What does "hatred for anything republican" have to do with Diebold, unless Diebold is Republican? Shouldn't a voting machine company be politically neutral?
Welll, actually yes. They are a steadfast republican company. How else would you explain away this quote by Wally O'Dell; former Diebold CEO?
A Diebold plot to rig the elections? Where did that idea come from? The rumors began with this letter from Diebold's CEO, Wally Odell, who was moonlighting as a Republican fundraiser. In his invitation to a benefit for Bush last August, he wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." (emphasis added)
Of course this quote is often used on sites with a clear agenda. I figured that CBS (the full article can be found here) can be considered as somewhat neutral.
Well, generally speaking I believe that laws concerning issues , which don't victimize third parties are stupid. If somebody doesn't want to wear a seatbelt: hey, go for it!
Don't get annoyed however if your insurance company makes a 90% deduction on your claim since the not-wearer of a seatbelt is a stupid moron ignoring absolutely basic safety. And the public (via insurance premiums) shouldn't have to pay for that.
I know of the stories of the guy who was lucky to live and unharmed since he didn't wear a seatbelt. (Same as the story of grampa Jones, who is 99, smokes three daily packs of Chsterfield without filter, swills a fifth of Jack Daniels, before lunch and jogs 20 miles a day, but I digress).
Flaunting statistically proven safety devices, when doing something potentially dangerous is outright stupid. If you want to do it anyway, be my guest, but don't let society pay for your stupidity.
You touch on a good point. My prediction however is that semi-power users are less of Microsofts concern, then government entities and even businesses. Here's my reasoning:
To run Vista a lot of companies need to replace all of their PC infrastructure. In addition they will have to provide training to their employees; they will experience severe license costs for OS and software, if they didn't succumb yet to Microsofts extorionist Licensing whatever agreement.
On the other side you have Linux definitely coming into maturity on the Desktop. Open Office is a serious competitor nowadays and apart from the fact that you need to retrain your employees some (which you anyway have to do) I don't really see a big advantage of Office anymore, apart maybe from better integration into the Microsoft monoculture. I'd wager that remote managing a Linux infrastructure is simpler and cheaper then the Windows world. But that's certainly up for debate.
Sure, not every company can rush to the rescue. A lot got hooked on Exchange and Active Directory, customized software may not run on alternative OS' and there certainly are applications, which can't just be ported to Linux (nope: running an old Photoshop version under Crossover Office, doesn't count).
It's certainly not just a matter of loading some Linux on every PC, which you found on a free CD that came with a bad PC-rag. If an entity, with a sharp person in charge of IT, really want's to do the switch there is a lot of questions, planning, training, cost and probably a significant amount of dogheadedness involved. In other words: a switch requires real commitment from everybody involved and Microsoft will be hell bent to discourage you, if you're a big company (which in itself can be construed a really nice bargaining argument, when it comes to re-negotiate licenses and support).
If the very visible projects in Munich and to a lesser extent Vienna are successful then Vista may not be good news for Microsoft on a corporate and government level.
That's one of the really nice things about discussion boards. If you're willing to listen to reason it may challenge your dogma without necessarily alter your general outlook to life, the universe and all.
For the same reason I have an Economist subscription. I sure as hell don't always agree with their views, which are inevitably well reasoned, but they often get me to think about if I'm goddamn right (which of course I'm often not).
I added you to my Firends list in order to track your comments (plus you seem to be yet another undogmatic, fellow Ubuntu user:) ).
OK, fair point. Let me rephrase my statement and find out if you can agree:
The application of DRM to any form of digital media (music, film, word, etc) is a bad idea. In combination with copyright legislation it's outright evil.
I do not advocate widespread theft of media, I do advocate however that future geneartions get unrestricted access to culture produced and crafted by their ancestors. I further advocate that a legal purchaser of a media "file" has the right to convert it to whatever media format he desires for his personal consumption.
When it comes to providing a copy to a friend (and no! 2 billion Internet users with access to your shared drive do not constitute "friends"), or when it comes to enhancing it, sampling, remexing and building on it we are getting into a grey area, which is certainly up for discussion.
Personally I'd take a more lenient view, since culture builds on culture and invetions build on inventions, but I'm certainly not advocating abolishing copyrights and patents. Despite the fact that those concepts have been so viciously abused.
Could it be that you're somehow annnoyed that Plays for Sure[TM] isn't so sure to play any more?
There's no doubt that DRM is evil; no matter if it's provided by Apple or Microsoft (alas I hear that Apples cripling system is more lenient towards the buyer), but remarks like this are just rediculous:
iPod vs 100+ WMA devices...
Have you ever considered market share between 1 iPod and 100+ of WMA devices? I'd wager that if you insist on buying DRMd crap, your chances are far better that you can still play them in Apples cripled universe in a couple years time.
I upgraded after reading the/. article and would estimate average download speed at 25KB/Sec, which is less then 10% of what I usually achieve.
Mind you, I'm not complaining. I just let the upgrade run well into the night and after declining a couple of replaced initialisation files everything went absolutely flawlessly.
Europe is great if you are young or unemployed. Europe sucks if you actually want to make something of yourself through hard work.
Then pray tell why in independant quality of life surveys European cities take almost all of the first 30 places, while the best US place to live (rank 27) is Honolulu?
You base your experience on one European country and probably the worst governed European country at that, ignoring the diversity of European countries and cities. Else the that, and for the record, you don't have a friggin' clue.
North Korea, Turkmenistan, Eritrea the worst violators of press freedom
France, the United States and Japan slip further Mauritania and Haiti gain much ground
New countries have moved ahead of some Western democracies in the fifth annual Reporters Without Borders Worldwide Press Freedom Index, issued today, while the most repressive countries are still the same ones.
"Unfortunately nothing has changed in the countries that are the worst predators of press freedom," the organisation said, "and journalists in North Korea, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, Cuba, Burma and China are still risking their life or imprisonment for trying to keep us informed. These situations are extremely serious and it is urgent that leaders of these countries accept criticism and stop routinely cracking down on the media so harshly.
"Each year new countries in less-developed parts of the world move up the Index to positions above some European countries or the United States. This is good news and shows once again that, even though very poor, countries can be very observant of freedom of expression. Meanwhile the steady erosion of press freedom in the United States, France and Japan is extremely alarming," Reporters Without Borders said.
The three worst violators of free expression - North Korea, bottom of the Index at 168th place, Turkmenistan (167th) and Eritrea (166th) - have clamped down further. The torture death of Turkmenistan journalist Ogulsapar Muradova shows that the country's leader, "President-for-Life" Separmurad Nyazov, is willing to use extreme violence against those who dare to criticise him. Reporters Without Borders is also extremely concerned about a number of Eritrean journalists who have been imprisoned in secret for more than five years. The all-powerful North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, also continues to totally control the media.
Northern European countries once again come top of the Index, with no recorded censorship, threats, intimidation or physical reprisals in Finland, Ireland, Iceland and the Netherlands, which all share first place.
Deterioration in the United States and Japan, with France also slipping
The United States (53rd) has fallen nine places since last year, after being in 17th position in the first year of the Index, in 2002. Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of "national security" to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his "war on terrorism." The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media's right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism.
Freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf was imprisoned when he refused to hand over his video archives. Sudanese cameraman Sami al-Haj, who works for the pan-Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera, has been held without trial since June 2002 at the US military base at Guantanamo, and Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein has been held by US authorities in Iraq since April this year.
France (35th) slipped five places during the past year, to make a loss of 24 places in five years. The increase in searches of media offices and journalists' homes is very worrying for media organisations and trade unions. Autumn 2005 was an especially bad time for French journalists, several of whom were physically attacked or threatened during a trade union dispute involving privatisation of the Corsican firm SNCM and during violent demonstrations in French city suburbs in November.
Rising nationalism and the system of exclusive press clubs (kishas) threatened democratic gains in Japan, which fell 14 places to 51st. The newspaper Nihon Keizai was firebombed and several journalists phsyically attacked by far-right activists (uyoku).
Fallout from the row over the "Mohammed cartoons"
Denmark (19th) dropped from joint first place because of serious
Even worse, I once worked for a company that sent out a press release with a Microsoft Word virus. Sending a virus in a press release not good marketing.
I always wondered about complete dunderheads that send a press release as a Word document. I can accept (but don't like) when a company I contract for sends Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.
Even if the Office document is not virus ladden, there's a good chance that the receiver gets a couple of gaffaws from the history of the document, due to some embarrassing metadata.
People that are too dumb to create a PDF of a document, which is not intended for editing, before sending it out deserve all the embarrassment they get.
Most industries would love that. They would cream their pants if such a thing were possible.
I'd wager that any company that tries that goes bust pretty fast due to lack of customer demand.
This is not to say that a "point-of-break" isn't designed into most products. If it breaks too fast, though, they run into bad image problems, based on pissed off customers, who most certainly buy a different brand next time. Building an image for quality is pretty hard. Wrecking it is extremely hard to recover from and is the sure path to obsolecense.
Any action by the EC would "disrupt the entire software eco-system" and the report itself looked "more like a marketing document than a serious survey", according to the letter - written by Hugo Lueders, director of the European branch of the ISC,
and then we have this
In the ISC letter, Lueders criticised the Commission for giving the ISC only 10 days to respond to the report. "From this, one might surmise that the Commission is intolerant to opposing comments," he wrote. He accused the Commission of engaging in a "closed process" that limits input from dissenting points of view: "We perceive this ironic lack of transparency - i.e., open source but closed process - as becoming more widespread."
So can we conclude that Mr. Lueders is not the brightest lightbulb on the EU lobbyist scene, since he believes that 10 days is not adequate to read a marketing document?
Hell, I'll bet Jobs isn't even concerned about iRiver's or Sony's products even though they seem to have been in the market longer.
As a matter of fact I also wouldn't be concerned about Sony (who invented portable music, but at that time it was the arguably most innovative tech company, but I digress) when they come up with a portable music player in 2004, which couldn't even natively understand the MP3 format, in order to force you to their hideous Sonic Stage software and their Connect store.
Hell! Does anybody even consider using Sony Connect?
But the question is really: Why would you need such a technology for an airport where the waiting room also functions as check in, security check and airport bar (granted, I am talkin out of my arse here).
That was a bit like interviewing the Sybase "expert" with four years Sybase experience (provided by an agent, of course) who mumbled something about tempdb when I asked him to describe a couple of system tables. The interview ended in a "we call you, don't call us", of course.
Depending on the job and the application you must not necessarily be the product wizard, but if your resumee states four years of Sybase experience you better heard about sysobjects, sysdatabases and another couple of systems tables and are able to describe their functionality.
What I was looking for was consistency within the resumee and with what the applicant claims to be. Everybody can learn and I met damn good applicants who weren't quite an expert on the product yet. But if somebody claims that he has four years experience, he better makes sure that he can back them up in the technical interview.
Budapest may not be the worlds busyest airport by a long shot, but talking about a few dozen passengers a day is just idiotic. Even if you engage a bit in hyperbole, you come out looking like a complete, utter moron.
As a matter of fact: BUD served roughly 8'000'000 passengers in 2005 and 4'682'163 up and including the month of July in 2006, which translates to roughly 22'000 passengers a day. It took me a whopping 20 seconds to find those statistics with a Google search.
I wouldn't even bother with a troll like you, but this has so much the reek of typical US arrogance, where the rest of the world is stuck in the middle ages and can be glad if they don't have to ride their horse carriage for longer then 20 minutes to the public toiletry center if they want to take a dump.
Applications should only take what they need to survive; there's only room for one bloated thing that hogs memory, and it has to be at the top of the food chain.
You have to exclude database engines from this overall correct quote. With a database you need predictability. You cannot rely that the database gets the required resources during runtime. Thus those resources (most specific memory) must be acquired upfront when you startup the database.
Is this a waste of resources? I'd venture that this is not necessarily the case. A good DBA will calculate the resource requirements upfront and configure the database engine appropriately.
I don't mean to nitpick. But this is certainly the overall exception to the rule.
if people switch to Vista it's because we want to, and not because they have to.
Uhh, not quite. I believe that most Vista licenses will go out via Microsoft tax on new OEM PCs, same as they cornered their market up to now. It's still very, very hard to find Intel based PCs with Linux pre-installed, or naked.
Nevertheless Microsoft may face an upward battle when it comes to Vista and business. Hey, if I anyway need new machines for all my employees and software and (bloody extortionist) license agreements and training savvy IT managers will take a very hard look at alternatives since the pain and expense of migrating to Vista is just too damn big.
That's not to say that Microsoft will go under anytime, soon. But it won't be quite such an easy shove into literally any busines' face as they did with W2K. or XP.
Projects like they are run in Vienna, or Munich are highly visible and will convince other entities to look into alternatives if they are successful (and I don't see why they wouldn't).
But don't fool yourself, there will be a lot of friction and resistance from various entites on that path.
Michael Corleone critized the NYPD for refusing to release half a dozen of his family members, councelors and buddies.
He argued that the NYPD should corporate to root out the bad apples under the mafiosos, which in essence consists of his competition.
Mr. Corleone is quoted as stating: "There are bad apples in every industry around the world, and these incidents happen in the Ukraine as well as in St. Petersburg and Tokyo. Our practices are the best and most efficient in the world".
Government websites and web services are already all built on open source software.
It was only a few years ago, when a French friend of mine pointed out that SNCFs (The french national railroad, a government entity) was IE only.
I was completely flabberghasted, since I thin it's outrageous for any government entity to implement browser specific websites. I trust that this changed then.
Slashdot Mirror
Not in the UK, you can't; also not at Tesco at that.
Welll, actually yes. They are a steadfast republican company. How else would you explain away this quote by Wally O'Dell; former Diebold CEO? A Diebold plot to rig the elections? Where did that idea come from? The rumors began with this letter from Diebold's CEO, Wally Odell, who was moonlighting as a Republican fundraiser. In his invitation to a benefit for Bush last August, he wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." (emphasis added)
Of course this quote is often used on sites with a clear agenda. I figured that CBS (the full article can be found here) can be considered as somewhat neutral.
Don't get annoyed however if your insurance company makes a 90% deduction on your claim since the not-wearer of a seatbelt is a stupid moron ignoring absolutely basic safety. And the public (via insurance premiums) shouldn't have to pay for that.
I know of the stories of the guy who was lucky to live and unharmed since he didn't wear a seatbelt. (Same as the story of grampa Jones, who is 99, smokes three daily packs of Chsterfield without filter, swills a fifth of Jack Daniels, before lunch and jogs 20 miles a day, but I digress).
Flaunting statistically proven safety devices, when doing something potentially dangerous is outright stupid. If you want to do it anyway, be my guest, but don't let society pay for your stupidity.
To run Vista a lot of companies need to replace all of their PC infrastructure. In addition they will have to provide training to their employees; they will experience severe license costs for OS and software, if they didn't succumb yet to Microsofts extorionist Licensing whatever agreement.
On the other side you have Linux definitely coming into maturity on the Desktop. Open Office is a serious competitor nowadays and apart from the fact that you need to retrain your employees some (which you anyway have to do) I don't really see a big advantage of Office anymore, apart maybe from better integration into the Microsoft monoculture. I'd wager that remote managing a Linux infrastructure is simpler and cheaper then the Windows world. But that's certainly up for debate.
Sure, not every company can rush to the rescue. A lot got hooked on Exchange and Active Directory, customized software may not run on alternative OS' and there certainly are applications, which can't just be ported to Linux (nope: running an old Photoshop version under Crossover Office, doesn't count).
It's certainly not just a matter of loading some Linux on every PC, which you found on a free CD that came with a bad PC-rag. If an entity, with a sharp person in charge of IT, really want's to do the switch there is a lot of questions, planning, training, cost and probably a significant amount of dogheadedness involved. In other words: a switch requires real commitment from everybody involved and Microsoft will be hell bent to discourage you, if you're a big company (which in itself can be construed a really nice bargaining argument, when it comes to re-negotiate licenses and support).
If the very visible projects in Munich and to a lesser extent Vienna are successful then Vista may not be good news for Microsoft on a corporate and government level.
For the same reason I have an Economist subscription. I sure as hell don't always agree with their views, which are inevitably well reasoned, but they often get me to think about if I'm goddamn right (which of course I'm often not).
I added you to my Firends list in order to track your comments (plus you seem to be yet another undogmatic, fellow Ubuntu user :) ).
You forgot the BMG-Sony rootkit.
I really resented that.
The application of DRM to any form of digital media (music, film, word, etc) is a bad idea. In combination with copyright legislation it's outright evil.
I do not advocate widespread theft of media, I do advocate however that future geneartions get unrestricted access to culture produced and crafted by their ancestors. I further advocate that a legal purchaser of a media "file" has the right to convert it to whatever media format he desires for his personal consumption.
When it comes to providing a copy to a friend (and no! 2 billion Internet users with access to your shared drive do not constitute "friends"), or when it comes to enhancing it, sampling, remexing and building on it we are getting into a grey area, which is certainly up for discussion.
Personally I'd take a more lenient view, since culture builds on culture and invetions build on inventions, but I'm certainly not advocating abolishing copyrights and patents. Despite the fact that those concepts have been so viciously abused.
There's no doubt that DRM is evil; no matter if it's provided by Apple or Microsoft (alas I hear that Apples cripling system is more lenient towards the buyer), but remarks like this are just rediculous:
Have you ever considered market share between 1 iPod and 100+ of WMA devices? I'd wager that if you insist on buying DRMd crap, your chances are far better that you can still play them in Apples cripled universe in a couple years time.
Mind you, I'm not complaining. I just let the upgrade run well into the night and after declining a couple of replaced initialisation files everything went absolutely flawlessly.
Kudos to the Ubunut team from my perspective.
Then pray tell why in independant quality of life surveys European cities take almost all of the first 30 places, while the best US place to live (rank 27) is Honolulu?
You base your experience on one European country and probably the worst governed European country at that, ignoring the diversity of European countries and cities. Else the that, and for the record, you don't have a friggin' clue.
There is no need to thank me.
Well, one of those is 100% realistic and the other is not... And I think you know which is which.
(Apologies for the formating; I hope this helps)
North Korea, Turkmenistan, Eritrea the worst violators of press freedom
France, the United States and Japan slip further Mauritania and Haiti gain much ground
New countries have moved ahead of some Western democracies in the fifth annual Reporters Without Borders Worldwide Press Freedom Index, issued today, while the most repressive countries are still the same ones.
"Unfortunately nothing has changed in the countries that are the worst predators of press freedom," the organisation said, "and journalists in North Korea, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, Cuba, Burma and China are still risking their life or imprisonment for trying to keep us informed. These situations are extremely serious and it is urgent that leaders of these countries accept criticism and stop routinely cracking down on the media so harshly.
"Each year new countries in less-developed parts of the world move up the Index to positions above some European countries or the United States. This is good news and shows once again that, even though very poor, countries can be very observant of freedom of expression. Meanwhile the steady erosion of press freedom in the United States, France and Japan is extremely alarming," Reporters Without Borders said.
The three worst violators of free expression - North Korea, bottom of the Index at 168th place, Turkmenistan (167th) and Eritrea (166th) - have clamped down further. The torture death of Turkmenistan journalist Ogulsapar Muradova shows that the country's leader, "President-for-Life" Separmurad Nyazov, is willing to use extreme violence against those who dare to criticise him. Reporters Without Borders is also extremely concerned about a number of Eritrean journalists who have been imprisoned in secret for more than five years. The all-powerful North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, also continues to totally control the media.
Northern European countries once again come top of the Index, with no recorded censorship, threats, intimidation or physical reprisals in Finland, Ireland, Iceland and the Netherlands, which all share first place.
Deterioration in the United States and Japan, with France also slipping
The United States (53rd) has fallen nine places since last year, after being in 17th position in the first year of the Index, in 2002. Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of "national security" to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his "war on terrorism." The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media's right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism.
Freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf was imprisoned when he refused to hand over his video archives. Sudanese cameraman Sami al-Haj, who works for the pan-Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera, has been held without trial since June 2002 at the US military base at Guantanamo, and Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein has been held by US authorities in Iraq since April this year.
France (35th) slipped five places during the past year, to make a loss of 24 places in five years. The increase in searches of media offices and journalists' homes is very worrying for media organisations and trade unions. Autumn 2005 was an especially bad time for French journalists, several of whom were physically attacked or threatened during a trade union dispute involving privatisation of the Corsican firm SNCM and during violent demonstrations in French city suburbs in November.
Rising nationalism and the system of exclusive press clubs (kishas) threatened democratic gains in Japan, which fell 14 places to 51st. The newspaper Nihon Keizai was firebombed and several journalists phsyically attacked by far-right activists (uyoku).
Fallout from the row over the "Mohammed cartoons"
Denmark (19th) dropped from joint first place because of serious
I always wondered about complete dunderheads that send a press release as a Word document. I can accept (but don't like) when a company I contract for sends Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.
Even if the Office document is not virus ladden, there's a good chance that the receiver gets a couple of gaffaws from the history of the document, due to some embarrassing metadata.
People that are too dumb to create a PDF of a document, which is not intended for editing, before sending it out deserve all the embarrassment they get.
I'd wager that any company that tries that goes bust pretty fast due to lack of customer demand.
This is not to say that a "point-of-break" isn't designed into most products. If it breaks too fast, though, they run into bad image problems, based on pissed off customers, who most certainly buy a different brand next time. Building an image for quality is pretty hard. Wrecking it is extremely hard to recover from and is the sure path to obsolecense.
and then we have this
So can we conclude that Mr. Lueders is not the brightest lightbulb on the EU lobbyist scene, since he believes that 10 days is not adequate to read a marketing document?
That it even comes close has yet to be seen. I'm definitely not imprsessed by the design, the features offered and the price of the Zune.
As a matter of fact I also wouldn't be concerned about Sony (who invented portable music, but at that time it was the arguably most innovative tech company, but I digress) when they come up with a portable music player in 2004, which couldn't even natively understand the MP3 format, in order to force you to their hideous Sonic Stage software and their Connect store.
Hell! Does anybody even consider using Sony Connect?
But the question is really: Why would you need such a technology for an airport where the waiting room also functions as check in, security check and airport bar (granted, I am talkin out of my arse here).
Depending on the job and the application you must not necessarily be the product wizard, but if your resumee states four years of Sybase experience you better heard about sysobjects, sysdatabases and another couple of systems tables and are able to describe their functionality.
What I was looking for was consistency within the resumee and with what the applicant claims to be. Everybody can learn and I met damn good applicants who weren't quite an expert on the product yet. But if somebody claims that he has four years experience, he better makes sure that he can back them up in the technical interview.
As a matter of fact: BUD served roughly 8'000'000 passengers in 2005 and 4'682'163 up and including the month of July in 2006, which translates to roughly 22'000 passengers a day. It took me a whopping 20 seconds to find those statistics with a Google search.
I wouldn't even bother with a troll like you, but this has so much the reek of typical US arrogance, where the rest of the world is stuck in the middle ages and can be glad if they don't have to ride their horse carriage for longer then 20 minutes to the public toiletry center if they want to take a dump.
Is this a waste of resources? I'd venture that this is not necessarily the case. A good DBA will calculate the resource requirements upfront and configure the database engine appropriately.
I don't mean to nitpick. But this is certainly the overall exception to the rule.
Nevertheless Microsoft may face an upward battle when it comes to Vista and business. Hey, if I anyway need new machines for all my employees and software and (bloody extortionist) license agreements and training savvy IT managers will take a very hard look at alternatives since the pain and expense of migrating to Vista is just too damn big.
That's not to say that Microsoft will go under anytime, soon. But it won't be quite such an easy shove into literally any busines' face as they did with W2K. or XP.
Projects like they are run in Vienna, or Munich are highly visible and will convince other entities to look into alternatives if they are successful (and I don't see why they wouldn't).
But don't fool yourself, there will be a lot of friction and resistance from various entites on that path.
Mr. Corleone is quoted as stating: "There are bad apples in every industry around the world, and these incidents happen in the Ukraine as well as in St. Petersburg and Tokyo. Our practices are the best and most efficient in the world".
It was only a few years ago, when a French friend of mine pointed out that SNCFs (The french national railroad, a government entity) was IE only.
I was completely flabberghasted, since I thin it's outrageous for any government entity to implement browser specific websites. I trust that this changed then.
It's really low to reply to your own posts. So, mea culpa!