Hey! Be fair. The Catholic Church are fucking experts on matters of "Pollution of the spirit" and ''multiple forms of degradation and humiliation' of the essence of a person'.
While they aren't stupid, per se(it's not as though they don't have loads of well degreed Jesuits who definitely aren't, if it comes to that), and some of their people definitely have the low, animal cunning that makes a good politician; but, deep down, I think what causes them to keep making these unbelievably tone-deaf moves is ingrained arrogance.
It's hard to respond correctly when you just can't quite bring yourself to believe that great unwashed might, at some point, apply the rules to you. Even harder when you also posses the nigh-unshakable conviction that you are, in fact, the "good guys"(and where goodness is concerned, empiricism seems to run in reverse. Very few "good people" have ever said "Wait. I do bad things, I must not be a good person." Many "good people" have said "Wait. I'm a good person. The things that I do cannot be bad things.").
And that is how you get things like A senior priest saying(in public) that the condemnation being suffered by the Catholic Church was like the persecution of the jews.
The problem with using ground troops is that casualties make for terrible press. Plus, although we've been working hard to change this, there is only so much profit that defense contractors can wring out of sending some kid to get shot in dustymudholistan.
Gigantic explosions, on the other hand, make every red blooded American's cock stand just a little straighter, and very-high-performance sophisticated single-use delivery vehicles are delightfully expensive...
After all, if the warhead contains more than 3 ounces of fluid in any one container, or won't fit in a one liter zip-lock bag, there is no way that the TSA will allow the launch...
If the TSA's word isn't sufficiently reassuring, we could always stencil "No nukes here, we're saving them for Ivan" on all conventional ordnance...
What, if any, level of incompetence would (legally) be "indistinguishable from malice"...
Obviously, by installing an AV product, you indicate a desire for it to perform certain operations on your system, and an acceptance of the fact that it will probably tank your I/O performance and so forth. And, in general, courts have generally accepted the notion that vendors are nominally, at best, liable for buggy software.
In this case, albeit unintentionally, McAfee ended up committing several hundred thousand hack attacks. Disabling thousands of computers, including plenty that would fall under the CFA's definition of "protected computers".
Thought experiment: If some punk kid had accidentally disabled some hundreds of thousands of computers(along the lines of that old accidental self-replicator worm, or something), what parts of the book would they be throwing at him right now? Are McAfee's actions just a desperate attempt to keep some of their burned customers, or do they fear something more serious here?
"System security agent software" doesn't seem like a synonym for AV software, though it would definitely include it.
Something like a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/tripwire/">Tripwire, or whatever the name of the chunk of code that actually manages AppArmor or SELinux(I forget what the BSD MAC system is called) restrictions, would(on a naive reading) seem to qualify, and any of those are useful and plausible parts of a BSD/Linux server.
They do forbid checking that checkbox by running a copy of Norton 7 with definitions from 2001, or some similar nonsense, which seems like a good thing.
If a case came to court, and the argument that a properly configured MAC setup with a small list of enumerated goodness with only the permissions it needed, all else denied execution, qualified as "System security agent software" with both "malware protection and virus definitions"(anything not specifically blessed by the admins, in this case) were to be rejected, my position on this part of the law would change. For the considerably worse.
Worst comes to worst, ClamAV has "AV" right in the name, and is quite inexpensive...
Businesses have had decades to "self-regulate" good data practices. But many of them haven't bothered, don't bother, won't bother unless they're forced. And that includes businesses from ma-and-pa shops up through the world's largest retailers.
It's worse than that, in many, perhaps most, cases, businesses have (as a body) actively attempted to worm their way out of what little responsibility they had. "Bank fraud", which is the bank's problem, became "Identity theft", which is your problem. People don't even get notification if their data are lost or stolen, unless that is a statutory requirement.
The only realistic hope for "self-regulation" would be in an environment where people have a statutory right to know if something has happened to their data, and had some realistic hope of obtaining damages if they were, indeed, harmed. The kind of self-regulation where the little people don't get to know anything, and if any of them manage to guess, we get five years of screaming about "evil trial lawyers" and "tort reform" and they get a $10 gift certificate is simply a polite euphemism for "ha ha, no regulation at all".
A state cannot just make laws that apply to random 3rd parties who aren't in/don't do business in that state; nor can they make laws that would specifically contradict something the feds have promulgated on the matter; but that doesn't mean they can't, de facto "export" the effects of (certain) laws.
California's labelling requirements, for instance, would probably be struck down hard if they applied to the entire country, or even said something like "You can only do business here if you follow our laws in all places you do business". However, they just say "you must do X when you do business here". Because California is a fairly large market, and stickers are fairly cheap, simple economics and economies of scale "export" that particular law for them.
I don't know whether the economics of this situation would cause a de facto exportation or not. I would assume that, in general, it is cheaper and easier to build and maintain one standard system, instead of two in parallel, and that there would be substantial exportation(especially since these measures aren't exactly something a responsible CIO wouldn't want to do anyway. There may be a number of cases of "Yeah, I know you don't like it; but look at this scary, scary new law, and approve my upgrade!" being used as an excuse to do things that people had wanted to do anyway.)
Because MA isn't exactly gigantic, or if the costs of doing it there way are noticably higher on a per user basis(rather than just on the design/setup/initial costs basis), I assume that you'd just see certain CC processors and the like offering "MA compliant" handling options at a modest premium and making those easy to invoke based on customer address.
I suspect that the broader effect will largely depend on the precise economics of how these systems are written/modified.
California's "OMG Carcinogens!" warnings are only required in that state; but you see them all over the place; because, for all the whining, it is often cheaper to make all your products compliant, rather than produce a California edition and a fuck-you-California edition.
MA is a much smaller market; but software has much smaller per-unit costs of production. If you have enough MA customers/operations in MA, you'll need to have an MA-compliant system. If you already have one, just using it for everybody might well be easier and cheaper than having a second, weaker, one for other people.
Obviously, some organizations are just sclerotic and incompetent. Being a complex system is, actually, pretty tricky. However, some organizations are that way by design.
In this case, was the SEC basically just incompetent, or was their incompetence tolerated, abetted, nurtured by those who really didn't want them to find anything?
After all, in retrospect, it is fairly obvious that much of the apparent prosperity of the last decade or so was a bubble. Consumer spending based on imaginary wealth provided by homes appraised for large numbers, GDP numbers based on rampant construction of housing stock that nobody could actually afford to live in, various quite sophisticated flavors of financial chicanery and shell-gaming on Wall Street. Now, if you suspect that you are in a bubble, you have the option of trying to pop it before it gets any bigger, which provides the best long term outcome; but generally involves having it burst in your face, or riding it, and hoping that you can make it out of office/retire/move to a new job/cash out a big stack/etc. before it bursts. If you aren't excessively burdened in the ethics department, the latter is pretty sensible.
In situations where you cannot, for political reasons, eliminate a regulatory body outright, there are various ways of quietly gutting it. Just cutting its budget usually helps, appointing an incompetent crony to mismanage it also works pretty well(and rewards a crony), I suspect that allowing incompetence to fester probably works to.
Did the SEC manage to fuck up on its own, or was it permitted and tacitly encouraged to, since an SEC was needed; but nobody really wanted it to find anything?
My understanding is that there isn't any real technical obstacle to implementing other FSes on Windows(though to work with the newest ones, you might well need to play the WHQL/driver signing game, which isn't free, and would give MS the option of stonewalling you); but that, in practice, there is basically no way that that is going to happen.
Customers(sensibly enough) are going to balk at being asked to install a kernel driver just to get a flash drive or generic MP3 player to work and, even if they would go for it, MS can easily enough make FAT licensing sufficiently cheap that it just isn't worth the effort and support nightmare of producing a fully supported ext2 implementation for Windows.
FAT is, indeed, an antique; but it is still pretty much the only FS that is trivial enough to implement in your cheap digital camera or USB MSC MP3 player, or whatever, that is also supported out of the box by MS operating systems.
That is why FAT is still worth something to Microsoft. Even for fairly fiddly embedded systems, there are plenty of free filesystems that are easily good enough. For real computers, FAT would be absurd. If, however, you are making a fiddly embedded system that also has to share a filesystem with a real computer, FAT is basically your choice(or exFAT, which is newer and more evil, and will be patent protected even longer).
Microsoft has absolutely no incentive to support ext2, 3, or 4, or HFS, or any of the others, and NTFS is a bit much for the lighter-weight embedded systems.
Depends: If BSD, nothing(so long as you followed any attribution requirements).
If GPL, nothing, unless you distributed your proprietary binaries, at which point you would be legally obligated to offer the recipients of those binaries access to the source for no more than reasonable costs of reproduction(this is a common misconception: lots of outfits comply with the GPL just by slapping a zipped source bundle on an FTP server somewhere, just to save the hassle; but your legal obligation is only to recipients of the derivative binaries). If you did distribute, and they caught you, you could theoretically be on the hook for Real Serious (civil) Penalties. Thanks to our friends in big content, and the proprietary software industry, you can really get your ass kicked for knowingly committing commercial copyright violation. And, although there exists the sentiment that "GPL=free hippie stuff", GPL violations are, in fact, just as serious as violations of any proprietary license agreement. As a matter of style, the SFLC and similar tend to prefer cooperative approaches, and view litigation as a last resort; but that is purely voluntary. They would be legally entitled to nail you to the wall. Such case law as exists has upheld OSS.
(What I don't know, and have never heard about a test case involving, would be some dodge like incorporating OSS into your product; but having contractual language in your sale agreement that requires recpients to agree not to exercise their rights under the GPL, thus keeping the code de-facto closed.)
And that's ignoring the fact that Marxism childishly assumes all economic transactions are zero-sum and wealth can never be created.
Where did you dig up that nonsense? Yes, communism consistently fails because it never manages to come up with a viable alternative to the market for setting prices and distributing commodities. However, there is nothing in Marxism implying that transactions are zero-sum. Marx himself, in his sections on economics, is practically orthodox Adam Smith. He is completely in agreement with Smith's stuff about gains from specialization of labor(the famous Pin Factory) and was, if anything, even more fixated on the productivity advantages of capital goods, and the way in which capital goods could be combined with labor to produce a surplus with which to produce more capital goods. The only real difference was that he took the (wholly orthodox) notion that "In a competitive market, the price of a commodity is equal to its marginal cost of production" combined that with the (also wholly orthodox) idea of "labor as commodity", and drew the unpleasant conclusion that "in a competitive market, the price of labor will be equal to the cost of bare subsistence for the laborer."(and, given what the pre-welfare-state industrial slums looked like, this wasn't exactly without empirical validation)... The whole marxist idea of labor being oppressed by capital rested on this conclusion, and on the idea(explicitly opposed to the "zero-sum" notion) that capital + labor would generate surplus value; but that, since the market for unskilled industrial labor was extremely competitive, capital would end up holding basically all the surplus value, reinvesting it in capital goods, and obtaining even more surplus value in the next round, while labor would always be stuck at a subsistence level.
Later Marxists were fascinated with(and frequently sought to emulate) to work of industrialist innovators like Ford and Taylor, precisely because they recognized that those guys where on the cutting edge of non-zero-sum transactions and maximal productivity gains from the combination of capital and labor with scientific management techniques.
Obviously, none of this denies the existence of random pot-smoking dorm-room "communists" who wear Che shirts and think that "work is slavery, man!"; but the intellectual underpinnings of Marxism and communism(as well as the activities of communist states, which tended to explicitly emphasize the swiftest possible transition from near-zero-sum subsistence activities to high-surplus industrial ones) is actually in nearly complete agreement with orthodox capitalist theorists about the non-zero-sumness of transactions, and the gains from trade and specialization of labor. Communists just don't like how those gains are distributed. Unfortunately for them, they never hit on a more viable mechanism.
With the one significant difference of OSS being "From each according to his abilities, if he feels like it, or is redistributing modified binaries, to each according to his needs if something matching his needs happens to be available, and because the provider of that something voluntarily made it available.
The difference between being voluntary(yes, BSD trolls, people are legally compelled to release their modifications if they distribute binaries from GPLed source; but they take on this contractual obligation voluntarily) and being a command-and-control scheme is not insignificant.
Looked at in a slightly different light, OSS development is basically a variation on the "consortium development" model, adjusted for the fact that, since duplicating data is virtually free, lawyers and restrictions to prevent free-riding are actually more expensive than free-riders are. BSD-style OSS makes no legal effort to rein-in free riding, either ignoring the issue or depending on the fact that maintaining your own fork is often more of a POS than staying up with the mainline, while GPL-style OSS makes no legal effort to go after free-riding users; but does seek to compel free-riding developers to contribute.
The handy thing about it is that, because it does have a slightly communistic flavor, it works for and appeals to your idealistic sharing hippie types; but, as experience has demonstrated, it is surprisingly compatible with capitalist incentive structures(just look at how much kernel development gets done, basically because large corporations find it profitable), and it involves basically zero state coercion, aside from legal enforcement of voluntary private contracts. Thus, it is largely agreeable to everyone from communists to libertarians, with the exception only of rent-seeking corporatist scum.
While I can't say that I'm delighted that Google is gathering even more data, I'm pretty sure that they aren't the first, just the most high profile, to do this.
Back when the original iPhone and iPod touch were released, they didn't have GPS hardware. However, Apple still offered location services on those models, through a deal with skyhook.
Skyhook has a gigantic database of wifi base stations, and their locations, which allows devices equipped with their service to use their wifi capabilities to provide decent, if not GPS grade, location fixes(works better in denser areas, obviously).
My assumption would be that, since Google is spending the cash to drive the little Google cars around anyway, they figured that it would be a virtually zero marginal cost to assemble a Skyhook-style database, probably to improve location services in future phones.
Again, I do not say this as a "Well, other guys are doing it, so google is OK.". I frankly find Google's capabilities slightly sinister. However, if you just focus on Google's fairly high-profile activities, you miss out on a lot of rather disconcerting stuff being done under the radar by smaller, or stealthier, outfits.
Frankly, other than in search, much of Google's sinister surveillance activity is rather derivative. They are more dangerous than some of the smaller guys because they are bigger, have more data sources to combine, and are quite possibly smarter about combining them; but the cutting edge of privacy and annonymity destruction is almost always being pioneered elsewhere.
Oh, it definitely doesn't do you color fidelity any good; but contemporary POS TN screens actually do alright in terms of contrast on their sides(I'm currently doing this with a 20-inch widescreen that came with a $500 dell package, monitor price being maybe $150-200 of that, and it works just fine).
If you are photoshopping, or proofing websites or something, it isn't really a good option. Then again, neither are cheap LCDs in general. For word processing, or coding, or other text manipulation, though, the contrast is easily good enough, and some color inaccuracy just isn't a big deal.
Now, in a perfect world, you'd be able to get those OLPC/Pixel Qi monitors in desktop form. Those are comparatively lousy for color(better than e-ink, worse than conventional LCD); but they are a dream for text. Run in reflective mode, you get better DPI than just about anything else in a remotely similar price range(proud owners of 32bit dedicated greyscale radiologist workstation screens needn't flame me here), which makes text and greyscale figures look really nice.
As it is, though, I don't get my pony, and 4:3 screens are facing extinction; but the fact that I can run a couple of 20 inchers, on horizontal, one vertical, off a $50 graphics card does kind of take the pain away.
It depends on what kind of LED backlighting you get.
Basic LED backlighting which, to the best of my knowledge, is the only type available on any remotely inexpensive monitors(and the majority of LED-lit TVs), simply replaces the CCFLs with LEDs. Removing the mercury buffs your eco-cred, and the warm-up time is sharply reduced, and you can wring a little more out of the color gamut; but that's about it.
On rather high end LCDs, typically the really pricey LED TVs, you get LED array backlighting, where the LEDs are arranged in a grid or honeycomb pattern behind the LCD. By selectively dimming certain regions, you do indeed get substantially more dramatic contrast(particularly if viewed from a sufficient distance, so that your eyes can't perceive the fact that the resolution of the backlight dimming is pretty coarse(since there are only a few hundred backlight "pixels" available, which is why it is particularly seen on TVs).
The Apple Display tax isn't as high as it used to be(especially if you make the mistake of buying a Dell at retail price, rather than on sale or as a corporate lot); but the difference between the two displays isn't as dramatic as it would be if the Apple had array backlighting.
One potential issue: GP used the magic phrase "business users I deal with". Among other things, this almost certainly implies a number of, shall we say, naively(or perhaps "quaintly") programmed; but absolutely vital and not likely to be replaced programs and websites.
If Bob in payroll isn't getting any younger, and the custom frontend that some hot-shit VB6 jockey put together back in '97 has a UI cobbled together out of fixed size bitmaps, "resolution independence" just isn't going to help him that much.
If we all lived in the future, with vector-graphic UIs and hovercars, high DPI would, indeed, mean more detailed and easier to read. All too often, though, it means the choice between "too small" or "Blurry" or "just plain weird and broken(watching a program, or programs, that don't play nicely with adjustments to Windows' DPI settings struggle with non-defaults is Not Pretty)".
Or you could get the equivalent Dell or HP, which will have identical PPI(pretty much any 30-inch monitor that isn't sold as an "LCD TV", or bundled with medical workstations for $15,000 will have exactly the same 2560x1600 resolution in a 30 inch panel). In many cases, assuming equipment from the same time period, they'll even have a panel made by the same manufacturer(and, since you aren't going to be driving your 30-inch monster off a VGA port, the video processor board isn't nearly as distinguishing as it once was). The only real differences will be price(Apple high, Dell low), case (Apple attractive, Dell plasticky), input options(Apple minimalist, Dell multiple), and possibly backlight(I think Apple was first to LED at 30 inches; don't remember if Dell has caught up yet).
16:9 and 16:10 screens actually kick ass for text, assuming you have the right setup.
Most programs and websites(in terms of sidebars and toolbars and stuff) are still laid out for screens that are wider than they are tall, so you do usually need one monitor in the usual configuration.
Your second monitor, though, you just rotate so that it is now taller than it is wide, and offers rather more horizontal resolution than any but the nicest 4:3 monitors ever did.
All but the cheapest video cards support dual monitors(and we are talking really cheap here. the 20-30 dollar card might not; but for $50 you'll have a hard time not getting dual monitor support, albeit often 1VGA, 1DVI), and the software is mature enough(you'll have to suffer through looking at your BIOS bootup sideways on one of the screens; but you'll survive).
Unless your environment is quite space constrained, or has to fit in a laptop bag and go with you, a second monitor, rotated so that its dimensions closely match those of your common paper document, is a fairly cheap way to make an office-type worker's life more pleasant and productive.
Are you just dabbling in ad hominem, or are you actually missing my point?
I was sarcastically suggesting that Sony would be on the hook for colo fees to illustrate two things: 1. The absurdity and unacceptability that you fall easily in to once you drop the notion that a purchase represents a genuine change of ownership. 2. The sheer asymmetry that has characterized the absurd and unacceptable conclusions that have been drawn by abandoning this notion. Sony asserts the right to control the device that I purchased(I didn't actually purchase one, Sony can take their DRM-mobile and shove it; but the rhetorical "I") in perpetuity, and it elicits some mild controversy among geeks, with a nontrivial number of apologists. I, sarcastically, suggest that if they want the device in my house to be theirs they should pay a colo fee, same as anybody else who wants to control software on a piece of hardware owned by somebody else, the notion is treated as absurd.
Sony's attitude and actions(among others indulging in similar things) represents a fundamental attack on the notions of "purchase" and "ownership". However, it isn't even a symmetric attack. They seek to undermine all the aspects that are useful to the customer, and preserve all the aspects are useful to them.
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Bing is a decision engine, so they should be able to decide when to pull the plug...
Hey! Be fair. The Catholic Church are fucking experts on matters of "Pollution of the spirit" and ''multiple forms of degradation and humiliation' of the essence of a person'.
They have centuries of experience.
While they aren't stupid, per se(it's not as though they don't have loads of well degreed Jesuits who definitely aren't, if it comes to that), and some of their people definitely have the low, animal cunning that makes a good politician; but, deep down, I think what causes them to keep making these unbelievably tone-deaf moves is ingrained arrogance.
It's hard to respond correctly when you just can't quite bring yourself to believe that great unwashed might, at some point, apply the rules to you. Even harder when you also posses the nigh-unshakable conviction that you are, in fact, the "good guys"(and where goodness is concerned, empiricism seems to run in reverse. Very few "good people" have ever said "Wait. I do bad things, I must not be a good person." Many "good people" have said "Wait. I'm a good person. The things that I do cannot be bad things.").
And that is how you get things like A senior priest saying(in public) that the condemnation being suffered by the Catholic Church was like the persecution of the jews.
The problem with using ground troops is that casualties make for terrible press. Plus, although we've been working hard to change this, there is only so much profit that defense contractors can wring out of sending some kid to get shot in dustymudholistan.
Gigantic explosions, on the other hand, make every red blooded American's cock stand just a little straighter, and very-high-performance sophisticated single-use delivery vehicles are delightfully expensive...
It's amazing how many political problems become trivial if you have an air force and killing civilians en masse doesn't bother you...
After all, if the warhead contains more than 3 ounces of fluid in any one container, or won't fit in a one liter zip-lock bag, there is no way that the TSA will allow the launch...
If the TSA's word isn't sufficiently reassuring, we could always stencil "No nukes here, we're saving them for Ivan" on all conventional ordnance...
What, if any, level of incompetence would (legally) be "indistinguishable from malice"...
Obviously, by installing an AV product, you indicate a desire for it to perform certain operations on your system, and an acceptance of the fact that it will probably tank your I/O performance and so forth. And, in general, courts have generally accepted the notion that vendors are nominally, at best, liable for buggy software.
In this case, albeit unintentionally, McAfee ended up committing several hundred thousand hack attacks. Disabling thousands of computers, including plenty that would fall under the CFA's definition of "protected computers".
Thought experiment: If some punk kid had accidentally disabled some hundreds of thousands of computers(along the lines of that old accidental self-replicator worm, or something), what parts of the book would they be throwing at him right now? Are McAfee's actions just a desperate attempt to keep some of their burned customers, or do they fear something more serious here?
"System security agent software" doesn't seem like a synonym for AV software, though it would definitely include it.
Something like a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/tripwire/">Tripwire, or whatever the name of the chunk of code that actually manages AppArmor or SELinux(I forget what the BSD MAC system is called) restrictions, would(on a naive reading) seem to qualify, and any of those are useful and plausible parts of a BSD/Linux server.
They do forbid checking that checkbox by running a copy of Norton 7 with definitions from 2001, or some similar nonsense, which seems like a good thing.
If a case came to court, and the argument that a properly configured MAC setup with a small list of enumerated goodness with only the permissions it needed, all else denied execution, qualified as "System security agent software" with both "malware protection and virus definitions"(anything not specifically blessed by the admins, in this case) were to be rejected, my position on this part of the law would change. For the considerably worse.
Worst comes to worst, ClamAV has "AV" right in the name, and is quite inexpensive...
Businesses have had decades to "self-regulate" good data practices. But many of them haven't bothered, don't bother, won't bother unless they're forced. And that includes businesses from ma-and-pa shops up through the world's largest retailers.
It's worse than that, in many, perhaps most, cases, businesses have (as a body) actively attempted to worm their way out of what little responsibility they had. "Bank fraud", which is the bank's problem, became "Identity theft", which is your problem. People don't even get notification if their data are lost or stolen, unless that is a statutory requirement.
The only realistic hope for "self-regulation" would be in an environment where people have a statutory right to know if something has happened to their data, and had some realistic hope of obtaining damages if they were, indeed, harmed. The kind of self-regulation where the little people don't get to know anything, and if any of them manage to guess, we get five years of screaming about "evil trial lawyers" and "tort reform" and they get a $10 gift certificate is simply a polite euphemism for "ha ha, no regulation at all".
A state cannot just make laws that apply to random 3rd parties who aren't in/don't do business in that state; nor can they make laws that would specifically contradict something the feds have promulgated on the matter; but that doesn't mean they can't, de facto "export" the effects of (certain) laws.
California's labelling requirements, for instance, would probably be struck down hard if they applied to the entire country, or even said something like "You can only do business here if you follow our laws in all places you do business". However, they just say "you must do X when you do business here". Because California is a fairly large market, and stickers are fairly cheap, simple economics and economies of scale "export" that particular law for them.
I don't know whether the economics of this situation would cause a de facto exportation or not. I would assume that, in general, it is cheaper and easier to build and maintain one standard system, instead of two in parallel, and that there would be substantial exportation(especially since these measures aren't exactly something a responsible CIO wouldn't want to do anyway. There may be a number of cases of "Yeah, I know you don't like it; but look at this scary, scary new law, and approve my upgrade!" being used as an excuse to do things that people had wanted to do anyway.)
Because MA isn't exactly gigantic, or if the costs of doing it there way are noticably higher on a per user basis(rather than just on the design/setup/initial costs basis), I assume that you'd just see certain CC processors and the like offering "MA compliant" handling options at a modest premium and making those easy to invoke based on customer address.
I suspect that the broader effect will largely depend on the precise economics of how these systems are written/modified.
California's "OMG Carcinogens!" warnings are only required in that state; but you see them all over the place; because, for all the whining, it is often cheaper to make all your products compliant, rather than produce a California edition and a fuck-you-California edition.
MA is a much smaller market; but software has much smaller per-unit costs of production. If you have enough MA customers/operations in MA, you'll need to have an MA-compliant system. If you already have one, just using it for everybody might well be easier and cheaper than having a second, weaker, one for other people.
The universe is a very large address space...
Obviously, some organizations are just sclerotic and incompetent. Being a complex system is, actually, pretty tricky. However, some organizations are that way by design.
In this case, was the SEC basically just incompetent, or was their incompetence tolerated, abetted, nurtured by those who really didn't want them to find anything?
After all, in retrospect, it is fairly obvious that much of the apparent prosperity of the last decade or so was a bubble. Consumer spending based on imaginary wealth provided by homes appraised for large numbers, GDP numbers based on rampant construction of housing stock that nobody could actually afford to live in, various quite sophisticated flavors of financial chicanery and shell-gaming on Wall Street. Now, if you suspect that you are in a bubble, you have the option of trying to pop it before it gets any bigger, which provides the best long term outcome; but generally involves having it burst in your face, or riding it, and hoping that you can make it out of office/retire/move to a new job/cash out a big stack/etc. before it bursts. If you aren't excessively burdened in the ethics department, the latter is pretty sensible.
In situations where you cannot, for political reasons, eliminate a regulatory body outright, there are various ways of quietly gutting it. Just cutting its budget usually helps, appointing an incompetent crony to mismanage it also works pretty well(and rewards a crony), I suspect that allowing incompetence to fester probably works to.
Did the SEC manage to fuck up on its own, or was it permitted and tacitly encouraged to, since an SEC was needed; but nobody really wanted it to find anything?
My understanding is that there isn't any real technical obstacle to implementing other FSes on Windows(though to work with the newest ones, you might well need to play the WHQL/driver signing game, which isn't free, and would give MS the option of stonewalling you); but that, in practice, there is basically no way that that is going to happen.
Customers(sensibly enough) are going to balk at being asked to install a kernel driver just to get a flash drive or generic MP3 player to work and, even if they would go for it, MS can easily enough make FAT licensing sufficiently cheap that it just isn't worth the effort and support nightmare of producing a fully supported ext2 implementation for Windows.
Hopefully the patents involved will expire soon.
FAT is, indeed, an antique; but it is still pretty much the only FS that is trivial enough to implement in your cheap digital camera or USB MSC MP3 player, or whatever, that is also supported out of the box by MS operating systems.
That is why FAT is still worth something to Microsoft. Even for fairly fiddly embedded systems, there are plenty of free filesystems that are easily good enough. For real computers, FAT would be absurd. If, however, you are making a fiddly embedded system that also has to share a filesystem with a real computer, FAT is basically your choice(or exFAT, which is newer and more evil, and will be patent protected even longer).
Microsoft has absolutely no incentive to support ext2, 3, or 4, or HFS, or any of the others, and NTFS is a bit much for the lighter-weight embedded systems.
Depends: If BSD, nothing(so long as you followed any attribution requirements).
If GPL, nothing, unless you distributed your proprietary binaries, at which point you would be legally obligated to offer the recipients of those binaries access to the source for no more than reasonable costs of reproduction(this is a common misconception: lots of outfits comply with the GPL just by slapping a zipped source bundle on an FTP server somewhere, just to save the hassle; but your legal obligation is only to recipients of the derivative binaries). If you did distribute, and they caught you, you could theoretically be on the hook for Real Serious (civil) Penalties. Thanks to our friends in big content, and the proprietary software industry, you can really get your ass kicked for knowingly committing commercial copyright violation. And, although there exists the sentiment that "GPL=free hippie stuff", GPL violations are, in fact, just as serious as violations of any proprietary license agreement. As a matter of style, the SFLC and similar tend to prefer cooperative approaches, and view litigation as a last resort; but that is purely voluntary. They would be legally entitled to nail you to the wall. Such case law as exists has upheld OSS.
(What I don't know, and have never heard about a test case involving, would be some dodge like incorporating OSS into your product; but having contractual language in your sale agreement that requires recpients to agree not to exercise their rights under the GPL, thus keeping the code de-facto closed.)
And that's ignoring the fact that Marxism childishly assumes all economic transactions are zero-sum and wealth can never be created.
Where did you dig up that nonsense? Yes, communism consistently fails because it never manages to come up with a viable alternative to the market for setting prices and distributing commodities. However, there is nothing in Marxism implying that transactions are zero-sum. Marx himself, in his sections on economics, is practically orthodox Adam Smith. He is completely in agreement with Smith's stuff about gains from specialization of labor(the famous Pin Factory) and was, if anything, even more fixated on the productivity advantages of capital goods, and the way in which capital goods could be combined with labor to produce a surplus with which to produce more capital goods. The only real difference was that he took the (wholly orthodox) notion that "In a competitive market, the price of a commodity is equal to its marginal cost of production" combined that with the (also wholly orthodox) idea of "labor as commodity", and drew the unpleasant conclusion that "in a competitive market, the price of labor will be equal to the cost of bare subsistence for the laborer."(and, given what the pre-welfare-state industrial slums looked like, this wasn't exactly without empirical validation)... The whole marxist idea of labor being oppressed by capital rested on this conclusion, and on the idea(explicitly opposed to the "zero-sum" notion) that capital + labor would generate surplus value; but that, since the market for unskilled industrial labor was extremely competitive, capital would end up holding basically all the surplus value, reinvesting it in capital goods, and obtaining even more surplus value in the next round, while labor would always be stuck at a subsistence level.
Later Marxists were fascinated with(and frequently sought to emulate) to work of industrialist innovators like Ford and Taylor, precisely because they recognized that those guys where on the cutting edge of non-zero-sum transactions and maximal productivity gains from the combination of capital and labor with scientific management techniques.
Obviously, none of this denies the existence of random pot-smoking dorm-room "communists" who wear Che shirts and think that "work is slavery, man!"; but the intellectual underpinnings of Marxism and communism(as well as the activities of communist states, which tended to explicitly emphasize the swiftest possible transition from near-zero-sum subsistence activities to high-surplus industrial ones) is actually in nearly complete agreement with orthodox capitalist theorists about the non-zero-sumness of transactions, and the gains from trade and specialization of labor. Communists just don't like how those gains are distributed. Unfortunately for them, they never hit on a more viable mechanism.
With the one significant difference of OSS being "From each according to his abilities, if he feels like it, or is redistributing modified binaries, to each according to his needs if something matching his needs happens to be available, and because the provider of that something voluntarily made it available.
The difference between being voluntary(yes, BSD trolls, people are legally compelled to release their modifications if they distribute binaries from GPLed source; but they take on this contractual obligation voluntarily) and being a command-and-control scheme is not insignificant.
Looked at in a slightly different light, OSS development is basically a variation on the "consortium development" model, adjusted for the fact that, since duplicating data is virtually free, lawyers and restrictions to prevent free-riding are actually more expensive than free-riders are. BSD-style OSS makes no legal effort to rein-in free riding, either ignoring the issue or depending on the fact that maintaining your own fork is often more of a POS than staying up with the mainline, while GPL-style OSS makes no legal effort to go after free-riding users; but does seek to compel free-riding developers to contribute.
The handy thing about it is that, because it does have a slightly communistic flavor, it works for and appeals to your idealistic sharing hippie types; but, as experience has demonstrated, it is surprisingly compatible with capitalist incentive structures(just look at how much kernel development gets done, basically because large corporations find it profitable), and it involves basically zero state coercion, aside from legal enforcement of voluntary private contracts. Thus, it is largely agreeable to everyone from communists to libertarians, with the exception only of rent-seeking corporatist scum.
While I can't say that I'm delighted that Google is gathering even more data, I'm pretty sure that they aren't the first, just the most high profile, to do this.
Back when the original iPhone and iPod touch were released, they didn't have GPS hardware. However, Apple still offered location services on those models, through a deal with skyhook.
Skyhook has a gigantic database of wifi base stations, and their locations, which allows devices equipped with their service to use their wifi capabilities to provide decent, if not GPS grade, location fixes(works better in denser areas, obviously).
My assumption would be that, since Google is spending the cash to drive the little Google cars around anyway, they figured that it would be a virtually zero marginal cost to assemble a Skyhook-style database, probably to improve location services in future phones.
Again, I do not say this as a "Well, other guys are doing it, so google is OK.". I frankly find Google's capabilities slightly sinister. However, if you just focus on Google's fairly high-profile activities, you miss out on a lot of rather disconcerting stuff being done under the radar by smaller, or stealthier, outfits.
Frankly, other than in search, much of Google's sinister surveillance activity is rather derivative. They are more dangerous than some of the smaller guys because they are bigger, have more data sources to combine, and are quite possibly smarter about combining them; but the cutting edge of privacy and annonymity destruction is almost always being pioneered elsewhere.
Oh, it definitely doesn't do you color fidelity any good; but contemporary POS TN screens actually do alright in terms of contrast on their sides(I'm currently doing this with a 20-inch widescreen that came with a $500 dell package, monitor price being maybe $150-200 of that, and it works just fine).
If you are photoshopping, or proofing websites or something, it isn't really a good option. Then again, neither are cheap LCDs in general. For word processing, or coding, or other text manipulation, though, the contrast is easily good enough, and some color inaccuracy just isn't a big deal.
Now, in a perfect world, you'd be able to get those OLPC/Pixel Qi monitors in desktop form. Those are comparatively lousy for color(better than e-ink, worse than conventional LCD); but they are a dream for text. Run in reflective mode, you get better DPI than just about anything else in a remotely similar price range(proud owners of 32bit dedicated greyscale radiologist workstation screens needn't flame me here), which makes text and greyscale figures look really nice.
As it is, though, I don't get my pony, and 4:3 screens are facing extinction; but the fact that I can run a couple of 20 inchers, on horizontal, one vertical, off a $50 graphics card does kind of take the pain away.
It depends on what kind of LED backlighting you get.
Basic LED backlighting which, to the best of my knowledge, is the only type available on any remotely inexpensive monitors(and the majority of LED-lit TVs), simply replaces the CCFLs with LEDs. Removing the mercury buffs your eco-cred, and the warm-up time is sharply reduced, and you can wring a little more out of the color gamut; but that's about it.
On rather high end LCDs, typically the really pricey LED TVs, you get LED array backlighting, where the LEDs are arranged in a grid or honeycomb pattern behind the LCD. By selectively dimming certain regions, you do indeed get substantially more dramatic contrast(particularly if viewed from a sufficient distance, so that your eyes can't perceive the fact that the resolution of the backlight dimming is pretty coarse(since there are only a few hundred backlight "pixels" available, which is why it is particularly seen on TVs).
The Apple Display tax isn't as high as it used to be(especially if you make the mistake of buying a Dell at retail price, rather than on sale or as a corporate lot); but the difference between the two displays isn't as dramatic as it would be if the Apple had array backlighting.
One potential issue: GP used the magic phrase "business users I deal with". Among other things, this almost certainly implies a number of, shall we say, naively(or perhaps "quaintly") programmed; but absolutely vital and not likely to be replaced programs and websites.
If Bob in payroll isn't getting any younger, and the custom frontend that some hot-shit VB6 jockey put together back in '97 has a UI cobbled together out of fixed size bitmaps, "resolution independence" just isn't going to help him that much.
If we all lived in the future, with vector-graphic UIs and hovercars, high DPI would, indeed, mean more detailed and easier to read. All too often, though, it means the choice between "too small" or "Blurry" or "just plain weird and broken(watching a program, or programs, that don't play nicely with adjustments to Windows' DPI settings struggle with non-defaults is Not Pretty)".
Or you could get the equivalent Dell or HP, which will have identical PPI(pretty much any 30-inch monitor that isn't sold as an "LCD TV", or bundled with medical workstations for $15,000 will have exactly the same 2560x1600 resolution in a 30 inch panel). In many cases, assuming equipment from the same time period, they'll even have a panel made by the same manufacturer(and, since you aren't going to be driving your 30-inch monster off a VGA port, the video processor board isn't nearly as distinguishing as it once was). The only real differences will be price(Apple high, Dell low), case (Apple attractive, Dell plasticky), input options(Apple minimalist, Dell multiple), and possibly backlight(I think Apple was first to LED at 30 inches; don't remember if Dell has caught up yet).
16:9 and 16:10 screens actually kick ass for text, assuming you have the right setup.
Most programs and websites(in terms of sidebars and toolbars and stuff) are still laid out for screens that are wider than they are tall, so you do usually need one monitor in the usual configuration.
Your second monitor, though, you just rotate so that it is now taller than it is wide, and offers rather more horizontal resolution than any but the nicest 4:3 monitors ever did.
All but the cheapest video cards support dual monitors(and we are talking really cheap here. the 20-30 dollar card might not; but for $50 you'll have a hard time not getting dual monitor support, albeit often 1VGA, 1DVI), and the software is mature enough(you'll have to suffer through looking at your BIOS bootup sideways on one of the screens; but you'll survive).
Unless your environment is quite space constrained, or has to fit in a laptop bag and go with you, a second monitor, rotated so that its dimensions closely match those of your common paper document, is a fairly cheap way to make an office-type worker's life more pleasant and productive.
Are you just dabbling in ad hominem, or are you actually missing my point?
I was sarcastically suggesting that Sony would be on the hook for colo fees to illustrate two things: 1. The absurdity and unacceptability that you fall easily in to once you drop the notion that a purchase represents a genuine change of ownership. 2. The sheer asymmetry that has characterized the absurd and unacceptable conclusions that have been drawn by abandoning this notion. Sony asserts the right to control the device that I purchased(I didn't actually purchase one, Sony can take their DRM-mobile and shove it; but the rhetorical "I") in perpetuity, and it elicits some mild controversy among geeks, with a nontrivial number of apologists. I, sarcastically, suggest that if they want the device in my house to be theirs they should pay a colo fee, same as anybody else who wants to control software on a piece of hardware owned by somebody else, the notion is treated as absurd.
Sony's attitude and actions(among others indulging in similar things) represents a fundamental attack on the notions of "purchase" and "ownership". However, it isn't even a symmetric attack. They seek to undermine all the aspects that are useful to the customer, and preserve all the aspects are useful to them.