Depending on how long it was since you used basic last it might not be much harder to learn Python than to remember Basic.
That's very true. I just went over to the Python page and it look slike what I need. See, make a foolish state ment on/., and the masses will quickly point you to the answer! I suspect that most versions of BASIC that are out there and useful now would have syntax different enough from what I learned 25 years ago that it would be just as easy to learn the new syntax and command strucutre of a more modern language. The first few manual pages of Python look very promising.
Any good books you would recommend for reference? Commands, syntax, and examples are key - starting at "hello world" and learning the concept behind the bubble sort (no I am dating myself) isn't going to help me much. Also, since most of my "study" time is compressed into the last hous of the evening before I go to sleep, so online/digital sources lose out to dead trees for me.
Man, I would kill to get a simlple BASIC interpreter that has I/O functions that could handle NTFS. I deal with lots of data sometimes, and I don't want to write a VBasic program with a GUI so that I can run the program, then click a button to execute the code. Command line works fine for me, but I want it to be simple and fast to code. No, I don't want to fuss with declarations most of the time, and no, I dont' have time to learn a whole new langauge and mess with a compiler. I just want to write (essentially) a script and have it run. Why does everything have to be so @$%%ing complicated.
Yes, I grew up on apple basic, and even used qbasic until the mid-90s to do simple data sorting and transformations. Slow? maybe, but an extra minute of runtime on a script I might run twice a week never seemed to add up to a good reason to kill several days learning to program in C, or pull my hair out trying to get quick output in FORTRAN. I don't think I'd ever worry about speed now - I learned to count on 700ops/sec (550/sec on the PC), and that was fast enough for my needs in 1982. I suspect that a 2.8GHz processor can go a smidge faster than my old 6502, and that should keep up with my current datasets.;-)
Well, it would be far more impressive it if happened before laptops came out, but, well, it's a laptop that isn't constrained by needing a keyboard and monitor attached, or a battery in the case. There wasn't space to slip in 128MB of dedicated RAM? More likely there wasn't enough cooling capacity to handle a serious graphics processor.
This is not to say that it isn't cool - I'd love to get one for HT, if I thought I could hook it up an go (I'm time constrained right now...don't have time to fool around much). And don't worry, even if you put a great video processor in it and cut the price in half, the gaming crowd would still turn their noses up at it. They're always comparing whats on the market to what will be on the market in 6 months - which is normally considered a "baseline" for their comparisons.
Of course you're not. You had permission to break those messages and copy them from your professor. These are copyright by the Nazi government, who's permission I think you'll be hard pressed to get in writing. Once created, its copyrighted, and copyrights last for a billion years (well maybe not quite that long...yet). Unless you have your SS permission slip, best not distribute the code which is intended to break the messages.
(Yes this is humor, but I think it acutally does contain the DMCA requisites: you don't own/haven't licensed the copyright, the material is encrypted, a pre-made code is being distributed to break the encryption. Since you're simply downloading the code to help break the encryption, you're writing the code from scratch - hence the crack is being distributed)
You're going to need these anyway. Even the non-early adopter HD sets generally come with only one digital input. That's a bummer when you end up with three or four input devices that require a HDCP-compatible input. My Hitachi RP has one HDMI and a pair of component inputs. Now, that's enough for an updampling DVD player, a satellite dish or cable input, and a HTPC or HD VHS deck, but I'd hate to have to start switching wires just to flip between sources.
This doesn't just screw the early adopters, it will snag most anyone who buys an HD set this year and wants both HD-DVD and HD-(cable/sat) over a digital link.
For the record, I have a 51" RP set, and although I think its great in HD, a superbit DVD looks awfully good at tmy normal viewing distance. About the only thing that really makes a big difference on a set this small is football, because there's so much going on, especially in wide shots. Now, if I still had my 120" FP, I'd probbaly have a different opinion. But by the time I find a spot in my new house for an FP setup, this should be mostly hashed out (I hope).
The goverment doesn't care if they suck all the money from you (that's what taxes are for), but being called a terrorist will get you blacklisted forever. Or maybe that' if they call you a communist. Hrmmmmm...
And that's where a good portion of twenty-somethings get practially all their international news from. Sad, but true. Though, in their defense, The Daily Show tends to have more national and international facts than my local mid-market 5 o'clock news. By a long shot. And, it turns out that even though John Stewart clearly leans left, he's not above pointing out the weaknesses of the left. He just gets a little more satisfaction when he pokes fun at the right.
Actually, that should be just enough time to lose a good portion of our "corporate knowledge" re:manned missions. I'm not sure being an astronaut that is going to be looking at a 10 year (optimistically speaking) hiatus from flight is going to be a real career incentive. These folks tend to be driven and tenacious, but with the schedules the way they tend to slip, I don't think I'd stay in the corps. (I was never a real astronaut-candidate, though I considered it at one point early in my NASA career).
I'm not really sure that getting people into space ius really that big of a deal anyway, unless you plan on doing something other than invesigating the effects on humans in LEO. Most of what is done, that isn't just for show, is controlled remotely. I'm a big "Rah! Rah! Manned Space Flight!" kind of guy, but there really is a limit to the value we're getting for our manned space flight dollars. Right now, I think it's money down the tubes, but if we're really going to be ambitious, we need to be a bit more proactive in getting a replacement vehicle up before we lose the in house expertise in manned spaceflight. I mean, lets face it, the only people with orbital spaceflight experience in this hemisphere are the ones currently doing it at JSC. Lose them, and we'll get to start all over in a couple of decades when the next program is finally ready to get off the ground.
Well, I'm probably not the l33T H4x0r you expect. I started programming on an Apple II in the early 80s and managed to turn out some simple machine language programs for the 6502 in middle school. I don't do real admin anymore - I just don't have the time to keep up with it. My virus track record is merely a function of not opening stuff I don't trust. It's really not that hard. This exploit wouldn't affect me, either, if I used a Mac.
My comment about the "computer literate" had nothing to do with OS flaming. I was simply going with the market numbers, not making an OSX is crap statement. Most people buy something else (that would be true of everything but XP). The idea, or at least the marketing, is that Macs are for people who don't understand computers. Not "Bob" don't understand, but more in an "I don't want to fool with having to set it up" understand. If you understand computers, you're willing to put up with a bit more administration, if that happens to be the case. I'd put XP in the "hard to use" category, based on my experience in getting certain things to work right. The advantage is that some of those things weren't available for the mac at that time. The dig about other OSs being Advanced was not part of my comment.
Personally, if there were no cost to switch, and I could forget all the admin I have to do on my systems, I'd be happy to switch to something else. Unfortunately, it would probably mean several thousand dollars of downtime and I'd probably have to repurchase a good portion of my twenty grand in software. It's just not going to be in the budget. It's still more cost effective to waste two ro three thousand dollars of time a year on a known evil than spend the cash to change, and hope that there's no gremlins on the other side. Having been through OS changes at former employers, I'm still waiting for that advertised smooth transition and TCO to materialize.
Its just an unencrypted VOB rip with dvddecrypter. That way it will play with menus and such right from the hard disc with most software. DVDshrink offers the option to re-author and strip out all the extras manually, so I usually end up re-authoring on the fly from the full rip on HDD. It's a darned shame that lightning_uk didn't OSS his dvddecrypter, but I haven't really come up against any DVDs in my collection that it doens't rip properly...yet.
So, why allow customization of icons? That's the key area of the attack. People think they're opening an image, but its not. I know why. Pretty trumps Functional any day of the week. The problem isn't the OS, but the userbase. That and the "I'm bulletproof" attitude I hear from even neophyte mac users. *shrug* Any OS can be set up to be "secure" if you've got security conscious expert users and limited needs. I have about 6 windows boxes and one linux box, and haven't had a virus/trojan/worm affect the systems in the last decade (okay, technically the linux box is only a year old).
Most that I've seen have come in through email, but *suprise* I know better than to run a file with a.pif/.bat/.com/.exe extension. How freakin' hard is that? But you see people doing it everyday. And, as for win turning off extensions, what dumbass is so stupid that they try to open an image.jpg file, when they know darned well that none of their image files have an extension on them. But are they suspicious? Of course not...they're sheep.
To quote you, There is no way to compensate for an Administator who is computer illiterate., and that's exactly who you've got sitting in the chairs of home mac users. If they were computer literate, they'd likely have bought one of those other "hard to use" operating systems.
DRM. And I mean ugly, tight, restictive, ball-in-a-vice DRM.
There was no mention of compatibility with iPod, or any other player, that I read. This sounds more like an Audible-like service, but for music. Near total lock in to the Amazon format, without any portability.
DVDs do take serious storage. I'd like to end up with a media center at some point, so I'm ripping as I get space/time. I picked up an 8 bay firewire tower on ebay for $300, and have been adding 200-250GB HDs as the prices have come down. I'm up to about 1.8TB, but I've been taking stuff of the TiVo, too, so I still don't have quite enough space to put all 240-250 DVDs onto HDD...yet. It think with the 500GBs come down to the $100 level, I'll be in good shape.
My biggest problem with DVDs is that the writables are so delicate. I've stared compressing the heck out of them with DVDshrink (the little one doesn't care about compression artifacts) so that the feature fits on the inner half of the diameter. Most of the scratches happen near the edge, and cause freezing and stuttering. Also, if she forgets and grabs the edge with her fingers, the prints stay out of the data area. Mostly. I think we've been through 3 Finding Nemo discs.
The vulnerability isn't always plugged in
on
First Mac OS X Virus?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Everybody seems so certain that this is a non-starter on OSX because it requires some user intervention to propagate. I have bad news for you: there are clueless Mac users out there, too. These are probably the same folks who will click on a web popup to "see the lastest hollywood gaff" and then "accept" the untrusted executable when windows warns about the download to be executed. And they're the same ones who will dutifully click their bank url in an email and login to make sure their information is correct .
Never understimate the power of the incomptenece of 20% of your userbase.
You have localities that spend less than they take in in tax revenue by chance? Y'all need to come talk to floks down south of the mason-dixon line, and let them in on your secret.
No, I take that back. My tax rates are less than $8 per $1000 of assessed (assessed at full mkt value, which translates to about $40-50k under actual resale). On second thought, you'd better stay up north!;-)
Yeah, all my CDs are ripped to HDD as FLAC as soon as they come out of the case. The originals reside in a binder, the cases in boxes in the attic, and a "working copy" is used by my daughter (she has a cd player she's allowed to use in her room, and we have a single dvd player in the living room for her use). The bonus of DVDs is that after I rip them, I strip out all the extras and menus, so when she puts a disc in it plays immediately. All of my DVDs are in a jukebox in the basement, so my archival storage = my working set, but only because they are never touched.
I'm going to say that you are buying a "single format license to a copyrighted work, which is embodied as a physycal artifact, the destruction of which terminates your license. The pyhsical nature of the medium affords you certain limited rights (first-sale doctrine), but the content contained therein must remain, or an infringing action has occured."
Now, you're bull-shit-o-meter should be registering pretty high right now, but I'm guessing that's what the RIAA would claim. The RIAA is claiming that the replacement cost is so low that there should be no need to back up the media.
You're not concerned about that cable, currently floating around at geosyncronous orbit and passing by most of the communications satellites? Murphy's Law dictates that between several billion and several hundred billion dollars worth of space hardware will get hit by the debris. If I were Lloyds, I'd pass on this one.
Thank goodness having 60,000km of 10E6psi cable floating around the earth, crossing the path of geosynchronous satellites used for a good portiona of all communications on this planet, wouldn't cause any foreseeable problems.
The other thing to consider as that your $50 lamps, aside from poor color rendition and high power consumption, will only last 50-100 hours of operation, with some new ones pushing the 120-130 hour range.
There's some merit to this, actually, though it has certain limits. I'd love to know when I call someone's cell (especially those who have no landline) whether I'm going to interrupt them in a meeting or during a meal. A lot of folks will not put their phones on vibe or silent - some are inconsiderate, some are just forgetful - when they don't really want to be disturbed. When I call, I have a reason - I rarely call "just to chat". I want someone's full attention, and if they are busy, I'd rather get voicemail than interrupt. The flip side is the occasional time I might call just to talk. I don't want to interrupt something important with a useless call. I'll just hang up.
Then, there's the reason to want forced ring-through. If something happens to a family member, I want someone to interrupt me, whatever I happen to be doing. Even if that just happens to be a vibe when I've got the cell set for silent. If it's serious, I'd rather be rude. I'd probably not give out the "ring anywhere" access to most folks, or put a block in the phone (say, a per-number access level). Likewise, if I have an urgent message, I'd like to make sure the person gets notified of my call.
This won't fix the problem of rude users who - rather than leaving the room - will take a call anywhere, anytime, and talk at full volume. That's not something technology can't fix (though I would recommend a location-specific bark-collar device for repeat-offenders while they're in otherwise quiet spaces)
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Depending on how long it was since you used basic last it might not be much harder to learn Python than to remember Basic.
/., and the masses will quickly point you to the answer! I suspect that most versions of BASIC that are out there and useful now would have syntax different enough from what I learned 25 years ago that it would be just as easy to learn the new syntax and command strucutre of a more modern language. The first few manual pages of Python look very promising.
That's very true. I just went over to the Python page and it look slike what I need. See, make a foolish state ment on
Any good books you would recommend for reference? Commands, syntax, and examples are key - starting at "hello world" and learning the concept behind the bubble sort (no I am dating myself) isn't going to help me much. Also, since most of my "study" time is compressed into the last hous of the evening before I go to sleep, so online/digital sources lose out to dead trees for me.
TIA
Man, I would kill to get a simlple BASIC interpreter that has I/O functions that could handle NTFS. I deal with lots of data sometimes, and I don't want to write a VBasic program with a GUI so that I can run the program, then click a button to execute the code. Command line works fine for me, but I want it to be simple and fast to code. No, I don't want to fuss with declarations most of the time, and no, I dont' have time to learn a whole new langauge and mess with a compiler. I just want to write (essentially) a script and have it run. Why does everything have to be so @$%%ing complicated.
;-)
Yes, I grew up on apple basic, and even used qbasic until the mid-90s to do simple data sorting and transformations. Slow? maybe, but an extra minute of runtime on a script I might run twice a week never seemed to add up to a good reason to kill several days learning to program in C, or pull my hair out trying to get quick output in FORTRAN. I don't think I'd ever worry about speed now - I learned to count on 700ops/sec (550/sec on the PC), and that was fast enough for my needs in 1982. I suspect that a 2.8GHz processor can go a smidge faster than my old 6502, and that should keep up with my current datasets.
Well, it would be far more impressive it if happened before laptops came out, but, well, it's a laptop that isn't constrained by needing a keyboard and monitor attached, or a battery in the case. There wasn't space to slip in 128MB of dedicated RAM? More likely there wasn't enough cooling capacity to handle a serious graphics processor.
This is not to say that it isn't cool - I'd love to get one for HT, if I thought I could hook it up an go (I'm time constrained right now...don't have time to fool around much). And don't worry, even if you put a great video processor in it and cut the price in half, the gaming crowd would still turn their noses up at it. They're always comparing whats on the market to what will be on the market in 6 months - which is normally considered a "baseline" for their comparisons.
the Bose Wave Radio...I can plugin the iPod into this too.. and get great sound...
;-)
Well, one out of two ain't bad
Yeah,m but where'd they find the donor duck for his vocal chord replacement surgery?
Of course you're not. You had permission to break those messages and copy them from your professor. These are copyright by the Nazi government, who's permission I think you'll be hard pressed to get in writing. Once created, its copyrighted, and copyrights last for a billion years (well maybe not quite that long...yet). Unless you have your SS permission slip, best not distribute the code which is intended to break the messages.
(Yes this is humor, but I think it acutally does contain the DMCA requisites: you don't own/haven't licensed the copyright, the material is encrypted, a pre-made code is being distributed to break the encryption. Since you're simply downloading the code to help break the encryption, you're writing the code from scratch - hence the crack is being distributed)
You're going to need these anyway. Even the non-early adopter HD sets generally come with only one digital input. That's a bummer when you end up with three or four input devices that require a HDCP-compatible input. My Hitachi RP has one HDMI and a pair of component inputs. Now, that's enough for an updampling DVD player, a satellite dish or cable input, and a HTPC or HD VHS deck, but I'd hate to have to start switching wires just to flip between sources.
This doesn't just screw the early adopters, it will snag most anyone who buys an HD set this year and wants both HD-DVD and HD-(cable/sat) over a digital link.
For the record, I have a 51" RP set, and although I think its great in HD, a superbit DVD looks awfully good at tmy normal viewing distance. About the only thing that really makes a big difference on a set this small is football, because there's so much going on, especially in wide shots. Now, if I still had my 120" FP, I'd probbaly have a different opinion. But by the time I find a spot in my new house for an FP setup, this should be mostly hashed out (I hope).
The goverment doesn't care if they suck all the money from you (that's what taxes are for), but being called a terrorist will get you blacklisted forever. Or maybe that' if they call you a communist. Hrmmmmm...
And that's where a good portion of twenty-somethings get practially all their international news from. Sad, but true. Though, in their defense, The Daily Show tends to have more national and international facts than my local mid-market 5 o'clock news. By a long shot. And, it turns out that even though John Stewart clearly leans left, he's not above pointing out the weaknesses of the left. He just gets a little more satisfaction when he pokes fun at the right.
Actually, that should be just enough time to lose a good portion of our "corporate knowledge" re:manned missions. I'm not sure being an astronaut that is going to be looking at a 10 year (optimistically speaking) hiatus from flight is going to be a real career incentive. These folks tend to be driven and tenacious, but with the schedules the way they tend to slip, I don't think I'd stay in the corps. (I was never a real astronaut-candidate, though I considered it at one point early in my NASA career).
I'm not really sure that getting people into space ius really that big of a deal anyway, unless you plan on doing something other than invesigating the effects on humans in LEO. Most of what is done, that isn't just for show, is controlled remotely. I'm a big "Rah! Rah! Manned Space Flight!" kind of guy, but there really is a limit to the value we're getting for our manned space flight dollars. Right now, I think it's money down the tubes, but if we're really going to be ambitious, we need to be a bit more proactive in getting a replacement vehicle up before we lose the in house expertise in manned spaceflight. I mean, lets face it, the only people with orbital spaceflight experience in this hemisphere are the ones currently doing it at JSC. Lose them, and we'll get to start all over in a couple of decades when the next program is finally ready to get off the ground.
Well, I'm probably not the l33T H4x0r you expect. I started programming on an Apple II in the early 80s and managed to turn out some simple machine language programs for the 6502 in middle school. I don't do real admin anymore - I just don't have the time to keep up with it. My virus track record is merely a function of not opening stuff I don't trust. It's really not that hard. This exploit wouldn't affect me, either, if I used a Mac.
My comment about the "computer literate" had nothing to do with OS flaming. I was simply going with the market numbers, not making an OSX is crap statement. Most people buy something else (that would be true of everything but XP). The idea, or at least the marketing, is that Macs are for people who don't understand computers. Not "Bob" don't understand, but more in an "I don't want to fool with having to set it up" understand. If you understand computers, you're willing to put up with a bit more administration, if that happens to be the case. I'd put XP in the "hard to use" category, based on my experience in getting certain things to work right. The advantage is that some of those things weren't available for the mac at that time. The dig about other OSs being Advanced was not part of my comment.
Personally, if there were no cost to switch, and I could forget all the admin I have to do on my systems, I'd be happy to switch to something else. Unfortunately, it would probably mean several thousand dollars of downtime and I'd probably have to repurchase a good portion of my twenty grand in software. It's just not going to be in the budget. It's still more cost effective to waste two ro three thousand dollars of time a year on a known evil than spend the cash to change, and hope that there's no gremlins on the other side. Having been through OS changes at former employers, I'm still waiting for that advertised smooth transition and TCO to materialize.
Its just an unencrypted VOB rip with dvddecrypter. That way it will play with menus and such right from the hard disc with most software. DVDshrink offers the option to re-author and strip out all the extras manually, so I usually end up re-authoring on the fly from the full rip on HDD. It's a darned shame that lightning_uk didn't OSS his dvddecrypter, but I haven't really come up against any DVDs in my collection that it doens't rip properly...yet.
So, why allow customization of icons? That's the key area of the attack. People think they're opening an image, but its not. I know why. Pretty trumps Functional any day of the week. The problem isn't the OS, but the userbase. That and the "I'm bulletproof" attitude I hear from even neophyte mac users. *shrug* Any OS can be set up to be "secure" if you've got security conscious expert users and limited needs. I have about 6 windows boxes and one linux box, and haven't had a virus/trojan/worm affect the systems in the last decade (okay, technically the linux box is only a year old).
.pif/.bat/.com/.exe extension. How freakin' hard is that? But you see people doing it everyday. And, as for win turning off extensions, what dumbass is so stupid that they try to open an image.jpg file, when they know darned well that none of their image files have an extension on them. But are they suspicious? Of course not...they're sheep.
Most that I've seen have come in through email, but *suprise* I know better than to run a file with a
To quote you, There is no way to compensate for an Administator who is computer illiterate., and that's exactly who you've got sitting in the chairs of home mac users. If they were computer literate, they'd likely have bought one of those other "hard to use" operating systems.
DRM. And I mean ugly, tight, restictive, ball-in-a-vice DRM.
There was no mention of compatibility with iPod, or any other player, that I read. This sounds more like an Audible-like service, but for music. Near total lock in to the Amazon format, without any portability.
DVDs do take serious storage. I'd like to end up with a media center at some point, so I'm ripping as I get space/time. I picked up an 8 bay firewire tower on ebay for $300, and have been adding 200-250GB HDs as the prices have come down. I'm up to about 1.8TB, but I've been taking stuff of the TiVo, too, so I still don't have quite enough space to put all 240-250 DVDs onto HDD...yet. It think with the 500GBs come down to the $100 level, I'll be in good shape.
My biggest problem with DVDs is that the writables are so delicate. I've stared compressing the heck out of them with DVDshrink (the little one doesn't care about compression artifacts) so that the feature fits on the inner half of the diameter. Most of the scratches happen near the edge, and cause freezing and stuttering. Also, if she forgets and grabs the edge with her fingers, the prints stay out of the data area. Mostly. I think we've been through 3 Finding Nemo discs.
Everybody seems so certain that this is a non-starter on OSX because it requires some user intervention to propagate. I have bad news for you: there are clueless Mac users out there, too. These are probably the same folks who will click on a web popup to "see the lastest hollywood gaff" and then "accept" the untrusted executable when windows warns about the download to be executed. And they're the same ones who will dutifully click their bank url in an email and login to make sure their information is correct .
Never understimate the power of the incomptenece of 20% of your userbase.
You have localities that spend less than they take in in tax revenue by chance? Y'all need to come talk to floks down south of the mason-dixon line, and let them in on your secret.
;-)
No, I take that back. My tax rates are less than $8 per $1000 of assessed (assessed at full mkt value, which translates to about $40-50k under actual resale). On second thought, you'd better stay up north!
Yeah, all my CDs are ripped to HDD as FLAC as soon as they come out of the case. The originals reside in a binder, the cases in boxes in the attic, and a "working copy" is used by my daughter (she has a cd player she's allowed to use in her room, and we have a single dvd player in the living room for her use). The bonus of DVDs is that after I rip them, I strip out all the extras and menus, so when she puts a disc in it plays immediately. All of my DVDs are in a jukebox in the basement, so my archival storage = my working set, but only because they are never touched.
I'm going to say that you are buying a "single format license to a copyrighted work, which is embodied as a physycal artifact, the destruction of which terminates your license. The pyhsical nature of the medium affords you certain limited rights (first-sale doctrine), but the content contained therein must remain, or an infringing action has occured."
Now, you're bull-shit-o-meter should be registering pretty high right now, but I'm guessing that's what the RIAA would claim. The RIAA is claiming that the replacement cost is so low that there should be no need to back up the media.
You clearly don't have a three year old in your house.
You're not concerned about that cable, currently floating around at geosyncronous orbit and passing by most of the communications satellites? Murphy's Law dictates that between several billion and several hundred billion dollars worth of space hardware will get hit by the debris. If I were Lloyds, I'd pass on this one.
Thank goodness having 60,000km of 10E6psi cable floating around the earth, crossing the path of geosynchronous satellites used for a good portiona of all communications on this planet, wouldn't cause any foreseeable problems.
The other thing to consider as that your $50 lamps, aside from poor color rendition and high power consumption, will only last 50-100 hours of operation, with some new ones pushing the 120-130 hour range.
It's even smaller at the size of "2 sugar cubes".
Damned europeans and their metric units. Hrumph.
There's some merit to this, actually, though it has certain limits. I'd love to know when I call someone's cell (especially those who have no landline) whether I'm going to interrupt them in a meeting or during a meal. A lot of folks will not put their phones on vibe or silent - some are inconsiderate, some are just forgetful - when they don't really want to be disturbed. When I call, I have a reason - I rarely call "just to chat". I want someone's full attention, and if they are busy, I'd rather get voicemail than interrupt. The flip side is the occasional time I might call just to talk. I don't want to interrupt something important with a useless call. I'll just hang up.
Then, there's the reason to want forced ring-through. If something happens to a family member, I want someone to interrupt me, whatever I happen to be doing. Even if that just happens to be a vibe when I've got the cell set for silent. If it's serious, I'd rather be rude. I'd probably not give out the "ring anywhere" access to most folks, or put a block in the phone (say, a per-number access level). Likewise, if I have an urgent message, I'd like to make sure the person gets notified of my call.
This won't fix the problem of rude users who - rather than leaving the room - will take a call anywhere, anytime, and talk at full volume. That's not something technology can't fix (though I would recommend a location-specific bark-collar device for repeat-offenders while they're in otherwise quiet spaces)