What? You can't do this in Linux? The uber powerful everybody should switch right away it's 100 times better and more powerful for the elite powerful power user of power Linux that I'm always hearing about?
Depends on what file-selection widget the program is using.
The default GTK (and, therefore, Gnome) widget couldn't do that last I looked, no.
It's rarely been something I even notice, however, given that almost all file interaction is done on the command line; I can only think of twice I've even wanted to do this under Linux.
If you think it's that important, however, I doubt it would be that difficult to add... (Assuming you could grok GTK well enough, of course, which is far from a given.)
And since you are using MySQL all your referential management is done in code (phone table should have person's id column as a foreign key from persons table, for instance).
...are you saying that MySQL doesn't support foreign key constraints?
News to me; I created a database with about as many of them as I have tables just a couple of months ago, and mysql 5.0.3.2 accepted that just fine.
If that's not what you're saying, I'm not sure what you are trying to get at.
Like so much else in life, there is Good, Fast, and Cheap. You can only have two of the three.
I liked Giganews when I read Usenet. They're good, and fast.
Eh? By my assessment back when I subscribed to Giganews - after Comcast dropped their Usenet access, which itself was subcontracted through Giganews - they're actually quite cheap, especially for what you get. (Even the bottommost price tier includes full binaries access under a bandwidth cap high enough to be completely ignored for casual use, and all tiers have retention so high as to be ridiculous - I believe there were literally three years of old posts in the text groups when I went to clear out the backlog to catch up again to where I had been.)
I'll admit that that's only if you want binaries access. If text-only is fine for you, then there are much cheaper providers out there. Even for text, however, I doubt that anything out there (except arguably Google Groups, which should be disqualified for other reasons) comes remotely close to Giganews on retention time.
I have four living grandparents non of which own or use a computer much less the internet. While you may claim that it benefits them in some way, they don't give a damn.
And they wouldn't be taxed, because they don't use a computer.
From TFA:
suppose that if I had a choice between living in a world where all 100 million other Internet users in the US had no anti-virus software installed (using round numbers to make things simpler)
The 100 million being discussed is only people who are Internet users, not "the entire population of the USA" (I think that's closer to 300 million by now, actually). Since your grandparents don't use the Internet, they wouldn't be included in that count, and so wouldn't be obligated to pay the tax.
(Two weeks late! Whee! At least I'm not jumping into that 'definition of libertarianism' thread...)
You are in agreement with Unoriginal_Nickname, and others such as myself who say that understanding them is important, just that you shouldn't necessarily need to hand code one in exam room conditions at the drop of a hat.
I'm not sure he is; I know I'm not.
Rather, I don't think that programmers should necessarily need to hand-code e.g. a sorting algorithm at the drop of a hat - but I do think that they need to be able to so code one, if the circumstance really did require it. If they don't have the skill to be able to do that, then they aren't going to have the skill to be a really good programmer.
Putting it the other way around: if someone has acquired the skill necessary to be a really good programmer, then by and large, that person will also by that point be able to code a sorting algorithm - even if not necessarily an especially efficient implementation - at, as the fellow says, the drop of a hat. There will always be exceptions to that, of course, but not nearly enough to invalidate it as a general rule.
By that standard, as it happens, I myself am not an especially good programmer. I could code a bubble sort with no difficulty, and linked lists (handcoded since C doesn't provide any such thing) are an integral part of every nontrivial program I write these days - but I've never even seriously understood (as in, would be able to explain it a week later without referring back to what I'd previously read) quicksort, much less been able to implement it, and I wouldn't know where to get started on implementing a hash or a B-tree.
First, we don't have to grant ourselves freedoms, as they are already inherent. Of course we do. Where do you think they come from? Do you think the big bang created them? Or do you think God created them?
They don't have to come from anywhere.
If there were only one person in the world - if, hypothetically, there had only ever been one person - then that one person would be free to do whatever he, she, it, or other could manage to do.
If there were two people in the world, they would be similarly free, except insofar as one placed restrictions on the other - "stay on your side of the river or we'll fight", for instance.
Increasing the number of people beyond that doesn't change the basic picture, only the complexity of the details.
Restrictions on freedom are artificial creations, which we impose on ourselves or have imposed on us by others.
That is, at least, the view to which I subscribe (and the only one which makes sense to me), along with part of one possible rationale for it; it is what is referred to as "sea of rights", from the metaphor that there is a naturally existing sea of rights in which we create small islands of restrictions.
The opposing view, "sea of restrictions" - as the name implies, the metaphor is that there is a naturally existing sea of restrictions in which we create small islands of rights - seems somewhere between silly and abhorrent to me; certainly I've never been able to come up with a rationale for it which did not seem either utterly horrific or immediately laughable.
Oh, I'm entirely willing to support people making a living by creating music, movies, books, and software.
More specifically, I'm willing to support people who are providing me with something I want.
TPB, et al., are providing me with something I want: convenient access to other things I want.
Restricted forms of a work (copy-protected software, DRMed music, et cetera) is not something I want.
I do, in fact, send money to content creators when the mood strikes me - generally in association with running across something I particularly like, but sometimes in response to an apparent specific need on the part of the creator(s) in question. Though it's never happened, I can easily envision myself sending money to a creator whose works I had already paid for in the traditional way (i.e. an author whose book I'd bought), simply because I decide that their work is good enough to warrant it or that they are enough in need of the support to make it worthwhile to me.
TPB appear to presently be in specific need. It is therefore not surprising that people would be willing to send them money and provide other forms of support.
Isn't the whole point of piracy to acquire things without the expense of supporting the creators?
Not in my case.
I don't pirate much anymore - I'm not even entirely clear on how much I ever did - but when I do/did, it's almost entirely a matter of convenience. Yes, not having to pay for it is a factor, but - in my case at least - that's pretty much entirely because having to pay for it is almost inherently less convenient than not having to do so. (Even iTunes fails on this point; it's highly inconvenient for a Linux user to run as far as I've ever been aware, and when I've seen family members who run Macs try to take a non-DRMed file they bought via iTunes and make it available on the household LAN, they have had to jump through so many hoops as to make the process impracticable as a general rule.)
Make paying for music (and movies, and TV-show episodes, and so forth) just as convenient as not doing so, and give me the same or a better end product (comparable or better quality, no use restrictions as with DRM, etc.), and very soon buying it will again be the first thing I think of when I want something. Until that is achieved - and it's a difficult enough target that I wouldn't be surprised if it never happened - the more convenient option will almost certainly remain my reflexive choice.
Try reading my post before replying next time. I was talking about licensing terms when dealing with software.
But you said
Every person who has downloaded and used it has stolen 9 dollars from me.
That statement, itself, has nothing to do with licensing terms. In order for it to be true, you would have to have - in some sense - already had that $9 per each such person.
If the person who downloaded it would have paid the $9 - that is, bought a copy - if the "download without paying" option were not available, then you did in some sense have that $9 for that person.
If, on the other hand, the person in question would not have paid the $9 - and would have gone without - then you did not in any sense already have that $9, so it cannot be said to have been stolen from you, and you have not lost anything. (The person in question, by comparison, has gained something - and it would be possible to argue that the overall gain to people in this category is enough to outweigh the overall loss from people in the other category. I'm not interested in trying to argue it now, and it's possible that the argument would be wrong, but it would be possible to make.)
The trouble is that there is little or no practical ability to tell the two classes of person from one another, save by anecdotal evidence, and so no ability to assess just how much could be said to have been taken. ("No one is ever told what would have happened.")
I don't have any especially memorable spam subject lines to report, but I've seen some amusing From: names.
For a while, I was receiving spam from people who apparently assembled their From: names randomly based on the pattern "Adjective X. Noun", where the X could be any letter. The first of those I noticed was "Statesmanlike M. Quadruped", which has remained good for a laugh ever since.
One is tempted to point out "Return to Zork," made with the blessing of the original game's creators. That game had 3d graphics.
And, while it was a halfway decent game, it wasn't Zork.
I haven't tried this newest offering yet - I'm at work, and I have slightly more integrity than that (though apparently not much, as I'm reading Slashdot) - but from descriptions, it sounds even less like Zork than RtZ was.
Yo, everyone! Microsoft, Stardock, Adobe, Sony, and all the rest of you. I've got an idea on how you can make money here. Listen carefully, because this is very tricky.
What you need to do is sell me something that I can take home and use!
The trouble with this is that Microsoft, et al., don't sell things.
They license them.
They try to cover this up by talking about "selling a license", et cetera, but this is a bogus claim. They can cancel or otherwise revoke the license under the right conditions, and keep the money paid; if it were a sale, then you would retain the license and all associated rights no matter what they did, unless and until you sold or gave it to someone else.
DRM and its kin, in all their many permutations and by all their many names, are simply an extension of this and an attempt to enforce it by means more direct than that of the law.
The "license it, don't sell it" model is the problem.
with the Stardock implementation you only need to access the server once (usually at the time of installation). After that as long as program is on the same HD, you should be able to use it.
Even if you move that hard drive to a different computer?
"'open source' is new," if you consider things that have been around since the 80's new
I'm fairly sure the GP meant that "'open source' is the thing that's coming in trying to displace the old system" - i.e. "new" in the sense of "not what's already being used in these places".
No, it's not. The <p> and </p> tags delimit a paragraph - which is a semantic unit.
In HTML as I learned it - as I said, roughly the HTML 3 era - there was no such thing as a </p> tag; it was one of the standalone tags, like <br> and <hr>. It was, in most but not all cases, functionally equivalent to two consective <br> tags (owing to comparatively crude browser implementations).
It's faintly possible that this learning actually took place in a parallel universe, and I've yet again sideslipped into a universe which is almost but not quite practically identical to the one I had been in before. That is, however, the language as I learned it.
Early in the HTML standard, 'p' tags didn't refer to paragraphs at all - they signified paragraph breaks.
Eh? I was under the impression that that was still the case, and had never been suggested to be otherwise. I seem to remember having learned that originally from the O'Reilly "Definitive Guide" to HTML 3 (along with most of the rest of my understanding of the basics of HTML)...
And really, if the <p> tag had been intended to delimit paragraphs as such, it would make no sense at all to have it be a standalone self-closing tag rather than pair it with </p>.
I know I'll get stoned for saying it, but the divorce of email and the browser was a travesty.
I wouldn't consider that a stoning-worthy offense - I stuck with Mozilla Suite for a very long time, and only switched to Firefox+Thunderbird when building a new machine (and after having gotten used to them on my work computers).
I do have to disagree that the integrated mail-client and browser is inherently superior to separated ones, however, if for only one reason.
When I ran Mozilla, if either the mail client or the browser hung or crashed or otherwise died (as happened not infrequently, most often due to either Flash or just ballooning memory usage), the other would be dragged along with it.
When running Firefox+Thunderbird, if either of them hangs (common with Thunderbird on HTML E-mail for some reason - possibly one of my extensions) or crashes (hasn't happened yet that I recall), the other stays up and running just fine.
I gladly trade the slight inconvenience of the less smooth functionality integration between the two for not losing the functionality of one just because the other is having a problem.
Re:looks like it still loses history
on
BASH 4.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Of course, there are also times when you don't want to do that - such as when you typed an important password in cleartext in such a way that it would enter the command history, which I've done more than once. The ability to trivially and conveniently wipe it out of the long-term history, done in this case by ensuring that the session which had the password isn't the one whose history gets preserved, is not something I'd want to lose either.
Now, why would Linux users want to go to the Windows Update site anyway?
Aside from "to download things which they will then install on Windows machines" or similar, why do you assume that non-IE browser means Linux?
I run Windows at work because it's what we have to use there, and I run Firefox for every site which doesn't rely on something IE-only. Having to switch over just for the one particular site is quite annoying.
(Having to switch over just because of detection which refuses to let me in because I'm not running IE, which happens all too frequently, is even more annoying. But that's a bit of a tangent.)
As for Windows Update being a Control Panel entry and a service:
* The service simply runs in the background to download and optionally install updates. It runs on its own time; you can't tell it "go out and get updates now", the only way to tell it "don't try to get updates now" is to disable it, and you can't configure it beyond the single radio-button Windows-Security-Center option.
* The Control Panel entry - at least the only one I see on the computer I'm using now - simply brings up the "configure the Automatic Updates service" dialog, with that single radio-button option I mentioned.
Neither of those gives you the detailed "list of all available&applicable updates" which can be gotten via the Windows Update Website, nor do they let you say "go out and get updates now" as the Website-based version does.
If there's a non-Website-based way to get that kind of functionality, I'd love to hear of it, but I don't know of any right now.
Prison is punishment for misdeeds as well as a place for rehabilitation. The whole point of prison is to make it an undesirable place so people won't want to go there.
Well, no, that's only part of the point.
Another part is to make sure that those who commit a crime - say, murder - can't commit it again, by keeping them away from the opportunity to commit it.
In this case, keeping him locked up would deny him the opportunity to kill anyone but visitors, guards, and other inmates, and it's quite possible that the benefit from letting him hack on Linux might outweigh the potential benefit of making the experience less pleasant for him by not allowing him to hack on Linux.
Re:No, I think the converse is true
on
You Are Not a Lawyer
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· Score: 2, Insightful
...it's a good thing I don't have mod points right now, because I'd be completely stumped as to how to mod that.
On the one hand, I agree with most of what you're saying.
On the other, I can see how to interpret what you're saying and the fact (and way) that you're saying it as evidence that the article's premises are correct.
On the third, given the juxtaposition of your post with your.sig, I'm not entirely positive you aren't trolling.
Hopefully those who do have mod points will be better able to judge this than I am.
Slashdot Mirror
What? You can't do this in Linux? The uber powerful everybody should switch right away it's 100 times better and more powerful for the elite powerful power user of power Linux that I'm always hearing about?
Depends on what file-selection widget the program is using.
The default GTK (and, therefore, Gnome) widget couldn't do that last I looked, no.
It's rarely been something I even notice, however, given that almost all file interaction is done on the command line; I can only think of twice I've even wanted to do this under Linux.
If you think it's that important, however, I doubt it would be that difficult to add... (Assuming you could grok GTK well enough, of course, which is far from a given.)
And since you are using MySQL all your referential management is done in code (phone table should have person's id column as a foreign key from persons table, for instance).
...are you saying that MySQL doesn't support foreign key constraints?
News to me; I created a database with about as many of them as I have tables just a couple of months ago, and mysql 5.0.3.2 accepted that just fine.
If that's not what you're saying, I'm not sure what you are trying to get at.
No.
Like so much else in life, there is Good, Fast, and Cheap. You can only have two of the three.
I liked Giganews when I read Usenet. They're good, and fast.
Eh? By my assessment back when I subscribed to Giganews - after Comcast dropped their Usenet access, which itself was subcontracted through Giganews - they're actually quite cheap, especially for what you get. (Even the bottommost price tier includes full binaries access under a bandwidth cap high enough to be completely ignored for casual use, and all tiers have retention so high as to be ridiculous - I believe there were literally three years of old posts in the text groups when I went to clear out the backlog to catch up again to where I had been.)
I'll admit that that's only if you want binaries access. If text-only is fine for you, then there are much cheaper providers out there. Even for text, however, I doubt that anything out there (except arguably Google Groups, which should be disqualified for other reasons) comes remotely close to Giganews on retention time.
I have four living grandparents non of which own or use a computer much less the internet. While you may claim that it benefits them in some way, they don't give a damn.
And they wouldn't be taxed, because they don't use a computer.
From TFA:
suppose that if I had a choice between living in a world where all 100 million other Internet users in the US had no anti-virus software installed (using round numbers to make things simpler)
The 100 million being discussed is only people who are Internet users, not "the entire population of the USA" (I think that's closer to 300 million by now, actually). Since your grandparents don't use the Internet, they wouldn't be included in that count, and so wouldn't be obligated to pay the tax.
(Two weeks late! Whee! At least I'm not jumping into that 'definition of libertarianism' thread...)
Sure.
Now imagine how much more of a load running that many instances of e.g. WoW on that server would have involved.
And surely you don't think a full compile of WoW (by whomever actually has access to do that) is a resource-light endeavour?
Running Nethack or another roguelike can take up resources, yes - but not to nearly the extent that a more modern graphical game would.
You are in agreement with Unoriginal_Nickname, and others such as myself who say that understanding them is important, just that you shouldn't necessarily need to hand code one in exam room conditions at the drop of a hat.
I'm not sure he is; I know I'm not.
Rather, I don't think that programmers should necessarily need to hand-code e.g. a sorting algorithm at the drop of a hat - but I do think that they need to be able to so code one, if the circumstance really did require it. If they don't have the skill to be able to do that, then they aren't going to have the skill to be a really good programmer.
Putting it the other way around: if someone has acquired the skill necessary to be a really good programmer, then by and large, that person will also by that point be able to code a sorting algorithm - even if not necessarily an especially efficient implementation - at, as the fellow says, the drop of a hat. There will always be exceptions to that, of course, but not nearly enough to invalidate it as a general rule.
By that standard, as it happens, I myself am not an especially good programmer. I could code a bubble sort with no difficulty, and linked lists (handcoded since C doesn't provide any such thing) are an integral part of every nontrivial program I write these days - but I've never even seriously understood (as in, would be able to explain it a week later without referring back to what I'd previously read) quicksort, much less been able to implement it, and I wouldn't know where to get started on implementing a hash or a B-tree.
First, we don't have to grant ourselves freedoms, as they are already inherent.
Of course we do. Where do you think they come from? Do you think the big bang created them? Or do you think God created them?
They don't have to come from anywhere.
If there were only one person in the world - if, hypothetically, there had only ever been one person - then that one person would be free to do whatever he, she, it, or other could manage to do.
If there were two people in the world, they would be similarly free, except insofar as one placed restrictions on the other - "stay on your side of the river or we'll fight", for instance.
Increasing the number of people beyond that doesn't change the basic picture, only the complexity of the details.
Restrictions on freedom are artificial creations, which we impose on ourselves or have imposed on us by others.
That is, at least, the view to which I subscribe (and the only one which makes sense to me), along with part of one possible rationale for it; it is what is referred to as "sea of rights", from the metaphor that there is a naturally existing sea of rights in which we create small islands of restrictions.
The opposing view, "sea of restrictions" - as the name implies, the metaphor is that there is a naturally existing sea of restrictions in which we create small islands of rights - seems somewhere between silly and abhorrent to me; certainly I've never been able to come up with a rationale for it which did not seem either utterly horrific or immediately laughable.
Oh, I'm entirely willing to support people making a living by creating music, movies, books, and software.
More specifically, I'm willing to support people who are providing me with something I want.
TPB, et al., are providing me with something I want: convenient access to other things I want.
Restricted forms of a work (copy-protected software, DRMed music, et cetera) is not something I want.
I do, in fact, send money to content creators when the mood strikes me - generally in association with running across something I particularly like, but sometimes in response to an apparent specific need on the part of the creator(s) in question. Though it's never happened, I can easily envision myself sending money to a creator whose works I had already paid for in the traditional way (i.e. an author whose book I'd bought), simply because I decide that their work is good enough to warrant it or that they are enough in need of the support to make it worthwhile to me.
TPB appear to presently be in specific need. It is therefore not surprising that people would be willing to send them money and provide other forms of support.
Isn't the whole point of piracy to acquire things without the expense of supporting the creators?
Not in my case.
I don't pirate much anymore - I'm not even entirely clear on how much I ever did - but when I do/did, it's almost entirely a matter of convenience. Yes, not having to pay for it is a factor, but - in my case at least - that's pretty much entirely because having to pay for it is almost inherently less convenient than not having to do so. (Even iTunes fails on this point; it's highly inconvenient for a Linux user to run as far as I've ever been aware, and when I've seen family members who run Macs try to take a non-DRMed file they bought via iTunes and make it available on the household LAN, they have had to jump through so many hoops as to make the process impracticable as a general rule.)
Make paying for music (and movies, and TV-show episodes, and so forth) just as convenient as not doing so, and give me the same or a better end product (comparable or better quality, no use restrictions as with DRM, etc.), and very soon buying it will again be the first thing I think of when I want something. Until that is achieved - and it's a difficult enough target that I wouldn't be surprised if it never happened - the more convenient option will almost certainly remain my reflexive choice.
Try reading my post before replying next time. I was talking about licensing terms when dealing with software.
But you said
Every person who has downloaded and used it has stolen 9 dollars from me.
That statement, itself, has nothing to do with licensing terms. In order for it to be true, you would have to have - in some sense - already had that $9 per each such person.
If the person who downloaded it would have paid the $9 - that is, bought a copy - if the "download without paying" option were not available, then you did in some sense have that $9 for that person.
If, on the other hand, the person in question would not have paid the $9 - and would have gone without - then you did not in any sense already have that $9, so it cannot be said to have been stolen from you, and you have not lost anything. (The person in question, by comparison, has gained something - and it would be possible to argue that the overall gain to people in this category is enough to outweigh the overall loss from people in the other category. I'm not interested in trying to argue it now, and it's possible that the argument would be wrong, but it would be possible to make.)
The trouble is that there is little or no practical ability to tell the two classes of person from one another, save by anecdotal evidence, and so no ability to assess just how much could be said to have been taken. ("No one is ever told what would have happened.")
I don't have any especially memorable spam subject lines to report, but I've seen some amusing From: names.
For a while, I was receiving spam from people who apparently assembled their From: names randomly based on the pattern "Adjective X. Noun", where the X could be any letter. The first of those I noticed was "Statesmanlike M. Quadruped", which has remained good for a laugh ever since.
One is tempted to point out "Return to Zork," made with the blessing of the original game's creators. That game had 3d graphics.
And, while it was a halfway decent game, it wasn't Zork.
I haven't tried this newest offering yet - I'm at work, and I have slightly more integrity than that (though apparently not much, as I'm reading Slashdot) - but from descriptions, it sounds even less like Zork than RtZ was.
Yo, everyone! Microsoft, Stardock, Adobe, Sony, and all the rest of you. I've got an idea on how you can make money here. Listen carefully, because this is very tricky.
What you need to do is sell me something that I can take home and use!
The trouble with this is that Microsoft, et al., don't sell things.
They license them.
They try to cover this up by talking about "selling a license", et cetera, but this is a bogus claim. They can cancel or otherwise revoke the license under the right conditions, and keep the money paid; if it were a sale, then you would retain the license and all associated rights no matter what they did, unless and until you sold or gave it to someone else.
DRM and its kin, in all their many permutations and by all their many names, are simply an extension of this and an attempt to enforce it by means more direct than that of the law.
The "license it, don't sell it" model is the problem.
with the Stardock implementation you only need to access the server once (usually at the time of installation). After that as long as program is on the same HD, you should be able to use it.
Even if you move that hard drive to a different computer?
"'open source' is new," if you consider things that have been around since the 80's new
I'm fairly sure the GP meant that "'open source' is the thing that's coming in trying to displace the old system" - i.e. "new" in the sense of "not what's already being used in these places".
No, it's not. The <p> and </p> tags delimit a paragraph - which is a semantic unit.
In HTML as I learned it - as I said, roughly the HTML 3 era - there was no such thing as a </p> tag; it was one of the standalone tags, like <br> and <hr>. It was, in most but not all cases, functionally equivalent to two consective <br> tags (owing to comparatively crude browser implementations).
It's faintly possible that this learning actually took place in a parallel universe, and I've yet again sideslipped into a universe which is almost but not quite practically identical to the one I had been in before. That is, however, the language as I learned it.
Early in the HTML standard, 'p' tags didn't refer to paragraphs at all - they signified paragraph breaks.
Eh? I was under the impression that that was still the case, and had never been suggested to be otherwise. I seem to remember having learned that originally from the O'Reilly "Definitive Guide" to HTML 3 (along with most of the rest of my understanding of the basics of HTML)...
And really, if the <p> tag had been intended to delimit paragraphs as such, it would make no sense at all to have it be a standalone self-closing tag rather than pair it with </p>.
I know I'll get stoned for saying it, but the divorce of email and the browser was a travesty.
I wouldn't consider that a stoning-worthy offense - I stuck with Mozilla Suite for a very long time, and only switched to Firefox+Thunderbird when building a new machine (and after having gotten used to them on my work computers).
I do have to disagree that the integrated mail-client and browser is inherently superior to separated ones, however, if for only one reason.
When I ran Mozilla, if either the mail client or the browser hung or crashed or otherwise died (as happened not infrequently, most often due to either Flash or just ballooning memory usage), the other would be dragged along with it.
When running Firefox+Thunderbird, if either of them hangs (common with Thunderbird on HTML E-mail for some reason - possibly one of my extensions) or crashes (hasn't happened yet that I recall), the other stays up and running just fine.
I gladly trade the slight inconvenience of the less smooth functionality integration between the two for not losing the functionality of one just because the other is having a problem.
Of course, there are also times when you don't want to do that - such as when you typed an important password in cleartext in such a way that it would enter the command history, which I've done more than once. The ability to trivially and conveniently wipe it out of the long-term history, done in this case by ensuring that the session which had the password isn't the one whose history gets preserved, is not something I'd want to lose either.
That's actually not a half-bad suggestion.
Virtually no chance they'd actually do it, though - particularly not given that this has been being marketed as IE 8 for so long already.
Maybe a faint chance for version 9...
Now, why would Linux users want to go to the Windows Update site anyway?
Aside from "to download things which they will then install on Windows machines" or similar, why do you assume that non-IE browser means Linux?
I run Windows at work because it's what we have to use there, and I run Firefox for every site which doesn't rely on something IE-only. Having to switch over just for the one particular site is quite annoying.
(Having to switch over just because of detection which refuses to let me in because I'm not running IE, which happens all too frequently, is even more annoying. But that's a bit of a tangent.)
As for Windows Update being a Control Panel entry and a service:
* The service simply runs in the background to download and optionally install updates. It runs on its own time; you can't tell it "go out and get updates now", the only way to tell it "don't try to get updates now" is to disable it, and you can't configure it beyond the single radio-button Windows-Security-Center option.
* The Control Panel entry - at least the only one I see on the computer I'm using now - simply brings up the "configure the Automatic Updates service" dialog, with that single radio-button option I mentioned.
Neither of those gives you the detailed "list of all available&applicable updates" which can be gotten via the Windows Update Website, nor do they let you say "go out and get updates now" as the Website-based version does.
If there's a non-Website-based way to get that kind of functionality, I'd love to hear of it, but I don't know of any right now.
Prison is punishment for misdeeds as well as a place for rehabilitation. The whole point of prison is to make it an undesirable place so people won't want to go there.
Well, no, that's only part of the point.
Another part is to make sure that those who commit a crime - say, murder - can't commit it again, by keeping them away from the opportunity to commit it.
In this case, keeping him locked up would deny him the opportunity to kill anyone but visitors, guards, and other inmates, and it's quite possible that the benefit from letting him hack on Linux might outweigh the potential benefit of making the experience less pleasant for him by not allowing him to hack on Linux.
...but tomorrow is Friday...
...it's a good thing I don't have mod points right now, because I'd be completely stumped as to how to mod that.
On the one hand, I agree with most of what you're saying.
On the other, I can see how to interpret what you're saying and the fact (and way) that you're saying it as evidence that the article's premises are correct.
On the third, given the juxtaposition of your post with your .sig, I'm not entirely positive you aren't trolling.
Hopefully those who do have mod points will be better able to judge this than I am.