What Jesus taught, as reported in the Bible (King James version) has less to do with Christianity than current federal laws have to do with the constitution.
Just because the organization wears the name doesn't mean it attends to the stated ideals. It rarely does if it's more then two generations from it's founder. (And often fails sooner than that.)
Well, I haven't used the programs I don't like in a long time. This is a surprise? (I have used Photoshop. Just not in a long time, so I don't consider myself qualified to comment on it as if I were a user. Others don't seem to have the same scruples.)
And a part of my criterion for "a good program" is that it runs well on the system that I'm using. So for many of these I don't need to try them to know that it fails on at least some criteria. I also have criteria as to what terms I will accept in an EULA. If the software doesn't meet those, then I consider it unusably lousy software. Perhaps you don't care about legal requirements.
Seriously, different people have different standards about what is good software. The ggp claimed that all FOSS software was inferior (as an absolute statement, with no consideration that other people might have other ranking styles). I was responding in, I believe, a quite moderate fashion to that piece of absolute bladerdash.
I think you have some misconceptions about what money is. But if you want nobody to get money back, just set the intercept at 0, and deal with the resulting social unrest some other way. Expect a violent revolution.
I think we disagree about what is best. I've used OS X, and I prefer Linux. I'll admit I've never used Photoshop, but for my purposes the GIMP and Inkscape are quite good, and I've heard other people complaining about various aspects of Photoshop. (Yeah, I've heard them complaining about the GIMP, too.) And I'll admit I don't know about AutoCAD. Supposedly Intel makes the best compilers...if you never intend to compile on and for anything but and Intel chip. If you need the program to run on a competitors chips...expect intentional delays.
Basically, I think you're wrong. And I also don't believe that there's an "absolute standard" of best for a software product. What's best depends on exactly what you're doing.
P.S.: The ONLY aspect in which I've heard MSOffice is superior to OpenOffice or LibreOffice is support for MSBasic. Since I don't use that, I don't count this as a superiority. I do, however, often edit long documents, and MSOffice is reported to crash on those, destroying the original document. So from my perspective MSOffice is decidedly inferior. And that's without considering that it won't run on Linux (my chosen OS) anyway.
I think you're believing self-promoting government figures.
FWIW, yes it's gotten safer. This is what you EXPECT from an aging population. It hasn't gotten safer at the rate one should expect. So, yes, something isn't working.
OTOH, I don't believe that currently safety is the major problem. The major problem is "unemployment". By this I don't mean people not having jobs as traditionally defined, because more and more those jobs are going away as automation increases. But without a job people don't have any way to have a decent life. So automation is making a few people extremely rich (not wealthy), and driving more and more to desperation.
Please understand, it's not that automation is, per se, a bad thing. It isn't. But the social implementation of how to deal with it is attrocious, to be kind about it. If this is not addressed fairly quickly, I expect we will experience violent upheaval fairly soon. Say, within the decade, though the timing is a guess. I suspect this is why various police departments are getting drones, and I'm certain it's seen as one of the benefits of the robotic soldiers.
Given Obama's first term, it will amaze me if he doesn't make things worse. I may feel that Romney would have been an even worse choice, but that doesn't make Obama a good one. His first term was so bad that I literally could not force myself to vote for him this time. So I voted Green...the candidate did not convince me that she was competent for the office, but then neither did any of the other candidates. I know she wouldn't have been able to get anything through Congress, but given what the Democrats and the Republicans were able to agree on, not getting anything through Congress might be an improvement.
I have, indeed, heard that unemployment is down. I think what that means is that more people have been unemployed for a long enough time that they are no longer counted.
OTOH, face it, no matter WHO gets elected, unemployment is going to be continually increasing over the next decade. Because automation is increasing. Even China is experiencing job loss to automation, because robots are cheaper than people.
We need a very different answer. The best one I've come up with is free college education combined with a linear income tax, and no exemptions. Note that a linear tax can easily be adjusted so that persons making below some particular amount receive money rather than paying it. And at every step along the way you're better off if you earn more money. It goes: y = mx + b y is the tax owed. x is the income. m is the tax rate. b is the location where you've decided the tax should intersect the y axis. If b is negative then mx abs(b) you get money back instead of paying.
Perhaps the college should also supply the official text books for free. And any needed lab equipment.
Unfortunately, this must be a federal program, because currently the feds are taking most of the tax money, so no state can afford to implement it. (I want to say taking and squandering, but many people would disagree with me over just which programs constitute squandering.)
Still, even with this proposed approach, unemployment is going to be skyrocketing over the next decade...unless going to college is reclassified as having a job, of course. But even then, lots of people wouldn't qualify with the best intentions in the world. (Many go through their teens oblivious to the long term effects on their life. Sometimes reasonably, as among some sub-groups of the population they can't expect to have much of one, no matter what they do.)
It is still warranted. They haven't done ANYTHING positive that comes even close to approaching the negative things they have done in the past. The first that comes to mind is the way they stacked the committees on the Word processor format standard. And got a totally unusable standard mandated. Even though it includes microsoft proprietary features, even Microsoft hasn't managed (or chosed?) to implement it. (I'm not counting partial implementations. Anyone can do those. Even an ASCII text file would count as a partial implementation.)
I guess, if they don't do anything vile for a decade, I might sort of trust them even if they don't start doing positive things. I give that a 0.00,000,000,000,001% chance. At most.
From my point of view, "binary blobs in the kernel are evil" is a form of future-proofing. It limits the changes that the kernel developers can make without breaking them. When you don't understand what something is doing, it's hard to manuver around it.
OTOH, I will admit that I also have a sidgeon of ideological bias. But I also have a large lump of practicality. I've had too many systems die under me because of something proprietary that nobody understood or could fix, and which the prior manufacturer was no longer interested in. (Sometimes because he had gone out of business.) So my main reason is future-proofing. I tend to hold onto my systems for up to a decade, with minor improvements. (Added external storage, new display, etc.) I don't like things that can't be fixed without some-particular-body else's participation.
A better answer than "root your phone" is to get a phone that's unlocked. I hear Nexus is a good choice, though I'll admit I haven't yet got a phone with even a GPS, much less a smartphone.
(I'm a cheapskate, and I also live in an area with lousy coverage due to hilly terrain. For me those fancy phones would be a lousy investment with not much real advantage. So you might want to listen to someone else's advice, if your situation is different. I *am* starting to look at Nexus, though.)
I'm not really certain that if Apple hadn't invented it, nobody would have. Debian has had it's repositories from long before Apple. Red Hat sort of copied Debian's usage, and maintains a more limited set of repositories. And I think most major Linux distributions were doing that before Apple decided to make a proprietary version of it.
So the choice is: Do you want to pay a corporation extra to censor the apps that you use? (Yeah, censor is a loaded word. But that's essentially what they are doing...and not doing a really good job of.)
I don't imagine that I'll ever be that enamored of an AppStore. And before blaming the AppStore customers, you might give some thought to blaming all the developers who headed for App development with $$ signs in their eyes. Each individual one is them is guiltier than any individual customer.
Leaving a blank invites someone to later fill in THEIR choice. Vote for yourself as a write-in candidate. (Except in such locations as voting for a non-registered candidate would invalidate the ballot. In those cases vote for a random candidate, so at least the machine will have a higher noise level to overcome. If the ballots are honestly counted.)
My high school grammar teacher would have objected to "Strauss's". We werre not allowed to insert an "s" after the apostorphe in that kind of context.
And I admit that I have no idea of how to use an apostrophe to make a possessive of "Houses of Congress". Placing it after "Houses" is extremely confusing, and placing it after "Congress" is as bad or worse. (In such cases I avoid using the apotrophe to form a possessive, and use a preposition.)
I think you overstate the extent of the anger of the court. And I doubt that the legal office can be shown to have any input into the web site design. Nobody's that suicida.
OTOH, the court will definitely take notice. And probably be quite upset. I suppose they could slap a ban on Apple imports until the correction has been suitably made, and possibly a large fine. But probably no more than a few million, and in the small millions wouldn't surprise me. But neither would a fine in the hundreds of thousands. Or some totally different punishment. Contempt of court, and sitting in jail for awhile for some high Apple official would seem like as likely an outcome as a huge fine.
Yes it's KDE4, and yes it's in the alternate dock. And yes it's really annoying, but not as annoying as not having that dock. I heavily use one at the top of the screen and one at the bottom. Not being able to do that would be a good reason not to use that window manager.
Sorry, but KDE 4.0 was not as bad as Gnome3. Primarily because they didn't decide to prevent you from changing options that they decreed. (I never encountered any of the bugs that people were complaining about, I just don't like the change in design. KDE3 was far superior.)
Also, IIRC, the "4.0" release was supposed to be only a test release, but several distros decided to include it as the default. So some of the bugs should properly be laid at the foot of the distros that made it standard. And I guess that there are enough incompatibilities that it wouldn't have made sense to call it KDE3.99.01, which would have warned people.
So I don't blame them for that. I *do* blame them for killing an excellent GUI and replacing it with a rather poor one. And it still is rather poor, by comparison. Even Gnome2 was better. (So I switched from KDE3 to Gnome2. That I'm now back on KDE4 doesn't mean I like it any better. It's just that Gnome has gotten worse.)
No. I preferred KDE3 over KDE4. I still do. Actually, I preferred KDE3 over Gnome2, but when KDE3 went away, I moved to Gnome2, because it was better than KDE4. Now I'm on KDE4, and Gnome2 is still better, but *it's* now going away. And Trinity (KDE3 remix) isn't yet ready.
(Yes, I've also tried Mate and Cinnamon. Maybe I'll try them again in a few more months. Or maybe ElectricSheep will have installation instructions for Xfce or LXDE. [It's important to my wife...which means it's important to me.])
One thing I really dislike about KDE4 is the way icons flash up to a huge size when you get near them. It often hides things I want to see. It's not like it's hard to click on an icon at it's normal size.
N.B.: I do realize that this might be a positive feature on a palmtop, but I don't think it would even be useful on a tablet. I haven't yet found a way to turn it off. (And I still prefer KDE3. For that matter I also prefer Gnome2, though KDE3 was better.)
Xfce and LXDE are also reasonable choices. KDE4 is too flashy for my taste, and Xfce and LXDE are a bit too simple. The think that finally decided me in favor of KDE4 was that I got electricsheep to run as a screensaver under it, and I wasn't able to get it to run as a screensaver under either LXDE or Xfce. This is important to my wife. (Note that I'm not really enamored of minimalism. I don't have a system that demands it, and so it seems like a silly focus and waste of time. I recognize that this is a matter of taste, however, and sometimes of hardware constraints. And even so I found LXDE to be nearly as good as KDE4.)
That could be, but I'll believe nearly anything bad said about voting machines, regardless of the source. They are pretty much designed to allow massive cheating without any possibility of verification.
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What Jesus taught, as reported in the Bible (King James version) has less to do with Christianity than current federal laws have to do with the constitution.
Just because the organization wears the name doesn't mean it attends to the stated ideals. It rarely does if it's more then two generations from it's founder. (And often fails sooner than that.)
Well, I haven't used the programs I don't like in a long time. This is a surprise? (I have used Photoshop. Just not in a long time, so I don't consider myself qualified to comment on it as if I were a user. Others don't seem to have the same scruples.)
And a part of my criterion for "a good program" is that it runs well on the system that I'm using. So for many of these I don't need to try them to know that it fails on at least some criteria. I also have criteria as to what terms I will accept in an EULA. If the software doesn't meet those, then I consider it unusably lousy software. Perhaps you don't care about legal requirements.
Seriously, different people have different standards about what is good software. The ggp claimed that all FOSS software was inferior (as an absolute statement, with no consideration that other people might have other ranking styles). I was responding in, I believe, a quite moderate fashion to that piece of absolute bladerdash.
I think you have some misconceptions about what money is. But if you want nobody to get money back, just set the intercept at 0, and deal with the resulting social unrest some other way. Expect a violent revolution.
I think we disagree about what is best. I've used OS X, and I prefer Linux. I'll admit I've never used Photoshop, but for my purposes the GIMP and Inkscape are quite good, and I've heard other people complaining about various aspects of Photoshop. (Yeah, I've heard them complaining about the GIMP, too.) And I'll admit I don't know about AutoCAD. Supposedly Intel makes the best compilers...if you never intend to compile on and for anything but and Intel chip. If you need the program to run on a competitors chips...expect intentional delays.
Basically, I think you're wrong. And I also don't believe that there's an "absolute standard" of best for a software product. What's best depends on exactly what you're doing.
P.S.: The ONLY aspect in which I've heard MSOffice is superior to OpenOffice or LibreOffice is support for MSBasic. Since I don't use that, I don't count this as a superiority. I do, however, often edit long documents, and MSOffice is reported to crash on those, destroying the original document. So from my perspective MSOffice is decidedly inferior. And that's without considering that it won't run on Linux (my chosen OS) anyway.
I think you're believing self-promoting government figures.
FWIW, yes it's gotten safer. This is what you EXPECT from an aging population. It hasn't gotten safer at the rate one should expect. So, yes, something isn't working.
OTOH, I don't believe that currently safety is the major problem. The major problem is "unemployment". By this I don't mean people not having jobs as traditionally defined, because more and more those jobs are going away as automation increases. But without a job people don't have any way to have a decent life. So automation is making a few people extremely rich (not wealthy), and driving more and more to desperation.
Please understand, it's not that automation is, per se, a bad thing. It isn't. But the social implementation of how to deal with it is attrocious, to be kind about it. If this is not addressed fairly quickly, I expect we will experience violent upheaval fairly soon. Say, within the decade, though the timing is a guess. I suspect this is why various police departments are getting drones, and I'm certain it's seen as one of the benefits of the robotic soldiers.
Given Obama's first term, it will amaze me if he doesn't make things worse. I may feel that Romney would have been an even worse choice, but that doesn't make Obama a good one. His first term was so bad that I literally could not force myself to vote for him this time. So I voted Green...the candidate did not convince me that she was competent for the office, but then neither did any of the other candidates. I know she wouldn't have been able to get anything through Congress, but given what the Democrats and the Republicans were able to agree on, not getting anything through Congress might be an improvement.
I have, indeed, heard that unemployment is down. I think what that means is that more people have been unemployed for a long enough time that they are no longer counted.
OTOH, face it, no matter WHO gets elected, unemployment is going to be continually increasing over the next decade. Because automation is increasing. Even China is experiencing job loss to automation, because robots are cheaper than people.
We need a very different answer. The best one I've come up with is free college education combined with a linear income tax, and no exemptions. Note that a linear tax can easily be adjusted so that persons making below some particular amount receive money rather than paying it. And at every step along the way you're better off if you earn more money. It goes:
y = mx + b
y is the tax owed. x is the income. m is the tax rate. b is the location where you've decided the tax should intersect the y axis. If b is negative then mx abs(b) you get money back instead of paying.
Perhaps the college should also supply the official text books for free. And any needed lab equipment.
Unfortunately, this must be a federal program, because currently the feds are taking most of the tax money, so no state can afford to implement it. (I want to say taking and squandering, but many people would disagree with me over just which programs constitute squandering.)
Still, even with this proposed approach, unemployment is going to be skyrocketing over the next decade...unless going to college is reclassified as having a job, of course. But even then, lots of people wouldn't qualify with the best intentions in the world. (Many go through their teens oblivious to the long term effects on their life. Sometimes reasonably, as among some sub-groups of the population they can't expect to have much of one, no matter what they do.)
I don't count it yet, because I don't yet understand it. I suspect that it will reset the clock.
It is still warranted. They haven't done ANYTHING positive that comes even close to approaching the negative things they have done in the past. The first that comes to mind is the way they stacked the committees on the Word processor format standard. And got a totally unusable standard mandated. Even though it includes microsoft proprietary features, even Microsoft hasn't managed (or chosed?) to implement it. (I'm not counting partial implementations. Anyone can do those. Even an ASCII text file would count as a partial implementation.)
I guess, if they don't do anything vile for a decade, I might sort of trust them even if they don't start doing positive things. I give that a 0.00,000,000,000,001% chance. At most.
From my point of view, "binary blobs in the kernel are evil" is a form of future-proofing. It limits the changes that the kernel developers can make without breaking them. When you don't understand what something is doing, it's hard to manuver around it.
OTOH, I will admit that I also have a sidgeon of ideological bias. But I also have a large lump of practicality. I've had too many systems die under me because of something proprietary that nobody understood or could fix, and which the prior manufacturer was no longer interested in. (Sometimes because he had gone out of business.) So my main reason is future-proofing. I tend to hold onto my systems for up to a decade, with minor improvements. (Added external storage, new display, etc.) I don't like things that can't be fixed without some-particular-body else's participation.
A better answer than "root your phone" is to get a phone that's unlocked. I hear Nexus is a good choice, though I'll admit I haven't yet got a phone with even a GPS, much less a smartphone.
(I'm a cheapskate, and I also live in an area with lousy coverage due to hilly terrain. For me those fancy phones would be a lousy investment with not much real advantage. So you might want to listen to someone else's advice, if your situation is different. I *am* starting to look at Nexus, though.)
I'm not really certain that if Apple hadn't invented it, nobody would have. Debian has had it's repositories from long before Apple. Red Hat sort of copied Debian's usage, and maintains a more limited set of repositories. And I think most major Linux distributions were doing that before Apple decided to make a proprietary version of it.
So the choice is: Do you want to pay a corporation extra to censor the apps that you use? (Yeah, censor is a loaded word. But that's essentially what they are doing...and not doing a really good job of.)
I don't imagine that I'll ever be that enamored of an AppStore. And before blaming the AppStore customers, you might give some thought to blaming all the developers who headed for App development with $$ signs in their eyes. Each individual one is them is guiltier than any individual customer.
Leaving a blank invites someone to later fill in THEIR choice. Vote for yourself as a write-in candidate. (Except in such locations as voting for a non-registered candidate would invalidate the ballot. In those cases vote for a random candidate, so at least the machine will have a higher noise level to overcome. If the ballots are honestly counted.)
My high school grammar teacher would have objected to "Strauss's". We werre not allowed to insert an "s" after the apostorphe in that kind of context.
And I admit that I have no idea of how to use an apostrophe to make a possessive of "Houses of Congress". Placing it after "Houses" is extremely confusing, and placing it after "Congress" is as bad or worse. (In such cases I avoid using the apotrophe to form a possessive, and use a preposition.)
I think you overstate the extent of the anger of the court. And I doubt that the legal office can be shown to have any input into the web site design. Nobody's that suicida.
OTOH, the court will definitely take notice. And probably be quite upset. I suppose they could slap a ban on Apple imports until the correction has been suitably made, and possibly a large fine. But probably no more than a few million, and in the small millions wouldn't surprise me. But neither would a fine in the hundreds of thousands. Or some totally different punishment. Contempt of court, and sitting in jail for awhile for some high Apple official would seem like as likely an outcome as a huge fine.
Yes it's KDE4, and yes it's in the alternate dock. And yes it's really annoying, but not as annoying as not having that dock. I heavily use one at the top of the screen and one at the bottom. Not being able to do that would be a good reason not to use that window manager.
To transmit a false video you'd need to have a camera there...of course you could transmit old footage...but then how do you control the drone?
Sorry, but KDE 4.0 was not as bad as Gnome3. Primarily because they didn't decide to prevent you from changing options that they decreed. (I never encountered any of the bugs that people were complaining about, I just don't like the change in design. KDE3 was far superior.)
Also, IIRC, the "4.0" release was supposed to be only a test release, but several distros decided to include it as the default. So some of the bugs should properly be laid at the foot of the distros that made it standard. And I guess that there are enough incompatibilities that it wouldn't have made sense to call it KDE3.99.01, which would have warned people.
So I don't blame them for that. I *do* blame them for killing an excellent GUI and replacing it with a rather poor one. And it still is rather poor, by comparison. Even Gnome2 was better. (So I switched from KDE3 to Gnome2. That I'm now back on KDE4 doesn't mean I like it any better. It's just that Gnome has gotten worse.)
No. I preferred KDE3 over KDE4. I still do. Actually, I preferred KDE3 over Gnome2, but when KDE3 went away, I moved to Gnome2, because it was better than KDE4. Now I'm on KDE4, and Gnome2 is still better, but *it's* now going away. And Trinity (KDE3 remix) isn't yet ready.
(Yes, I've also tried Mate and Cinnamon. Maybe I'll try them again in a few more months. Or maybe ElectricSheep will have installation instructions for Xfce or LXDE. [It's important to my wife...which means it's important to me.])
OK, but he said FreeBSD, which isn't quite the same thing. He didn't say anything about OpenBSD, or DragonFly, either. He was quite specific.
That said, I don't really understand his point...except that clearly FreeBSD didn't fit his use-case. (As someone else said, it sounds like a laptop.)
One thing I really dislike about KDE4 is the way icons flash up to a huge size when you get near them. It often hides things I want to see. It's not like it's hard to click on an icon at it's normal size.
N.B.: I do realize that this might be a positive feature on a palmtop, but I don't think it would even be useful on a tablet. I haven't yet found a way to turn it off. (And I still prefer KDE3. For that matter I also prefer Gnome2, though KDE3 was better.)
Xfce and LXDE are also reasonable choices. KDE4 is too flashy for my taste, and Xfce and LXDE are a bit too simple. The think that finally decided me in favor of KDE4 was that I got electricsheep to run as a screensaver under it, and I wasn't able to get it to run as a screensaver under either LXDE or Xfce. This is important to my wife. (Note that I'm not really enamored of minimalism. I don't have a system that demands it, and so it seems like a silly focus and waste of time. I recognize that this is a matter of taste, however, and sometimes of hardware constraints. And even so I found LXDE to be nearly as good as KDE4.)
Actually the US involvement started before Kennedy, but I think we had something like 52 troops on the ground when he took office.
That could be, but I'll believe nearly anything bad said about voting machines, regardless of the source. They are pretty much designed to allow massive cheating without any possibility of verification.
Better use something indellible, like a Sharpie or a Bingo marker.
Genetically standardized strains of mice are MUCH more expensive to replace.