Really? I haven't seen that position paper. What I have read about is that the weak president of Iran has made mutterings that can be interpreted that way; but being that I'm not fluent in Farsi, it's hard to judge. Either side could be lying (and at least one is) in a propaganda game.
Additionally, "Ahmadine-Jihad" doesn't have the authority to launch a war of any kind - at worst he can use black-ops to try to instigate one, but foreign policy is ultimately in the hands of the Ayatollah. What kind of nutcase he is, I'm not privy to, but have seen no evidence of "insane" actions in their foreign policy as of yet. Offensive, yes. Justifying radical means by Israel and the greater Jewish community, yes; but none so far by the US government, except as it is in the US interest to support an ally. And we see how this tough talk actually gets played out in practice - Menem, the ex-Argentinian president who appears to have had his hand in one of the most dastardly terrorist actions in recent memory continues to run around the world quite happily. Those kinds of guys are a real threat, but as part of an elite club continue to commit crimes in perfect freedom.
But mostly your posting is incoherent nonsense, the same propaganda that can be used against almost any state. If we are to really handle Iran, rather than let the ME situation continue to deteriorate, it really is time for everyone to start dismissing these kinds of ramblings and really think about how to integrate Iran into the international system.
Instead, half the people in the US believe these kinds of fantasies, rather than seeing where Iran really is our opponent, where Iran could be (and has been) our ally (Afghanistan), and what a reasonable foreign policy would be.
So the question is, do you not know what you're taking about, or are you simply mindlessly repeating propaganda?
Have you looked at insurgencies? The French partisans were no choir boys. The Hagannah and Irgun were accused of attacking civilians. The American revolutionaries tarred and feathered civilians. Do you know what that means? Dipping civilians ("collaborators") in hot tar, leaving third degree burns on their skins in the days before antibiotics?
Really, nice fantasy world you live in. "Freedom fighters" are a vile bunch in every insurgency since time began. War is vile without exception. You can argue whether the tactics are necessary and justified, whether the community represented by the "Freedom Fighters" is sufficiently oppressed to justify the inevitable monstrosity of war. But to pretend that some acts of war are universally beyond the pale is an astonishing level of naiveté. The question is whether in a particular case the tactics are both justified in terms of the threat of their opponents and efficacious in terms of reaching their goals.
How else does the West justify targeting civilian populations with fire-bombings and nuclear weapons? Clearly magnitudes worst than blowing up a school-bus, yet acceptable in light of the threat of Germany and Japan (at least arguably so).
The threat of Israeli occupation and dominance may not justify Palestinian terror attacks, and the acts may be useless blood-letting in terms of their goals, but you must actually argue those points rather than simply assuming that such actions are universally unacceptable - history says such acts are par for the course in warfare.
You got it. It's the "market cost" not the wholesale cost. And since they'll sell you a sub-par system without Windows, you'd better be ready for a huge fight if you want to get your money back for Windows - they'll simply argue that they have a supported system you should have bought.
If it was an actual free market, there'd be close to no advertising, so you can tell how close we are to that!
Well, you either have to convince yourself that it's productive, or not really care whether you are productive. In short, either amoral or not quite the top of the class - IQ 120 not IQ 150.
Plus a whole lotta balls.
That's capitalism for you! Like Churchill said about democracy, it's a terrible system - but all the other systems are worse.
But are you half a million to a million in debt on top of it? You're doing good in comparison to a lot of American doctors who come out of school with massive debt, then have to go through the same internship/residency BS for 5-10 years. After that, they've accumulated a huge amount of interest on that debt, have a family to support and are 35-40 years old.
So what do they do? Focus exclusively on making cash. It's the only sensible thing to do. And people wonder why so many doctors treat them poorly - after you've been treated like a piece of meat for decades, you'd have to be insane to not "return the favor". Unfortunately, the patients aren't the ones who were abusing them in the first place.
As always, count your blessings. It could be worse. You could even be a GP or pediatrician in the US, where you'll be retiring just as you finish paying off your debt! Those "high" salaries are only real in US private practice for the elite - surgeons, folks who run labs and such. It's the banks that are really making the money.
Governments will drive it. A number of government in Europe and S. America have requirements that all gov docs have to be in an ISO standard format. If MS isn't ISO standard, the docs will either have to be written in Word and converted to ODF, then futzed with to get them to look right, or done in ODF in the first place. Since they will have to be disseminated as ODF, everyone else will at least need a converter from ODF to Office, in which case they'll probably look like crap, thereby leading anyone who works with lots of government documents to just bite the bullet and start using an ODF word processor.
It'll trickle down from there, with ensuing format wars between governments and large corporations who want to avoid retraining costs but are heavily dependent on government contracts, and from them to smaller sub-contractors.
The US government will probably make ODF criminal to possess in retaliation (snark, I hope). MS will try to get laws changed to consider ECMA "good enough". It'll work in some countries - it'll all depend on what the larger or more developed countries do. France, Germany, Brazil - if they hold the line, there'll exist an economic incentive to dump MS.
The people follow their bosses - people use Word because it became a standard for large businesses a decade ago, and that trickled down into the household. The reverse can happen as well.
Ask Dell. How could the Linux offerings be just as or more expensive than Windows?
But run their "customize options" pages and get a comparable machine. I recall finding that the 1420 with Ubuntu or Windows came to the same price, but the Windows version had some extra bells and whistles. Bettor off buying the Windows version and stripping it - anyhow, I'm sure that Dell pays per unit so you're paying the MS tax either way - they're pro-rating it across their entire line.
I'm sure it is. I used an HP Pavilion with their Broadcom card. After the first few connections, it refused to take dhcp from the server. But running under Linux with ndiswrapper (same exact driver), I had no problems at all. And this was just a few months ago.
Google it and you see endless "advices", and multiple unclear tech-notes.
And people complain about wireless on Linux - makes me laugh! With little manufacturer support, you can get it to work, but the million that are thrown in by MS and device manufacturers and they can't get the kinks out for Vista.
It's not conspiracy, but incompetence. A GP should be aware that every immunization causes an immune reaction, and that immune reactions vary with individuals, but do get stronger with each exposure. It's why we get allergies that become dangerous after the first response. That's med school year 1. I would strongly suggest that your Dad never go to that GP again - he's a hack.
This is a person by person problem. If your children have an abnormal reaction (for most vaccines, normal is a slight fever that subsides within 3 days, and your doctor should tell you exactly what's normal), I would then avoid the follow-ups for that vaccine, and would be careful about later vaccines (in other words, space them out, one by one in case different vaccines induce the same reaction, and avoid everything but the primaries).
But for most people? Not a problem. The reason that the number of vaccines is increasing is fairly simple. The number of virii and bacteria that are locally available increase every year with the growth of travel, and the number of diseases for which we have vaccines increases as well. I'm sure that pharma is pushing them; but that's secondary to the epidemiological studies.
What you can watch out for though are vaccines that are given to everyone, even though the vulnerable population is only a subset. For example, they're pushing rotavirus vaccines now; the vulnerable population are people in poor housing with poor water supplies, but since doctors can't know, really, what conditions you're living under, the vaccine is pushed to the population in general.
"I know that information like this is considered anecdotal, but I'm not expecting you to take it to heart, just to understand that I have my own reasons. I'm sure that you feel you're doing yourself a favor by assuming I'm an indoctrinated idiot because I expressed a belief (is the B-word getting to be taboo these days?), but there really are other, potentially valid opinions out there besides your own."
So, if you're just telling us that "you have your own reasons", reasons that are opinions and not based on scientific evidence, why are you telling us that? Why would you tell me something just based on your own beliefs?
You are obviously allowed to have any belief you'd like to, based upon any combination of revelation, anecdote, empirical research or dice throwing. But of all those reasons, the only one that isn't private to your system (mind, religion, culture) is empirical research. I don't have to "respect" your beliefs or consider them "valid", outside of simply not agitating for laws to ban them. Why would you express a belief not based on empirical research to anyone who doesn't share your basis for that belief (same anecdotes, same religion, same culture, same dice event)? It can't convince any one else - the only interest for anyone outside your circle is anthropological (voyeuristic, in other words). In short, it's not that opinions are valid, it's that the reasons for an opinion are valid - and the only universal validity can be empirical.
The simpler explanation for your sisters seizures is that she was autistic, had some underlying brain damage, causing her to be particularly sensitive to immune reactions. Did she ever have any other seizures? They're fairly common in small children due to fever, and don't lead to autism in and of themselves. To develop autism, most of your mirror cells must be knocked out. That is unlikely to happen due to any single exposure event - it would require a long series of seizures and obvious immune reactions to cause that scale of brain damage; we know that because, as I said, many small children have multiple seizures and do not develop any significant brain abnormalities. Chronic epileptics take many violent and continual seizures to start developing that kind of brain damage that would characterize autism. You may be inverting cause and effect: someone with brain-damage (possibly undetected) would be far more likely to have seizures when stressed - it's not the seizure causing any significant damage, it's the damage leading to the seizure - it's a symptom.
No one believes that vaccinations are "100%" safe - just that the documented risks associated with them are lower than the risk associated with the disease you're being immunized against. We know that there are deaths due to vaccination.
No, it's Heinlen speak from "Stranger in a Strange World". It's made it into tech because they're big consumers of sci-fi. It means not just "understand" but to understand deeply, to have an intuitive grasp.
It's not only violent imagery, but it's "safe" violent imagery - it doesn't actually result in physical suffering, which should kickback with some negative feedback (and thereby suppress that system).
And we know it's cumulative - just look at the anthropological literature on the introduction of TV and movies. Whenever a community first sees a western - even an old, 50's style western - they generally run in horror. They haven't been desensitized yet, so the violence produces the real fear that real-life violence should produce.
On top of that, it's disconnected from social events - where in pre-movie societies you only saw that violence when you had already been worked up, so it was "appropriate" for war or local rioting, now it's completely individual and unrelated to what everyone else is doing.
Or higher better salesmen. If you don't have salesmen that can sell snowboards in Florida and jet skis in Arizona, you need a new salesman. In other words, there's more money to be made in creating new markets - in actually marketing, than just looking for what customers already want - bigger kids on the block will always be there to take those jobs.
Not all switches are the same. Not all companies are the same. The problem is the "Windows environment". If, for example, Solaris has your right balance of price, stability, support and performance in your particular app (they're not all the same for all products), and your talking about switching one group of servers, I don't see why it would be "prohibitively expensive".
If you're talking about switching everything simultaneously, then you can never switch anything - it's prohibitively expensive just to switch from XP to Vista overnight for everything. I just don't understand that can of a mind set - that it has to be all or nothing. If you're a large or medium size company, your talking a lot of people. Some of those people are just better at developing apps for one environment or another, so why wouldn't you have each group working and supporting themselves? If you have engineers developing one product, another group developing something completely different, another group of salesmen and secretaries, their needs are completely different.
And if you're a small company, you want to keep yourself flexible. You never know what opportunity comes down the pike that you need to jump on, so you want to be a multiple OS house. If you're integrating with a windows product, you had better know windows. If a large company comes in with Solaris and AIX servers, you had better already have someone who is at least familiar with those systems; if you need to sell a low cost system, a few linux developers would be handy.
Everyone is both a vendor and a customer. If you let a few IT people invent the idea that your costs will be lower if you force the entire company to "standardize" -- I'd bet they're selling you a line (and possibly getting kickbacks from some vendor). It makes sense to standardize secretaries and salesmen. It make sense to have interchangeable desktops in HR. But in the backroom, or for developers? And if you've standardized those classes, switching them for one app, say from IE to Firefox, it should be fairly simple and low cost to do the switch - you just force the upgrade, because your desktops already are identical (within a class and an age).
You don't actually argue that "There are almost no reasons, apart from ideological ones, to move away from MS products," you just assume it and beg the question. Often there are many good, cost-effective reasons to switch. If I can develop my product more cheaply for an alternate platform, then my product can be sold at a lower price; if the cost of the product is large compared to the cost of switching users from IE to Firefox, for example, that would be an excellent reason. If my product is more stable than my competitors, but is on an alternate platform, once again there are quite a few situations where it would be smart to switch. If I offer other "benefits", (whatever those may be in a real business world), they will switch.
You seem to live in some kind of alternate reality where all products are equal in all cases, where all salesmen are equally talented, where the cost of development is the same for all products on all platforms, where all developer pools have equal talent and cost, where all infrastructure is the same, and so on ad nauseum, where the only distinguishing feature in the world is "ideology". That's trivially untrue.
Unless you're little parenthetical comment is a strawman: the choice is to completely abandon all MS products completely, or to be a completely MS environment. And that's just plain weak. You don't have to drop Windows to go to Firefox, you don't have to drop Windows desktops to go to Solaris servers, you don't have to drop Windows servers to go to python; if you want to, you can run KDE on OSX (if that made sense in some situation). To lock yourself into one vendor under some mythical idea of support costs is just plain stupid. It's like claiming that you have lower support costs if all your housing contractors restricted themselves to hammers - "I know how to replace a hammer, but a saw is a completely different tool".
But developers do drive to a large extent their customers. For a while, I had to have IE on at least one computer because of a piece of "web software" (to put it politely) that was required by my organization. If the vendor had developed it to run only on Firefox, for example, I'm sure my IT department would have bought it anyway and demanded that we put firefox on our machines - if the kickbacks were right and it didn't increase their work load, they'd require me to use lynx.
It's not a simple relationship and not completely asymmetrical; power is on both sides - but a decent sales staff with a decent product will find customers that match your product or that are willing to work with you. The "we standardize on MS" line can be replaced with any other word than "MS" if IT feels it's in their interest (or management above IT), whether it's price, personal relationship, quality, cost of use, or simple old-fashioned corruption.
Do you think that folks don't understand that MS is a business, and their legal responsibility is to make money by any legal means necessary? Are you suggesting that./ers are mildly retarded and don't understand the legal atmosphere of contemporary capitalism?
Of course MS will try to extract every last dime they can. The questions are: 1) are their methods efficacious and 2) should they be accepted socially and/or legally? For point 1, the fact that MS thinks this is the way it can maximize profits doesn't necessarily true - stupidity is just as common among CEOs as among janitors. For point 2, your motto of "business is business" is completely irrelevant - if IBM is working in Saudi Arabia and they believe that they can maximize profit by using slaves, "business is business" would dictate that they should. That would obviously be abhorrent (and don't start whining that that's different - of course it. It's an analogy.).
So please, don't use trite cliches and childish simplifications and believe that you are being clever. Not everyone has the mental faculties of a slightly impaired rhesus monkey.
Mighty mouse is one of the absolutely worst design decision by Apple, short of the puck mouse.
Why can't they get mice right? It's not really that hard, and they've been doing it for two decades now. But here you have it, Apple's tendency to try to jam all features into some average package, rather than setting a simple default yet allowing you to alter it. Now, the mouse has a whole bunch of buttons, without the tactile feedback that make them easy to use, and with the added complexity of multiple buttons.
"Just Works?" - not really, just don't give your customers too much and they'll think it just works.
Mac - universal mediocrity. PC - universal incompetence. Linux - universal complexity (or mediocrity if you have gnome).
"I've been using Microsoft's OSes and programs for a quarter of a century, and they used to be the best quality out there. The quality has been declining for all that time, IMO right now Microsoft's OSes and programs are by far the very worst either on or off the market."
When was MS quality "the best out there"? In the 70's and early 80's? The Apple 2e beat MS, as did the C64. The only reason most folks bought MS in the early days was because their company bought from IBM.
In the 80's and 90's? You mean that crapfest that was early Word, the real pathetic interface of Windows 3.1, the lack of a native IP stack into the mid 90's? Any Mac or Sun could beat them hands down - and Linux came on strong.
In the late 90's and early 2000's? Well, yes, Apple was down and out. But MS was already a morass of virii, of network storms and blue screens of death. Linux could beat it any day for most uses, except when Word docs were demands - and that's not quality, that's monopoly.
Are you talking about the mess of Visual Basic and Visual C++, which have ruined more programmers than Cobol has? Or the gui builders, which were no more useful than the X gui builders that Sun already had by 95.
Really, is there even a single year were MS is clearly the quality leader in almost any field? I can't think of one - but every dog has it's day.
"Vista isn't the upgrade it should have been but it is not horrible."
People are nuts! Here you have a product that you've (supposedly) payed hard-cash for. They have "upgrade features" that are 15 years out of date, and they've taken a year and a half to get stable, and you say "that's not horrible"? They've added computationally expensive flashy graphics that are close to useless, even though the models for some useful eyecandy have been out for a decade (multi-desktop from X, expose from OSX)?
What's horrible? You're PC blows up when you bring the Vista DVD within five yards? You catch gonorrhea from watching porn with Vista?
Really, the best you can say about Vista is that it's not terribly different from Ubuntu (a bit slower with more useless eye candy, but more hardware compatibility done by vendors) - you gonna pay cash for that? That's horrible!
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"Iran has vowed to annhiliate Israel"
Really? I haven't seen that position paper. What I have read about is that the weak president of Iran has made mutterings that can be interpreted that way; but being that I'm not fluent in Farsi, it's hard to judge. Either side could be lying (and at least one is) in a propaganda game.
Additionally, "Ahmadine-Jihad" doesn't have the authority to launch a war of any kind - at worst he can use black-ops to try to instigate one, but foreign policy is ultimately in the hands of the Ayatollah. What kind of nutcase he is, I'm not privy to, but have seen no evidence of "insane" actions in their foreign policy as of yet. Offensive, yes. Justifying radical means by Israel and the greater Jewish community, yes; but none so far by the US government, except as it is in the US interest to support an ally. And we see how this tough talk actually gets played out in practice - Menem, the ex-Argentinian president who appears to have had his hand in one of the most dastardly terrorist actions in recent memory continues to run around the world quite happily. Those kinds of guys are a real threat, but as part of an elite club continue to commit crimes in perfect freedom.
But mostly your posting is incoherent nonsense, the same propaganda that can be used against almost any state. If we are to really handle Iran, rather than let the ME situation continue to deteriorate, it really is time for everyone to start dismissing these kinds of ramblings and really think about how to integrate Iran into the international system.
Instead, half the people in the US believe these kinds of fantasies, rather than seeing where Iran really is our opponent, where Iran could be (and has been) our ally (Afghanistan), and what a reasonable foreign policy would be.
So the question is, do you not know what you're taking about, or are you simply mindlessly repeating propaganda?
Have you looked at insurgencies? The French partisans were no choir boys. The Hagannah and Irgun were accused of attacking civilians. The American revolutionaries tarred and feathered civilians. Do you know what that means? Dipping civilians ("collaborators") in hot tar, leaving third degree burns on their skins in the days before antibiotics?
Really, nice fantasy world you live in. "Freedom fighters" are a vile bunch in every insurgency since time began. War is vile without exception. You can argue whether the tactics are necessary and justified, whether the community represented by the "Freedom Fighters" is sufficiently oppressed to justify the inevitable monstrosity of war. But to pretend that some acts of war are universally beyond the pale is an astonishing level of naiveté. The question is whether in a particular case the tactics are both justified in terms of the threat of their opponents and efficacious in terms of reaching their goals.
How else does the West justify targeting civilian populations with fire-bombings and nuclear weapons? Clearly magnitudes worst than blowing up a school-bus, yet acceptable in light of the threat of Germany and Japan (at least arguably so).
The threat of Israeli occupation and dominance may not justify Palestinian terror attacks, and the acts may be useless blood-letting in terms of their goals, but you must actually argue those points rather than simply assuming that such actions are universally unacceptable - history says such acts are par for the course in warfare.
You got it. It's the "market cost" not the wholesale cost. And since they'll sell you a sub-par system without Windows, you'd better be ready for a huge fight if you want to get your money back for Windows - they'll simply argue that they have a supported system you should have bought.
If it was an actual free market, there'd be close to no advertising, so you can tell how close we are to that!
Well, you either have to convince yourself that it's productive, or not really care whether you are productive. In short, either amoral or not quite the top of the class - IQ 120 not IQ 150.
Plus a whole lotta balls.
That's capitalism for you! Like Churchill said about democracy, it's a terrible system - but all the other systems are worse.
But are you half a million to a million in debt on top of it? You're doing good in comparison to a lot of American doctors who come out of school with massive debt, then have to go through the same internship/residency BS for 5-10 years. After that, they've accumulated a huge amount of interest on that debt, have a family to support and are 35-40 years old.
So what do they do? Focus exclusively on making cash. It's the only sensible thing to do. And people wonder why so many doctors treat them poorly - after you've been treated like a piece of meat for decades, you'd have to be insane to not "return the favor". Unfortunately, the patients aren't the ones who were abusing them in the first place.
As always, count your blessings. It could be worse. You could even be a GP or pediatrician in the US, where you'll be retiring just as you finish paying off your debt! Those "high" salaries are only real in US private practice for the elite - surgeons, folks who run labs and such. It's the banks that are really making the money.
Governments will drive it. A number of government in Europe and S. America have requirements that all gov docs have to be in an ISO standard format. If MS isn't ISO standard, the docs will either have to be written in Word and converted to ODF, then futzed with to get them to look right, or done in ODF in the first place. Since they will have to be disseminated as ODF, everyone else will at least need a converter from ODF to Office, in which case they'll probably look like crap, thereby leading anyone who works with lots of government documents to just bite the bullet and start using an ODF word processor.
It'll trickle down from there, with ensuing format wars between governments and large corporations who want to avoid retraining costs but are heavily dependent on government contracts, and from them to smaller sub-contractors.
The US government will probably make ODF criminal to possess in retaliation (snark, I hope). MS will try to get laws changed to consider ECMA "good enough". It'll work in some countries - it'll all depend on what the larger or more developed countries do. France, Germany, Brazil - if they hold the line, there'll exist an economic incentive to dump MS.
The people follow their bosses - people use Word because it became a standard for large businesses a decade ago, and that trickled down into the household. The reverse can happen as well.
Ask Dell. How could the Linux offerings be just as or more expensive than Windows?
But run their "customize options" pages and get a comparable machine. I recall finding that the 1420 with Ubuntu or Windows came to the same price, but the Windows version had some extra bells and whistles. Bettor off buying the Windows version and stripping it - anyhow, I'm sure that Dell pays per unit so you're paying the MS tax either way - they're pro-rating it across their entire line.
I'm sure it is. I used an HP Pavilion with their Broadcom card. After the first few connections, it refused to take dhcp from the server. But running under Linux with ndiswrapper (same exact driver), I had no problems at all. And this was just a few months ago.
Google it and you see endless "advices", and multiple unclear tech-notes.
And people complain about wireless on Linux - makes me laugh! With little manufacturer support, you can get it to work, but the million that are thrown in by MS and device manufacturers and they can't get the kinks out for Vista.
It's not conspiracy, but incompetence. A GP should be aware that every immunization causes an immune reaction, and that immune reactions vary with individuals, but do get stronger with each exposure. It's why we get allergies that become dangerous after the first response. That's med school year 1. I would strongly suggest that your Dad never go to that GP again - he's a hack.
This is a person by person problem. If your children have an abnormal reaction (for most vaccines, normal is a slight fever that subsides within 3 days, and your doctor should tell you exactly what's normal), I would then avoid the follow-ups for that vaccine, and would be careful about later vaccines (in other words, space them out, one by one in case different vaccines induce the same reaction, and avoid everything but the primaries).
But for most people? Not a problem. The reason that the number of vaccines is increasing is fairly simple. The number of virii and bacteria that are locally available increase every year with the growth of travel, and the number of diseases for which we have vaccines increases as well. I'm sure that pharma is pushing them; but that's secondary to the epidemiological studies.
What you can watch out for though are vaccines that are given to everyone, even though the vulnerable population is only a subset. For example, they're pushing rotavirus vaccines now; the vulnerable population are people in poor housing with poor water supplies, but since doctors can't know, really, what conditions you're living under, the vaccine is pushed to the population in general.
"I know that information like this is considered anecdotal, but I'm not expecting you to take it to heart, just to understand that I have my own reasons. I'm sure that you feel you're doing yourself a favor by assuming I'm an indoctrinated idiot because I expressed a belief (is the B-word getting to be taboo these days?), but there really are other, potentially valid opinions out there besides your own."
So, if you're just telling us that "you have your own reasons", reasons that are opinions and not based on scientific evidence, why are you telling us that? Why would you tell me something just based on your own beliefs?
You are obviously allowed to have any belief you'd like to, based upon any combination of revelation, anecdote, empirical research or dice throwing. But of all those reasons, the only one that isn't private to your system (mind, religion, culture) is empirical research. I don't have to "respect" your beliefs or consider them "valid", outside of simply not agitating for laws to ban them. Why would you express a belief not based on empirical research to anyone who doesn't share your basis for that belief (same anecdotes, same religion, same culture, same dice event)? It can't convince any one else - the only interest for anyone outside your circle is anthropological (voyeuristic, in other words). In short, it's not that opinions are valid, it's that the reasons for an opinion are valid - and the only universal validity can be empirical.
The simpler explanation for your sisters seizures is that she was autistic, had some underlying brain damage, causing her to be particularly sensitive to immune reactions. Did she ever have any other seizures? They're fairly common in small children due to fever, and don't lead to autism in and of themselves. To develop autism, most of your mirror cells must be knocked out. That is unlikely to happen due to any single exposure event - it would require a long series of seizures and obvious immune reactions to cause that scale of brain damage; we know that because, as I said, many small children have multiple seizures and do not develop any significant brain abnormalities. Chronic epileptics take many violent and continual seizures to start developing that kind of brain damage that would characterize autism. You may be inverting cause and effect: someone with brain-damage (possibly undetected) would be far more likely to have seizures when stressed - it's not the seizure causing any significant damage, it's the damage leading to the seizure - it's a symptom.
No one believes that vaccinations are "100%" safe - just that the documented risks associated with them are lower than the risk associated with the disease you're being immunized against. We know that there are deaths due to vaccination.
No, it's Heinlen speak from "Stranger in a Strange World". It's made it into tech because they're big consumers of sci-fi. It means not just "understand" but to understand deeply, to have an intuitive grasp.
It's not only violent imagery, but it's "safe" violent imagery - it doesn't actually result in physical suffering, which should kickback with some negative feedback (and thereby suppress that system).
And we know it's cumulative - just look at the anthropological literature on the introduction of TV and movies. Whenever a community first sees a western - even an old, 50's style western - they generally run in horror. They haven't been desensitized yet, so the violence produces the real fear that real-life violence should produce.
On top of that, it's disconnected from social events - where in pre-movie societies you only saw that violence when you had already been worked up, so it was "appropriate" for war or local rioting, now it's completely individual and unrelated to what everyone else is doing.
Or higher better salesmen. If you don't have salesmen that can sell snowboards in Florida and jet skis in Arizona, you need a new salesman. In other words, there's more money to be made in creating new markets - in actually marketing, than just looking for what customers already want - bigger kids on the block will always be there to take those jobs.
Not all switches are the same. Not all companies are the same. The problem is the "Windows environment". If, for example, Solaris has your right balance of price, stability, support and performance in your particular app (they're not all the same for all products), and your talking about switching one group of servers, I don't see why it would be "prohibitively expensive".
If you're talking about switching everything simultaneously, then you can never switch anything - it's prohibitively expensive just to switch from XP to Vista overnight for everything. I just don't understand that can of a mind set - that it has to be all or nothing. If you're a large or medium size company, your talking a lot of people. Some of those people are just better at developing apps for one environment or another, so why wouldn't you have each group working and supporting themselves? If you have engineers developing one product, another group developing something completely different, another group of salesmen and secretaries, their needs are completely different.
And if you're a small company, you want to keep yourself flexible. You never know what opportunity comes down the pike that you need to jump on, so you want to be a multiple OS house. If you're integrating with a windows product, you had better know windows. If a large company comes in with Solaris and AIX servers, you had better already have someone who is at least familiar with those systems; if you need to sell a low cost system, a few linux developers would be handy.
Everyone is both a vendor and a customer. If you let a few IT people invent the idea that your costs will be lower if you force the entire company to "standardize" -- I'd bet they're selling you a line (and possibly getting kickbacks from some vendor). It makes sense to standardize secretaries and salesmen. It make sense to have interchangeable desktops in HR. But in the backroom, or for developers? And if you've standardized those classes, switching them for one app, say from IE to Firefox, it should be fairly simple and low cost to do the switch - you just force the upgrade, because your desktops already are identical (within a class and an age).
You don't actually argue that "There are almost no reasons, apart from ideological ones, to move away from MS products," you just assume it and beg the question. Often there are many good, cost-effective reasons to switch. If I can develop my product more cheaply for an alternate platform, then my product can be sold at a lower price; if the cost of the product is large compared to the cost of switching users from IE to Firefox, for example, that would be an excellent reason. If my product is more stable than my competitors, but is on an alternate platform, once again there are quite a few situations where it would be smart to switch. If I offer other "benefits", (whatever those may be in a real business world), they will switch.
You seem to live in some kind of alternate reality where all products are equal in all cases, where all salesmen are equally talented, where the cost of development is the same for all products on all platforms, where all developer pools have equal talent and cost, where all infrastructure is the same, and so on ad nauseum, where the only distinguishing feature in the world is "ideology". That's trivially untrue.
Unless you're little parenthetical comment is a strawman: the choice is to completely abandon all MS products completely, or to be a completely MS environment. And that's just plain weak. You don't have to drop Windows to go to Firefox, you don't have to drop Windows desktops to go to Solaris servers, you don't have to drop Windows servers to go to python; if you want to, you can run KDE on OSX (if that made sense in some situation). To lock yourself into one vendor under some mythical idea of support costs is just plain stupid. It's like claiming that you have lower support costs if all your housing contractors restricted themselves to hammers - "I know how to replace a hammer, but a saw is a completely different tool".
But developers do drive to a large extent their customers. For a while, I had to have IE on at least one computer because of a piece of "web software" (to put it politely) that was required by my organization. If the vendor had developed it to run only on Firefox, for example, I'm sure my IT department would have bought it anyway and demanded that we put firefox on our machines - if the kickbacks were right and it didn't increase their work load, they'd require me to use lynx.
It's not a simple relationship and not completely asymmetrical; power is on both sides - but a decent sales staff with a decent product will find customers that match your product or that are willing to work with you. The "we standardize on MS" line can be replaced with any other word than "MS" if IT feels it's in their interest (or management above IT), whether it's price, personal relationship, quality, cost of use, or simple old-fashioned corruption.
Do you think that folks don't understand that MS is a business, and their legal responsibility is to make money by any legal means necessary? Are you suggesting that ./ers are mildly retarded and don't understand the legal atmosphere of contemporary capitalism?
Of course MS will try to extract every last dime they can. The questions are: 1) are their methods efficacious and 2) should they be accepted socially and/or legally? For point 1, the fact that MS thinks this is the way it can maximize profits doesn't necessarily true - stupidity is just as common among CEOs as among janitors. For point 2, your motto of "business is business" is completely irrelevant - if IBM is working in Saudi Arabia and they believe that they can maximize profit by using slaves, "business is business" would dictate that they should. That would obviously be abhorrent (and don't start whining that that's different - of course it. It's an analogy.).
So please, don't use trite cliches and childish simplifications and believe that you are being clever. Not everyone has the mental faculties of a slightly impaired rhesus monkey.
Mighty mouse is one of the absolutely worst design decision by Apple, short of the puck mouse.
Why can't they get mice right? It's not really that hard, and they've been doing it for two decades now.
But here you have it, Apple's tendency to try to jam all features into some average package, rather than setting a simple default yet allowing you to alter it. Now, the mouse has a whole bunch of buttons, without the tactile feedback that make them easy to use, and with the added complexity of multiple buttons.
"Just Works?" - not really, just don't give your customers too much and they'll think it just works.
Mac - universal mediocrity.
PC - universal incompetence.
Linux - universal complexity (or mediocrity if you have gnome).
"I've been using Microsoft's OSes and programs for a quarter of a century, and they used to be the best quality out there. The quality has been declining for all that time, IMO right now Microsoft's OSes and programs are by far the very worst either on or off the market."
When was MS quality "the best out there"? In the 70's and early 80's? The Apple 2e beat MS, as did the C64. The only reason most folks bought MS in the early days was because their company bought from IBM.
In the 80's and 90's? You mean that crapfest that was early Word, the real pathetic interface of Windows 3.1, the lack of a native IP stack into the mid 90's? Any Mac or Sun could beat them hands down - and Linux came on strong.
In the late 90's and early 2000's? Well, yes, Apple was down and out. But MS was already a morass of virii, of network storms and blue screens of death. Linux could beat it any day for most uses, except when Word docs were demands - and that's not quality, that's monopoly.
Are you talking about the mess of Visual Basic and Visual C++, which have ruined more programmers than Cobol has? Or the gui builders, which were no more useful than the X gui builders that Sun already had by 95.
Really, is there even a single year were MS is clearly the quality leader in almost any field? I can't think of one - but every dog has it's day.
"Vista isn't the upgrade it should have been but it is not horrible."
People are nuts! Here you have a product that you've (supposedly) payed hard-cash for. They have "upgrade features" that are 15 years out of date, and they've taken a year and a half to get stable, and you say "that's not horrible"? They've added computationally expensive flashy graphics that are close to useless, even though the models for some useful eyecandy have been out for a decade (multi-desktop from X, expose from OSX)?
What's horrible? You're PC blows up when you bring the Vista DVD within five yards? You catch gonorrhea from watching porn with Vista?
Really, the best you can say about Vista is that it's not terribly different from Ubuntu (a bit slower with more useless eye candy, but more hardware compatibility done by vendors) - you gonna pay cash for that? That's horrible!