Yes, but sending a SMS message costs a total of about a penny,
Nope. That's correct only if you're sending messages locally. International SMS text messages cost between 25 to 50 cents apiece. It depends on the location and the US dollar exchange rate.
If you can see that I wrote all of the above without ever thinking that I'm any better than you just because I know of a better way (a way that I did not invent), then you will understand where I'm coming from.
I don't understand where you're coming from. You present an extraordinarily literate argument[1] though. Anyone who can write like you do has utterly no business defending `M$', justifiable anger or not. IMO.
[1] And one which is going to fly over the heads of 99.99%, as a rough guess, of the folks here.
(I'm glad you got modded up to +5 by the time I saw this)
If you're so puerile to have the need to use "M$ Winbloze" or "open sores software" in a rational discussion, it seems as if you're trying to sidestep the issue with colorful language. Call things by their name and focus on arguments rather than taking trite potshots.
Hear, hear!
If one must troll or lay down flame bait, one should at least be clever about it. Simple sarcasm merely goes over the head of many moderators and should tend be avoided. Name calling is always boring.
You know, I'm starting to take issue with comments that protest the use of the M$, Micro$oft etc. memes. I know how something can get on your tits - articles that identify companies by their stock symbols is a particular irritant of mine.
It goes both ways. I'm irritated that `$' is being used as an intended insult. It's supposed to be a symbol of _earned_ wealth, which is never a bad thing in my book.
I had a lot more fun irritating a former roommate expanding MS to Multiple Sclerosis. At the time, it was the more recognized expansion of MS.
I don't mind using stock symbols as abbreviations either. I even recently proposed that when the CSC namespace runs out for Cisco bugids (we've been as wasteful as the IPV4 guys were) we use CSCO to identify an expanded namespace.
Personally, I think using "M$" as an abbreviation for Microsoft just identifies the user as an idiot. Same as if one would write "Ci$co". The abbreviation that *really* pisses me off is abbreviating Microsoft Windows as "win". "Win" has unfortunate and untrue connotations when applied to Microsoft Windows.
I guess I'll just be more fastidious and always write the names out in full, instead of occasionally using the stock symbol as an abbreviation.
I totally disagree with your other statements about C though. I'm sorry, it's not a dying language. There are lots and lots and lots of new, active C projects in FOSS and in business.
I think you're correct in a theoretical sort of way. C has succeeded in becoming The portable assembly language. It has succeeded in the world of ideas (OS implementation languages) as Microsoft has done in the market place - driven out all competition.
4GLs and things like Prolog never took off and it's sad that C++ and Java have so much current mindshare, but they are fads too.
Language-wise, only one, Dr. John McCarthy's LISP has withstood the test of time. For excellent reason. Syntactically, you can understand the rules in a matter of minutes. Practically, you can do complex things in a very small amount of code *and* it scales up.
I like to think of OO as the financial derivatives of the computer science world. Complex, sexy and dangerous as hell. When you get burned, you get really burned. But you sound like a genius when you're talking about it even when you're spewing nonsense[1].
For the long-term, I think we (on the functional programming side) will maintain our niche until everyone else sees how right we are. We're patient.
[1] See the Perl man pages perltoot(1), perltooc(1).
Yes, there are lots of jobs for good C (and COBOL) programmers, but there are lots of good C (and COBOL) programmers. The number of jobs needing these skills is shrinking faster than these guys are dying or retiring, so if you choose either of these languages, every job you go for you'll be up against people who are not only better than you but also more experienced than you.
True and...
In any case the principal skill of a software person is not knowing language X, it's being able to learn (and become productive in) new languages, new libraries and new technologies quickly. The reason why this industry is fun to be in is because it changes so rapidly.
Nobody expects a recent graduate to write a kernel or a banking app!
Very true. In addition, no one expects a recent graduate to produce highly professional work either.
I think you're asking the wrong question. The kinds of skills you need in the work place just aren't taught in school. It's a hands on sort of thing and you will be most successful if you are language agnostic. You should be comfortable with the idea of getting handed a program in such-and-such language and expected to do something useful with it, regardless of whether you have had much (if any) experience with such-and-such language before. Knuth's Art of Programming books are useful in this regard.
Make sure you know the fundamentals. Having a good ground in data structures and algorithms is vital. Logical thinking about how you go about attacking problems is another.
And a secret: If I was interviewing you for a position and you were to quote something from The Elements of Programming Style at me (and could demonstrate that you knew what you were talking about), I'd likely halt the interview and attempt to hire you on the spot.
Most climate change theories put the temperature shift at fractions of a degree every decade.
The climate change models are only based on fairly recent data (and the most accurate data is only a few years old).
The scare mongers (like Algore and company) are insisting that climate change is caused by people and the longest-term records show that the earth has undergone many different long-term climate changes like ice ages and subsequent global warming to get things back to "normal".
I would give the recent data putting temperatures as cooling in the last couple of years as much weight as I would put on data from the last 50 or 100 years. The earth has been around for billions of years and we do not have enough data to predict future trends without other variables being added in as "special sauce" to the computation.
i argue that speed and efficency of information is useless of the information is no good. hell look at/. and how this supposed "wizdom of the group" thing fails hard.
See my earlier postings in this thread how I have used data similar to this in real life.
There is absolute gold to be found on slashdot. It requires a lot of work, patience and reading at -1. Suggest you learn how to use that big key on the left side of your keyboard labeled "shift" to make an uppercase letter at the start of each sentence. It's a lot easier than data mining on/., though equally as rewarding.
Arguably, signal cuts through noise. If millions of people are wrong about it but in random directions, the handful of people that are completely right about it, and the elite cadre who are just slightly more right than wrong about it, might turn into a usable few bits of info on the subject.
Precisely correct. Excellent summary.
Also note that assigning a value to "elite cadre" is critical. Ex: Al Gore is NOT an expert on the ecology of the earth, he is a politician. He is expert on begging people for campaign donations (and perhaps knowing when to drink tea so he is outside peeing when critical conversations are taking place in meetings he is supposed to be attending).
Are there any experts on it here who can briefly describe how effective (or not) the current techniques are at sifting gold from the silt?
I would imagine so. In the old days, we used to call this a "bullshit filter". So long as you have a good representative sample, statistical methods Just Plain Work. I described some of this in a previous message in this thread.
The biggest danger in any of this sort of work is wanting the results to come out the way you wish them to. If I took a direct poll of my friends and coworkers I talk to, the approval rating of the man bowling 129 in the White House basement would be just around 0, but that is obviously not a representative sample.
I think I wrote a/. journal entry on this topic. If I haven't, I should.
Disclaimer: I'm from the old school of data mining and not up on the state of the art. And, I do not work for Google.
The real markets only collapsed because the government messed with them.
That's only part of the story. I'm a libertarian, but I've lived too long in the 3rd world to accept the idea that private enterprise is going to build certain critical infrastructure (like roads, sewers, etc.)
If the government hadn't made it profitable to make bad loans, the banks wouldn't have done it.
The bad loans are only the tip of the iceberg. The real monster is all the outstanding derivatives. I don't think anyone knows how big it really is, estimates vary by the hundreds of trillions of dollars how much it is, and the most pessimistic figures I've seen dwarf global GDP.
The bad loans weren't the root cause of the problem per se, the problem was that they were packaged into other financial instruments and sold as AAA debt. If they had been treated as the bad loans they truly were, we have enough regulation in place to deal with that.
The governmental blame lies in encouraging very smart people being required by law to do something really dumb (issue bad loans) and leaving the only (temporary) avenue of escape as doing something "innovative" outside the existing financial system.
It's kind of sad in a way. Bookies have had this all figured out for ages. They adjust odds on the bets (like financial derivative instruments) so that no matter which side of the bet wins, they end up paying out something less than they take in. All of the Wall Street bookies appear to have been betting on financial good times continuing forever and that is well-documented in history as being a major mistake.
Does this imply that we should move Wall Street to The Strip in Las Vegas? We would have probably been better off in the long run if it had been done before...
Let's try to come up with regulations that actually work before we expand their use.
Hmmm, like the regulations that Wall Street got around by inventing new financial instruments that hadn't been regulated yet?
It seems that the answer someone got in an open questions period in an upper division Accounting class[1] I took - she asked for an explanation of derivatives and the answer was "I can't explain it here", is still true. But the reason is that no one probably understands the full extent of what has happened.
Markets are very, very, very easy to manipulate.
As are regulations for insiders with the right connections. Why are USians so outraged at miniscule bonuses being paid by AIG (contracted from before public bailout and specified as valid in the TARP), when they sent so many billions to their fellow banking buds?
[1] In 1996. The derivative time bomb got lit under impeached ex-President Clinton.
True and this is really, really old news. I recall around the time of a quake (I think the world series quake) in the SF area, a time so far back in the past that SCO were Good Guys, other more remote folk followed the aftermath of postings on ca.earthquakes and we got the first real data on what happened by determining machines that were down from nearby posters.
It turned out that that particular quake was practically underneath SCO in Santa Cruz and everyone was relieved to see a "We're not dead yet!" message from a poster within SCO.
I also used the KNX news radio station (which always switched to a call in format when there was an earthquake) in the LA area (on my car radio) to get an early indication of how bad it was. In the Northridge quake, I was about to head towards the freeway that suffered a fallen bridge (and killed the reckless motorcycle cop who went right off the new edge).
The capability has existed for three decades and some of us have been doing this for a *long* time.
OK, my bias up front, I work for Cisco, though not directly in the California project.
Cisco doesn't have integrated solutions. All the others provide storage, network, and compute integration with large, well-trained Professional Services orgs. Cisco has CCIEs in piles, but what do they know about anything but network gear?
Cisco has people like me and I'm far from alone.
I'm very picky about where I accept employment from and I CHOSE to work at Cisco even though I despise Northern California. For whatever it's worth.
Linux makes a powerful server, but its desktop applications (even OpenOffice) lag far behind their proprietary counterparts in features, or are non-existent (where's the Photoshop or InDesign clones?).
Who cares about clones? Why aren't Photoshop and InDesign (whatever that is) for sale on Linux? If they're so unique and valuable that Open Source alternatives haven't covered them, then it seems to me that someone is missing out on a software market.
I know I've been trolled, but I've rarely seen this point brought up.
The "Free as in beer" is the least important feature of Linux and other Open Source operating systems.
You missed the key point of the OP. Al Capone was prosecuted under the stipulation you quoted because that's INCOME tax. The OP specially asked about law relating to SALES tax.
Granted, that is correct. I did indeed misread that. The problem is the mixed jurisdictions here. Sales tax is local not federal and Al Capone was prosecuted under federal laws. Also, stolen property is conceptually (unearned) income in the same way that Gift Taxes are applied as income coming from gifts.
Although US federal income taxes apply to the profits from the sales of illegal drugs (and stolen property), I do not believe I've ever heard of States, etc. going after "lost" sales taxes from those sales. Given the way things are going in California, Arnold could possibly lead the way in that.
Another interesting question is, do bribes to public officials count as sales and should sales tax apply? I think so. It's not called "buying" for nothing. And given the current climate, should you pay capital gains tax on a bribe to a City Councilman who later gets elected Mayor? Would the shame of being treated as an inanimate commodity bring integrity back to the governments of the world? Probably not, alas.
Therein lies the problem. Although XP is several years old, it actually does every single thing a user needs from an operating system.
Actually, no it doesn't. It's klunky looking and slow. On my corporate issue Lenovo T60, I was amazed at how fast a machine it really was when I was permitted to wipe the "Enterprise" XP and replace it with RHEL.
I found it difficult to give up the multiple desktops I had become accustomed to in over a decade (starting way back from olvwm) and I also found it difficult to customize. It takes a few seconds and no internet access to fix the large key to the left of the `a' key issue (should be control not capslock) on both MacOS X and KDE.
The only thing I ever found pleasurable about Microsoft Windows XP was how I felt when I turned the machine off.
I despise the citrix applications I am forced to use, but at least I can run them on a decent desktop system.
Huge wall of text? Check. Microsoft sycophantry? Check. High userid? Check.
Lord and Lady pair, I love the smell of astroturf in the morning!
Illegal activities. Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Form 1040, line 21, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.
None of your examples seemed worthwhile in terms of making me want to run out and implement them, though the `better Slashdot rss reader' is a gem of much value.
I'll grant that for those trapped in the Microsoft ghetto, PowerShell appears to be a Good Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Short answer: only one thing I mentioned involved disk I/O, RAM is cheap.
Not in modern architectures and it depends. Registers are faster than L1 caches. L1 caches are faster than L2 caches, etc.
See: http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/ for an excellent discussion about how one can dramatically speed up applications by optimizing memory access.
And I disagree with the title of this thread - Linux (the kernel at least) is quite well prepared for multicore chips.
I'm not particularly your enemy and you're a friend of a friend, so I'm not going to foe you back. I love slash.
Yes, but sending a SMS message costs a total of about a penny,
Nope. That's correct only if you're sending messages locally. International SMS text messages cost between 25 to 50 cents apiece. It depends on the location and the US dollar exchange rate.
If you can see that I wrote all of the above without ever thinking that I'm any better than you just because I know of a better way (a way that I did not invent), then you will understand where I'm coming from.
I don't understand where you're coming from. You present an extraordinarily literate argument[1] though. Anyone who can write like you do has utterly no business defending `M$', justifiable anger or not. IMO.
[1] And one which is going to fly over the heads of 99.99%, as a rough guess, of the folks here.
(I'm glad you got modded up to +5 by the time I saw this)
If you're so puerile to have the need to use "M$ Winbloze" or "open sores software" in a rational discussion, it seems as if you're trying to sidestep the issue with colorful language. Call things by their name and focus on arguments rather than taking trite potshots.
Hear, hear!
If one must troll or lay down flame bait, one should at least be clever about it. Simple sarcasm merely goes over the head of many moderators and should tend be avoided. Name calling is always boring.
You know, I'm starting to take issue with comments that protest the use of the M$, Micro$oft etc. memes. I know how something can get on your tits - articles that identify companies by their stock symbols is a particular irritant of mine.
It goes both ways. I'm irritated that `$' is being used as an intended insult. It's supposed to be a symbol of _earned_ wealth, which is never a bad thing in my book.
I had a lot more fun irritating a former roommate expanding MS to Multiple Sclerosis. At the time, it was the more recognized expansion of MS.
I don't mind using stock symbols as abbreviations either. I even recently proposed that when the CSC namespace runs out for Cisco bugids (we've been as wasteful as the IPV4 guys were) we use CSCO to identify an expanded namespace.
Personally, I think using "M$" as an abbreviation for Microsoft just identifies the user as an idiot. Same as if one would write "Ci$co". The abbreviation that *really* pisses me off is abbreviating Microsoft Windows as "win". "Win" has unfortunate and untrue connotations when applied to Microsoft Windows.
I guess I'll just be more fastidious and always write the names out in full, instead of occasionally using the stock symbol as an abbreviation.
In addition, Australia is not geographically positioned to have a high volume of international traffic flow through it.
Eh? It's one of the major nodes on the eastern side of the Pacific Ocean. One of two, the other being Japan.
Australia has always been a major player on the 'net.
I totally disagree with your other statements about C though. I'm sorry, it's not a dying language. There are lots and lots and lots of new, active C projects in FOSS and in business.
I think you're correct in a theoretical sort of way. C has succeeded in becoming The portable assembly language. It has succeeded in the world of ideas (OS implementation languages) as Microsoft has done in the market place - driven out all competition.
4GLs and things like Prolog never took off and it's sad that C++ and Java have so much current mindshare, but they are fads too.
Language-wise, only one, Dr. John McCarthy's LISP has withstood the test of time. For excellent reason. Syntactically, you can understand the rules in a matter of minutes. Practically, you can do complex things in a very small amount of code *and* it scales up.
I like to think of OO as the financial derivatives of the computer science world. Complex, sexy and dangerous as hell. When you get burned, you get really burned. But you sound like a genius when you're talking about it even when you're spewing nonsense[1].
For the long-term, I think we (on the functional programming side) will maintain our niche until everyone else sees how right we are. We're patient.
[1] See the Perl man pages perltoot(1), perltooc(1).
Yes, there are lots of jobs for good C (and COBOL) programmers, but there are lots of good C (and COBOL) programmers. The number of jobs needing these skills is shrinking faster than these guys are dying or retiring, so if you choose either of these languages, every job you go for you'll be up against people who are not only better than you but also more experienced than you.
True and ...
In any case the principal skill of a software person is not knowing language X, it's being able to learn (and become productive in) new languages, new libraries and new technologies quickly. The reason why this industry is fun to be in is because it changes so rapidly.
Very true.
If you do not know this book http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Style-Brian-Kernighan/dp/0070342075 inside and out, take the time to do so. That's the best advice you'll ever get.
Languages come and go. Style and taste in programming is timeless.
Nobody expects a recent graduate to write a kernel or a banking app!
Very true. In addition, no one expects a recent graduate to produce highly professional work either.
I think you're asking the wrong question. The kinds of skills you need in the work place just aren't taught in school. It's a hands on sort of thing and you will be most successful if you are language agnostic. You should be comfortable with the idea of getting handed a program in such-and-such language and expected to do something useful with it, regardless of whether you have had much (if any) experience with such-and-such language before. Knuth's Art of Programming books are useful in this regard.
Make sure you know the fundamentals. Having a good ground in data structures and algorithms is vital. Logical thinking about how you go about attacking problems is another.
And a secret: If I was interviewing you for a position and you were to quote something from The Elements of Programming Style at me (and could demonstrate that you knew what you were talking about), I'd likely halt the interview and attempt to hire you on the spot.
Is this like Microsoft asserting control over what programmers may code for Windows?"
No and that's stupid flame bait.
It's comparable to Stallman's hate against XEmacs .so loading facility and equally as idiotic.
Most climate change theories put the temperature shift at fractions of a degree every decade.
The climate change models are only based on fairly recent data (and the most accurate data is only a few years old).
The scare mongers (like Algore and company) are insisting that climate change is caused by people and the longest-term records show that the earth has undergone many different long-term climate changes like ice ages and subsequent global warming to get things back to "normal".
I would give the recent data putting temperatures as cooling in the last couple of years as much weight as I would put on data from the last 50 or 100 years. The earth has been around for billions of years and we do not have enough data to predict future trends without other variables being added in as "special sauce" to the computation.
FYI: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/paragraph
i argue that speed and efficency of information is useless of the information is no good. hell look at /. and how this supposed "wizdom of the group" thing fails hard.
See my earlier postings in this thread how I have used data similar to this in real life.
There is absolute gold to be found on slashdot. It requires a lot of work, patience and reading at -1. Suggest you learn how to use that big key on the left side of your keyboard labeled "shift" to make an uppercase letter at the start of each sentence. It's a lot easier than data mining on /., though equally as rewarding.
Arguably, signal cuts through noise. If millions of people are wrong about it but in random directions, the handful of people that are completely right about it, and the elite cadre who are just slightly more right than wrong about it, might turn into a usable few bits of info on the subject.
Precisely correct. Excellent summary.
Also note that assigning a value to "elite cadre" is critical. Ex: Al Gore is NOT an expert on the ecology of the earth, he is a politician. He is expert on begging people for campaign donations (and perhaps knowing when to drink tea so he is outside peeing when critical conversations are taking place in meetings he is supposed to be attending).
Are there any experts on it here who can briefly describe how effective (or not) the current techniques are at sifting gold from the silt?
I would imagine so. In the old days, we used to call this a "bullshit filter". So long as you have a good representative sample, statistical methods Just Plain Work. I described some of this in a previous message in this thread.
The biggest danger in any of this sort of work is wanting the results to come out the way you wish them to. If I took a direct poll of my friends and coworkers I talk to, the approval rating of the man bowling 129 in the White House basement would be just around 0, but that is obviously not a representative sample.
I think I wrote a /. journal entry on this topic. If I haven't, I should.
Disclaimer:
I'm from the old school of data mining and not up on the state of the art. And, I do not work for Google.
The real markets only collapsed because the government messed with them.
That's only part of the story. I'm a libertarian, but I've lived too long in the 3rd world to accept the idea that private enterprise is going to build certain critical infrastructure (like roads, sewers, etc.)
If the government hadn't made it profitable to make bad loans, the banks wouldn't have done it.
The bad loans are only the tip of the iceberg. The real monster is all the outstanding derivatives. I don't think anyone knows how big it really is, estimates vary by the hundreds of trillions of dollars how much it is, and the most pessimistic figures I've seen dwarf global GDP.
The bad loans weren't the root cause of the problem per se, the problem was that they were packaged into other financial instruments and sold as AAA debt. If they had been treated as the bad loans they truly were, we have enough regulation in place to deal with that.
The governmental blame lies in encouraging very smart people being required by law to do something really dumb (issue bad loans) and leaving the only (temporary) avenue of escape as doing something "innovative" outside the existing financial system.
It's kind of sad in a way. Bookies have had this all figured out for ages. They adjust odds on the bets (like financial derivative instruments) so that no matter which side of the bet wins, they end up paying out something less than they take in. All of the Wall Street bookies appear to have been betting on financial good times continuing forever and that is well-documented in history as being a major mistake.
Does this imply that we should move Wall Street to The Strip in Las Vegas? We would have probably been better off in the long run if it had been done before ...
Let's try to come up with regulations that actually work before we expand their use.
Hmmm, like the regulations that Wall Street got around by inventing new financial instruments that hadn't been regulated yet?
It seems that the answer someone got in an open questions period in an upper division Accounting class[1] I took - she asked for an explanation of derivatives and the answer was "I can't explain it here", is still true. But the reason is that no one probably understands the full extent of what has happened.
Markets are very, very, very easy to manipulate.
As are regulations for insiders with the right connections. Why are USians so outraged at miniscule bonuses being paid by AIG (contracted from before public bailout and specified as valid in the TARP), when they sent so many billions to their fellow banking buds?
[1] In 1996. The derivative time bomb got lit under impeached ex-President Clinton.
True and this is really, really old news. I recall around the time of a quake (I think the world series quake) in the SF area, a time so far back in the past that SCO were Good Guys, other more remote folk followed the aftermath of postings on ca.earthquakes and we got the first real data on what happened by determining machines that were down from nearby posters.
It turned out that that particular quake was practically underneath SCO in Santa Cruz and everyone was relieved to see a "We're not dead yet!" message from a poster within SCO.
I also used the KNX news radio station (which always switched to a call in format when there was an earthquake) in the LA area (on my car radio) to get an early indication of how bad it was. In the Northridge quake, I was about to head towards the freeway that suffered a fallen bridge (and killed the reckless motorcycle cop who went right off the new edge).
The capability has existed for three decades and some of us have been doing this for a *long* time.
OK, my bias up front, I work for Cisco, though not directly in the California project.
Cisco doesn't have integrated solutions. All the others provide storage, network, and compute integration with large, well-trained Professional Services orgs. Cisco has CCIEs in piles, but what do they know about anything but network gear?
Cisco has people like me and I'm far from alone.
I'm very picky about where I accept employment from and I CHOSE to work at Cisco even though I despise Northern California. For whatever it's worth.
Linux makes a powerful server, but its desktop applications (even OpenOffice) lag far behind their proprietary counterparts in features, or are non-existent (where's the Photoshop or InDesign clones?).
Who cares about clones? Why aren't Photoshop and InDesign (whatever that is) for sale on Linux? If they're so unique and valuable that Open Source alternatives haven't covered them, then it seems to me that someone is missing out on a software market.
I know I've been trolled, but I've rarely seen this point brought up.
The "Free as in beer" is the least important feature of Linux and other Open Source operating systems.
You missed the key point of the OP. Al Capone was prosecuted under the stipulation you quoted because that's INCOME tax. The OP specially asked about law relating to SALES tax.
Granted, that is correct. I did indeed misread that. The problem is the mixed jurisdictions here. Sales tax is local not federal and Al Capone was prosecuted under federal laws. Also, stolen property is conceptually (unearned) income in the same way that Gift Taxes are applied as income coming from gifts.
Although US federal income taxes apply to the profits from the sales of illegal drugs (and stolen property), I do not believe I've ever heard of States, etc. going after "lost" sales taxes from those sales. Given the way things are going in California, Arnold could possibly lead the way in that.
Another interesting question is, do bribes to public officials count as sales and should sales tax apply? I think so. It's not called "buying" for nothing. And given the current climate, should you pay capital gains tax on a bribe to a City Councilman who later gets elected Mayor? Would the shame of being treated as an inanimate commodity bring integrity back to the governments of the world? Probably not, alas.
They understand something Microsoft forgot 9 years ago, that version numbers are pointless
Actually they aren't pointless, but since you obviously have never worked in software before I won't give away your secret. Oh wait ...
Therein lies the problem. Although XP is several years old, it actually does every single thing a user needs from an operating system.
Actually, no it doesn't. It's klunky looking and slow. On my corporate issue Lenovo T60, I was amazed at how fast a machine it really was when I was permitted to wipe the "Enterprise" XP and replace it with RHEL.
I found it difficult to give up the multiple desktops I had become accustomed to in over a decade (starting way back from olvwm) and I also found it difficult to customize. It takes a few seconds and no internet access to fix the large key to the left of the `a' key issue (should be control not capslock) on both MacOS X and KDE.
The only thing I ever found pleasurable about Microsoft Windows XP was how I felt when I turned the machine off.
I despise the citrix applications I am forced to use, but at least I can run them on a decent desktop system.
Huge wall of text? Check.
Microsoft sycophantry? Check.
High userid? Check.
Lord and Lady pair, I love the smell of astroturf in the morning!
Is there precedent for prosecuting for failing to pay sales tax on stolen physical goods?
It's right there in black and white and never been repealed.
(From the 2008 US IRS guidelines http://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch12.html )
Illegal activities. Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Form 1040, line 21, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.
Thanks. I gave you a full response here: http://slashdot.org/~SL+Baur/journal/225315
None of your examples seemed worthwhile in terms of making me want to run out and implement them, though the `better Slashdot rss reader' is a gem of much value.
I'll grant that for those trapped in the Microsoft ghetto, PowerShell appears to be a Good Thing.