The measurement between centimetre and metre is the decimetre - 10cm or about 4 inches.
Bonus fun points, when people ask you for measurements, for using decimetres (10cm) and decametres (10m)...
That's true and thanks for reminding me. I find it a bit strange that it's not in common use, though.
Query: how could it be in beta for over two years? By now, it should be in gamma or delta, or, perhaps, final.
GMail is in beta with its current features, and perhaps it always will be because Google's obviously happy to use it as a beta-style testing environment for some of their relatively new features and ideas.
Older versions of the code-base were stabilised and released from Beta ages ago, and you can easily use a non-beta edition in Google Apps. The difference? Google Apps is targeted at people (often businesses) who have a greater need for the system to stay relatively stable and predictible, and who might even pay for it.
this coutry is great in so many respects but they are really bad at punishing people.
Do you see prison and tougher sentances as a deterrant? I don't. Unlike what I hear quite a lot of, I'm not personally convinced that the possibility of longer sentances even occur to most people before they commit a crime. Many are probably not even considering the possibility of getting caught, or just thinking it's unlikely.
Personally I'd prefer that people didn't offend in the first place, and that people didn't re-offend when they got out of prison. There are much more fundamental and more complex issues to deal with in that respect.
Why is this modded Funny? In this case it's a perfectly reasonable justice system. He's already been fined NZ$15,000 (~US$11,000) which would likely be a lot for him.
The judge looked at the situation and the context (including the fact that he's autistic), took into account that the police weren't too interested in seeing him in jail (NZ police are interested in actually preventing crime rather than simply locking people up), decided he's young and is probably unlikely to do it again if given a second chance, took into account that he's received other forms of discipline already, noted that he'd actually realised and accepted the consequences of what he did and was willing to try and pay reparations, noted that an on-the-record criminal conviction would limit him in a lot of ways for the rest of his life and probably put him in a position where he'd more likely offend again, and determined that all of this information outweighed the possibility of a discharge-without-conviction encouraging others.
This seems like a very good justice system to me. The judge is actually considering the case on its merits and taking into account that throwing someone into jail will just make it more likely they'll re-offend when they get out.
Libertarianism isn't about freedom for everyone. It's about the freedom of those with money to economically oppress those without. Libertarianism is about the freedom to own slaves.
Okay, I'm not an American and I've never been to the USA and I haven't spent a lot of time studying this. But my understanding of the Libetarians, at least on the Federal level, was that they're specifically interested in reducing the size and bureacracy of the Federal government. Doing this would free up space for individual US States to have more control over how they want to legislate their own locations.
This is why I don't think a libertarian government would work as well in my own country (New Zealand), because with a much smaller population of a bit over 4 million, there's not a lot of potential for governing structure left once you minimise the national government... apart from 4-5 significantly sized population centres, there's a lot of relatively empty space. At the size that it is, though, I'm personally quite happy with the way our government and system is structured, how transparent it is and how much easier it seems to be to get things done than in a lot of other places I've seen. (There are always some people who think otherwise, of course.)
Given that many US states are about the same population as many other countries anyway, I wouldn't have thought it'd be much beyond a state to govern itself. The feds would just stick around to make sure that no state started infringing certain guarantees (such as constitutional freedoms), and maybe provide central services for things like inter-state law enforcement where it makes sense.
So what am I missing about the US Libertarian ideas?
It's a relic from an era when measurements didn't have to be exact and estimates were more important than calculations.
I live in a nearly 100% metric country (New Zealand) and I definitely like metric because it's very nice (and much more reliable) to simply be able to move a decimal point when calculating things. But some of the imperial system does actually have some logic behind it, especially with operational things, and you'll often find that the most popular units are optimised in one way or another for use with values that are very common in day-to-day life, as much today as 100 years ago.
Counting in dozens is a great example, because 12 is divisible by so many more factors than 10, which makes it much easier to divide up 12 eggs or whatever. 12 easily divides by 2, 3, 4 and 6 and then 4 and 6 will divide further. 10 only divides by 2 and 5, and neither of those numbers is very flexible after that. I also sometimes find it awkward that metric doesn't promote any natural measure between about 1 cm and 1 m. I hate explaining distances using feet, but for distances or lengths that fall into a certain category, it's often just simpler to say 1 foot than 30 centimetres or 0.3 metres.
What I think would be interesting is a metric system that was built around something like base 12 instead of base 10. The obvious down side of that is that it'd probably be much more difficult to collectively get people to switch bases than to simply switch between imperial and metric.
I wouldn't dispute the follower culture claim, having encoutered some quite big cultural differences around things like copying-from-textbooks when working with asian students around university. That said, would it be fair to say that a lack in programming interest might be to do with the English language bias of most available programming languages?
There certainly seem to be a lot of developers in non-English-speaking countries around Europe in particular, but a lot of people in European countries tend to be multi-lingual anyway, often including at least some English, and they're not (as) hindered by things like conflicting character sets.
So, it's one thing to make fun of an irrational person and a different thing to make fun of an irrational person? I certainly would classify as "irrational" a person who commits suicide based on something someone wrote in a website.
I'm not a legal expert, but my personal gut feeling is that it should come down to whether the accused person had a reasonable expectation that the victim might kill themselves as a result of what the accused person is doing. Like it or not, some people really do abuse and insult others who they know to be mentally unstable, in full knowledge of and sometimes even in the hope that the targeted person might commit suicide when they wouldn't have otherwise.
I don't know enough about this particular case to know if that's what actually happened.
Microsoft buying Yahoo would only have made sense if they never had MSN in the first place. It is buying a competitor to compete with its own products
Not really. Microsoft's just buying a new customer base to add to an existing customer base.
There are plenty of reasons to buy competitors beyond simply shutting them down or merging them. A couple of others are to add more diversity or just to confuse consumers as to who owns what. (Car analogy warning:) eg. One of the General Motors tactics in the past was to own many different brands of car in the market, even if they did appeal to a similar base of customers and compete with each other. If you're going out to buy a car and have 6 brands to choose from, there's probably a 1/6 chance that you might choose a General Motors car. But if you want to buy a car and have 10 brands to choose from... and 5 of them happen to be owned by General Motors... there's probably a much higher chance that you'll buy a General Motors car.
Microsoft might decide to try and merge Yahoo with MSN, but there could be at least as much of an incentive to keep it differentiated, because Yahoo's services appeal to different demographics than MSN. What Microsoft doesn't want is for potential customers to drift to something it doesn't own (like Google). By owning and controlling more of the choices, they increase the potential for people to choose something they have a stake in.
Really, I haven't seen much legit use of DLLs as they were intended (shared libraries) when it comes to applications. After "DLL Hell" everyone just started statically linking in the libraries, and can you blame them? I mean, MSI does have some really cool features, but dependency tracking for DLLs is not one of them.
I'd have to give Microsoft some credit for trying at least, I guess. MSI installers do support Merge Modules, which help the OS to track what's been installed and what hasn't, and will un-install it once the last application is removed. Furthermore, the point of the Global Assembly Cache is to allow assemblies to be installed several times for different versions, which at least does away with getting the wrong DLL because each assembly is identified by both a version number and being signed by the source that provided the version number. If the GAC is used properly with merge modules then you can theoretically have some quite nice synchronised installations of many different bits of software.
It's still fraught with many problems, though. For instance, if someone writes a re-usable library then they really have to provide a merge module for that library for everyone to use, or there's no obvious way that the client applications can all incorporate the same one. (If I make a merge module for someone else's library and you make a merge module for the same library, Windows won't recognise them as the same.) Even Microsoft doesn't seem to provide Merge Modules for a lot of its "reusable" components, which I've often thought is a bit annoying.
Ultimately I think the entire problem with package management in Windows is that it's not all able to be managed by a single source, specifically because it's proprietary software... and proprietary vendors don't like letting other people distribute their software. With Free Software, everything's available with a licence that lets anyone else redistribute it under certain generally consistent terms. That's the point of it, after all, and it means that an organisation like Debian or RedHat or whoever can take 10,000+ libraries and applications from a huge number of independent vendors and authors, tune them all to work together nicely, and package them up for distribution with well-defined meta information about exactly how each part of the system fits with every other part. If I want to install an application on Debian, it's as simple as 'sudo aptitude install [packagename]', and all the required libraries that I don't already have are downloaded from the Debian repository and installed on my PC. If I remove an application and certain libraries are no longer required, they'll be removed automatically. Even if Debian doesn't package the software I want, I can still make my own package with the necessary files, state its dependencies, and install my package with confidence that it'll be properly removed when I want to remove it.
This can never happen with proprietary software and licence hell, because every vendor is so protective about its own turf and having control of the distribution of what it produces, presumably so it can make sure it gets paid by anyone who obtains the software, or whatever. The only libraries that can be reliably re-used are those that you know should definitely be there, such as those provided by Microsoft and included with Windows.
You'd think an 18,000 person company would be able to release a finished project once in a while.
Isn't this exactly what Google Apps is? It's certainly the same codebase (or an earlier and more stable branch), and it doesn't have Beta written on it. It also doesn't get the latest Google Labs innovations attached to it.
I wouldn't be too surprised if GMail is perpetually in Beta. It's Google's testing platform for what they actually sell. That said, the way they treat their testing platform still seems to be with a lot of respect as far as stability is concerned.
The problem is that beta products should eventually *leave* beta.
But they have. Gmail itself is perpetually in beta (at least until now) because Gmail is the latest version of the code that's available to the world, but stable editions of the code-base have been moved to Google Apps where it certainly isn't in beta. You don't even have to pay Google for a non-beta form, or even to connect your own domain to a Google Mail account, though you probably can't move your existing GMail address to Google Apps.
That said, I personally prefer GMail being in beta if that's what it takes. Google's demonstrated itself as easily being reliable enough to handle my email with what it considers Beta software, as long as I can download my email over pop3 from time to time for my own backup copy, but I'd want my own copy regardless.
They won't introduce many of their non-completely-tested Google Labs features in the Google Apps codebase where customers (some of whom pay) expect something stable and predictible, but they will make them available in GMail, and don't even require me to switch them on.
It's all perception of what the actual product is
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Fresh Air For Windows?
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If I was one of the people at the helm of Microsoft, I'd be really worried about this, because when the hardware is $50, there's not going to be much room left for profit on the OS.
It's all perception though, I think. You might also ask if people would pay $500 for the hardware if it's available for $50. They will pay $500 for the hardware if the $50 hardware isn't actually what they want. This is the same for software, just as it is for everything, and the only real difference here is that the roles of the hardware and software in making up the total price are being reversed.
Most people I know think they want a computer, but really they want Windows running on a computer. What they usually need is something that's fully compatible with Windows and its applications, but what they want is Windows. If they'll pay $500 for a PC with Windows attached, they'll pay $200 for Windows with a PC attached. The fact that they could buy the hardware for $50 and install another OS isn't really an option for them, because Windows is what they want until they're convinced otherwise.
From a marketing perspective for Microsoft, it could make a lot of sense to start focusing on convincing people that for all sorts of things, Windows is what really matters. In other words, Microsoft could end up going into the business of including commodity hardware when it sells its software. A PC wouldn't be the real product being sold, Windows would. Going into a computer shop, you'd buy Windows, perhaps with a few hardware specs that might adjust the price in minor ways. (eg. The executive gaming brand of Windows would cost three times the price, even though the main differences are in the installed commodity hardware.)
Obviously this would be a big task for a Microsoft Marketing team, but that's what most people in the marketing profession do, like it or hate it, and they have a lot of often-underhanded tactics to manipulate people in the course of doing it. Granted that if someone could convince people that a $60 non-MS hippie system is just as good and useful and practical as a $200 Microsoft system, those people might take that instead it, but at the moment I think it'll still take a lot of thought and effort to convince a lot of people of that.
What concerns me personally if this happens is that it might become more difficult to get commodity hardware at reasonable prices without it being bought in a Windows box. Can you imagine what it'd be like if the personal computer market was transformed into something more like a game console market, primarily built around devices optimised to run Windows? For one thing it'd be easy for Microsoft to use DRM to tie Windows to its own hardware for one thing, so it'd never run on home-built PCs or laptops and thereby forcing people to buy Windows-approved console hardware to use it. In the longer term it'd also be much easier for governments to regulate.
This assumes they'd actually get away with it of course.
Here is what invariably (in my experience) happens when a shop includes defect counts in there comp plans.
So far I've been fortunate enough not to have worked in such an environment. If I did, though, I could imagine that there would be a lot of motivation to fix the minor, easy-to-address defects such as "text is a slightly incorrect shade of gray", and ignoring the larger, more complicated defects that take longer to solve and might be orders of magnitude more serious for the end product. I guess this is partly related to your second point.
And yet, barely anyone gives a second thought to tuning their radio while driving or talking to a passenger while driving - both things that are shown to create just as much of a distraction.
I've heard this before and although I haven't gone to much effort to look for the data it's based on, I don't really understand the reasoning behind it. It seems completely counter-intuitive to me.
I can talk to passengers at the same time as I watch the road, steer the car, etc. I can reach down to tune the radio at the same time as I watch the road, and I have at least one free hand to steer the car. If necessary, the other hand can leave the radio and return very quickly. (Some cars I've driven even have all the important radio controls on the steering wheel.) Granted that I might need to briefly glance at the radio to check I have the right control, but I can do this quickly when I know there's a relatively safe area in front of me, using the same rationale I might use when I need to look back to check a blind spot, etc.
Maybe some people are better at it than I am, but if I have to write a text message while driving, I have to take my attention off the road for significantly longer periods of time, and they're more frequent. I have to remove my hands from controlling the car, and fumble around with tiny keys on my phone which haven't been designed for non-visual use. Furthermore, I have to frequently look at the phone display to make sure the letters I thought I was entering were actually entered, because my phone requires that I wait a short amount of time after each letter before keying in the next one. I can't always hold my phone with one hand when I'm doing this, because it's been designed in such a way that it might slip out of my hand when using the keypad if I don't anchor it on something besides my hand that's doing the dialing.
As I indicated earlier, this is all completely subjective and anecdotal. But why exactly is text messaging supposedly no worse than tuning the radio or talking to passengers in the car. As far as I can tell all three require some degree of attention, but text messaging requires a much larger degree of physical manipulation and lengthy visual attention, both of which I think add up to a very bad combination with driving.
Without that low cost of hardware Linux would not have taken off, and its extremely unlikely that as many people would have computers, internet access and slashdot accounts with which to slag off Microsoft.
Perhaps Linux wouldn't have gotten off the ground, but wouldn't a greater diversity of hardware have made Open Source much more desirable? Being able to compile for many different options is one of the things that makes it so useful. As for an OS if Linux wasn't around, the lack of an existing GPL kernel might have been what was needed to motivate other developers to get behind GNU Hurd.
Maybe if companies didn't build applications on brain-dead, proprietary, single-vendor platforms they wouldn't run into these kinds of problems.
It's getting better now, but what frustrated me a lot was when Microsoft encouraged developers (perhaps sabotage is a closer word) to make applications IE-only even when there was no reason to whatsoever.
Back in 2000 I joined a small startup company (2 developers total) primarily to work on an ASP/VBScript application that included a lot of Javascript. The other developer who'd been there before me had evidently been pasting and adapting some of the examples from MSDN, because the majority of the Javascript code was using () round brackets instead of [] square brackets as an array lookup operator. (Square brackets being the standard universally supported way, whereas round brackets adding no benefit yet at the same time breaking support for every browser except MSIE.) From there, the broken code had been duplicated and re-used and adapted to other things all over the place.
It probably hadn't been the brightest thing to have copied this code verbatim, but it was rather silly and (imho) malicious that it was even expressed that way within MSDN in the first place. The fact that these little and rather pointless things in the MS documentation broke compatibility with everything except Microsoft, for no benefit, meant that the whole product was restricted in that way simply because someone had naively trusted the documentation, or possibly wanted to save a few minutes early on. From that point on, trying to convince managers that it was a good idea to spend time cleaning up the code was very difficult, and didn't amount to much.
Lately I've been doing some DotNet development and although there are the obvious things that are incompatible (like Silverlight), there doesn't seem to be as much blatant sabotage of people's applications to make the Microsoft only. An ASP.Net web application, if you stick to the basics of HTML, Javascript, etc, without throwing in any proprietary stuff, will tend to work nicely in a lot of browsers.
And if there is a 1-hours downtime, EVER, you just blew through the scheduled downtime for the next 120 years. "Six nines" is meaningless. Unrealistic.
Setting aside the arguments that maybe you can have that kind of uptime with certain setups and clauses, I did think that these requirements were also often so that it'd be clear to both sides when a sales company owed a user company some kind of compensation. I don't think either would expect it to be reliable, but it gives a measurement system for deciding just how much money as owed, as long as there's agreement on how to interpret it. ie. If it's down for longer than 30 seconds this year, B will pay A ((#seconds-30) * $some-amount). If it's down for longer than 5 minutes, perhaps they'll switch to a different scale.
I think you'd find that a lot of companies are prepared for the system not to live up to that particular requirement, no matter which side of the deal they're on.
It just means that all of that trademark hysteria of the last one and a half decades, this "get outta my intellectual property!" attitude, it all hurts progress. Because, at the end of the day, isn't progress what it is all about? Shouldn't we just shut up, roll up our sleeves and start making our global village a better place instead of worrying about not hurting someones feelings or not breaking some law? I am really sick of every good initiative being sabotaged by someone who "owns" some "intellectual property".
I can't comment on this particular case with much knowledge, but if I spent a lot of time, money and effort to build up a local product around a particular name, I'd be really annoyed if someone else came in from overseas and usurped all that effort making it worthless. This is particularly the case if their only claim to having the name was that they happened to be a company 1000+ times larger than my own (eg. Google, Microsoft) with expensive lawyers, and they thought it'd be a nice name for their own service. Businesses and organisations shouldn't get special treatment over others just because they happen to be well known and (in some cases) liked by a lot of people.
Clearly there should be some kind of common sense approach to trademarks, without clearly defining what that actually means, but I don't think that simply stomping on anyone who happens to already be using a name that a corporation like Google might want is the way to go. If these guys were using 'gmail' in Germany before Google created its own service, and if they were using it for something that might be confused with Google's service (which they clearly were), and if they notified Google within a reasonable amount of time, then I think they're completely within their rights to take this action. Good for them.
It's part of doing global business that some names might already be being used in some countries. The people at Google should know this as much as every other corporation and plan for it accordingly. If Google picked a global name that might eventually send more business to a possible competitor, then it's Google's own fault.
However later they added some extra code, and even blocked that. The only way I could bank then, was by downloading the login page and editing it to remove the IE/Windows detection bit.. And guess what ? I could enter and use the rest of the site no problems whatsoever..
Not to excuse them for having a crappy site, but do you know for sure that you weren't breaking their terms of service by doing this? With most sites I wouldn't care, but in the case of Internet Banking I might be tempted to just find an alternative bank that did agree to support my browser.
For all you know, the reason they were trying to block Firefox might have been because they knew of a bug that would mis-interpret your banking instructions. (eg. If you told it to pay someone on 6/7/2008, it might be sent by the browser as 7/6/2008.)
If you'd knowingly worked around their efforts to block your browser from using their banking interface, and then they'd lost your money, you might not have much of a legal standing to fall back on.
If the person in front is willing to lie to the cops "I saw something and braked" then the person in back can lie as well, "I was traveling down the road and this maniac pulled out, passed me, and slammed on his brakes, causing the crash." If both are liars, then it won't be the "automatic" fault people assert. There is nothing automatic about it, and no place I know of codifies the assumed "the person at the back is at fault" that everyone says.
I think the parent poster was asserting that the driver in front might see something that the driver behind can't see, and be forced to stop. If the reason for stopping was to avoid a fatality, then someone following too close could be liable for involuntary manslaughter.
The kind of lie that you describe might potentially get someone out of paying an insurance excess if they can tell the lie well enough, for as long as it's a case where there's no serious investigation and both parties just give their respective stories over the phone. Even so, every insurance company that I've encountered tends to go by fairly methodical rules which says it's your fault regardless if you drove into the back of them. (I'm not in the USA, which might be why you seem to be claiming something different.) Occasionally it's probably not completely fair, but it usually is, and most people accept it since insurance from one side or the other covers most of the bill.
If the person in front slammed on their brakes because they saw a kid run out in front of them, and someone then come ploughing into the back of them causing a fatality, that kind of lie won't get them anywhere and might very well get them into even more trouble. The resulting accident scene examination will be very likely to prove that the front car couldn't possibly have pulled right in front of them and slammed on the brakes. Never mind the reports of any potential witnesses who might also have seen the person at the back driving like an idiot and being able to verify what happened.
"worried you could be the target of an RIAA lawsuit? pay $X a month and the EFF will come to your rescue if and when they come to get ya"
Wouldn't this just encourage the RIAA to prioritise going after people without the insurance? My understanding has been that much of the criticism against them has been that they're often picking unsuspecting people who never would have considered themselves as copyright pirates anyway, and would never have considered some kind of insurance against the possibility of a corporate dinosaur they'd never heard of randomly deciding to prosecute them for it.
It'd be unlikely for any more than a small minority of people to pay for that kind of insurance, and it wouldn't seem too surprising if those who did were people who maybe are being quite malicious about their copyright infringement. If I considered myself a likely target for a big lawsuit then I'd think it'd be great to be able to pay a few $$ to the EFF and have them defend me through a long and difficult case that I'm unlikely to ever have a chance of winning.
Isn't it time for Microsoft to admit there are lots of other development environments? If they bitch about fragmented Linux, there is Apple there, has standard "XCode" which everyone is free to plugin.
Perhaps it is, but why does this have anything to do with the ISO's certification of OOXML?
Don't you think Sun and IBM won't use it against Microsoft? They will show how neutral their things are, even running on OS X and they will show line managing to put 4 registered trademark symbols in a sentence.
If they try to use it against Microsoft then it's a weak argument that won't hold up. Microsoft's provision of an SDK to a subset of users doesn't prevent anyone else from using the OOXML specification to do the same thing, at least in theory. It's the openness of the OOXML specification that actually matters, and this has no relevance to one of many SDKs that Microsoft happens to have provided for a subset of developers that use a heavily promoted Microsoft platform. Microsoft could have provided no SDK at all and the OOXML standard would be in the same state as far as the ISO was concerned, but a large base of Microsoft business customers who want easy access to OOXML documents via DotNet would have been quite annoyed, and those are the customers Microsoft cares about most because they're often paying expensive subscriptions.
Er? C#, CLI (including binary image format and instruction codes), and the Base Class Library are all *ahem* ISO standards.
Okay, I stand corrected. In which case, doesn't this just demonstrate the parent's claim about DotNet being proprietary as meaningless? I think the point, though, was that Microsoft presumably isn't providing the source code for their SDK, but theoretically they shouldn't need to because it's the OOXML specification that matters.
Slashdot Mirror
The measurement between centimetre and metre is the decimetre - 10cm or about 4 inches. Bonus fun points, when people ask you for measurements, for using decimetres (10cm) and decametres (10m) ...
That's true and thanks for reminding me. I find it a bit strange that it's not in common use, though.
GMail is in beta with its current features, and perhaps it always will be because Google's obviously happy to use it as a beta-style testing environment for some of their relatively new features and ideas.
Older versions of the code-base were stabilised and released from Beta ages ago, and you can easily use a non-beta edition in Google Apps. The difference? Google Apps is targeted at people (often businesses) who have a greater need for the system to stay relatively stable and predictible, and who might even pay for it.
Do you see prison and tougher sentances as a deterrant? I don't. Unlike what I hear quite a lot of, I'm not personally convinced that the possibility of longer sentances even occur to most people before they commit a crime. Many are probably not even considering the possibility of getting caught, or just thinking it's unlikely.
Personally I'd prefer that people didn't offend in the first place, and that people didn't re-offend when they got out of prison. There are much more fundamental and more complex issues to deal with in that respect.
Why is this modded Funny? In this case it's a perfectly reasonable justice system. He's already been fined NZ$15,000 (~US$11,000) which would likely be a lot for him.
The judge looked at the situation and the context (including the fact that he's autistic), took into account that the police weren't too interested in seeing him in jail (NZ police are interested in actually preventing crime rather than simply locking people up), decided he's young and is probably unlikely to do it again if given a second chance, took into account that he's received other forms of discipline already, noted that he'd actually realised and accepted the consequences of what he did and was willing to try and pay reparations, noted that an on-the-record criminal conviction would limit him in a lot of ways for the rest of his life and probably put him in a position where he'd more likely offend again, and determined that all of this information outweighed the possibility of a discharge-without-conviction encouraging others.
This seems like a very good justice system to me. The judge is actually considering the case on its merits and taking into account that throwing someone into jail will just make it more likely they'll re-offend when they get out.
Okay, I'm not an American and I've never been to the USA and I haven't spent a lot of time studying this. But my understanding of the Libetarians, at least on the Federal level, was that they're specifically interested in reducing the size and bureacracy of the Federal government. Doing this would free up space for individual US States to have more control over how they want to legislate their own locations.
This is why I don't think a libertarian government would work as well in my own country (New Zealand), because with a much smaller population of a bit over 4 million, there's not a lot of potential for governing structure left once you minimise the national government... apart from 4-5 significantly sized population centres, there's a lot of relatively empty space. At the size that it is, though, I'm personally quite happy with the way our government and system is structured, how transparent it is and how much easier it seems to be to get things done than in a lot of other places I've seen. (There are always some people who think otherwise, of course.)
Given that many US states are about the same population as many other countries anyway, I wouldn't have thought it'd be much beyond a state to govern itself. The feds would just stick around to make sure that no state started infringing certain guarantees (such as constitutional freedoms), and maybe provide central services for things like inter-state law enforcement where it makes sense.
So what am I missing about the US Libertarian ideas?
I live in a nearly 100% metric country (New Zealand) and I definitely like metric because it's very nice (and much more reliable) to simply be able to move a decimal point when calculating things. But some of the imperial system does actually have some logic behind it, especially with operational things, and you'll often find that the most popular units are optimised in one way or another for use with values that are very common in day-to-day life, as much today as 100 years ago.
Counting in dozens is a great example, because 12 is divisible by so many more factors than 10, which makes it much easier to divide up 12 eggs or whatever. 12 easily divides by 2, 3, 4 and 6 and then 4 and 6 will divide further. 10 only divides by 2 and 5, and neither of those numbers is very flexible after that. I also sometimes find it awkward that metric doesn't promote any natural measure between about 1 cm and 1 m. I hate explaining distances using feet, but for distances or lengths that fall into a certain category, it's often just simpler to say 1 foot than 30 centimetres or 0.3 metres.
What I think would be interesting is a metric system that was built around something like base 12 instead of base 10. The obvious down side of that is that it'd probably be much more difficult to collectively get people to switch bases than to simply switch between imperial and metric.
I wouldn't dispute the follower culture claim, having encoutered some quite big cultural differences around things like copying-from-textbooks when working with asian students around university. That said, would it be fair to say that a lack in programming interest might be to do with the English language bias of most available programming languages?
There certainly seem to be a lot of developers in non-English-speaking countries around Europe in particular, but a lot of people in European countries tend to be multi-lingual anyway, often including at least some English, and they're not (as) hindered by things like conflicting character sets.
I'm not a legal expert, but my personal gut feeling is that it should come down to whether the accused person had a reasonable expectation that the victim might kill themselves as a result of what the accused person is doing. Like it or not, some people really do abuse and insult others who they know to be mentally unstable, in full knowledge of and sometimes even in the hope that the targeted person might commit suicide when they wouldn't have otherwise.
I don't know enough about this particular case to know if that's what actually happened.
Not really. Microsoft's just buying a new customer base to add to an existing customer base.
There are plenty of reasons to buy competitors beyond simply shutting them down or merging them. A couple of others are to add more diversity or just to confuse consumers as to who owns what. (Car analogy warning:) eg. One of the General Motors tactics in the past was to own many different brands of car in the market, even if they did appeal to a similar base of customers and compete with each other. If you're going out to buy a car and have 6 brands to choose from, there's probably a 1/6 chance that you might choose a General Motors car. But if you want to buy a car and have 10 brands to choose from... and 5 of them happen to be owned by General Motors... there's probably a much higher chance that you'll buy a General Motors car.
Microsoft might decide to try and merge Yahoo with MSN, but there could be at least as much of an incentive to keep it differentiated, because Yahoo's services appeal to different demographics than MSN. What Microsoft doesn't want is for potential customers to drift to something it doesn't own (like Google). By owning and controlling more of the choices, they increase the potential for people to choose something they have a stake in.
I'd have to give Microsoft some credit for trying at least, I guess. MSI installers do support Merge Modules, which help the OS to track what's been installed and what hasn't, and will un-install it once the last application is removed. Furthermore, the point of the Global Assembly Cache is to allow assemblies to be installed several times for different versions, which at least does away with getting the wrong DLL because each assembly is identified by both a version number and being signed by the source that provided the version number. If the GAC is used properly with merge modules then you can theoretically have some quite nice synchronised installations of many different bits of software.
It's still fraught with many problems, though. For instance, if someone writes a re-usable library then they really have to provide a merge module for that library for everyone to use, or there's no obvious way that the client applications can all incorporate the same one. (If I make a merge module for someone else's library and you make a merge module for the same library, Windows won't recognise them as the same.) Even Microsoft doesn't seem to provide Merge Modules for a lot of its "reusable" components, which I've often thought is a bit annoying.
Ultimately I think the entire problem with package management in Windows is that it's not all able to be managed by a single source, specifically because it's proprietary software... and proprietary vendors don't like letting other people distribute their software. With Free Software, everything's available with a licence that lets anyone else redistribute it under certain generally consistent terms. That's the point of it, after all, and it means that an organisation like Debian or RedHat or whoever can take 10,000+ libraries and applications from a huge number of independent vendors and authors, tune them all to work together nicely, and package them up for distribution with well-defined meta information about exactly how each part of the system fits with every other part. If I want to install an application on Debian, it's as simple as 'sudo aptitude install [packagename]', and all the required libraries that I don't already have are downloaded from the Debian repository and installed on my PC. If I remove an application and certain libraries are no longer required, they'll be removed automatically. Even if Debian doesn't package the software I want, I can still make my own package with the necessary files, state its dependencies, and install my package with confidence that it'll be properly removed when I want to remove it.
This can never happen with proprietary software and licence hell, because every vendor is so protective about its own turf and having control of the distribution of what it produces, presumably so it can make sure it gets paid by anyone who obtains the software, or whatever. The only libraries that can be reliably re-used are those that you know should definitely be there, such as those provided by Microsoft and included with Windows.
Isn't this exactly what Google Apps is? It's certainly the same codebase (or an earlier and more stable branch), and it doesn't have Beta written on it. It also doesn't get the latest Google Labs innovations attached to it.
I wouldn't be too surprised if GMail is perpetually in Beta. It's Google's testing platform for what they actually sell. That said, the way they treat their testing platform still seems to be with a lot of respect as far as stability is concerned.
But they have. Gmail itself is perpetually in beta (at least until now) because Gmail is the latest version of the code that's available to the world, but stable editions of the code-base have been moved to Google Apps where it certainly isn't in beta. You don't even have to pay Google for a non-beta form, or even to connect your own domain to a Google Mail account, though you probably can't move your existing GMail address to Google Apps.
That said, I personally prefer GMail being in beta if that's what it takes. Google's demonstrated itself as easily being reliable enough to handle my email with what it considers Beta software, as long as I can download my email over pop3 from time to time for my own backup copy, but I'd want my own copy regardless.
They won't introduce many of their non-completely-tested Google Labs features in the Google Apps codebase where customers (some of whom pay) expect something stable and predictible, but they will make them available in GMail, and don't even require me to switch them on.
It's all perception though, I think. You might also ask if people would pay $500 for the hardware if it's available for $50. They will pay $500 for the hardware if the $50 hardware isn't actually what they want. This is the same for software, just as it is for everything, and the only real difference here is that the roles of the hardware and software in making up the total price are being reversed.
Most people I know think they want a computer, but really they want Windows running on a computer. What they usually need is something that's fully compatible with Windows and its applications, but what they want is Windows. If they'll pay $500 for a PC with Windows attached, they'll pay $200 for Windows with a PC attached. The fact that they could buy the hardware for $50 and install another OS isn't really an option for them, because Windows is what they want until they're convinced otherwise.
From a marketing perspective for Microsoft, it could make a lot of sense to start focusing on convincing people that for all sorts of things, Windows is what really matters. In other words, Microsoft could end up going into the business of including commodity hardware when it sells its software. A PC wouldn't be the real product being sold, Windows would. Going into a computer shop, you'd buy Windows, perhaps with a few hardware specs that might adjust the price in minor ways. (eg. The executive gaming brand of Windows would cost three times the price, even though the main differences are in the installed commodity hardware.)
Obviously this would be a big task for a Microsoft Marketing team, but that's what most people in the marketing profession do, like it or hate it, and they have a lot of often-underhanded tactics to manipulate people in the course of doing it. Granted that if someone could convince people that a $60 non-MS hippie system is just as good and useful and practical as a $200 Microsoft system, those people might take that instead it, but at the moment I think it'll still take a lot of thought and effort to convince a lot of people of that.
What concerns me personally if this happens is that it might become more difficult to get commodity hardware at reasonable prices without it being bought in a Windows box. Can you imagine what it'd be like if the personal computer market was transformed into something more like a game console market, primarily built around devices optimised to run Windows? For one thing it'd be easy for Microsoft to use DRM to tie Windows to its own hardware for one thing, so it'd never run on home-built PCs or laptops and thereby forcing people to buy Windows-approved console hardware to use it. In the longer term it'd also be much easier for governments to regulate.
This assumes they'd actually get away with it of course.
And where does one put these kill switches? The Pentagon?
So far I've been fortunate enough not to have worked in such an environment. If I did, though, I could imagine that there would be a lot of motivation to fix the minor, easy-to-address defects such as "text is a slightly incorrect shade of gray", and ignoring the larger, more complicated defects that take longer to solve and might be orders of magnitude more serious for the end product. I guess this is partly related to your second point.
I've heard this before and although I haven't gone to much effort to look for the data it's based on, I don't really understand the reasoning behind it. It seems completely counter-intuitive to me.
I can talk to passengers at the same time as I watch the road, steer the car, etc. I can reach down to tune the radio at the same time as I watch the road, and I have at least one free hand to steer the car. If necessary, the other hand can leave the radio and return very quickly. (Some cars I've driven even have all the important radio controls on the steering wheel.) Granted that I might need to briefly glance at the radio to check I have the right control, but I can do this quickly when I know there's a relatively safe area in front of me, using the same rationale I might use when I need to look back to check a blind spot, etc.
Maybe some people are better at it than I am, but if I have to write a text message while driving, I have to take my attention off the road for significantly longer periods of time, and they're more frequent. I have to remove my hands from controlling the car, and fumble around with tiny keys on my phone which haven't been designed for non-visual use. Furthermore, I have to frequently look at the phone display to make sure the letters I thought I was entering were actually entered, because my phone requires that I wait a short amount of time after each letter before keying in the next one. I can't always hold my phone with one hand when I'm doing this, because it's been designed in such a way that it might slip out of my hand when using the keypad if I don't anchor it on something besides my hand that's doing the dialing.
As I indicated earlier, this is all completely subjective and anecdotal. But why exactly is text messaging supposedly no worse than tuning the radio or talking to passengers in the car. As far as I can tell all three require some degree of attention, but text messaging requires a much larger degree of physical manipulation and lengthy visual attention, both of which I think add up to a very bad combination with driving.
Perhaps Linux wouldn't have gotten off the ground, but wouldn't a greater diversity of hardware have made Open Source much more desirable? Being able to compile for many different options is one of the things that makes it so useful. As for an OS if Linux wasn't around, the lack of an existing GPL kernel might have been what was needed to motivate other developers to get behind GNU Hurd.
It's getting better now, but what frustrated me a lot was when Microsoft encouraged developers (perhaps sabotage is a closer word) to make applications IE-only even when there was no reason to whatsoever.
Back in 2000 I joined a small startup company (2 developers total) primarily to work on an ASP/VBScript application that included a lot of Javascript. The other developer who'd been there before me had evidently been pasting and adapting some of the examples from MSDN, because the majority of the Javascript code was using () round brackets instead of [] square brackets as an array lookup operator. (Square brackets being the standard universally supported way, whereas round brackets adding no benefit yet at the same time breaking support for every browser except MSIE.) From there, the broken code had been duplicated and re-used and adapted to other things all over the place.
It probably hadn't been the brightest thing to have copied this code verbatim, but it was rather silly and (imho) malicious that it was even expressed that way within MSDN in the first place. The fact that these little and rather pointless things in the MS documentation broke compatibility with everything except Microsoft, for no benefit, meant that the whole product was restricted in that way simply because someone had naively trusted the documentation, or possibly wanted to save a few minutes early on. From that point on, trying to convince managers that it was a good idea to spend time cleaning up the code was very difficult, and didn't amount to much.
Lately I've been doing some DotNet development and although there are the obvious things that are incompatible (like Silverlight), there doesn't seem to be as much blatant sabotage of people's applications to make the Microsoft only. An ASP.Net web application, if you stick to the basics of HTML, Javascript, etc, without throwing in any proprietary stuff, will tend to work nicely in a lot of browsers.
Setting aside the arguments that maybe you can have that kind of uptime with certain setups and clauses, I did think that these requirements were also often so that it'd be clear to both sides when a sales company owed a user company some kind of compensation. I don't think either would expect it to be reliable, but it gives a measurement system for deciding just how much money as owed, as long as there's agreement on how to interpret it. ie. If it's down for longer than 30 seconds this year, B will pay A ((#seconds-30) * $some-amount). If it's down for longer than 5 minutes, perhaps they'll switch to a different scale.
I think you'd find that a lot of companies are prepared for the system not to live up to that particular requirement, no matter which side of the deal they're on.
I can't comment on this particular case with much knowledge, but if I spent a lot of time, money and effort to build up a local product around a particular name, I'd be really annoyed if someone else came in from overseas and usurped all that effort making it worthless. This is particularly the case if their only claim to having the name was that they happened to be a company 1000+ times larger than my own (eg. Google, Microsoft) with expensive lawyers, and they thought it'd be a nice name for their own service. Businesses and organisations shouldn't get special treatment over others just because they happen to be well known and (in some cases) liked by a lot of people.
Clearly there should be some kind of common sense approach to trademarks, without clearly defining what that actually means, but I don't think that simply stomping on anyone who happens to already be using a name that a corporation like Google might want is the way to go. If these guys were using 'gmail' in Germany before Google created its own service, and if they were using it for something that might be confused with Google's service (which they clearly were), and if they notified Google within a reasonable amount of time, then I think they're completely within their rights to take this action. Good for them.
It's part of doing global business that some names might already be being used in some countries. The people at Google should know this as much as every other corporation and plan for it accordingly. If Google picked a global name that might eventually send more business to a possible competitor, then it's Google's own fault.
Not to excuse them for having a crappy site, but do you know for sure that you weren't breaking their terms of service by doing this? With most sites I wouldn't care, but in the case of Internet Banking I might be tempted to just find an alternative bank that did agree to support my browser.
For all you know, the reason they were trying to block Firefox might have been because they knew of a bug that would mis-interpret your banking instructions. (eg. If you told it to pay someone on 6/7/2008, it might be sent by the browser as 7/6/2008.)
If you'd knowingly worked around their efforts to block your browser from using their banking interface, and then they'd lost your money, you might not have much of a legal standing to fall back on.
I think the parent poster was asserting that the driver in front might see something that the driver behind can't see, and be forced to stop. If the reason for stopping was to avoid a fatality, then someone following too close could be liable for involuntary manslaughter.
The kind of lie that you describe might potentially get someone out of paying an insurance excess if they can tell the lie well enough, for as long as it's a case where there's no serious investigation and both parties just give their respective stories over the phone. Even so, every insurance company that I've encountered tends to go by fairly methodical rules which says it's your fault regardless if you drove into the back of them. (I'm not in the USA, which might be why you seem to be claiming something different.) Occasionally it's probably not completely fair, but it usually is, and most people accept it since insurance from one side or the other covers most of the bill.
If the person in front slammed on their brakes because they saw a kid run out in front of them, and someone then come ploughing into the back of them causing a fatality, that kind of lie won't get them anywhere and might very well get them into even more trouble. The resulting accident scene examination will be very likely to prove that the front car couldn't possibly have pulled right in front of them and slammed on the brakes. Never mind the reports of any potential witnesses who might also have seen the person at the back driving like an idiot and being able to verify what happened.
Wouldn't this just encourage the RIAA to prioritise going after people without the insurance? My understanding has been that much of the criticism against them has been that they're often picking unsuspecting people who never would have considered themselves as copyright pirates anyway, and would never have considered some kind of insurance against the possibility of a corporate dinosaur they'd never heard of randomly deciding to prosecute them for it.
It'd be unlikely for any more than a small minority of people to pay for that kind of insurance, and it wouldn't seem too surprising if those who did were people who maybe are being quite malicious about their copyright infringement. If I considered myself a likely target for a big lawsuit then I'd think it'd be great to be able to pay a few $$ to the EFF and have them defend me through a long and difficult case that I'm unlikely to ever have a chance of winning.
Perhaps it is, but why does this have anything to do with the ISO's certification of OOXML?
If they try to use it against Microsoft then it's a weak argument that won't hold up. Microsoft's provision of an SDK to a subset of users doesn't prevent anyone else from using the OOXML specification to do the same thing, at least in theory. It's the openness of the OOXML specification that actually matters, and this has no relevance to one of many SDKs that Microsoft happens to have provided for a subset of developers that use a heavily promoted Microsoft platform. Microsoft could have provided no SDK at all and the OOXML standard would be in the same state as far as the ISO was concerned, but a large base of Microsoft business customers who want easy access to OOXML documents via DotNet would have been quite annoyed, and those are the customers Microsoft cares about most because they're often paying expensive subscriptions.
Okay, I stand corrected. In which case, doesn't this just demonstrate the parent's claim about DotNet being proprietary as meaningless? I think the point, though, was that Microsoft presumably isn't providing the source code for their SDK, but theoretically they shouldn't need to because it's the OOXML specification that matters.