This planet, any planet, has finite resources. No matter what we do, no matter how many alternatives we go through or how well we conserve, sooner or later we'll exhaust them. It's merely a question of how long it'll take to do so. Which means in the long term there are exactly two paths: get off this single planet, or perish. Personally I don't like option #2, and I'd like to get option #1 underway while we have the luxuries of time and resources, not wait until it's a crash program under a short deadline with limited resources.
From a practical standpoint, two things. First, opening new frontiers has never been unprofitable. It's expensive opening them up, but every one we've opened up has yielded an ROI any businessman would give up several major organs for. It's rarely immediately obvious what the rewards will be, looking back at history no major exploration ever turned up what they were looking for, but consistently the rewards are more than high enough to justify the cost. I doubt space will be different, and the spoils will go to he who's there first with the most. Second, high ground. Any military man will tell you that he who controls the high ground controls the battlefield. In ancient days the high ground was a hill so your archers could shoot down at the enemy. Today it's the airspace over the battlefield, so your aircraft can bomb the enemy without being distracted by enemy fighters. Orbit's a pretty serious high ground. Want an example? Take a look at Meteor Crater in Arizona. That was a chunk of rock coming in ballistic. Now, imagine that crater overlaid on Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Washington DC. Or all of them. Rocks are plentiful, getting them onto the right path is fairly straightforward and cheap. And shooting back up the gravity well is hideously expensive.
We don't need Firefox or Opera bundled alongside IE. We need to be able to install Firefox or Opera instead of IE. Whether the user or the OEM does it, the need is to be able to choose a browser other than IE, not just one in addition to IE.
Basically, the Massachusetts rules say that courtroom proceedings may be broadcast if they fall into certain categories "or by order of the court", which is generally taken to mean that the court can allow other proceedings to be broadcast at it's discretion. The RIAA wants to read that rule as "and by order of the court", limiting the court to allowing broadcasting only of the categories specified.
Also, when the RIAA appeals to the rules of the Judicial Conference, it glosses over the fact that the Judicial Conference has no authority to dictate rules to the courts under it and that no court under it has actually adopted it's proposed prohibition on broadcasting proceedings.
No protection from conviction either. Remember, the court-martial for insubordination will be carried out by the same officers who're giving the orders, or at least ones in the same chain of command (and if the chain of command wasn't problematic, the orders wouldn't have been given in the first place). And a soldier doesn't have any right to appeal for a determination that those orders were unlawful, that right and authority rests higher in the chain of command (and what did we just say about the chain of command?). The best a soldier can hope for is that, after he's convicted, there's enough of a flap for the relevant authorities to finally determine that the orders he was given were in fact unlawful, at which point he can (if he's still in the military) appeal to have his conviction overturned.
There's this big difference between what everybody thinks the rules say, and what the rules mean in practice in conjunction with all the other applicable rules. The reality is that, even though a soldier isn't required to follow unlawful orders, the rules also say he has to follow all orders unless and until those orders are found to be unlawful and that he can't make that determination.
It's because YouTube hosts the videos, not the White House site. And the White House has no viable way to make YouTube not use tracking cookies on the content it serves up depending on the site the videos were embedded on. So they have a choice: allow YouTube to set it's normal cookies even when the videos are embedded in pages on the White House site, or never use YouTube for videos in the blog.
This isn't political. It's not about the White House, or the Democrafts, or the Republicans. It's about how YouTube tracks it's users. All users, all sites/blogs/whatever that drop YouTube videos into their pages.
Problem, though: the UCMJ also gives a soldier no authority to determine whether an order's unlawful or not, and no protection from charges of insubordination if they do refuse an unlawful order. It's a nice little catch-22. You see the same thing with written orders: a soldier almost always has a right to demand his orders in writing, but since his superiors can throw him in the brig for refusing to accept a verbal order the only time you demand written orders is to preserve the evidence for the court-martial you know you're going to be facing anyway.
The dirty little secret behind Area 51: that command consists entirely of a captain, a couple of lieutenants, several dozen enlisted men and a whole freakin' lot of printing presses. Their sole brief is to insure a constant stream of leaks to the media, mistakes and suspicious behavior centered around all the exotic alien technology stored there, so that all the effort of breaking the government's veil of secrecy concentrates where there's absolutely nothing to find. This'll make it much easier to conceal the real work elsewhere, since most of the people who might investigate will be occupied out in Nevada.
Save that Visa and Mastercard rules prohibit the merchant from validating the identity of the person using the credit card. For instance, a merchant is prohibited from requiring the customer to present ID (such as a driver's license) before they'll take the card. If a merchant refuses to take cards without identification, Visa/MC will terminate their merchant account.
One crucial difference, though: I can tell Windows to uninstall Minesweeper and it's gone. Completely. No traces of it left. Contrast this with IE which, when "uninstalled" remains fully present and functional in the system and in fact will continue to be used for a wide variety of purposes (including the viewing of Web content) even after the user has told Windows to use another browser instead of IE.
Actually Microsoft is the biggest offender when it comes to hard-wiring references to IE into software that needs a browser. That's, in fact, exactly the justification that they gave to a US judge for being physically unable to unbundle IE from Windows: that too much of their own software was hard-wired for it and couldn't use any other browser. If Microsoft put themselves in a bad position by ignoring their own advice to developers on the right way to do things, I fail to see why the EU should have any sympathy for them.
Microsoft already solved this problem. Look up the IBrowser COM interface that Microsoft designed way back when they introduced COM. It's specifically designed to allow an application to get an implementation of a browser object and use it to render HTML pages without knowing or needing to know exactly what implementation it got. Their specific example was in fact using IBrowser to create an application that could use either Netscape or IE transparently depending on which one the user had installed. This, of course, was back when Netscape was the default browser everybody used and Microsoft was trying to get IE accepted.
One major difference, though: while Apple, KDE and most Linux distributions include various browsers, none of them force the installation of any of them nor prevent their uninstallation, nor do they force the use of those browsers for certain things even after the user's installed an alternative.
And no, no operating system needs a web browser to run. A user may need a web browser for their day-to-day application needs, but the operating system doesn't in general need it to run other programs. And even where the system may need a web browser (say to display it's HTML-format help pages), it doesn't need a specific web browser to do that. Windows could, for instance, use the IBrowser COM interface (which Microsoft designed) to get an implementation of a browser and then use that implementation to display HTML (exactly as done in Microsoft's example of using the IBrowser interface) regardless of the exact browser implementation behind the IBrowser object (Microsoft themselves described this ability as exactly the reason to use a generic interface, so that you could replace Netscape with IE in a manner transparent to the applications that displayed HTML pages).
An amendment becomes part of the constitution, yes. But unless it specifically says so, it also does not remove other parts of the constitution. So while for instance the amendment may prohibit issuing marriage license to same-sex couples, it doesn't relieve the state of the requirement elsewhere in the constitution to not grant privileges to some citizens not granted to all (CA Constitution Section 7 paragraph b: "A citizen or class of citizens may not be granted privileges or immunities not granted on the same terms to all citizens. Privileges or immunities granted by the Legislature may be altered or revoked.").
The breathalyser may not be a witness, but it's reading is certainly evidence. And the defense in a case is entitled to question the evidence presented by the prosecution. For instance, if the prosecution contends that they took a box from your home and when they opened it they found a knife with your fingerprints and the blood of the murder victim on it, your attorney is perfectly well allowed to subpoena the chain-of-custody of the box and demand answers to questions like "Who had access to the box at any given time?" and "What procedures were in place to insure nobody tampered with the evidence?". And if it turns out there's a 48-hour period where the box was sitting in an unlocked broom closet at the station because there wasn't any space in the evidence room, defense is entirely entitled to ask "But then how do you know that somebody you don't know about didn't come along during that time and put the knife in the box after you took it?". Similarly with radar guns. The difference between this breathalyser and a radar gun is that the radar gun had to be tested by an independent lab to insure that it works exactly as the manufacturer claims it does, and whether the calibration procedures the manufacturer laid out are sufficient to insure the claimed accuracy. And the defense is, again, entitled to subpoena the calibration and maintenance records of the gun used and ask questions like "What procedures were followed to insure that the gun was in fact correctly calibrated at the time of use?". And if the police can't show that gun was in fact kept calibrated and maintained per the manufacturer's specifications, the defense will in all likelihood get the gun's reading thrown out.
Here the source code is being questioned because the breathalyser hasn't been tested and analyzed by an independent authority. The police are essentially asking the defense to just take their word that the thing does what they claim it does. And we don't do that in a court of law. If one side or the other wants to introduce evidence, they bear the burden of showing that that evidence did in fact come from where they say it did and that it wasn't tampered with before they presented it. If it weren't that way, the defense could simply introduce as evidence a receipt from a store showing the defendant was miles away from the scene of the crime at the time and the prosecution wouldn't be able to challenge it with questions like "How do we know you didn't just mock this up in a word processor and print it out?" and "How do we know the defendant really made this purchase and you didn't just get a receipt from some random person who happened to be buying a soda at a convenience store at the right time?".
It's not about being used to produce a criminal case. It's about being used as evidence in a criminal case. The prosecutor can use Word all he wants to write up briefs, or even to write up summaries of evidence to present in court, and Word's source code isn't relevant at all. But if the prosecutor wants to claim when they opened an incriminating document in Word and checked the author that Word said it was the defendant, then it becomes relevant how Word determines the author.
... and there are people who can't do basic work on those things? How odd. I'm not sure how they'd get through life, what with all the little break-downs that need fixed and the wasted time and monetary cost of finding someone else to do a 5-minute repair for you.
No alternative needed. Even in Windows you don't need to use Verizon's software to configure network access through them. You can do it all using the standard Windows network configuration dialogs.
As far as features, I haven't found any basic or intermediate features that aren't in both. And the advanced features that are don't belong in a college course, they belong in a vocational-ed class specifically in "How to Use Microsoft Word". Mechanics, for example, don't get classes in "How to Use Matco Wrenches", they get taught "How to Torque Down a Bolt".
Actually, it shouldn't require the original product. She doesn't need to install Verizon's access disk, for example, she simply needs to get her Internet connection up and running. On Linux that should just be a matter of configuring the network interface, and Ubuntu should have prompted her for it when it detected her network card the first time she fired the system up. Mostly it's just a matter of entering the username and password your ISP gave you. That Verizon tries to claim you must use their software when you don't is a Verizon issue. Similarly for Word. She doesn't need to use Word, she needs to open and create Word documents. Ubuntu comes with several pieces of software that do just that.
The problem is that too many people today confuse using a tool vs. doing a task. It's as pathetic as a mechanic standing looking at a toolbox full of Snap-on wrenches in all sizes and complaining that he can't do his job, he doesn't have a Matco #870334 wrench to tighten a nut with when it's a standard 3/4" nut, there's 5 3/4" wrenches staring him in the face and his "problem" is that he's confused "having the right brand name" with "being the right tool". If a mechanic held a 3/4" Snap-on box-end wrench in your face and said "I can't use this to tighten this 3/4" nut, it's not a Matco.", you'd laugh in his face.
This guy may have an interest in the outcome, but he and Obama have a point: the public isn't ready for the changeover, and won't be until those coupons are in their hands (and maybe not even then, but they'll have the coupon for the box and if they choose not to use it that's their problem). It sounds to me like delaying the changeover for a month or two to give time to fund the coupon program is in the public interest. It'll hurt some companies and benefit others, but it seems to me that the only problem would be if the government decided to not delay the change because of the effects on those companies if they did. Unless someone can come up with a good argument why having analog TV broadcasts go dark for apparently a significant fraction of viewers is in the public interest (I think you could make that argument, but it'd require things from the companies that they aren't currently doing).
IMO it's because the labels are scared juiceless over the idea of legitimate, legal on-line distribution.
Distribution of physical media is a hard problem. It costs money to move physical discs from where they're manufactured to where they're sold to consumers. You need a big organization with lots of money to handle it efficiently enough with enough economies of scale to make it financially viable. Which means bands need the labels for this.
On-line distribution by contrast is easy. E-commerce sites sufficient to let you sell downloads are fairly cheap and easy to get. You don't need to produce physical media, create packaging, ship objects from point A to point B in the real world. Any band can, once they've got their music converted to MP3s, gain access to a cheap world-wide distribution and sales network with a few clicks of a mouse and no more than a few hundred dollars a month in hosting charges. And they don't need to pay a label 90% of the music's revenue to get it. The prospect of the majority of musicians realizing this terrifies the labels.
Their only recourse is to keep potential buyers from considering digital media as a viable option to physical product. That's why all the legitimate on-line outlets come with nasty, annoying DRM or require custom software or otherwise are deliberately made inconvenient for the consumer to use. That's why any outlet that's at all convenient to use, whether it's legit or not, is hounded until they either go out of business or adopt the same consumer-unfriendly wrappers the label's own outlets use. The goal isn't to stop illegitimate on-line distribution. It's to keep the label-sanctioned on-line distribution channels as unfriendly and inconvenient as possible and prevent anything more convenient (legitimate or not) from existing. Because if a convenient, legitimate channel exists, it spells the end for the labels and they know it.
I do not know which are worse, the folks that know they don't know or don't know they don't know.
The ones who don't know they don't know. The ones who know they don't know at least have the possibility of following with "but I know where to find out".
The problem is that the effect here is of fairly short duration (typically a few minutes, 15 or so at most) and happens infrequently (once every decade, if that often). You can build something to absorb the induced currents, but it'll be used so rarely it'll never pay back it's construction costs.
Despite its warts, Word *works* and people generally know how to use it. It's tested, it's a known entity, businesses know how much it costs, etc. They're not ready to experiment yet.
That, though, is exactly why companies are starting to experiment. Word in it's latest incarnations is such a change from prior versions that companies are starting to look for something that's closer to what they're currently using, rather than re-train users for such a large change in the UI. Let's face it, OpenOffice has a UI that's closer to older Word than current Word has, so if you have to retrain it's easier to retrain prior-version Word users on OOo than on new versions of Word.
It wouldn't. The damage isn't from the particle cloud itself, it's from the ripples it sets up in the Earth's magnetosphere. This makes the magnetic field move relative to any conductors (like power lines and circuit traces) in it. That causes an electric current to be induced in the conductor. The atmosphere doesn't affect the magnetic field at all, so it won't provide any protection from the disturbance.
Because we don't need to. The botnet software is readily detectable. Simple solution: require ISPs to warn users if their machines are found to be infected and, if no action is taken (ie. not cleaned up and the user doesn't contact the ISP to discuss it) in a reasonable timeframe, suspend their network access.
If you're driving with a car that's spraying oil all over the road, dropping pieces off and generally posing a hazard to other drivers, the police will cheerfully ticket you and impound the car. They don't try to fix the car, they take it off the road and leave what to do next up to the owner. I fail to see why a similar approach can't be applied (other than "But then they won't be able to use the Internet!", to which I reply "Well, yes, that's kind of the point.").
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This planet, any planet, has finite resources. No matter what we do, no matter how many alternatives we go through or how well we conserve, sooner or later we'll exhaust them. It's merely a question of how long it'll take to do so. Which means in the long term there are exactly two paths: get off this single planet, or perish. Personally I don't like option #2, and I'd like to get option #1 underway while we have the luxuries of time and resources, not wait until it's a crash program under a short deadline with limited resources.
From a practical standpoint, two things. First, opening new frontiers has never been unprofitable. It's expensive opening them up, but every one we've opened up has yielded an ROI any businessman would give up several major organs for. It's rarely immediately obvious what the rewards will be, looking back at history no major exploration ever turned up what they were looking for, but consistently the rewards are more than high enough to justify the cost. I doubt space will be different, and the spoils will go to he who's there first with the most. Second, high ground. Any military man will tell you that he who controls the high ground controls the battlefield. In ancient days the high ground was a hill so your archers could shoot down at the enemy. Today it's the airspace over the battlefield, so your aircraft can bomb the enemy without being distracted by enemy fighters. Orbit's a pretty serious high ground. Want an example? Take a look at Meteor Crater in Arizona. That was a chunk of rock coming in ballistic. Now, imagine that crater overlaid on Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Washington DC. Or all of them. Rocks are plentiful, getting them onto the right path is fairly straightforward and cheap. And shooting back up the gravity well is hideously expensive.
We don't need Firefox or Opera bundled alongside IE. We need to be able to install Firefox or Opera instead of IE. Whether the user or the OEM does it, the need is to be able to choose a browser other than IE, not just one in addition to IE.
Basically, the Massachusetts rules say that courtroom proceedings may be broadcast if they fall into certain categories "or by order of the court", which is generally taken to mean that the court can allow other proceedings to be broadcast at it's discretion. The RIAA wants to read that rule as "and by order of the court", limiting the court to allowing broadcasting only of the categories specified.
Also, when the RIAA appeals to the rules of the Judicial Conference, it glosses over the fact that the Judicial Conference has no authority to dictate rules to the courts under it and that no court under it has actually adopted it's proposed prohibition on broadcasting proceedings.
No protection from conviction either. Remember, the court-martial for insubordination will be carried out by the same officers who're giving the orders, or at least ones in the same chain of command (and if the chain of command wasn't problematic, the orders wouldn't have been given in the first place). And a soldier doesn't have any right to appeal for a determination that those orders were unlawful, that right and authority rests higher in the chain of command (and what did we just say about the chain of command?). The best a soldier can hope for is that, after he's convicted, there's enough of a flap for the relevant authorities to finally determine that the orders he was given were in fact unlawful, at which point he can (if he's still in the military) appeal to have his conviction overturned.
There's this big difference between what everybody thinks the rules say, and what the rules mean in practice in conjunction with all the other applicable rules. The reality is that, even though a soldier isn't required to follow unlawful orders, the rules also say he has to follow all orders unless and until those orders are found to be unlawful and that he can't make that determination.
It's because YouTube hosts the videos, not the White House site. And the White House has no viable way to make YouTube not use tracking cookies on the content it serves up depending on the site the videos were embedded on. So they have a choice: allow YouTube to set it's normal cookies even when the videos are embedded in pages on the White House site, or never use YouTube for videos in the blog.
This isn't political. It's not about the White House, or the Democrafts, or the Republicans. It's about how YouTube tracks it's users. All users, all sites/blogs/whatever that drop YouTube videos into their pages.
Problem, though: the UCMJ also gives a soldier no authority to determine whether an order's unlawful or not, and no protection from charges of insubordination if they do refuse an unlawful order. It's a nice little catch-22. You see the same thing with written orders: a soldier almost always has a right to demand his orders in writing, but since his superiors can throw him in the brig for refusing to accept a verbal order the only time you demand written orders is to preserve the evidence for the court-martial you know you're going to be facing anyway.
The dirty little secret behind Area 51: that command consists entirely of a captain, a couple of lieutenants, several dozen enlisted men and a whole freakin' lot of printing presses. Their sole brief is to insure a constant stream of leaks to the media, mistakes and suspicious behavior centered around all the exotic alien technology stored there, so that all the effort of breaking the government's veil of secrecy concentrates where there's absolutely nothing to find. This'll make it much easier to conceal the real work elsewhere, since most of the people who might investigate will be occupied out in Nevada.
Save that Visa and Mastercard rules prohibit the merchant from validating the identity of the person using the credit card. For instance, a merchant is prohibited from requiring the customer to present ID (such as a driver's license) before they'll take the card. If a merchant refuses to take cards without identification, Visa/MC will terminate their merchant account.
One crucial difference, though: I can tell Windows to uninstall Minesweeper and it's gone. Completely. No traces of it left. Contrast this with IE which, when "uninstalled" remains fully present and functional in the system and in fact will continue to be used for a wide variety of purposes (including the viewing of Web content) even after the user has told Windows to use another browser instead of IE.
Actually Microsoft is the biggest offender when it comes to hard-wiring references to IE into software that needs a browser. That's, in fact, exactly the justification that they gave to a US judge for being physically unable to unbundle IE from Windows: that too much of their own software was hard-wired for it and couldn't use any other browser. If Microsoft put themselves in a bad position by ignoring their own advice to developers on the right way to do things, I fail to see why the EU should have any sympathy for them.
Microsoft already solved this problem. Look up the IBrowser COM interface that Microsoft designed way back when they introduced COM. It's specifically designed to allow an application to get an implementation of a browser object and use it to render HTML pages without knowing or needing to know exactly what implementation it got. Their specific example was in fact using IBrowser to create an application that could use either Netscape or IE transparently depending on which one the user had installed. This, of course, was back when Netscape was the default browser everybody used and Microsoft was trying to get IE accepted.
One major difference, though: while Apple, KDE and most Linux distributions include various browsers, none of them force the installation of any of them nor prevent their uninstallation, nor do they force the use of those browsers for certain things even after the user's installed an alternative.
And no, no operating system needs a web browser to run. A user may need a web browser for their day-to-day application needs, but the operating system doesn't in general need it to run other programs. And even where the system may need a web browser (say to display it's HTML-format help pages), it doesn't need a specific web browser to do that. Windows could, for instance, use the IBrowser COM interface (which Microsoft designed) to get an implementation of a browser and then use that implementation to display HTML (exactly as done in Microsoft's example of using the IBrowser interface) regardless of the exact browser implementation behind the IBrowser object (Microsoft themselves described this ability as exactly the reason to use a generic interface, so that you could replace Netscape with IE in a manner transparent to the applications that displayed HTML pages).
An amendment becomes part of the constitution, yes. But unless it specifically says so, it also does not remove other parts of the constitution. So while for instance the amendment may prohibit issuing marriage license to same-sex couples, it doesn't relieve the state of the requirement elsewhere in the constitution to not grant privileges to some citizens not granted to all (CA Constitution Section 7 paragraph b: "A citizen or class of citizens may not be granted privileges or immunities not granted on the same terms to all citizens. Privileges or immunities granted by the Legislature may be altered or revoked.").
The breathalyser may not be a witness, but it's reading is certainly evidence. And the defense in a case is entitled to question the evidence presented by the prosecution. For instance, if the prosecution contends that they took a box from your home and when they opened it they found a knife with your fingerprints and the blood of the murder victim on it, your attorney is perfectly well allowed to subpoena the chain-of-custody of the box and demand answers to questions like "Who had access to the box at any given time?" and "What procedures were in place to insure nobody tampered with the evidence?". And if it turns out there's a 48-hour period where the box was sitting in an unlocked broom closet at the station because there wasn't any space in the evidence room, defense is entirely entitled to ask "But then how do you know that somebody you don't know about didn't come along during that time and put the knife in the box after you took it?". Similarly with radar guns. The difference between this breathalyser and a radar gun is that the radar gun had to be tested by an independent lab to insure that it works exactly as the manufacturer claims it does, and whether the calibration procedures the manufacturer laid out are sufficient to insure the claimed accuracy. And the defense is, again, entitled to subpoena the calibration and maintenance records of the gun used and ask questions like "What procedures were followed to insure that the gun was in fact correctly calibrated at the time of use?". And if the police can't show that gun was in fact kept calibrated and maintained per the manufacturer's specifications, the defense will in all likelihood get the gun's reading thrown out.
Here the source code is being questioned because the breathalyser hasn't been tested and analyzed by an independent authority. The police are essentially asking the defense to just take their word that the thing does what they claim it does. And we don't do that in a court of law. If one side or the other wants to introduce evidence, they bear the burden of showing that that evidence did in fact come from where they say it did and that it wasn't tampered with before they presented it. If it weren't that way, the defense could simply introduce as evidence a receipt from a store showing the defendant was miles away from the scene of the crime at the time and the prosecution wouldn't be able to challenge it with questions like "How do we know you didn't just mock this up in a word processor and print it out?" and "How do we know the defendant really made this purchase and you didn't just get a receipt from some random person who happened to be buying a soda at a convenience store at the right time?".
It's not about being used to produce a criminal case. It's about being used as evidence in a criminal case. The prosecutor can use Word all he wants to write up briefs, or even to write up summaries of evidence to present in court, and Word's source code isn't relevant at all. But if the prosecutor wants to claim when they opened an incriminating document in Word and checked the author that Word said it was the defendant, then it becomes relevant how Word determines the author.
... and there are people who can't do basic work on those things? How odd. I'm not sure how they'd get through life, what with all the little break-downs that need fixed and the wasted time and monetary cost of finding someone else to do a 5-minute repair for you.
No alternative needed. Even in Windows you don't need to use Verizon's software to configure network access through them. You can do it all using the standard Windows network configuration dialogs.
As far as features, I haven't found any basic or intermediate features that aren't in both. And the advanced features that are don't belong in a college course, they belong in a vocational-ed class specifically in "How to Use Microsoft Word". Mechanics, for example, don't get classes in "How to Use Matco Wrenches", they get taught "How to Torque Down a Bolt".
Actually, it shouldn't require the original product. She doesn't need to install Verizon's access disk, for example, she simply needs to get her Internet connection up and running. On Linux that should just be a matter of configuring the network interface, and Ubuntu should have prompted her for it when it detected her network card the first time she fired the system up. Mostly it's just a matter of entering the username and password your ISP gave you. That Verizon tries to claim you must use their software when you don't is a Verizon issue. Similarly for Word. She doesn't need to use Word, she needs to open and create Word documents. Ubuntu comes with several pieces of software that do just that.
The problem is that too many people today confuse using a tool vs. doing a task. It's as pathetic as a mechanic standing looking at a toolbox full of Snap-on wrenches in all sizes and complaining that he can't do his job, he doesn't have a Matco #870334 wrench to tighten a nut with when it's a standard 3/4" nut, there's 5 3/4" wrenches staring him in the face and his "problem" is that he's confused "having the right brand name" with "being the right tool". If a mechanic held a 3/4" Snap-on box-end wrench in your face and said "I can't use this to tighten this 3/4" nut, it's not a Matco.", you'd laugh in his face.
This guy may have an interest in the outcome, but he and Obama have a point: the public isn't ready for the changeover, and won't be until those coupons are in their hands (and maybe not even then, but they'll have the coupon for the box and if they choose not to use it that's their problem). It sounds to me like delaying the changeover for a month or two to give time to fund the coupon program is in the public interest. It'll hurt some companies and benefit others, but it seems to me that the only problem would be if the government decided to not delay the change because of the effects on those companies if they did. Unless someone can come up with a good argument why having analog TV broadcasts go dark for apparently a significant fraction of viewers is in the public interest (I think you could make that argument, but it'd require things from the companies that they aren't currently doing).
IMO it's because the labels are scared juiceless over the idea of legitimate, legal on-line distribution.
Distribution of physical media is a hard problem. It costs money to move physical discs from where they're manufactured to where they're sold to consumers. You need a big organization with lots of money to handle it efficiently enough with enough economies of scale to make it financially viable. Which means bands need the labels for this.
On-line distribution by contrast is easy. E-commerce sites sufficient to let you sell downloads are fairly cheap and easy to get. You don't need to produce physical media, create packaging, ship objects from point A to point B in the real world. Any band can, once they've got their music converted to MP3s, gain access to a cheap world-wide distribution and sales network with a few clicks of a mouse and no more than a few hundred dollars a month in hosting charges. And they don't need to pay a label 90% of the music's revenue to get it. The prospect of the majority of musicians realizing this terrifies the labels.
Their only recourse is to keep potential buyers from considering digital media as a viable option to physical product. That's why all the legitimate on-line outlets come with nasty, annoying DRM or require custom software or otherwise are deliberately made inconvenient for the consumer to use. That's why any outlet that's at all convenient to use, whether it's legit or not, is hounded until they either go out of business or adopt the same consumer-unfriendly wrappers the label's own outlets use. The goal isn't to stop illegitimate on-line distribution. It's to keep the label-sanctioned on-line distribution channels as unfriendly and inconvenient as possible and prevent anything more convenient (legitimate or not) from existing. Because if a convenient, legitimate channel exists, it spells the end for the labels and they know it.
I do not know which are worse, the folks that know they don't know or don't know they don't know.
The ones who don't know they don't know. The ones who know they don't know at least have the possibility of following with "but I know where to find out".
The problem is that the effect here is of fairly short duration (typically a few minutes, 15 or so at most) and happens infrequently (once every decade, if that often). You can build something to absorb the induced currents, but it'll be used so rarely it'll never pay back it's construction costs.
Despite its warts, Word *works* and people generally know how to use it. It's tested, it's a known entity, businesses know how much it costs, etc. They're not ready to experiment yet.
That, though, is exactly why companies are starting to experiment. Word in it's latest incarnations is such a change from prior versions that companies are starting to look for something that's closer to what they're currently using, rather than re-train users for such a large change in the UI. Let's face it, OpenOffice has a UI that's closer to older Word than current Word has, so if you have to retrain it's easier to retrain prior-version Word users on OOo than on new versions of Word.
It wouldn't. The damage isn't from the particle cloud itself, it's from the ripples it sets up in the Earth's magnetosphere. This makes the magnetic field move relative to any conductors (like power lines and circuit traces) in it. That causes an electric current to be induced in the conductor. The atmosphere doesn't affect the magnetic field at all, so it won't provide any protection from the disturbance.
Because we don't need to. The botnet software is readily detectable. Simple solution: require ISPs to warn users if their machines are found to be infected and, if no action is taken (ie. not cleaned up and the user doesn't contact the ISP to discuss it) in a reasonable timeframe, suspend their network access.
If you're driving with a car that's spraying oil all over the road, dropping pieces off and generally posing a hazard to other drivers, the police will cheerfully ticket you and impound the car. They don't try to fix the car, they take it off the road and leave what to do next up to the owner. I fail to see why a similar approach can't be applied (other than "But then they won't be able to use the Internet!", to which I reply "Well, yes, that's kind of the point.").