You just bought a product which was very likely clearly labelled as to the contents... and now you're going to complain that it contains contents you don't want? Give it up!
If you don't want to pay the price, don't. However, for full impact you might want to let the hardware company know why you're not buying their otherwise acceptable product-- in advance of the purchase. Complaining after you buy something is, well, ridiculous.
Until there's a strong demand for Linux laptops, we're stuck with paying the tax or buying used systems (which still might come with MS on them, but at least we won't have directly contributed to the coffers in Redmond).
They can say that all they want, but a contract you don't even know about until you buy something is not a contract at all. That's the crux of the current anti-EULA litigation. Sounds more like excuse-making on the part of the OEMs than any sort of sound legal theory to me. Of course, once they have your money, all they really need to say to you is: "If you'd like to return the whole computer for a refund, fine. Otherwise you knew what you were buying... we are not refunding a part of the purchase price because you claim you're not using the software."
While it's nice that YDL comes on the machine as a gimme, the machines cost the exact same amount as that same machine at Apple without YDL. Plus, the machines come with OS X on them. So you are still paying an "Apple tax" (which admittedly isn't anywhere as invasive as the MS tax-- since MS strongarmed 3rd party vendors into paying for a MS Windows license on every machine, while Apple simply refuses to sell its own hardware without bundling its OS).
So yes, if you plan to run YDL, get your machine through TerraSoft. But my personal thought is that YDL is one of the least appealing Linux distros you'll find. Debian has more recent versions of some packages (my personal grudge: Ruby -- YDL has this at 1.6.4, whereas everyone else has this at 1.6.7+). YDL also has a much slimmer list of available packages than most distros. Gentoo has a perfectly usable PPC distribution for those that truly desire the full Linux experience.
Personally I can't imagine purchasing Apple hardware just to run Linux. If you allow non-Free software on your system, you'll be continually disappointed by which things are not available as binaries for your PPC-based system. Of course, if you are okay with non-Free software, you might be just as happy running OS X. But if you are a hardcore Linux fan or Free Software zealot, Apple hardware is no better than buying any old Windows system in terms of the extra expense.
Not that I cited any sources myself, but care to say where you've seen a 30% rate? The traditional 10% number is from the Kinsey study, which I don't think was a random sample of the US population-- and actually that number doesn't really appear in the study.
I've found a reference to a Harvard study that found 20% of men had a same-sex attraction or experience during their life, but that hardly makes those people gay.
In the Kinsey study they talk more about a six point scale, and the fact that a person's measurement on that scale can change over time. And that, to me, is the important thing. This isn't a yes/no question and a given individual's orientation isn't static. So what we're measuring is not static and not binary. It's just not a question that can be answered usefully with a single number.
I didn't say I didn't believe you about the Unix toolchain-- I said the last Mac I bought didn't have those tools. In my case it was "too little too late" to get me to buy another Mac. I opted for a homebrew system which allows me all the hardware flexibility I've come to desire as a result of Apple's lock-in approach. That said, I, for my non-geeky friends/relatives I still suggest they buy Apple over Wintel-- in one case I could have built a buddy a Linux machine and provided him support for a lot less than he paid for his iMac, and I regret that I didn't because he is not finding Mac OS X at all intuitive. If you really wanted a Unix toolchain on your Mac, you could have had awk, cc, sed, perl, and grep on your Mac long before OS X was released by just running Yellow Dog Linux. But an offical Unix-based Mac OS is fairly new and still does nothing specific to mitigate the hardware issues I mentioned.
Hmmm. Last Mac I purchased didn't include awk, sed, gcc, or vim. What it did not allow one to do easily: add memory, change monitors, add more than four peripherals without buying a "hub" and having cables all over the desk, add any peripheral other than a USB device without also buying an adapter and praying that someone had written drivers for the device that would work on the system, change from an IDE hard-drive to SCSI, add a second internal hard drive, add an internal DVD player, upgrade the internal CD-ROM drive, swap out the video card and add a new sounds card. Yes, Macs can run all kinds of great software. I've got one running Gentoo Linux. But they are dumbed-down hardware-- at least the iMacs are. That's not better design, it's just less flexible.
Actually the percentage is probably a lot higher than that. The 10% figure is not people who identify as gay or lesbian, but people who have had same sex experiences. And that was only in one study, which may have not been properly (i.e. randomly) selected. Subsequent studies have shown that the proportion of people (at least in the U.S.) who identify as gay or lesbian is somewhere between 1% and 2%. This is not to attempt to make this sound like a small group of people. Consider that the percentage of people in the U.S. who are Jewish is also somewhere between 1% and 2%.
This is lucky, because if the gay population really were 10% of the whole, one would reasonably expect one of the ten links in the posted story to be gay or lesbian oriented and the charge of homophobia would have some support. As it is, at least one of the articles is not gender specific and actually references same sex affections.
Yeah so? That's why these people are getting paid to administer these machines, right? If the patch was issued in June 2002, I'd say six months is adequate time to test it and move it into production. Or, if six months isn't enough time, maybe these folks should investigate alternative solutions that don't have such severe problems when it comes to security updates. The fact that they chose a lousy product from an incompetent vendor sounds like a pretty lame excuse for continuing to operate an insecure server to me.
Because there have never been any security issues with Linux/Unix? The first internet worm didn't exploit a Unix service? And most importantly, having the right name on the operating system will magically make up for any programming errors like buffer overflows and protect users from harm? I'd avoid MS Linux just as much as the rest of MS' software because they have a terrible record of responding to concerns and poor up-front design decisions, not because Unix is inherently better.
If you actually think Apple "just gets out of the way of the user" prepare to be disappointed. They make computers-- and yes, by dumbing them down a bit they avoid some of the problems you mention, but they're still computers and they still have technical issues at times. FWIW, I just built a computer by hand and installed Gentoo Linux (from a stage 1 tarball, no less)... I didn't have to fiddle with any IRQs or I/O addresses. If I didn't have to touch that stuff on something as complicated as a homebrew computer and a built-from-scratch OS, I can't imagine the average Microsoft Windows user does either at this point.
Your girlfriend works for Adobe... so what are you doing looking for illegal copies of Illustrator on Kazaa? You know, if you want free software, you should check out Linux-- not only is the software often available at no cost, you get the source code. If you just want Illustrator, ask your gf to get a copy with her employee discount or pay for it at regular price like a decent citizen. Software companies deserve to get paid for the software they develop-- if they don't, people like your gf will be out of work.
Ever notice how many MS apologists have such high UIDs on Slashdot? Sometimes I wonder if these people are actual employees at Microsoft or just temps. Or maybe you're just way too invested in Microsoft products and you find Linux scary and you hope no one actually adopts Linux in larger settings because that would reduce your pointy-clicky Windows skills to complete uselessness.
The poster wasn't trying to tell you what to run on your machine (even if you somehow represent the UK government). He or she was hoping the UK government would decide to use Linux as a general purpose OS. As for you specifically, any "telling" would seem to have been more a case of making you aware of your options in hopes of making your life better, rather than some sort of force being applied. In the case of the UK government, apparently the poster believes that Linux fills their needs (probably for a general use OS) better than MS Windows does.
Apparently he or she also believes that the more people that use Linux, the more likely people will spend money improving various aspects of the OS or the applications that run on the OS. This seems like a reasonable assumption, since it seems helpful to a software project to have a large base of possible contributors of both money and code. Therefore, the more people who use Linux, the better Linux' chances of overall improvement.
Yes, but you make it sound like this is permanent, yet in your other response you state that the average MD makes $140K. $140K is a hell of a lot of money, and is certainly more than $30K. What this indicates is that what you have stated may be true for some people temporarily, but that for most of those folks the situation is radically better after a short period of time. OTOH, a programmer making $75K - $80K is not nearly as likely to be able to get anywhere near $140K in an entire lifetime of work (but for doctors this would be average), whether they work 100 hours a week or more or not.
So you're saying that there are people with PhDs and MDs are willing to work for the equivalent of $5.75/hr? If they were bright enough to get those degrees, they're smart enough to figure out what a rotten deal they're getting. It's possible you rely too heavily on anecdotal evidence and that 100 hrs/week may be a peak week, but is not typical of all 52 weeks in the year and that $30K is not the average lifetime salary for those types of people, but perhaps a starting salary.
Where do I get some of this free beer? (all the beer around here is pretty expensive)... And is it actually any good or is it some lame Budweiser clone?
Wrong. If the EULAs are considered invalid, then they're invalid-- i.e. they're bad contracts from the standpoint of contract law. How does that prevent me from using a product which I have already paid for? I don't need a license to read a book I bought, or to play a CD I bought... neither do I need a license to use software I paid for, unless you can somehow make a case that my use of the software is inherently an un-Fair-Use.... which seems pretty unlikely to me.
Um, you don't need an identifier inside the file to do this. Obviously the customer is going to have to go to a unique URL to download the specific file they want. Any web server can tell you how many hits were made to a specific URL and any idiot can figure out how to link up hit counts to a URL with whatever groupings apply to that URL (e.g. band name, label, etc).
First of all, who cares what the RIAA thinks? They got nothing on ClearChannel. Not only does CC own all the radio stations but they've done a bang-up job buying all the concert promotion business as well. A musician that wants to play to more than 2000 people is going to agree to this simply because there aren't many alternatives.
Second, half of these concerts are already being played from CD (i.e. do you really think Britney can "sing" and "dance" at the same time), so how hard would it be to print some location specific covers and add the crowd noise? For any actual performances, it's not like most pro audio mixing boards can't do an out to a recording device... so why would sound quality suffer?
For $15 this would be tempting, I'd have to say... what if the band is actually good and throws in some covers or oldies or whatever? That's the kind of stuff I think is best about shows.
I think that sounds like a cool story myself. Care to share the title? Any idea if it's been translated? Have they done any anime of it?:)
For my part, I collected the original US Akira adaptations as monthly comics when they came out in the 80s. I also collected the first 30 Sandman's or so. I collected a couple of edgy "mature" series with decent stories at the same time ("Faust", "Black Kiss"). I read quite a few Batman miniseries during the 80s. I've spent enough time around comics to know what I like-- and it ain't the typical DC or Marvel release.
I find most Japanese cartooning to be more believable (in spite of being less "realistic" in many cases). The characters are more accessible and the artwork less self-absorbed. American comics are filled with exaggerated attention to the surface detail of the image itself and the stories almost seem to exist to help justify a few full page frames of artistic wankery.
But look at comics in US papers... stuff like Boondocks, Calvin & Hobbes, Bloom County, Doonesbury, Peanuts, Far Side, Dilbert. The fact that Calvin isn't remotely realistically drawn doesn't detract from him having a fully-fleshed out character. In fact, visual simplicity allows us to fill in the gaps with our own experience/imagination, making our connection to the story that much deeper.
But there's nothing about the previous Mac OS that inhibited applications from having the problems described in the article. One only need look at a few of them to see it in action. Certainly AppleWorks/ClarisWorks changed significantly with each release. Such common apps as PageMaker would change. In many cases the changes were reasonable or necessary, I'm sure. I'm not taking a blanket line against change. It's computing after all-- a rapidly changing field which scarcely existed 50 years ago. My main point was that Apple was hardly immune from this. One only need look at the constantly changing default browser situation for a good example of this.
How many times do we have to hear this repeated when it is so obviously not true? I suppose what do I expect from someone who thinks Mac OS X is actually a solution to the problems described. Maybe one of these years Apple will finally decide on a standard web browser and stick with it. You have got to be kidding me with this nonsense, okay? I've been using Macs since 1987 and none of what is described in the article doesn't apply to them. In fact, the amount of relearning required to go from < OS 9.2 to OS X is enormous compared to the amount of relearning required to go from any version of MS Windows to a later version of MS Windows.
And, much to my regret, I think most other systems including the open source and free software worlds (GNUStep excluded) are just blindly following, convinced that if they don't make UIs that work identically to Microsoft's, then nobody will be able to use it.
How many times do we have to hear this repeated when it is so obviously not true? I suppose what do I expect from someone who thinks Mac OS X is actually a solution to the problems described. Maybe one of these years Apple will finally decide on a standard web browser and stick with it. You have got to be kidding me with this nonsense, okay? I've been using Macs since 1987 and none of what is described in the article doesn't apply to them. In fact, the amount of relearning required to go from
Free software just copying MS Windows? If they are it's because MS copied features from Apple back in the 80s. Just how different can a window-type GUI be and still be useful to users? The main design difference between Mac and everything else is the monolithic menu bar. It would be nice to see a desktop/toolkit combo on Linux that at least had this as a real option. Hunting for a menubar in the middle of the screen violates one of design principles central to a GUI: common acts shouldn't involve fine-grained mouse use. Of course, I've never met a Linux app that was as dependent on the mouse as most Mac apps are. Thankfully Mac has been improving this.
The parent post didn't say that gas taxes didn't go for roads, rather that much of the money used for roads wasn't the result of gas taxes. This means that in addition to the tax on gas, other tax revenues would be spent on roads. Whether or not this is true (which I suspect it is), it is what was asserted. What you refuted was the unmade assertion that gas tax did not go for roads.
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You just bought a product which was very likely clearly labelled as to the contents... and now you're going to complain that it contains contents you don't want? Give it up!
If you don't want to pay the price, don't. However, for full impact you might want to let the hardware company know why you're not buying their otherwise acceptable product-- in advance of the purchase. Complaining after you buy something is, well, ridiculous.
Until there's a strong demand for Linux laptops, we're stuck with paying the tax or buying used systems (which still might come with MS on them, but at least we won't have directly contributed to the coffers in Redmond).
They can say that all they want, but a contract you don't even know about until you buy something is not a contract at all. That's the crux of the current anti-EULA litigation. Sounds more like excuse-making on the part of the OEMs than any sort of sound legal theory to me. Of course, once they have your money, all they really need to say to you is: "If you'd like to return the whole computer for a refund, fine. Otherwise you knew what you were buying... we are not refunding a part of the purchase price because you claim you're not using the software."
While it's nice that YDL comes on the machine as a gimme, the machines cost the exact same amount as that same machine at Apple without YDL. Plus, the machines come with OS X on them. So you are still paying an "Apple tax" (which admittedly isn't anywhere as invasive as the MS tax-- since MS strongarmed 3rd party vendors into paying for a MS Windows license on every machine, while Apple simply refuses to sell its own hardware without bundling its OS).
So yes, if you plan to run YDL, get your machine through TerraSoft. But my personal thought is that YDL is one of the least appealing Linux distros you'll find. Debian has more recent versions of some packages (my personal grudge: Ruby -- YDL has this at 1.6.4, whereas everyone else has this at 1.6.7+). YDL also has a much slimmer list of available packages than most distros. Gentoo has a perfectly usable PPC distribution for those that truly desire the full Linux experience.
Personally I can't imagine purchasing Apple hardware just to run Linux. If you allow non-Free software on your system, you'll be continually disappointed by which things are not available as binaries for your PPC-based system. Of course, if you are okay with non-Free software, you might be just as happy running OS X. But if you are a hardcore Linux fan or Free Software zealot, Apple hardware is no better than buying any old Windows system in terms of the extra expense.
Do you realize you're completely full of shit? :)
Not that I cited any sources myself, but care to say where you've seen a 30% rate? The traditional 10% number is from the Kinsey study, which I don't think was a random sample of the US population-- and actually that number doesn't really appear in the study.
I've found a reference to a Harvard study that found 20% of men had a same-sex attraction or experience during their life, but that hardly makes those people gay.
In the Kinsey study they talk more about a six point scale, and the fact that a person's measurement on that scale can change over time. And that, to me, is the important thing. This isn't a yes/no question and a given individual's orientation isn't static. So what we're measuring is not static and not binary. It's just not a question that can be answered usefully with a single number.
I didn't say I didn't believe you about the Unix toolchain-- I said the last Mac I bought didn't have those tools. In my case it was "too little too late" to get me to buy another Mac. I opted for a homebrew system which allows me all the hardware flexibility I've come to desire as a result of Apple's lock-in approach. That said, I, for my non-geeky friends/relatives I still suggest they buy Apple over Wintel-- in one case I could have built a buddy a Linux machine and provided him support for a lot less than he paid for his iMac, and I regret that I didn't because he is not finding Mac OS X at all intuitive. If you really wanted a Unix toolchain on your Mac, you could have had awk, cc, sed, perl, and grep on your Mac long before OS X was released by just running Yellow Dog Linux. But an offical Unix-based Mac OS is fairly new and still does nothing specific to mitigate the hardware issues I mentioned.
Hmmm. Last Mac I purchased didn't include awk, sed, gcc, or vim. What it did not allow one to do easily: add memory, change monitors, add more than four peripherals without buying a "hub" and having cables all over the desk, add any peripheral other than a USB device without also buying an adapter and praying that someone had written drivers for the device that would work on the system, change from an IDE hard-drive to SCSI, add a second internal hard drive, add an internal DVD player, upgrade the internal CD-ROM drive, swap out the video card and add a new sounds card. Yes, Macs can run all kinds of great software. I've got one running Gentoo Linux. But they are dumbed-down hardware-- at least the iMacs are. That's not better design, it's just less flexible.
Maybe you should ask this self-described nerdy girl which site she used while writing this "blog" (hint).
Actually the percentage is probably a lot higher than that. The 10% figure is not people who identify as gay or lesbian, but people who have had same sex experiences. And that was only in one study, which may have not been properly (i.e. randomly) selected. Subsequent studies have shown that the proportion of people (at least in the U.S.) who identify as gay or lesbian is somewhere between 1% and 2%. This is not to attempt to make this sound like a small group of people. Consider that the percentage of people in the U.S. who are Jewish is also somewhere between 1% and 2%.
This is lucky, because if the gay population really were 10% of the whole, one would reasonably expect one of the ten links in the posted story to be gay or lesbian oriented and the charge of homophobia would have some support. As it is, at least one of the articles is not gender specific and actually references same sex affections.
Yeah so? That's why these people are getting paid to administer these machines, right? If the patch was issued in June 2002, I'd say six months is adequate time to test it and move it into production. Or, if six months isn't enough time, maybe these folks should investigate alternative solutions that don't have such severe problems when it comes to security updates. The fact that they chose a lousy product from an incompetent vendor sounds like a pretty lame excuse for continuing to operate an insecure server to me.
Because there have never been any security issues with Linux/Unix? The first internet worm didn't exploit a Unix service? And most importantly, having the right name on the operating system will magically make up for any programming errors like buffer overflows and protect users from harm? I'd avoid MS Linux just as much as the rest of MS' software because they have a terrible record of responding to concerns and poor up-front design decisions, not because Unix is inherently better.
If you actually think Apple "just gets out of the way of the user" prepare to be disappointed. They make computers-- and yes, by dumbing them down a bit they avoid some of the problems you mention, but they're still computers and they still have technical issues at times. FWIW, I just built a computer by hand and installed Gentoo Linux (from a stage 1 tarball, no less)... I didn't have to fiddle with any IRQs or I/O addresses. If I didn't have to touch that stuff on something as complicated as a homebrew computer and a built-from-scratch OS, I can't imagine the average Microsoft Windows user does either at this point.
Your girlfriend works for Adobe... so what are you doing looking for illegal copies of Illustrator on Kazaa? You know, if you want free software, you should check out Linux-- not only is the software often available at no cost, you get the source code. If you just want Illustrator, ask your gf to get a copy with her employee discount or pay for it at regular price like a decent citizen. Software companies deserve to get paid for the software they develop-- if they don't, people like your gf will be out of work.
Ever notice how many MS apologists have such high UIDs on Slashdot? Sometimes I wonder if these people are actual employees at Microsoft or just temps. Or maybe you're just way too invested in Microsoft products and you find Linux scary and you hope no one actually adopts Linux in larger settings because that would reduce your pointy-clicky Windows skills to complete uselessness.
The poster wasn't trying to tell you what to run on your machine (even if you somehow represent the UK government). He or she was hoping the UK government would decide to use Linux as a general purpose OS. As for you specifically, any "telling" would seem to have been more a case of making you aware of your options in hopes of making your life better, rather than some sort of force being applied. In the case of the UK government, apparently the poster believes that Linux fills their needs (probably for a general use OS) better than MS Windows does.
Apparently he or she also believes that the more people that use Linux, the more likely people will spend money improving various aspects of the OS or the applications that run on the OS. This seems like a reasonable assumption, since it seems helpful to a software project to have a large base of possible contributors of both money and code. Therefore, the more people who use Linux, the better Linux' chances of overall improvement.
Yes, but you make it sound like this is permanent, yet in your other response you state that the average MD makes $140K. $140K is a hell of a lot of money, and is certainly more than $30K. What this indicates is that what you have stated may be true for some people temporarily, but that for most of those folks the situation is radically better after a short period of time. OTOH, a programmer making $75K - $80K is not nearly as likely to be able to get anywhere near $140K in an entire lifetime of work (but for doctors this would be average), whether they work 100 hours a week or more or not.
So you're saying that there are people with PhDs and MDs are willing to work for the equivalent of $5.75/hr? If they were bright enough to get those degrees, they're smart enough to figure out what a rotten deal they're getting. It's possible you rely too heavily on anecdotal evidence and that 100 hrs/week may be a peak week, but is not typical of all 52 weeks in the year and that $30K is not the average lifetime salary for those types of people, but perhaps a starting salary.
Where do I get some of this free beer? (all the beer around here is pretty expensive)... And is it actually any good or is it some lame Budweiser clone?
Wrong. If the EULAs are considered invalid, then they're invalid-- i.e. they're bad contracts from the standpoint of contract law. How does that prevent me from using a product which I have already paid for? I don't need a license to read a book I bought, or to play a CD I bought... neither do I need a license to use software I paid for, unless you can somehow make a case that my use of the software is inherently an un-Fair-Use.... which seems pretty unlikely to me.
Um, you don't need an identifier inside the file to do this. Obviously the customer is going to have to go to a unique URL to download the specific file they want. Any web server can tell you how many hits were made to a specific URL and any idiot can figure out how to link up hit counts to a URL with whatever groupings apply to that URL (e.g. band name, label, etc).
First of all, who cares what the RIAA thinks? They got nothing on ClearChannel. Not only does CC own all the radio stations but they've done a bang-up job buying all the concert promotion business as well. A musician that wants to play to more than 2000 people is going to agree to this simply because there aren't many alternatives.
Second, half of these concerts are already being played from CD (i.e. do you really think Britney can "sing" and "dance" at the same time), so how hard would it be to print some location specific covers and add the crowd noise? For any actual performances, it's not like most pro audio mixing boards can't do an out to a recording device... so why would sound quality suffer?
For $15 this would be tempting, I'd have to say... what if the band is actually good and throws in some covers or oldies or whatever? That's the kind of stuff I think is best about shows.
I think that sounds like a cool story myself. Care to share the title? Any idea if it's been translated? Have they done any anime of it? :)
For my part, I collected the original US Akira adaptations as monthly comics when they came out in the 80s. I also collected the first 30 Sandman's or so. I collected a couple of edgy "mature" series with decent stories at the same time ("Faust", "Black Kiss"). I read quite a few Batman miniseries during the 80s. I've spent enough time around comics to know what I like-- and it ain't the typical DC or Marvel release.
I find most Japanese cartooning to be more believable (in spite of being less "realistic" in many cases). The characters are more accessible and the artwork less self-absorbed. American comics are filled with exaggerated attention to the surface detail of the image itself and the stories almost seem to exist to help justify a few full page frames of artistic wankery.
But look at comics in US papers... stuff like Boondocks, Calvin & Hobbes, Bloom County, Doonesbury, Peanuts, Far Side, Dilbert. The fact that Calvin isn't remotely realistically drawn doesn't detract from him having a fully-fleshed out character. In fact, visual simplicity allows us to fill in the gaps with our own experience/imagination, making our connection to the story that much deeper.
But there's nothing about the previous Mac OS that inhibited applications from having the problems described in the article. One only need look at a few of them to see it in action. Certainly AppleWorks/ClarisWorks changed significantly with each release. Such common apps as PageMaker would change. In many cases the changes were reasonable or necessary, I'm sure. I'm not taking a blanket line against change. It's computing after all-- a rapidly changing field which scarcely existed 50 years ago. My main point was that Apple was hardly immune from this. One only need look at the constantly changing default browser situation for a good example of this.
[my first paragraph without HTML mistake]
How many times do we have to hear this repeated when it is so obviously not true? I suppose what do I expect from someone who thinks Mac OS X is actually a solution to the problems described. Maybe one of these years Apple will finally decide on a standard web browser and stick with it. You have got to be kidding me with this nonsense, okay? I've been using Macs since 1987 and none of what is described in the article doesn't apply to them. In fact, the amount of relearning required to go from < OS 9.2 to OS X is enormous compared to the amount of relearning required to go from any version of MS Windows to a later version of MS Windows.
And, much to my regret, I think most other systems including the open source and free software worlds (GNUStep excluded) are just blindly following, convinced that if they don't make UIs that work identically to Microsoft's, then nobody will be able to use it.
How many times do we have to hear this repeated when it is so obviously not true? I suppose what do I expect from someone who thinks Mac OS X is actually a solution to the problems described. Maybe one of these years Apple will finally decide on a standard web browser and stick with it. You have got to be kidding me with this nonsense, okay? I've been using Macs since 1987 and none of what is described in the article doesn't apply to them. In fact, the amount of relearning required to go from
Free software just copying MS Windows? If they are it's because MS copied features from Apple back in the 80s. Just how different can a window-type GUI be and still be useful to users? The main design difference between Mac and everything else is the monolithic menu bar. It would be nice to see a desktop/toolkit combo on Linux that at least had this as a real option. Hunting for a menubar in the middle of the screen violates one of design principles central to a GUI: common acts shouldn't involve fine-grained mouse use. Of course, I've never met a Linux app that was as dependent on the mouse as most Mac apps are. Thankfully Mac has been improving this.
The parent post didn't say that gas taxes didn't go for roads, rather that much of the money used for roads wasn't the result of gas taxes. This means that in addition to the tax on gas, other tax revenues would be spent on roads. Whether or not this is true (which I suspect it is), it is what was asserted. What you refuted was the unmade assertion that gas tax did not go for roads.