out there that are cooled with just a heatsink. They tend to be based on VIA chipsets, Pentium Ms, Atoms, etc.
I don't have an idea of what the minimum specs should be for a myth box, though. There's nice ready-made ones at Cappuccino PC, mini-itx, and other places. Even if they'd make bad DVRs, I'm sure they'd do okay as a basic media center.
Loud hard drives do exist, even in the 7200 RPM range. Consider yourself lucky if you've never hard to make the decision of whether or not to swap out an otherwise decent drive simply because the thing won't shut up. We have some 5+ year old Dells at work with hard drives that chatter annoyingly, and I don't know if it's age or they were just always that loud.
You're still correct though. Hopefully if someone was building a DVR, they'd know enough to find a quiet drive. This is doubly true for the ready-made ones. I never considered my TiVo to be noisy.
That's a recent modification of the original troll. Most likely some 4chan copypasta. People use it instead of saying first post. They don't realize that trolling doesn't achieve the same effect when everyone's expecting it, or that the board employs a sophisticated moderation system to deal with it.
The nice thing about it is that the poster will likely alone -- having been rejected decades earlier by friends and family for being a mouth-breathing tool -- with only his virginity to keep him company.
In cmd.exe, if you right click on the title bar and select "Properties" and the "Layout" tab, you can change the number of rows and columns. Unfortunately changing the columns doesn't affect scrollback, but you can set whatever you want to be the default for next time.
The Employee Fair Choice Act scares the living daylights out of me. I'm biased there, and I tend to avoid bringing it up with people since they act like I'm evil for thinking employers should have a say on whether or not a union comes in. I feel like it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, and it's bad news for lots of American businesses, or at least those in two categories:
1. The ones that don't work on the sort of margins necessary to pay for all of the back-and-forth lawyering that a union creates.
2. The ones in fast-moving industries that can't afford to hire based on seniority rather than merit.
All the nice words like "fair choice" and "fair chance" belie the fact that it's still pretty easy to get bring a union into a shop if the majority of employees want it. I'm sure people will take issue with that statement but whatever, that's the experience I had with it. I'm not against collective bargaining. Quite the opposite. But it's not a cure-all and bringing unions into places is not always the best course of action.
So...had the OP said something like "the USA is still less socialized than other industrialized nations, and we should examine what is positive about that before we blindly throw it away in an effort to play catch-up with Europe" I would have agreed 100%. Instead he made it sound like we need to make sure our neighbors aren't "pink". I was picturing guys with thick beards and Russian accents talking into big army cell phones about which newspaper to subvert and saying "comrade" a lot (in the OP's defense, at least he didn't say "Amerika").
So I pointed out the alternative: maybe more social welfare is what Americans really want? Especially now, when the economy's in the toilet.
But keep in mind that I'm not saying Americans are smart enough to make those decisions responsibly. We went to school in the US, after all. I do fear for the future, but it's not because of pinkos lurking among us. It's because as important as these issues are, and even though this is a *presidential* election, half of us aren't even going to vote.
Can't argue with that, I definitely exaggerated on the cost part. They charged for a while (not the whole time, even) but it wasn't like you couldn't get it for free. Even so, IE was always both cheaper and easier to get going with.
I still view the Netscape of those days as a traditional software company, trying to make money with commercial software. In the same way that Norton retails but the majority of purchases come from OEMs tie-ins. And MS does have the power to crush software of this sort by creating an incompatible alternative and shipping it with Windows.
But honestly, I see the extent to which they tried to embrace and extend the web as crazy even for them. Active Channels (in your screen saver, on the desktop, and more), ActiveX, ASP, MSJVM (which admittedly was sort of tangential). All of this was way easier to do with IIS and using authoring tools like FrontPage and VB that were Windows-only.
I wouldn't hold their ability to come up with new solutions against them. Even if they're Windows-only, which not all of those are. I'm sure there are redeeming things about everything I've listed. But combine them with a browser that rendered HTML differently than everyone else's and perhaps you can see why the assertion that "IE won because Netscape was bad" annoyed me. To the point of hyperbole, even :)
IE didn't win, we all lost.
I think you're describing the difference between addictions and compulsive behavior. A real addiction is a chemical dependency. The ONDCP et al like to play with the fact that colloquially (as you mentioned) people can be "addicted" to gambling, which AFAIK doesn't involve introducing foreign chemicals into your body. Unless you're in a nice casino and they're bringing you drinks.
It's a well-known fact that reality has a liberal bias.
The ones making the arguments know that ID is unfalsifiable. So by asking for it to be put in science class (unfalsifiable means not science), they'd have to be liars.
The everyday people who repeat the arguments (but usually unfashionably old ones, there's a very Emerald City vibe to the whole thing) are perhaps sincere and misguided.
I hope.