what would prevent MS from basically thumbing their nose at EU, and saying fine, we'll just withdraw all new products from you market...and if things got worse, just plain stop supporting the products currently out there in EU.
Short answer: Wall Street.
Expanding a bit, MS can't just throw away that revenue from their EU sales. It will cause their stock to tank, killing their employee incentive schemes, wiping away their market cap, and making their cash reserves shrink away. It will cause a shareholder revolt and the forced resignation of the Board of Directors and possibly all C-level officers.
A multinational corporation of MS' size just can't gamble on revenue loss. Heck, most major corporations are too afraid to gamble on innovative ideas that might cause a minor shrinkage in revenue, MS being no exception. And the EU revenue is more than a minor part of MS' operations.
Be aware though that WordPad has a nasty habit of inserting superfluous spaces at the end of lines though. Even if you open a plain-text only document, you cannot reliably paste text into it and/or out of it if that text relies on no extra characters being added (like some certificates for example).
I found this out the hard way when I received a new SSL cert I had to install. The cert was attached as a plaintext file, and WordPad is my default viewer for that, so I sat scratching my head as the server kept refusing to install it, until someone suggested to try and open the attachment in NotePad and paste it from there into my vi session.
IE, on the other hand, is really very well coded. You can feed it random garbage almost indefinitely and it stands up fine
What do you think a buffer overflow is, but random garbage being fed to a program? And why do almost all exploits against IE come down to exploiting either buffer overflows or bad input validation?
I'm sorry, but I have a full set of IDS signatures that prove the lie in your statement.
Company towns, in the sense that you are referring to them (laws unto themselves), no longer exist within our borders.
Yet they once existed in the United States. They still exist (or something close to it) in the 'Free Trade Zones' in the Phillipines and Indonesia. They prove that it is possible to wield power equal to that of the state, without being a state. All that is needed to force someone to do your bidding is power, and power is more than just state-sanctioned force; power is essentially the capability to end someone's life, the way in which this is exercised or what justification is given is irrelevant.
If you can't focus on the relevant, you're going to be ignored, at least, by me.
Since obviously stopped thinking for yourself and merely stick to Randian dogma, I think you are virtually ignoring me anyway. No skin off my nose. Just remember that if you persist in being naive, chances are good that it is you who will end up being screwed.
No; Fascist implies they work to do so via means of governmental action.
Governmental action is by no means a requisite for Fascism. All of Mussolini, Franco and Hitler were rather insistent on the primacy of a strong single leader; Hitler went in fact so far as to designate it the primary principle of his brand of Fascism: the Führerprinzip.
Liberal: "I'm free to try; you're free to try and stop me."
That's Classical Liberalism, verging on Libertarianism, as you righly point out. However, true adherents to both philosophies do realise that an individual cannot make decisions for other individuals, especially if those decisions force a sacrifice on others. Therefore, in that definition, Adrian Veidt is no liberal, nor a Liberal.
Myself, I think the best political classification for Ozymandias is "Whacko".
Oh, I agree. I tend to take the Orwellian route, and just mark these kind of people as totalitarians. After all is said and done, whether you're murdered because the State thinks it's necessary, or because the Leader thinks it, you're dead anyway.
the conspiracy in Watchmen is non-governmental: It's actually an exceedingly liberal private citizen (Adrian/Ozymandias) who is controlling public opinion and worldview.
I respectfully submit that when a person starts to think that they can cure all humanity's ills by themselves, that they are the only enlightened leader capable of doing so, and that the end justifies the means, even if the means is killing millions, that that person has no right to any political classification but Fascist.
If they were to proclaim it was in service of the greater good, of which they are merely the executive officer, then they might make a claim to the classification of Communist (specifically a Marxist-Leninist, 'vanguard of the proletariat' and all that).
In no way can it be claimed they are a liberal, not even in the distorted US meaning of the word.
This message brought to you by your local Political Education Officer.
Come hang out with us in Europe for a while- see how the public sector works, watch people with PhDs in Astrophysics give math lessons to high-schoolers. While you are at it, have fun forking over 40% or more of your income in taxes,
You forget the services you got for free before you started paying that 40%. Things like healthcare, primary education, well-funded universities, and depending on location, a scholarship/student loan with no strings attached.
And then I'm not even talking about the things you continue to benefit from after graduating and starting to pay those horrid taxes: excellent road systems, decent to excellent public transport, low crime rates because social security removes one primary cause of crime, abject poverty.
If you don't think you get your money's worth, I suggest you move off to the United States.
and don't bother trying to start a business cause you won't be able to fire anyone you hire, even if its running you into the ground.
Patent bullshit. Rules vary in strictness, but all over Europe it is easy to fire someone for cause, and if you can prove economic necessity, it should be easy to downsize. Down here in the Netherlands, these latter decisions must be approved by the local labour agency, and they act as all but a rubber stamp for employers.
One thing I do grant you, is that regulations tend to favour big corporations over SMEs. But the US is not much different, although the numbers suggest otherwise: a lot of SMEs in the US are franchising operations, nothing more than sales arms of the big corps where a poor shmuck is paying for his dream by taking all the risk for, and paying most of his profit to, the parent company.
Sorry, but your translation is faulty. The use of the word 'seien' expresses uncertainty about the truth, it expresses the belief of the one making the statement, not a fact.
So the correct translation would be: "The information is not being kept secret because it is supposed to be valuable, but it is supposed to be valuable because it is being kept secret".
This is a significant difference, so I felt it needed correcting.
Anyone who read the link you provided can see just how you're weaselling.
What's in there is MS marketing Win2k to mobile users specifically. Not to Win9x users specifically. The rest of your argument rests on conflating laptop users with the 90% of the market that supposedly uses Windows.
Nice try, but noone but idiots and shills are going to buy that.
Nice try yourself. You can't throw around the old and tired 90% figure as the existing userbase for Win2k upgrades, and then when called upon the fact that Win2k was marketed at a fraction of that market (the corporate accounts), suddenly come up with mobile use. Because, quite frankly, that was (especially in 2000) also but a mere fraction of that '90%'.
Win2k was marketed at corporate use (a fact I don't see you denying). Corporate use was majority NT4, which, if you actually have any enterprise IT experience, you would have known.
But I don't expect facts to sway you. Your posting history gives you away as yet another MS shill. I bet you complain about being modded down for Linux criticism as well?
Give me one link to show that Win2k was marketed by MS at the home market of Win9x users. One link. I dare you.
They were promising (as they had been doing since the Cairo project) a unification of the NT/DOS lines of Windows, but Win2k was running late, so they scrapped the consumer bits and marketed Win2k primarily at the corporate accounts, so that they at least had something to show for years of promises.
This is pretty much common knowledge, and publications in 2001 and MS' own marketing materials tend to confirm it.
Since Windows 2000 was explicitly not marketed as an upgrade for Win9x users, I think he means the expectations of NT4 users. I'd have to agree, NT4 from SP4 onwards was a pretty decent workstation OS. Too bad the NT line went down the tubes after NT5.1
The 'no warming since 1998' conjecture is a particularly heinous misrepresentation that was mentioned in the Linzen discussion this week. Basically, 1998 was a record El Nino year, so of course everything after that looks like a decrease.
A statistical outlier was cherry-picked to massage the problem away. Treat everyone bringing this up the same as the 'volcanoes are the cause of global warming' ostriches.
Try and trim the releases down to every 12 months (or less!) and drop the "when it's ready" attitude because that just drives people away.
I wouldn't know about that. I switched to Debian somewhere in 2002 (during the potato/woody crossover), and it definitely was a fringe distribution at that time. The big players were Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake.
Since that day, I have seen both Debian itself and Debian derivatives like Linspire and Ubuntu making lots of headway. Debian is very popular as a base distro to start from because:
The main archive is fully redistributable Free Software.
The very strict packaging policy gives developers a stable base distro to build from.
I don't think the Debian project being very careful stops it from being popular. It might drive some people away, but I don't think that people that measure software quality by the amount of official release deadlines really are the kind of people the Debian project should care about.
If you look at those that advocate Debian the loudest, I see three distinct groups:
Server administrators who want a stable environment and have no requirements for the latest and greatest software.
Developers who require a basic stable distro to build their own software upon.
And a subset of 2: desktop users, both hobbyist and professional, who are willing to do or have done for them a bit of development/debugging to get a workstation install tailored to their personal needs (these tend to run unstable).
Debian succesfully meets the needs of those people, and that is all it should care about. The fanboys who want to brag about living on the bleeding edge can either try unstable, or they should move to Fedora Core or Gentoo, which specifically pander to their needs anyway.
Nonsense. Teachers forbid the citing of encyclopedias because they are at best secondary sources. And since the academic norm is to only consider primary sources valid, it is merely common sense to instill that norm as soon as possible.
Last time I tried it, apt-get install without arguments worked. But perhaps I misremember, it has been some time, and I don't have a test system handy (nor the time) to try it out.
I guess you don't remember the ruckus that was raised when the Clinton administration gave a survey to Marines asking if they'd be willing to fire upon American civilians in order to enforce gun control laws.
...Google has problems, and instead of calling upon Google to fix them, Businessweek suggests they hire a Chief Marketing Officer?!
If even the people who target CxOs admit implicitly that all a Chief Marketing Officer does is try to put spin on problems, then what does that say about Marketing in general?
And yet the financial world keeps complaining that there is not enough consolidation in the German market, that there are too many entities. In other words, despite the red tape, Germany has a thriving SME sector, one that is so healthy that large corps complain about it, because it 'fragments the market' (and here I thought that more competition was a good thing).
I don't mind that my old-style DS has a slightly less brilliant display. If only it had a !@#$% anti-reflective coating. In bright daylight it is virtually unusable.
OTOH, it seems that the touch screen means that strategy game publishers are definitely looking seriously at the DS. I've seen a few really good strategy game (turn-based no less!) in the 2006 lineup. I can't wait for Europa Universalis.
This type of argument is by no means invariably fallacious, but the strength of the argument is inversely proportional to the number of steps between A and Z, and directly proportional to the causal strength of the connections between adjacent steps. If there are many intervening steps, and the causal connections between them are weak, or even unknown, then the resulting argument will be very weak, if not downright fallacious.
So, no, unless you can point out that the chain of causality is too weak to justify it, the slippery slope is not a logical fallacy.
It's clear that PnP games lack the visuals, special effects and dynamic movements of a MMO world.
It is not so clear to me. When my party was almost killed by a bear a few weeks back, I don't think any visual effects designer could as effectively portrayed that bear as terrifyingly as my players minds' eyes could. The human imagination is after all not bound by the constraints of technological possibility; thus a party of good role-players with fertile imaginations and a merely competent GM can have a much more spectacular experience than any computer game can give.
Slashdot Mirror
Short answer: Wall Street.
Expanding a bit, MS can't just throw away that revenue from their EU sales. It will cause their stock to tank, killing their employee incentive schemes, wiping away their market cap, and making their cash reserves shrink away. It will cause a shareholder revolt and the forced resignation of the Board of Directors and possibly all C-level officers.
A multinational corporation of MS' size just can't gamble on revenue loss. Heck, most major corporations are too afraid to gamble on innovative ideas that might cause a minor shrinkage in revenue, MS being no exception. And the EU revenue is more than a minor part of MS' operations.
MartBe aware though that WordPad has a nasty habit of inserting superfluous spaces at the end of lines though. Even if you open a plain-text only document, you cannot reliably paste text into it and/or out of it if that text relies on no extra characters being added (like some certificates for example).
I found this out the hard way when I received a new SSL cert I had to install. The cert was attached as a plaintext file, and WordPad is my default viewer for that, so I sat scratching my head as the server kept refusing to install it, until someone suggested to try and open the attachment in NotePad and paste it from there into my vi session.
MartWhat do you think a buffer overflow is, but random garbage being fed to a program? And why do almost all exploits against IE come down to exploiting either buffer overflows or bad input validation?
I'm sorry, but I have a full set of IDS signatures that prove the lie in your statement.
MartYet they once existed in the United States. They still exist (or something close to it) in the 'Free Trade Zones' in the Phillipines and Indonesia. They prove that it is possible to wield power equal to that of the state, without being a state. All that is needed to force someone to do your bidding is power, and power is more than just state-sanctioned force; power is essentially the capability to end someone's life, the way in which this is exercised or what justification is given is irrelevant.
Since obviously stopped thinking for yourself and merely stick to Randian dogma, I think you are virtually ignoring me anyway. No skin off my nose. Just remember that if you persist in being naive, chances are good that it is you who will end up being screwed.
MartWhy ask if you know the answer already? Just stirring up shit?
MartNo, he is not. Two words: Company Town.
Go read some history books. Then come back and be considered something more than "-1, Naive" at best.
MartGovernmental action is by no means a requisite for Fascism. All of Mussolini, Franco and Hitler were rather insistent on the primacy of a strong single leader; Hitler went in fact so far as to designate it the primary principle of his brand of Fascism: the Führerprinzip.
That's Classical Liberalism, verging on Libertarianism, as you righly point out. However, true adherents to both philosophies do realise that an individual cannot make decisions for other individuals, especially if those decisions force a sacrifice on others. Therefore, in that definition, Adrian Veidt is no liberal, nor a Liberal.
Oh, I agree. I tend to take the Orwellian route, and just mark these kind of people as totalitarians. After all is said and done, whether you're murdered because the State thinks it's necessary, or because the Leader thinks it, you're dead anyway.
MartI respectfully submit that when a person starts to think that they can cure all humanity's ills by themselves, that they are the only enlightened leader capable of doing so, and that the end justifies the means, even if the means is killing millions, that that person has no right to any political classification but Fascist.
If they were to proclaim it was in service of the greater good, of which they are merely the executive officer, then they might make a claim to the classification of Communist (specifically a Marxist-Leninist, 'vanguard of the proletariat' and all that).
In no way can it be claimed they are a liberal, not even in the distorted US meaning of the word.
This message brought to you by your local Political Education Officer.
MartYou forget the services you got for free before you started paying that 40%. Things like healthcare, primary education, well-funded universities, and depending on location, a scholarship/student loan with no strings attached.
And then I'm not even talking about the things you continue to benefit from after graduating and starting to pay those horrid taxes: excellent road systems, decent to excellent public transport, low crime rates because social security removes one primary cause of crime, abject poverty.
If you don't think you get your money's worth, I suggest you move off to the United States.
Patent bullshit. Rules vary in strictness, but all over Europe it is easy to fire someone for cause, and if you can prove economic necessity, it should be easy to downsize. Down here in the Netherlands, these latter decisions must be approved by the local labour agency, and they act as all but a rubber stamp for employers.
One thing I do grant you, is that regulations tend to favour big corporations over SMEs. But the US is not much different, although the numbers suggest otherwise: a lot of SMEs in the US are franchising operations, nothing more than sales arms of the big corps where a poor shmuck is paying for his dream by taking all the risk for, and paying most of his profit to, the parent company.
MartSorry, but your translation is faulty. The use of the word 'seien' expresses uncertainty about the truth, it expresses the belief of the one making the statement, not a fact.
So the correct translation would be: "The information is not being kept secret because it is supposed to be valuable, but it is supposed to be valuable because it is being kept secret".
This is a significant difference, so I felt it needed correcting.
MartAnyone who read the link you provided can see just how you're weaselling.
What's in there is MS marketing Win2k to mobile users specifically. Not to Win9x users specifically. The rest of your argument rests on conflating laptop users with the 90% of the market that supposedly uses Windows.
Nice try, but noone but idiots and shills are going to buy that.
MartNice try yourself. You can't throw around the old and tired 90% figure as the existing userbase for Win2k upgrades, and then when called upon the fact that Win2k was marketed at a fraction of that market (the corporate accounts), suddenly come up with mobile use. Because, quite frankly, that was (especially in 2000) also but a mere fraction of that '90%'.
Win2k was marketed at corporate use (a fact I don't see you denying). Corporate use was majority NT4, which, if you actually have any enterprise IT experience, you would have known.
But I don't expect facts to sway you. Your posting history gives you away as yet another MS shill. I bet you complain about being modded down for Linux criticism as well?
MartGive me one link to show that Win2k was marketed by MS at the home market of Win9x users. One link. I dare you.
They were promising (as they had been doing since the Cairo project) a unification of the NT/DOS lines of Windows, but Win2k was running late, so they scrapped the consumer bits and marketed Win2k primarily at the corporate accounts, so that they at least had something to show for years of promises.
This is pretty much common knowledge, and publications in 2001 and MS' own marketing materials tend to confirm it.
MartSince Windows 2000 was explicitly not marketed as an upgrade for Win9x users, I think he means the expectations of NT4 users. I'd have to agree, NT4 from SP4 onwards was a pretty decent workstation OS. Too bad the NT line went down the tubes after NT5.1
MartThe 'no warming since 1998' conjecture is a particularly heinous misrepresentation that was mentioned in the Linzen discussion this week. Basically, 1998 was a record El Nino year, so of course everything after that looks like a decrease.
A statistical outlier was cherry-picked to massage the problem away. Treat everyone bringing this up the same as the 'volcanoes are the cause of global warming' ostriches.
MartI wouldn't know about that. I switched to Debian somewhere in 2002 (during the potato/woody crossover), and it definitely was a fringe distribution at that time. The big players were Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake.
Since that day, I have seen both Debian itself and Debian derivatives like Linspire and Ubuntu making lots of headway. Debian is very popular as a base distro to start from because:
I don't think the Debian project being very careful stops it from being popular. It might drive some people away, but I don't think that people that measure software quality by the amount of official release deadlines really are the kind of people the Debian project should care about.
If you look at those that advocate Debian the loudest, I see three distinct groups:
Debian succesfully meets the needs of those people, and that is all it should care about. The fanboys who want to brag about living on the bleeding edge can either try unstable, or they should move to Fedora Core or Gentoo, which specifically pander to their needs anyway.
MartNonsense. Teachers forbid the citing of encyclopedias because they are at best secondary sources. And since the academic norm is to only consider primary sources valid, it is merely common sense to instill that norm as soon as possible.
MartLast time I tried it, apt-get install without arguments worked. But perhaps I misremember, it has been some time, and I don't have a test system handy (nor the time) to try it out.
MartIn case you didn't know this already:
This will save your current installed packages, and allow you to reinstall in one fell swoop.
MartThat has been debunked.
Mart...Google has problems, and instead of calling upon Google to fix them, Businessweek suggests they hire a Chief Marketing Officer?!
If even the people who target CxOs admit implicitly that all a Chief Marketing Officer does is try to put spin on problems, then what does that say about Marketing in general?
MartAnd yet the financial world keeps complaining that there is not enough consolidation in the German market, that there are too many entities. In other words, despite the red tape, Germany has a thriving SME sector, one that is so healthy that large corps complain about it, because it 'fragments the market' (and here I thought that more competition was a good thing).
Something is wrong with this picture.
MartI don't mind that my old-style DS has a slightly less brilliant display. If only it had a !@#$% anti-reflective coating. In bright daylight it is virtually unusable.
OTOH, it seems that the touch screen means that strategy game publishers are definitely looking seriously at the DS. I've seen a few really good strategy game (turn-based no less!) in the 2006 lineup. I can't wait for Europa Universalis.
MartThe very page you're quoting says otherwise:
So, no, unless you can point out that the chain of causality is too weak to justify it, the slippery slope is not a logical fallacy.
MartIt is not so clear to me. When my party was almost killed by a bear a few weeks back, I don't think any visual effects designer could as effectively portrayed that bear as terrifyingly as my players minds' eyes could. The human imagination is after all not bound by the constraints of technological possibility; thus a party of good role-players with fertile imaginations and a merely competent GM can have a much more spectacular experience than any computer game can give.
Mart