considering MS dos has not been a part of windows since windows 2000, I assume you are also unaware of how modern windows works?.
You mean Windows ME. Windows 2000 was NT-based- no DOS in there.
System Restore is not a fool-proof way of removing viruses. Often to remove viruses, you need to hunt around in the file tree and muck with the registry. That's pretty damned user-unfriendly. Anything that constitutes "complex computing" is always difficult, on all platforms; that's just the way of the world.
I've used it, and I don't like it. It's an unpleasant mess of poorly thought out interface paradigms, hacked together without much thought. And I'm not saying that as some sort of desktop purist- I've used and like (to a point) Unity, Android on a large screen, KDE4, Mac...
I'm a Linux user, but I've always purchased a gaming machine with Windows on it. I currently have a gaming desktop with a (legitimate and paid for) Win7 install (dual booting with Ubuntu) for playing games on. And I'm perfectly happy with it; Win7 is a good piece of software. When it comes time to upgrade, I'll seriously assess whether I still need a Windows boot for the games I want to play. My desktop has got another couple of years on it yet, so if Steam (and others) can make Linux a gaming platform by then, then I'll be sold. At the moment, I would not willingly buy a Win8 computer. Full stop.
Yeah- meta-moderation is better. He's suggesting unilaterally letting random members to mark posts as "incorrect". How do you think that will pan out on any topic even remotely controversial? Political discussions (including open-source project politics), or any complex subject with a lot of misunderstandings or debate?
Our system has random members imbued with the ability to mark something as a good or a bad post (moderation). It then imbues other people to say if that moderation was correct, and undo false ones (such as "informative" ratings for factually incorrect statements). Far more nuanced, and it would take users exactly the same amount of time to do as the other one.
That's my snarky point. Whatever method you use to meta-moderate (either the current method, or the fantasy from the GP) you need people to put the time into it. Mature adults could moderate now, but they probably don't. Mature adults could volunteer to "mark posts as disinformation", but they probably wouldn't.
If he or you care to do it, you have a method to do so now. I'm guessing you don't. Do you think you'd spend much time doing it in the future if they tweaked the mechanism? I'm guessing not.
At worst, the USPTO didn't bother to check the previous valid trademarking of "iPad".
Just because they allowed something to be trademarked before, it doesn't mean it can't be nullified later. See trademark genericization for an example- when something that might have started as a unique trademark for a company passes into common language as a synonym for all products of that type (examples- "hoovering" as a synonym for vacuum cleaning, or aspirin as a synonym for all brands of acetylsalicylic acid).
I'm not going to bother reading the judgement in TFA (I don't care that much really), but it's possible that the judgement is alluding to something like that. Perhaps "pad" was not a generic term for tablet computer several years ago, but has become so now.
North Korea is a small and heavily populated country. It has (estimated) 24 million people in a space smaller than Mississippi. This isn't a vast wasteland that the South Koreans can fill up. Aside from the DMZ, which is only 2.5 miles wide, this would not produce "more real estate".
North Korea is also cripplingly poor. I mean we're not talking "Soviet-backed East Germany" poor, we're talking "24 million people who are starving" poor. South Korea is, of course, relatively rich. Unifying the country would mean that a country with the 13th biggest economy in the world would suddenly need to prop up a country with the 103rd biggest economy in the world. It would be an economic hell. I mean you think hitching the economy of Greece up to the economy of Germany went poorly, you see how that one turns out.
Unification would be politically good, but economically there is more or less no positive angle to be had in anything but the longest term.
Presumably this is in addition to, not a replacement for, other rescue technologies/methods currently in use. If this is a way of getting life preservers to victims at high speed ahead of the conventional lifeboat that is also on the way, that can only be a good thing. A full sized lifeboat can go at what, 25 knots (30 mph) maybe, and perhaps a quadcopter can go 50 mph, that might be the difference between someone being in the cold, rough water without safety equipment for 30 mins or 15 mins.
The quadcopter in TFA also has a heatcam, LED emergency beacons, and a voice recognition system to pick up on people shouting for help. All things that should make it easier for a lifeboat or rescue helicopter to directly pinpoint people in distress and get to them more quickly.
I couldn't get Cinnamon working on my netbook; screen freezes and crashes galore. MATE worked a treat though. Admittedly this was a year or so ago, so maybe the stability has improved since.
Cinnamon's a fantastic project, but it's still young and it doesn't have many resources behind it. There's no shame in admitting that it has a little way to go yet.
Personally, I still recommend XFCE as the best Unity/Gnome alternative. I'm actually not so disgusted by Unity anymore, but when I need something more workman-like XFCE does the trick.
It would be your standard anti-trust, monopoly-abuse rules we're talking about. Assuming the narrative of the complainant plays out- the company with 90%+ of the market in desktop computers has mandated a rule on all their distributors/OEMs which makes it extremely difficult for any competitors to compete with them. This is bad for competition. It is also something which is only possible for a company with a monopoly- if Canonical demanded the same thing of Dell, they would get no-where.
Bearing in mind that MS was heavily fined for shenanigans over web-browser bundling, I think it's fair to say that the rules are broad enough to apply to this situation.
In reality, an anti-war protest in London in Feb 2003 saw a crowd of approximately 1 million people gather in Hyde Park, preceded and succeeded by several other London protests at around 500,000 people. And we still went to war.
That's real social pressure of a sort that is far more real and tangible (and persuasive to politicians) than chatter on an internet microblogging site. There was nothing but hostility to the war here, and we still went. If Tony Blair was willing to face down crowds of up to 1 million angry protesters to go ahead with an unpopular invasion, do you really think he would have been turned by short messages on an internet chat room?
People who are on Twitter like to think that Twitter is far more revolutionary and important than it actually is. It's nothing more than the latest evolution in what humans have been doing for the whole information age- sending messages to people. It is just not that big a deal.
Really, the rightwing is the group you are accusing of using the press to destroy people? There may be some of the right that do sink to such levels but it does not even come close to what the left does to people they don't agree with.
Different countries have different situations. The press in the UK is dominated by the Right. Quick list of Right Wing papers: The Sun (biggest selling paper by far) The Daily Mail The Daily Express The Telegraph The Star The Times The Financial Times (no relation) The Daily/Sunday Sport
List of Left Wing papers: The Mirror The Guardian The Independent
The sad thing is, The Guardian and The Independent are the two "quality papers" with the lowest circulation. The Mirror is gutter press, but is outnumbered at least 5:1 by their Right Wing gutter counterparts.
You're probably an American with a different local media landscape; but over here, the Right dominate the rabid, vicious mass market of the press.
That is against the constitution. Yes, the UK has a constitution (it's just uncodified).
Probably the biggest constitutional rule in the UK is- no parliament can pass a law that can't be changed or repealed by a future parliament. It's pretty much parliamentary democracy 101; the first lesson of any A Level Politics course.
Supermajorities (the 2/3 majority rule) are acceptable and within the rules.
It's worth pointing out that in the UK, if the defendant proves that the plaintiff was telling lies with the truth (i.e. Journalist publishes expose on Politician's behaviour, Politician drags Journalist to court for libel, Journalist produces material proving that the Politician did do the things that were published), the plaintiff would then be guilty of the criminal offence of perjury, which carries a prison sentence.
I don't know if I have a point; only that libel proceedings are a high-risk game.
That is what courts and libel laws are for. If I say "Mr LoyalOpposition [including real name] is a paedophile, and I have proof (which I'll share later!)" and publish that sentiment somewhere prominent (such as on a well known blog site or on the front page of a newspaper), you would quite rightly be very cross. You would feel that I have attacked you, and that you want me to stop. You can take me to a court and charge me with libel, in the hope of a) getting the court to rule officially that I am talking nonsense, and b) perhaps get some sort of justice or recompense.
In the UK over the last few decades, our press has been practising serious criminal acts with impunity. The rap sheet include eavesdropping, hacking, theft, breaking and entering, bribery of officials, intimidation, and even one particularly murky murder case which one paper has been far too involved in. And these crimes were committed by a spread of different institutions, including all political spectra and some "quality" papers which should have known better. The new regulator is intended to give people a chance to pursue complaints against the press (including, obviously many complaints that fall short of the above) without needing to drag the whole affair in front of a judge. Which seems like a good idea- are we really saying we'd rather journalists be dragged into a formal court every few months, instead of being given a chance at arbitration by an independent body first?
As far as I can tell at first reading, TFA seems to misrepresent Clause 21A. From my reading, it appears that this is not introducing "massive new fines"- these are existing fines, which the bill is explicitly EXEMPTING news organisations from where they have already been punished by their independent regulator. To quote the minister Maria Miller from the Hansard records:
The first group of amendments relates to exemplary damages. It will perhaps be helpful to the House to explain their effect. Exemplary damages are already available, as I am sure hon. Members know, under common law. They are, however, very rare, and reservedfor the most serious cases. They are designed to punish only where there is no alternative. That general position will not change, but the new scheme will change the position for relevant publishers in certain types of cases relating to the media, namely: defamation, misuse of private information, breach of confidence and harassment. They would give effect to the recommendation in Lord Justice Leveson’s report that exemplary damages should be put on a statutory footing for media cases, with the aim of incentivising publishers to join the regulator.
There is no direct correlation between always on DRM and his departure.
Unless you consider poor reviews, disappointing sales, and an embarrassing telling-off by your biggest distributor (Amazon) to have a direct impact on financial results.
EA is a company which makes every penny of its money by selling games. The quality of the games it makes, how they review and sell, are more or less the only factor that goes into whether it's a financial success. If the CEO is being fired for crappy results (and there isn't some other cock-up attached to account for it, e.g. fraud), then essentially he is being fired for making crappy games.
Definitely true, but not bullet-proof. I remember not so long ago when Windows had 97% of the desktop market share, Mac had about 2%, and the rest scrambled over the last 1% (Linux clocking in somewhere like 0.5%). Now Mac is more like 10%, Linux is more like 2%. And that's obviously not counting the tablet market, which really is starting to converge with the mainstream desktop market (MS Surface Pro and RT are practically identical to each other, and only spitting distance from an Asus Transformer).
Windows benefits hugely from inertia- it's what people already have, it's what all software is compatible for, what all hardware is certified for. But even still, it's share has been gradually whittled away over the last decade. At some point that inertia will cease to be true and Windows will have to stand on its own against Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and the alternatives, both technically and in image terms. That will be a fun time to live through as a geek.
Presumably for a little longer than the 2 year warranty on the phone handset. Cutting support to the software before the device is even out of warranty seems bizarre. Hopefully there will be an upgrade path for all WP8 devices, but that might be a forlorn hope at the low end of the Windows Phone range.
But then, that's proprietary software for you, eh? My old Android phone isn't updated by Sony any more, but at least I can reflash it with Cyanogen Mod. I'm presuming that there's no such equivalent "vanilla", out-of-the-box version of Windows Phone you can buy for that purpose.
I don't use my microwave exclusively, but there's no denying that there are many things where it produces indistinguishable results.
Example 1- I cooked a big chicken casserole (in a slow cooker) the other day, with around half of it going in the fridge for another day. Heating up stew in the microwave takes about 4 minutes, and can be done in the serving bowl. Doing it in a saucepan would take more like 10-15 to do it without burning or boiling, and create more washing up. Both results will be the same- hot stew. The stew heated on my gas hob will not taste better.
Example 2- I make porridge most mornings for breakfast. In the microwave, you combine the ingredients in a cereal bowl and cook for about 3 minutes. In a pan, it takes about 20. The microwaved porridge is more or less identical to the hob porridge.
I wouldn't use a microwave for actual cooking, but it's definitely quicker at what it's quicker at. I mean l didn't even mention the big daddy of speedy microwave cooking- a baked potato in 12 mins, versus 1-2 hours in an oven.
More to the point, cooking technology hasn't changed but a jot in 5 years. If you thought a microwave was a good idea in 2008, you're going to think it's a good idea in 2013. If you feel like you never use one in 2013, odds are you could have not used one in 2008. Claiming that it's some sort of worldwide attitude change that has meant we are less likely to use microwaves this year (as TFA appears to do) is patently idiotic.
I believe it is usually accepted that his surname at birth was "Ockham". Most philosophers at that time would "latinize" their name when publishing writings; hence he latinized his name to "Occam". So both are correct, depending on whether you want to use the Latin or English version of his name.
Slashdot Mirror
considering MS dos has not been a part of windows since windows 2000, I assume you are also unaware of how modern windows works? .
You mean Windows ME. Windows 2000 was NT-based- no DOS in there.
System Restore is not a fool-proof way of removing viruses. Often to remove viruses, you need to hunt around in the file tree and muck with the registry. That's pretty damned user-unfriendly. Anything that constitutes "complex computing" is always difficult, on all platforms; that's just the way of the world.
I've used it, and I don't like it. It's an unpleasant mess of poorly thought out interface paradigms, hacked together without much thought. And I'm not saying that as some sort of desktop purist- I've used and like (to a point) Unity, Android on a large screen, KDE4, Mac...
I'm a Linux user, but I've always purchased a gaming machine with Windows on it. I currently have a gaming desktop with a (legitimate and paid for) Win7 install (dual booting with Ubuntu) for playing games on. And I'm perfectly happy with it; Win7 is a good piece of software. When it comes time to upgrade, I'll seriously assess whether I still need a Windows boot for the games I want to play. My desktop has got another couple of years on it yet, so if Steam (and others) can make Linux a gaming platform by then, then I'll be sold. At the moment, I would not willingly buy a Win8 computer. Full stop.
Yeah- meta-moderation is better. He's suggesting unilaterally letting random members to mark posts as "incorrect". How do you think that will pan out on any topic even remotely controversial? Political discussions (including open-source project politics), or any complex subject with a lot of misunderstandings or debate?
Our system has random members imbued with the ability to mark something as a good or a bad post (moderation). It then imbues other people to say if that moderation was correct, and undo false ones (such as "informative" ratings for factually incorrect statements). Far more nuanced, and it would take users exactly the same amount of time to do as the other one.
That's my snarky point. Whatever method you use to meta-moderate (either the current method, or the fantasy from the GP) you need people to put the time into it. Mature adults could moderate now, but they probably don't. Mature adults could volunteer to "mark posts as disinformation", but they probably wouldn't.
If he or you care to do it, you have a method to do so now. I'm guessing you don't. Do you think you'd spend much time doing it in the future if they tweaked the mechanism? I'm guessing not.
It's called "meta-moderating", and we already have it. I presume from your rant that you make use of this frequently?
At worst, the USPTO didn't bother to check the previous valid trademarking of "iPad".
Just because they allowed something to be trademarked before, it doesn't mean it can't be nullified later. See trademark genericization for an example- when something that might have started as a unique trademark for a company passes into common language as a synonym for all products of that type (examples- "hoovering" as a synonym for vacuum cleaning, or aspirin as a synonym for all brands of acetylsalicylic acid).
I'm not going to bother reading the judgement in TFA (I don't care that much really), but it's possible that the judgement is alluding to something like that. Perhaps "pad" was not a generic term for tablet computer several years ago, but has become so now.
How is this a +5?
North Korea is a small and heavily populated country. It has (estimated) 24 million people in a space smaller than Mississippi. This isn't a vast wasteland that the South Koreans can fill up. Aside from the DMZ, which is only 2.5 miles wide, this would not produce "more real estate".
North Korea is also cripplingly poor. I mean we're not talking "Soviet-backed East Germany" poor, we're talking "24 million people who are starving" poor. South Korea is, of course, relatively rich. Unifying the country would mean that a country with the 13th biggest economy in the world would suddenly need to prop up a country with the 103rd biggest economy in the world. It would be an economic hell. I mean you think hitching the economy of Greece up to the economy of Germany went poorly, you see how that one turns out.
Unification would be politically good, but economically there is more or less no positive angle to be had in anything but the longest term.
Presumably this is in addition to, not a replacement for, other rescue technologies/methods currently in use. If this is a way of getting life preservers to victims at high speed ahead of the conventional lifeboat that is also on the way, that can only be a good thing. A full sized lifeboat can go at what, 25 knots (30 mph) maybe, and perhaps a quadcopter can go 50 mph, that might be the difference between someone being in the cold, rough water without safety equipment for 30 mins or 15 mins.
The quadcopter in TFA also has a heatcam, LED emergency beacons, and a voice recognition system to pick up on people shouting for help. All things that should make it easier for a lifeboat or rescue helicopter to directly pinpoint people in distress and get to them more quickly.
I couldn't get Cinnamon working on my netbook; screen freezes and crashes galore. MATE worked a treat though. Admittedly this was a year or so ago, so maybe the stability has improved since.
Cinnamon's a fantastic project, but it's still young and it doesn't have many resources behind it. There's no shame in admitting that it has a little way to go yet.
Personally, I still recommend XFCE as the best Unity/Gnome alternative. I'm actually not so disgusted by Unity anymore, but when I need something more workman-like XFCE does the trick.
It would be your standard anti-trust, monopoly-abuse rules we're talking about. Assuming the narrative of the complainant plays out- the company with 90%+ of the market in desktop computers has mandated a rule on all their distributors/OEMs which makes it extremely difficult for any competitors to compete with them. This is bad for competition. It is also something which is only possible for a company with a monopoly- if Canonical demanded the same thing of Dell, they would get no-where.
Bearing in mind that MS was heavily fined for shenanigans over web-browser bundling, I think it's fair to say that the rules are broad enough to apply to this situation.
I am sure you're familiar with the old internet adage "Don't feed the trolls"? That applies here.
This is just some random internet drama queen trying to get attention. Ignore it and it will go away.
Completely agreed.
In reality, an anti-war protest in London in Feb 2003 saw a crowd of approximately 1 million people gather in Hyde Park, preceded and succeeded by several other London protests at around 500,000 people. And we still went to war.
That's real social pressure of a sort that is far more real and tangible (and persuasive to politicians) than chatter on an internet microblogging site. There was nothing but hostility to the war here, and we still went. If Tony Blair was willing to face down crowds of up to 1 million angry protesters to go ahead with an unpopular invasion, do you really think he would have been turned by short messages on an internet chat room?
People who are on Twitter like to think that Twitter is far more revolutionary and important than it actually is. It's nothing more than the latest evolution in what humans have been doing for the whole information age- sending messages to people. It is just not that big a deal.
"The Press" in the UK has systematically abused it's position.
We're not talking about the press. We're talking about individuals like you and me expressing our opinions online, and getting hit with libel charges.
No, we're not. TFS is woefully incorrect. I can't do better than link you to a post a few scrolls above this one:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3561475&cid=43215135
Really, the rightwing is the group you are accusing of using the press to destroy people? There may be some of the right that do sink to such levels but it does not even come close to what the left does to people they don't agree with.
Different countries have different situations. The press in the UK is dominated by the Right. Quick list of Right Wing papers:
The Sun (biggest selling paper by far)
The Daily Mail
The Daily Express
The Telegraph
The Star
The Times
The Financial Times (no relation)
The Daily/Sunday Sport
List of Left Wing papers:
The Mirror
The Guardian
The Independent
The sad thing is, The Guardian and The Independent are the two "quality papers" with the lowest circulation. The Mirror is gutter press, but is outnumbered at least 5:1 by their Right Wing gutter counterparts.
You're probably an American with a different local media landscape; but over here, the Right dominate the rabid, vicious mass market of the press.
That is against the constitution. Yes, the UK has a constitution (it's just uncodified).
Probably the biggest constitutional rule in the UK is- no parliament can pass a law that can't be changed or repealed by a future parliament. It's pretty much parliamentary democracy 101; the first lesson of any A Level Politics course.
Supermajorities (the 2/3 majority rule) are acceptable and within the rules.
It's worth pointing out that in the UK, if the defendant proves that the plaintiff was telling lies with the truth (i.e. Journalist publishes expose on Politician's behaviour, Politician drags Journalist to court for libel, Journalist produces material proving that the Politician did do the things that were published), the plaintiff would then be guilty of the criminal offence of perjury, which carries a prison sentence.
I don't know if I have a point; only that libel proceedings are a high-risk game.
Because it's a complex and delicate issue, and there was a lot of debating to be done.
Is it only democratic if everyone gets to go to be early?
That is what courts and libel laws are for. If I say "Mr LoyalOpposition [including real name] is a paedophile, and I have proof (which I'll share later!)" and publish that sentiment somewhere prominent (such as on a well known blog site or on the front page of a newspaper), you would quite rightly be very cross. You would feel that I have attacked you, and that you want me to stop. You can take me to a court and charge me with libel, in the hope of a) getting the court to rule officially that I am talking nonsense, and b) perhaps get some sort of justice or recompense.
In the UK over the last few decades, our press has been practising serious criminal acts with impunity. The rap sheet include eavesdropping, hacking, theft, breaking and entering, bribery of officials, intimidation, and even one particularly murky murder case which one paper has been far too involved in. And these crimes were committed by a spread of different institutions, including all political spectra and some "quality" papers which should have known better. The new regulator is intended to give people a chance to pursue complaints against the press (including, obviously many complaints that fall short of the above) without needing to drag the whole affair in front of a judge. Which seems like a good idea- are we really saying we'd rather journalists be dragged into a formal court every few months, instead of being given a chance at arbitration by an independent body first?
As far as I can tell at first reading, TFA seems to misrepresent Clause 21A. From my reading, it appears that this is not introducing "massive new fines"- these are existing fines, which the bill is explicitly EXEMPTING news organisations from where they have already been punished by their independent regulator. To quote the minister Maria Miller from the Hansard records:
The first group of amendments relates to exemplary damages. It will perhaps be helpful to the House to explain their effect. Exemplary damages are already available, as I am sure hon. Members know, under common law. They are, however, very rare, and reservedfor the most serious cases. They are designed to punish only where there is no alternative. That general position will not change, but the new scheme will change the position for relevant publishers in certain types of cases relating to the media, namely: defamation, misuse of private information, breach of confidence and harassment. They would give effect to the recommendation in Lord Justice Leveson’s report that exemplary damages should be put on a statutory footing for media cases, with the aim of incentivising publishers to join the regulator.
I get 40 MPG (Imperial) easily in my regular old petrol Corolla in normal mixed-use driving. That's about 48 MPG US.
I'm surprised that a Prius isn't considerably better. A small engined diesel can get 80+ MPG easily.
There is no direct correlation between always on DRM and his departure.
Unless you consider poor reviews, disappointing sales, and an embarrassing telling-off by your biggest distributor (Amazon) to have a direct impact on financial results.
EA is a company which makes every penny of its money by selling games. The quality of the games it makes, how they review and sell, are more or less the only factor that goes into whether it's a financial success. If the CEO is being fired for crappy results (and there isn't some other cock-up attached to account for it, e.g. fraud), then essentially he is being fired for making crappy games.
Definitely true, but not bullet-proof. I remember not so long ago when Windows had 97% of the desktop market share, Mac had about 2%, and the rest scrambled over the last 1% (Linux clocking in somewhere like 0.5%). Now Mac is more like 10%, Linux is more like 2%. And that's obviously not counting the tablet market, which really is starting to converge with the mainstream desktop market (MS Surface Pro and RT are practically identical to each other, and only spitting distance from an Asus Transformer).
Windows benefits hugely from inertia- it's what people already have, it's what all software is compatible for, what all hardware is certified for. But even still, it's share has been gradually whittled away over the last decade. At some point that inertia will cease to be true and Windows will have to stand on its own against Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and the alternatives, both technically and in image terms. That will be a fun time to live through as a geek.
Presumably for a little longer than the 2 year warranty on the phone handset. Cutting support to the software before the device is even out of warranty seems bizarre. Hopefully there will be an upgrade path for all WP8 devices, but that might be a forlorn hope at the low end of the Windows Phone range.
But then, that's proprietary software for you, eh? My old Android phone isn't updated by Sony any more, but at least I can reflash it with Cyanogen Mod. I'm presuming that there's no such equivalent "vanilla", out-of-the-box version of Windows Phone you can buy for that purpose.
I don't use my microwave exclusively, but there's no denying that there are many things where it produces indistinguishable results.
Example 1- I cooked a big chicken casserole (in a slow cooker) the other day, with around half of it going in the fridge for another day. Heating up stew in the microwave takes about 4 minutes, and can be done in the serving bowl. Doing it in a saucepan would take more like 10-15 to do it without burning or boiling, and create more washing up. Both results will be the same- hot stew. The stew heated on my gas hob will not taste better.
Example 2- I make porridge most mornings for breakfast. In the microwave, you combine the ingredients in a cereal bowl and cook for about 3 minutes. In a pan, it takes about 20. The microwaved porridge is more or less identical to the hob porridge.
I wouldn't use a microwave for actual cooking, but it's definitely quicker at what it's quicker at. I mean l didn't even mention the big daddy of speedy microwave cooking- a baked potato in 12 mins, versus 1-2 hours in an oven.
More to the point, cooking technology hasn't changed but a jot in 5 years. If you thought a microwave was a good idea in 2008, you're going to think it's a good idea in 2013. If you feel like you never use one in 2013, odds are you could have not used one in 2008. Claiming that it's some sort of worldwide attitude change that has meant we are less likely to use microwaves this year (as TFA appears to do) is patently idiotic.
I wonder if that notion also spreads by word of mouth...
I believe it is usually accepted that his surname at birth was "Ockham". Most philosophers at that time would "latinize" their name when publishing writings; hence he latinized his name to "Occam". So both are correct, depending on whether you want to use the Latin or English version of his name.