I'm fully aware of the descriptive linguistics issue, but the point is that any single person who makes an error doesn't make that error correct. The OP claimed "I'm a native speaker of english, *I* define what is valid and correct usage of the language", but that is completely incorrect. He only helps to define English usage along with millions of other native speakers.
Re froopsixac, if you reread my post, you'll see that I said that by the OP's logic, it is a valid English word *even if no-one ever uses it again*. That is all I was disagreeing with.
Did your English teachers in school buy that argument? If so, congratulations, but I'm sorry to have to tell you that you're completely incorrect. Otherwise, as a native speaker of English I could tell you that "froopsixac"[*] is an English word, regardless of whether anyone else has ever heard of it or whether anyone else ever uses it again. It doesn't work that way.
[*] froopsixac - the act of disillusioning one who holds an unlikely, albeit amusing, belief.
Option 6 wasn't warranted by the evidence. Don't take it too personally, the comment I quoted was just too PHB-like to pass up.
As for deadpan, dictionary definitions sometimes don't do justice to words. Try this description. Note the part about being "connotative, in that the circumstances might be expected to require some humor or emotion." On Slashdot, writing like a marketroid, when it's done it all, is often done humorously and/or sarcastically. Doing this without any indication of the intended humor would be an example of deadpan delivery, in the online context. I knew you weren't being humorous, but I was kidding about your deadpanning.
I don't know anything about the economics of the industry, which I don't doubt are daunting, but it's interesting that an audience of 2.5 million is considered a failure. That would be a huge success for a lot of other kinds of product. It also says something about the available distribution systems that there's no way to profitably distribute a show like that to people who want to watch it, e.g., pay per view across the net. Not that _I'd_ pay for it, mind you, but then I wasn't one of those 2.5 million.
MySQL started out a lot simpler - actually quite severely limited compared to PostgreSQL - but its simplicity is part of what attracted a large community. The community created network effects which have a lot to do with MySQL's continued dominance - more people are familiar with it, more packages already use it, so it makes sense to pick it for new projects, especially now that many of its original limitations have been overcome.
Heh. I'm not even an American. However, that doesn't mean I can't understand where they're coming from. I'm just not so embedded in either a European or U.S. ideology that I can't see it from either perspective, and a few others besides.
If you had the patience to re-read my long post without your erroneous assumptions about where I'm coming from, you might realize that you're being overly defensive and have certainly misunderstood me.
I don't believe I insulted you, and I'm sorry if you took it that way. I did strongly criticize some of your ideas, for example describing the "world citizen" thing as hopelessly idealistic and utterly empty, but those aren't insults - I backed those claims up with an argument which you haven't even attempted to address.
I don't want to "win" anything - if I've challenged you into thinking, that would be great. I thought you might offer some kind of defense of your ideas about rejecting nationalism, which might have been interesting. As it is, your lack of response on that point seems to confirm that there's nothing there. I'm disappointed, but I'm not surprised.
"Serverpronto went down for a day several times last year"?? That's horrible. I had a provider only half as bad as that and I dumped them pronto. You don't have to be running "critical uptime" applications to want your email and web to work when you need it, and be back up within an hour or so for very infrequent outages. A whole day more than once a year is as bad as it gets: just a single full day a year takes you below 99.9% uptime, which even the lamest hosts guarantee. Counted within a single month, as providers usually do, and a full day outage works out to 96.7% uptime. Some places would give you your money back for the month if that happened.
So yes, I am refusing to accept that your interpretation of the pledge is absolute, obvious, or definitive, just as you are refusing to accept my position that the meaning of a pledge should be literal. It doesn't go much deeper than that.
The interpretation of the pledge doesn't have to be "obvious". The fact that you can find literally thousands of texts which interpret the pledge in all more or less the same way indicate that its interpretation is not controversial. You can't refuse to accept that the pledge has an widely accepted interpretation. Given that, in essence, your critique boils down to "but it sucks". It's difficult to take that seriously, no matter how much you dress it up with distractions.
My "citizen of the world" wording wasn't, perhaps, the best way to express what I was talking about. I was advocating a rejection of nationalism altogether, rather than replacement of US nationalism with some more inclusive equivalent.
Feel free to re-read what I wrote as a critique of the concept of "rejection of nationalism altogether". "Nationalism" is just a special case of could be called "groupism", which I addressed in my post. Humans form groups and use those groups to compete with each other. The reason I called your position idealistic is that you're talking in simplistic terms about something which in reality, could never be that simple.
The rampant nationalism in the USA is frankly scaring much of the world.
For many in the U.S., that's completely intentional. Certainly, one of the central doctrines of Bush's foreign policy is a willingness to up the ante. The nationalism in this case is a reaction to external hostility. But we're getting off track again.
You do realise I wasn't suggesting that flags should not exist, for instance, or that they serve no useful purpose?
I'm not sure how you got to that question from what I wrote. I guess it was long and you didn't feel like paying attention, which is understandable. I explained why your focus on the flag as a physical object entirely missed the point, and how logically and philosophically, a flag is no better or worse a symbol for a nation than the name of the nation is.
But hey, tangents are shooting out everywhere in this sub-thread. I'll give up now.
For the record, all the points I raised were direct responses to things you wrote, and still apply after your clarifications. However, I seem to have misjudged your level of interest, and I fully understand if you want to give up.
No, the correct interpretation (based on formal logic) is that the possibility that you will throw things at me exists if I walk into your office for some other purpose than saying hello. IOW, by walking into your office for some non-hello purpose, I take a risk that you will throw things at me.
In the corporate & legal world, such risks can be expensive, and organizations go to great lengths to avoid them. If Microsoft will not eliminate this risk, that's a bad sign, which is highly likely to be indicative of their intent in the matter.
There's some confusion here over terminology, which is exactly what the Microsoft PR is exploiting.
Microsoft's Office file formats can by no stretch of the imagination be called "open" in the sense in which that word is used in the software industry today, i.e. as a term of art as used in the terms "open source" or "open standards". The Office formats are proprietary formats, and Microsoft is retaining its proprietary rights to them. For that reason alone, the formats cannot be considered "open" in the above sense. This is what the Jupiter analyst, Joe Wilcox, is correctly pointing out.
OTOH, Microsoft has published detailed documentation about the Office file formats. This is a good thing for many people, as far as it goes, and by the ordinary English definition of the word "open", does indeed make the Office formats more open than they were previously.
The Microsoft PR is playing on the word "open", exploiting terminology confusion to implicitly claim greater openness than they have in fact provided.
At the same time, the Massachussetts government is apparently accepting Microsoft's definition of "open" as sufficient to qualify for its requirements regarding open standards.
Both Massachussetts and Microsoft should make it clear that they are using "open" in a much more restricted sense than the term is usually used in the software industry. The press releases and coverage certainly didn't make this clear, so once again, Joe Wilcox is correct to take them to task for that. To quote him:
"So there is no misunderstanding, Microsoft hasn't opened up its proprietary Office file formats for general usage."
Once again, he is completely correct on this point, and correct to make a strong clarification about this. Actually, I fault both him and the linked article for not making the point clearly enough.
Venerating the flag, and the country over others, are both considered virtues by many of the USA. Not all US truths are held to be self evident by the remainder of humanity. Decades into the space age, isn't it time that people saw themselves as citizens of the world and loyal to their ideals first, with loyalty to country further down the list?
Short answer: No, that's hopelessly idealistic, and I'll try to show why below.
Longer answer: Which world should Americans be citizens of? The one in which billions of people are controlled by theocracies, or other authoritarian types of government? Or perhaps you're thinking of some kind of idealized version of Europe - should the E.U. be considered representative of the world? Or perhaps the international agreements of the United Nations should represent the world you're thinking of?
But none of these things represent the beliefs of the majority of Americans, otherwise there'd be some more overt variety of Euro-style socialism in the U.S., for example, and the U.S. would be a more willing participant in the U.N., and many other differences besides.
In short, the "world" you're referring to is very ill-defined, and considering oneself a "citizen" of it is an utterly empty proposition.
That's a good thing from my perspective, though, because I can use it to point out, by contrast, how citizenship in a well-defined nation with core principles enshrined in law is a very valuable thing. A citizen who values the protections and freedoms that his nation gives him might even want a symbol of it, such as a flag.
It is clear that in spite of protests to my post, the flag is venerated in and of itself in the USA.
I agree. But you may as well complain about people venerating statues of the Virgin Mary. That's human nature, and it's so ubiquitous that some religions have admonitions against idol worship. If people are instructed by their god not to worship idols, and they still do, what does that tell you? Concrete symbols are important to many, perhaps most people - it gives them a focus for abstract concepts that otherwise would be more difficult for them to encompass.
At a certain level or intelligence or education, it becomes possible to replace brightly colored objects with apparently simple words, like "god" or "nation", but both words and objects in this case are simply abstractions, symbols which represent some concept which is not concrete - there's no object you can point to and say there, that's a nation, or that's a god.
The foundation of human intelligence is abstraction, the ability to use symbols to represent concepts and objects. Worrying about the fact that a flag is made of cloth is as meaningful as worrying about whether alphabetic characters are composed of ink or, in this communication, merely of a seemingly transitory arrangement of electrons. A flag represents a nation in the same way as the words "The United States of America" do. When people venerate the United States of America, are they venerating a string of characters, or the concept for which those characters stand? I'd better stop now, before we have to start getting into Frege's "Sense and Reference", which is actually quite relevant here.
Anyway, a person would have to be spectacularly stupid not to work out that a flag is a symbol for a group and its ideals
OK, but then why do you write that the pledge "needs to be reworded" because of involving "loyalty to cloth among other things"? I've attempted to explain the meaning of the pledge, but you're simply refusing to accept that, instead sticking to your literal interpretation related in part to a flag as a piece of cloth, as opposed to a symbol.
Ultimately, communication can only occur between people who want to communicate. If you refuse to understand the inte
You might want to read the very next clause in the Pledge of Allegiance, namely "...and to the Republic for which it stands". The flag is a symbol of the Republic, and pledging to the flag is pledging to a symbol. It's not intended to be interpreted in the literal way you're doing.
The pledge was written in 1892, and at that time, flags were incredibly important symbols of their countries. No-one of that time, whether in America or throughout Europe, would have thought "the flag" in that pledge was a reference to "a piece of cloth". Rather, it's a concrete, tangible symbol of something that's otherwise very abstract - something that the average person can picture in their mind, much more so than the abstract notion of "country". The flag can be present at ceremonies, whereas otherwise there would be no tangible symbol of the nation.
I'll quote from here just to provide a sense of what the flag is intended to symbolize:
So in bundling it all together we have a symbol, a symbol that for two hundred years has signified honor, valor, justice, responsibility, perseverance, hardiness and commonweal. That symbol has been the banner that millions of Americans have marched and sailed and flown with int the maws of death. They have been proud of that symbol and in turn it has slowly and patiently nurtured their common good to the extent that America stands head and shoulders over most of the world.
You can ignore the jingoism at the end.;) I'm not arguing for blind patriotism, but it's a little silly to object to that pledge on the grounds that you haven't bothered to try to understand the rich history behind it, and what it's trying to convey.
I'm a practicing scientist. I don't find the philosophy of science intereresting at all; it annoys me. I wonder what fraction of practicing scientists do enjoy the philosophy of science...
Are you able to articulate why it annoys you? After all, it's pretty important to understand things like how to determine if one theory is better than another, for example. Any scientist has some philosophy of science, and this affects their practice of science. If you're not willing to examine the foundations of your knowledge, then your output is more suspect than someone who is willing to do so.
The biggest reason for the design is the node interconnect speed. From the article:
The 144 nodes (2 CPUs per node) are connected using an SCI fast interconnect supplied by Dolphin in a 12x12 2-dimensional torus. The layout of the machine is ring-like, thereby allowing very short "ribbon" cables to be used between the nodes. This fast interconnect network attains a peak bisection bandwidth of 96 Gbits/sec, with a node-node write/read latency as low as 1.5/3.5 microseconds.
Commercial racks could not be hooked up that way, at least not without a real cabling mess at the very least, and at the cost of higher latency because of longer cable lengths.
The bandwidth and latency figures quoted above are part of what makes this machine one of the fastest supercomputers of its time.
Intelligence does, however, imply the ability to perform self-directed learning. Without that, all you have is preprogrammed behavior, which is not intelligence. Given the ability to learn, an intelligent entity is likely to draw conclusions about its own existence ("I think therefore I am"), and will thus essentially be self-aware.
Of course, the builders of an artificially intelligent machine might restrict its ability to gather facts about itself - it wouldn't necessarily have the ability to "see" its "body", for example - so this may limit the scope of the AI's self-awareness, at least at first. However, that's an artificially-imposed external constraint, which says nothing about the AI's ability or potential for self-awareness.
The reason for spreading the news about something like this is that whether it's true or false, more information may come to light about it. That's how something like the recent faked documents scandal in the U.S. was exposed - by bloggers who questioned CBS news, and who had or were able to discover more information.
IOW, you no longer have to sit back and suck your news from the BBC's tit, nor should you, unless that thin and sour milky substance is all you can handle.
On the site's home page, it says "If your donation has not yet appeared on your bank or credit card statement, please bear with us. We hope to have all donations processed by the end of February".
Please, please pick a charity that is actually capable of responsibly handling the money, not a brand-new incompetent committee that's sitting on uncashed payments for up to a month before doing anything about them. (Not to mention allegedly having people arrested for trying to donate, possibly in a desperate effort to slow the flow of donations.)
I agree with all your concerns. But one big problem is that the need for better security of the "distrust the user" kind extends far beyond the examples you gave. Many fairly ordinary companies have multiple levels of sensitive information - stuff only certain managers and departments should have access to, etc., and stuff that administrators should not have access to - and the existing OS mechanisms for dealing with all of these requirements are pretty weak. Many companies would jump on board very quickly if capability systems were widely accessible and well-integrated into existing environments (i.e. Windows).
So then the big question will be, is it going to be worth Microsoft's while to maintain an entirely different security model for home use than for business use?
There's no such thing as 'healthy' biosphere or a 'correct' balance of any atmospheric things without saying 'healthy, to whom'.
OK, you got that part right.
What the poster meant is that our very notion and language of healthy, proper, right, correct... all the terms we use to describe how the earth should be... all need to be defined in terms of humans. that's the only reference we have.
...but there you blew it, ignoring your own observation and sinking into unjustified anthropomorphism. These things don't "need" to be defined in terms of humans, even if we *want* to do so. We could, for example, certainly define "healthy biosphere" with respect to any lifeform on Earth that we understand well enough to know the conditions it needs to survive, and there are many such variations on a healthy biosphere which would not be healthy for humans. That's why it's perfectly reasonable to point out that the issue here is not the health or survival of Earth, but the health or survival of humans.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fully aware of the descriptive linguistics issue, but the point is that any single person who makes an error doesn't make that error correct. The OP claimed "I'm a native speaker of english, *I* define what is valid and correct usage of the language", but that is completely incorrect. He only helps to define English usage along with millions of other native speakers. Re froopsixac, if you reread my post, you'll see that I said that by the OP's logic, it is a valid English word *even if no-one ever uses it again*. That is all I was disagreeing with.
Did your English teachers in school buy that argument? If so, congratulations, but I'm sorry to have to tell you that you're completely incorrect. Otherwise, as a native speaker of English I could tell you that "froopsixac"[*] is an English word, regardless of whether anyone else has ever heard of it or whether anyone else ever uses it again. It doesn't work that way.
[*] froopsixac - the act of disillusioning one who holds an unlikely, albeit amusing, belief.
Option 6 wasn't warranted by the evidence. Don't take it too personally, the comment I quoted was just too PHB-like to pass up.
As for deadpan, dictionary definitions sometimes don't do justice to words. Try this description. Note the part about being "connotative, in that the circumstances might be expected to require some humor or emotion." On Slashdot, writing like a marketroid, when it's done it all, is often done humorously and/or sarcastically. Doing this without any indication of the intended humor would be an example of deadpan delivery, in the online context. I knew you weren't being humorous, but I was kidding about your deadpanning.
I don't know anything about the economics of the industry, which I don't doubt are daunting, but it's interesting that an audience of 2.5 million is considered a failure. That would be a huge success for a lot of other kinds of product. It also says something about the available distribution systems that there's no way to profitably distribute a show like that to people who want to watch it, e.g., pay per view across the net. Not that _I'd_ pay for it, mind you, but then I wasn't one of those 2.5 million.
Oh, bravo! A classic example of the style, and totally deadpan, too!
Quick quiz: was the above quote written by:
Inquiring minds want to know!
...just order your stuff a few days before you would have ordered it otherwise, and ship it ground!
MySQL started out a lot simpler - actually quite severely limited compared to PostgreSQL - but its simplicity is part of what attracted a large community. The community created network effects which have a lot to do with MySQL's continued dominance - more people are familiar with it, more packages already use it, so it makes sense to pick it for new projects, especially now that many of its original limitations have been overcome.
If you had the patience to re-read my long post without your erroneous assumptions about where I'm coming from, you might realize that you're being overly defensive and have certainly misunderstood me.
I don't believe I insulted you, and I'm sorry if you took it that way. I did strongly criticize some of your ideas, for example describing the "world citizen" thing as hopelessly idealistic and utterly empty, but those aren't insults - I backed those claims up with an argument which you haven't even attempted to address.
I don't want to "win" anything - if I've challenged you into thinking, that would be great. I thought you might offer some kind of defense of your ideas about rejecting nationalism, which might have been interesting. As it is, your lack of response on that point seems to confirm that there's nothing there. I'm disappointed, but I'm not surprised.
"Serverpronto went down for a day several times last year"?? That's horrible. I had a provider only half as bad as that and I dumped them pronto. You don't have to be running "critical uptime" applications to want your email and web to work when you need it, and be back up within an hour or so for very infrequent outages. A whole day more than once a year is as bad as it gets: just a single full day a year takes you below 99.9% uptime, which even the lamest hosts guarantee. Counted within a single month, as providers usually do, and a full day outage works out to 96.7% uptime. Some places would give you your money back for the month if that happened.
No, the correct interpretation (based on formal logic) is that the possibility that you will throw things at me exists if I walk into your office for some other purpose than saying hello. IOW, by walking into your office for some non-hello purpose, I take a risk that you will throw things at me.
In the corporate & legal world, such risks can be expensive, and organizations go to great lengths to avoid them. If Microsoft will not eliminate this risk, that's a bad sign, which is highly likely to be indicative of their intent in the matter.
Microsoft's Office file formats can by no stretch of the imagination be called "open" in the sense in which that word is used in the software industry today, i.e. as a term of art as used in the terms "open source" or "open standards". The Office formats are proprietary formats, and Microsoft is retaining its proprietary rights to them. For that reason alone, the formats cannot be considered "open" in the above sense. This is what the Jupiter analyst, Joe Wilcox, is correctly pointing out.
OTOH, Microsoft has published detailed documentation about the Office file formats. This is a good thing for many people, as far as it goes, and by the ordinary English definition of the word "open", does indeed make the Office formats more open than they were previously.
The Microsoft PR is playing on the word "open", exploiting terminology confusion to implicitly claim greater openness than they have in fact provided.
At the same time, the Massachussetts government is apparently accepting Microsoft's definition of "open" as sufficient to qualify for its requirements regarding open standards.
Both Massachussetts and Microsoft should make it clear that they are using "open" in a much more restricted sense than the term is usually used in the software industry. The press releases and coverage certainly didn't make this clear, so once again, Joe Wilcox is correct to take them to task for that. To quote him:Once again, he is completely correct on this point, and correct to make a strong clarification about this. Actually, I fault both him and the linked article for not making the point clearly enough.
Short answer: No, that's hopelessly idealistic, and I'll try to show why below.
Longer answer: Which world should Americans be citizens of? The one in which billions of people are controlled by theocracies, or other authoritarian types of government? Or perhaps you're thinking of some kind of idealized version of Europe - should the E.U. be considered representative of the world? Or perhaps the international agreements of the United Nations should represent the world you're thinking of?
But none of these things represent the beliefs of the majority of Americans, otherwise there'd be some more overt variety of Euro-style socialism in the U.S., for example, and the U.S. would be a more willing participant in the U.N., and many other differences besides.
In short, the "world" you're referring to is very ill-defined, and considering oneself a "citizen" of it is an utterly empty proposition.
That's a good thing from my perspective, though, because I can use it to point out, by contrast, how citizenship in a well-defined nation with core principles enshrined in law is a very valuable thing. A citizen who values the protections and freedoms that his nation gives him might even want a symbol of it, such as a flag.
I agree. But you may as well complain about people venerating statues of the Virgin Mary. That's human nature, and it's so ubiquitous that some religions have admonitions against idol worship. If people are instructed by their god not to worship idols, and they still do, what does that tell you? Concrete symbols are important to many, perhaps most people - it gives them a focus for abstract concepts that otherwise would be more difficult for them to encompass.
At a certain level or intelligence or education, it becomes possible to replace brightly colored objects with apparently simple words, like "god" or "nation", but both words and objects in this case are simply abstractions, symbols which represent some concept which is not concrete - there's no object you can point to and say there, that's a nation, or that's a god.
The foundation of human intelligence is abstraction, the ability to use symbols to represent concepts and objects. Worrying about the fact that a flag is made of cloth is as meaningful as worrying about whether alphabetic characters are composed of ink or, in this communication, merely of a seemingly transitory arrangement of electrons. A flag represents a nation in the same way as the words "The United States of America" do. When people venerate the United States of America, are they venerating a string of characters, or the concept for which those characters stand? I'd better stop now, before we have to start getting into Frege's "Sense and Reference", which is actually quite relevant here.
OK, but then why do you write that the pledge "needs to be reworded" because of involving "loyalty to cloth among other things"? I've attempted to explain the meaning of the pledge, but you're simply refusing to accept that, instead sticking to your literal interpretation related in part to a flag as a piece of cloth, as opposed to a symbol.
Ultimately, communication can only occur between people who want to communicate. If you refuse to understand the inte
The pledge was written in 1892, and at that time, flags were incredibly important symbols of their countries. No-one of that time, whether in America or throughout Europe, would have thought "the flag" in that pledge was a reference to "a piece of cloth". Rather, it's a concrete, tangible symbol of something that's otherwise very abstract - something that the average person can picture in their mind, much more so than the abstract notion of "country". The flag can be present at ceremonies, whereas otherwise there would be no tangible symbol of the nation.
I'll quote from here just to provide a sense of what the flag is intended to symbolize:You can ignore the jingoism at the end.
The biggest reason for the design is the node interconnect speed. From the article:
Commercial racks could not be hooked up that way, at least not without a real cabling mess at the very least, and at the cost of higher latency because of longer cable lengths.
The bandwidth and latency figures quoted above are part of what makes this machine one of the fastest supercomputers of its time.
Intelligence does, however, imply the ability to perform self-directed learning. Without that, all you have is preprogrammed behavior, which is not intelligence. Given the ability to learn, an intelligent entity is likely to draw conclusions about its own existence ("I think therefore I am"), and will thus essentially be self-aware.
Of course, the builders of an artificially intelligent machine might restrict its ability to gather facts about itself - it wouldn't necessarily have the ability to "see" its "body", for example - so this may limit the scope of the AI's self-awareness, at least at first. However, that's an artificially-imposed external constraint, which says nothing about the AI's ability or potential for self-awareness.
Sometimes it seems as though simply exterminating the AC's would solve everything.
CBS News: Documents have come to light proving that George Bush cheated on his National Guard service.
Bloggers: Nuh-uh!
CBS News: Bloggers are a bunch of losers sitting at home behind their computers wearing pajamas.
Rest of world: CBS News crashed and burned. Investigations underway, heads are rolling.
Smaller examples happen all the time. Look for retractions in newspapers and even on some nightly TV news shows (*cough*Keith Olberman*cough*).
The reason for spreading the news about something like this is that whether it's true or false, more information may come to light about it. That's how something like the recent faked documents scandal in the U.S. was exposed - by bloggers who questioned CBS news, and who had or were able to discover more information.
IOW, you no longer have to sit back and suck your news from the BBC's tit, nor should you, unless that thin and sour milky substance is all you can handle.
Whereas "Prime Minister" is the British spelling of the Amero-Austrian "girlyman".
On the site's home page, it says "If your donation has not yet appeared on your bank or credit card statement, please bear with us. We hope to have all donations processed by the end of February".
Please, please pick a charity that is actually capable of responsibly handling the money, not a brand-new incompetent committee that's sitting on uncashed payments for up to a month before doing anything about them. (Not to mention allegedly having people arrested for trying to donate, possibly in a desperate effort to slow the flow of donations.)
People who are concerned about losing U.S. jobs are using security as an excuse in this case. There's no more to the story than that.
I agree with all your concerns. But one big problem is that the need for better security of the "distrust the user" kind extends far beyond the examples you gave. Many fairly ordinary companies have multiple levels of sensitive information - stuff only certain managers and departments should have access to, etc., and stuff that administrators should not have access to - and the existing OS mechanisms for dealing with all of these requirements are pretty weak. Many companies would jump on board very quickly if capability systems were widely accessible and well-integrated into existing environments (i.e. Windows).
So then the big question will be, is it going to be worth Microsoft's while to maintain an entirely different security model for home use than for business use?
Of course, there's always Linux...