It doesn't cost more to ship TO Europe, it costs more to ship WITHIN Europe. European postal, shipping, and trucking rates are MUCH higher than in the US. So while it costs about the same to get it to the dock on the container ship, it costs a lot more to truck it from the dock to the store.
For electronic products, there are also internationalization costs. Those costs are reduced for very popular languages, like Chinese and American English. Everyone else pays a premium.
And remember, that's MSRP, not the wholesale cost. That higher price is suggested because of the higer costs related to retail sales in Europe, especially staff cost. So the wholesale price might be $400 USD, the same as the US retail price, which pushes up the retail price.
When evaluating these products it's very important to remember that while one of your laptops MIGHT get stolen, MANY of your users WILL forget the password for their laptop and WILL get locked out. So key recovery is BY FAR the most important feature of these products. This really can't be stressed enough.
Which is why I'll tentatively recommend Bitlocker, since it's got the best data recovery capabilities (keys are automatically backed up to the AD server, etc.).
In the case of Word Perfect,... their product was clearly superior,
I agree. I used WordPerfect during that era, as did many others. I kept using the DOS versions long after Win3 was around, because I (an many organizations) never used Win3. I did switch to Word after Windows 95 came out. WordPerfect dragged their feet on releasing a Win32 version (Win32 WAS well-documented), and when they did it sucked. That isn't MS' fault.
Microsoft is clearly losing due to real competition (yet they still have more than 4/5 of the market share). But this is the exception rather than the rule.
My point is you haven't shown this. And in every case where you have claimed to do so I've shown you how it was "real competition". MS HAS engaged in unfair practices, but it's the unfair practices that are the exception. For the most part, MS competes fairly, it's just that they have large advantages so their competitors want to claim it's "unfair".
Just try reading the.DOCX format without access to Office.
So don't use the.DOCX format. I explained, at length, that the issues with.DOC and DOCX are unique to that format and an artifact of the screwy development process for Word. Maybe MS SHOULD break backwards compatibility and just tell everyone to use old versions of Word to open old documents, but I don't think they CAN do to contract obligations. There are lots of historical format quirks people are forced to live with in Unix, this is the equivalent for Windows. It sucks, but it's not intentional.
With the case of OEMs, however, they were intimidated from offering alternate bundles because Microsoft would simply retaliate and damage them economically for even offering the opportunity for competitors to include their products.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. If you're talking about Be and MS' licensing deals that prevented OEMs from installing other operating systems (like Be) on desktops, you're wrong. Exclusivity is a standard feature of these kids of contracts. Linux vendors have OEMs sign deals saying they won't bundle OTHER versions of Linux with their products. The fact that Linux has succeeded against MS' supposedly "unfair practices" is just proof that Be wasn't a compelling enough product, which was TRUE. Be failed because if inadequate business acumen, period.
I used to believe otherwise, that MS was evil and screwing people left and right. Then I talked to the Be people. I worked for Novell and Netscape. And THEN I worked for Microsoft. MS was/is just better run. Novell, and especially Netscape, were clusterfucks comparatively. Novell deliberately rested on their laurels when MS was beating at their door arguing, loudly, that "nobody wanted" graphical administration tools. At Netscape it was pretty clear to me that by the time I got there (shortly before the AOL buyout) most of the engineers either didn't give a fuck or were deliberately trying to run the company into the ground. Those that did care were demoted or fired. Really.
So, yes, sometimes Microsoft has had superior products, although it's arguable whether anything of theirs today is the best in its field (I'd nominate Excel as a possibility, but I haven't used any competing products).
Active Directory. This is the directory service that works. LDAP, in all implementations, is totally broken. At Netscape I worked on the LDAP and IMAP servers, and the specs are basically broken. I'm convinced it's NOT POSSIBLE to make a good LDAP or IMAP server. That leaves NDS as the only directory service that sort of works, and it doesn't work as well as AD.
Exchange. Other groupware solutions, which nowadays means "Domino", are horrible in comparison. The only other groupware platform that was halfway decent was HP OpenMail, and that was a direct Exchange knockoff.
IAS/NPS. Shockingly, to me a least, MS has the best RADIUS/802.1x server currently available. FreeRADIUS is broken as is Cisco's server, so the only remaining competitor is Steel Belted RADIUS, which is really expensive compared to MS' solution ($15,000 vs. $650). Navis is discontinued (I think).
Health care for individuals is ridiculously cheap if you do it correctly
Health care for people that are perfectly healthy is cheap. Health care for people that have actual health problems (anything from MS to asthma), is NOT cheap.
The wealthy always know what insurance is for: life catastrophes, not common colds, hail damage or minor floods. You pay for those out of your emergency savings, not out of your insurer's pocket. Insurance is CHEAP if you use it for emergencies only.
This is just batshit crazy. You do have any idea what REAL medical expenses cost? My father recently died from prostate cancer. He was wealthy and had very good insurance (the best private insurance available) that cost $1000 per individual per month. In the last few months of of his life his expenses were around $150,000 PER MONTH. If he had to pay that out of pocket, how wealthy would he be? How much wealth (and how many debts) would have been left for his children?
Do you have any idea how much it costs to go to an emergency room without insurance? It's $5,000 just to walk in the door, treatment is ADDED to that. It isn't uncommon to walk away from a 1 hour visit to an emergency room having spent $50,000-$100,000.
You have obviously never had to deal with a serious medical condition which is why you can give such boneheaded advice. I hope you continue to stay so lucky.
401Ks are also for idiots, IMHO. You're usually stuck in restrictive funds that issue no dividend profit distributions or anything worth investing in.
It all depends on whether or not the company does MATCHING. If you have access to a MATCHING 401K you should ALWAYS contribute up to the matching amount. That's a guaranteed 100% return on your investment. No private plan can come close to matching that.
Should I just bite the bullet and develop my prototype for Windows?
Do you actually want lots of people to play your game and/or do you want a possibility of a chance that you might make money?
If the answer is "yes" you're going to have to bite the bullet and work with the consoles. Anyone who says differently is setting you up for disaster. I'd go with Microsoft, they have a program called "Microsoft XNA" for indie developers.
When I was in the UK a few years ago they spent almost 15 minutes talking to me -- asked me where I came from, where I was going to, how I liked my trip, what my hometown was like, etc, etc, etc. I suppose I was technically being interrogated (presumably they are watching your facial reactions and listening for inconsistencies in your story?) but they were polite and courteous about it.
That's because in the UK, and in many other countries, airport security is a "make work" project. We don't do what you recommend in the US because it's time consuming which means either long(er) delays at the security checkpoints or lots more screeners. In the UK, the GOAL is to have as many screeners as possible, both to "create jobs" and for security (more eyes means more security). In the USA, the goal is the exact opposite, to "do the job" (the job being passing people through checkpoints) as quickly as possible with as small as staff as possible. The USA doesn't really care about security.
"I know all you guys watch this stuff and care, but I'm going to pretend like I believe that the only reason you watch it is because your girl makes you."
Let's be honest: The reason men watch gymnastics is to watch nubile young girls in skimpy outfits contort their bodies. They couldn't care less about the scoring.
And yeah, there is an ephebophile element to this. Get used to it. Many men are ephebophiles.
In which case you are arguing that a boxing match that is won by a knock-out is a sport, but if it's a points decision it's not.
Absolutely, 100%, correct. Anyone who follows boxing will tell you that the judges fuck it all up. The ideal situation is the "classic" boxing format which is 100 rounds (that's ONE HUNDRED), you go until someone quits or is knocked out. If it goes all 100 it's a draw. Early UFC fights worked in a similar format, except there were no rounds, just unlimited time. MANY observers agreed this was a "purer" competition. The downside of this format is that it can be really boring, with opponents circling each other for HOURS (this happened in the UFC). It's also really rough on the fighters. Just 10 or 12 rounds is extremely grueling, 100 rounds is life threatening. But the main reason is that it's boring for spectators, and doesn't work well on TV.
There are a lot of concessions made in sports for TV. One of the big reasons I don't watch televised sports.
Actually, NOBODY does. That's the whole point. In order to increase "fairness" in gymnastic scoring, byzantine systems requiring certain moves in a certain order and "reverse scoring", deducting for "errors" rather than awarding points for successful marks, etc. Again, NOBODY really understand these rules which is why in EVERY major gymnastics competition there are controversies with scoring. It's been shown that all of these attempts at "objectivity" don't seem to help. The Russians still always win, largely because they play to the judges as much as possible.
Game developers over the last ten years have been tied to the idea that something can only be spooky if it's dark brown and gray, and is also a sewer.
It's a basic lack of originality in general. The "space marine" or variant is the protagonist in virtually all FPS. How many warehouses and office buildings have you seen? The weapons are pretty much the same too. As are the enemies. Gears of War, the best FPS I've played recently, follows this pattern to a T. The only saving grace is the improved gameplay, otherwise it's cliche' city.
Many would argue, myself included, that Jim Crow-type laws prevented blacks from full exercising their voting rights until the 1960s. Even today, voter suppression of non-white Americans remains a serious issue.
Really? Then you would be familiar with the fact that it was impossible to compete with Office without access to all the undocumented functionality in Windows 3.
No it wasn't. Just because someone bungled their suite for Windows 3 doesn't make it MS' fault. People seem to forget that Windows 3 did NOT have monolithic control over the market and many companies weren't interested in developing for it. I never used it, I used PC Tools and GeoWorks and lots of other crap. And there was lots of undocumented functionality in Windows 3 because, shock, it was badly documented. They began to fix this for 3.1, but for 95 they wrote better documentation form scratch.
Ask Be, for instance.
Microsoft wanted exclusivity deals with their OEMs. If Be got enough money together, they could also have an exclusivity deal. Be's inability to raise money is not MS' fault. I was a huge supporter of Commodore and Amiga and Be, but they ran THEMSELVES into the ground.
Microsoft's file formats have largely over history been partially or poorly documented,
Microsoft for many years constantly broke backwards compatibility in products like Office,
How is Microsoft supposed to add new features without changing the file format? What versions of Office didn't allow you to save in older formats? Really, I'm curious.
What happens is that.DOC files were exchanged between organizations and if one organization saved their files in the new format the other would have to upgrade to use their upgraded files. How is this situation different from other word processors? New versions of StarOffice, for example, save files in a format incompatible with old StarOffice and new files open broken, just like Word.
The.DOC format is a mess due to it's wonky development history (DOSHowever, customers won't have a choice to stay with XP, even though it is perfectly adequately and superior to Vista in almost every measurable way.
Name 10 new features in Vista. Since there are literally dozens this should be no problem if you've actually examined the product. This is the same rant we hear from the anti-MS crowd ever time a new version of Windows is released. I heard the exact, word for word, criticisms made of Windows XP when it was launched. Nobody ever mentions Vista's new features or that Vista is more stable or that Vista has the best out-of-the-box hardware support of any operating system EVER. Somehow Areo is a bad idea, even though it looks and performs better than Quartz and everyone else (Gnome, KDE, etc.) is switching to 3D desktops as well. Somehow MS sucks because WinFS didn't make it into Vista despite the fact that no other OS (except Be) has a similar feature. etc. People just bitch about a handful of bugs and how various controls are moved around (again, just like XP).
Yes, Vista has steep entry requirements. Steeper than the jump between 2000 Pro and XP, largely because of Aero. Of course, any $500 entry-level PC sold TODAY runs Vista and Aero just fine. The problem was that wasn't true at launch. I blame the OEMs for insisting on this "Vista Capable" crap.
In a few years everyone will be using Vista and all this anti-Vista FUD will be remembered as well as the anti-XP FUD.
It was Windows 3 that was artificially rendered incompatible with DR-DOS (4DOS was a shell, not a full-blown OS).
No, this was code in the beta. There were patches for DR-DOS and PC-DOS before Windows 3 was even released. The DR-DOS people claimed this was a deliberate attempt at incompatibility. Windows 3 was NEVER incompatible with DR-DOS or PC-DOS. I think there might have been problems with WIndows For Workgroups 3.11 due to the 32-bit system.
Windows 95 did not use a separate DOS, so it wouldn't make sense to consider using it with something like DR-DOS.
Microsoft doesn't compete fairly. Microsoft has never competed fairly. I'm not even sure Microsoft _could_ have ever competed fairly.
Examples? I've very familiar with MS and I can only come up with a few. Most notably the changes made to Windows 95 to prevent it from running on other vendor's DOS (DR-DOS, 4DOS, etc.). And even then, there is some merit to MS' argument about not wanting to support Windows 95 on DOS variants.
Google's no corporate saint, but they also don't have a 30-year history of deceit, intimidation and downright theft.
Google's business model revolves around gathering as much personal information about you as possible and selling it to advertisers, governments, and anyone else who asks. They're the ones who argue that "Privacy does not exist" and will happily hand their customers over to foreign governments to face torture and death. I consider this fundamental attack on privacy a far more serious issue than anything MS has done.
Also, if you care about open source, Google actively spits on the concept. They exploit a loophole in the GPL to take open source code from the community, make "internal changes", and then market/sell those products (that are 95% open source code) as "software as a service", like Gmail and Google Apps. They're ripping off open source contributors. Google, IBM, etc. were successfully able to pressure the FSF from closing the loophole in GPLv3. Instead it's a separate license called the "Affero General Public License" that the Linux kernel (and Google, IBM, etc.) WON'T be adopting.
Microsoft has no interest in providing good products.
That's your opinion. It is not borne out by facts.
When your neighbour who has thrown rocks in all your windows, cut down your trees, slashed your tyres and poisoned your cat suddenly acts friendly and invites you to have dinner, what's your first move ?
Other than the SCO debacle, it's pretty difficult to come up with ACTUAL harms Microsoft has inflicted on the OSS community.
AT&T (like other mobile operators) would like you to pay extra for the privilege of using your phone as a modem.
For the record, this appears to be part of at least some versions of the "Unlimited Data Plan". The corporate Blackberry phones we get through AT&T don't have "phone as modem", but my girlfriend's AT&T Tilt with an unlimited data plan CAN be used as a modem.
The tools will help Western journalist reporting from Beijing, but they really won't do all that much for Chinese dissidents that are under state surveillance and face the constant threat of imprisonment, torture, and death.
The West needs to start cracking down the the Chinese, starting with the media. You want our money? Then mainland Chinese must have uncensored access to Western media. Media is the US' major export, buy blocking and stealing Western media the Chinese are furthering the trade imbalance and it should no longer be tolerated.
would you quit over it if they don't fire the cubicle mate that reads your email?
I'm assuming you cubicle mate isn't an authorized mail administrator.
In your scenario you wouldn't quit, you'd sue the company. It's negligence on the part of the company. I'd draw an analogy with sexual harassment, if the company is informed that an employee is sexually harassing other employees and they do nothing about it, they take on the liability of the employee's actions. In fact, there really isn't any requirement to inform because companies have tried to weasel out of liability by claiming they were never informed (lying). The standard is actually "they should have known". Or even "There was no way they could have known, but they are still liable because they were inadequately monitoring their employees to begin with".
Basically, if they don't immediately fire the employee that looked at your email they're looking at liability.
Possibly. We'll never know because of the outside pressure Nintendo faces.
It's unlikely this title will be picked up by the other, less "family friendly", consoles because they face the same pressures. THere is virtually no sexual content in video games. And it's certainly not because of the lack of demand, it's because of outside pressure groups. Remember the stir over "Hot Coffee" and the sex scenes in Mass Effect?
He campaigned against MLK's birthday being made a national holiday, and it's hard not to interpret that as a campaign against MLK. From the same Wikipedia article:
In 1983, McCain was elected to lead the incoming group of Republican representatives.[57] Also that year, he opposed creation of a federal Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but admitted in 2008: "I was wrong and eventually realized that, in time to give full support [in 1990] for a state holiday in Arizona."[71][72]
What's more likely is that the officer starts acting with utmost professionalism, smiles, and fines you for various things, with which he would not have bothered otherwise.
No, the camera's going to get taken or smashed.
Remember, there is no way he can know FOR SURE that you didn't catch him doing something bad. In fact, he's very likely to interpret your informing him that hes' being recorded as a threat that you're going to reveal unflattering information about him. Since there is ABSOLUTELY NO PENALTY WHATSOEVER attached to taking or destroying your camera he has no incentive NOT to do so. Hell, around here the cops often flat-out rob people, so I doubt they would think twice about a camera.
We need real accountability. The incident was recorded. Recording the police is a great start, but doesn't do much good if prosecutors ignore it.
The problem is that the prosecutors have to work with the police, and the police tell them flat-out that they'll sabotage the cases of prosecutors who go after them. Because of the "blue shield" if you go after one officer, ALL of them have to sabotage the prosecutor otherwise the other officers will sabotage the one that doesn't "play ball". If he pushes it far enough, they'll kill him. And I mean other cops will murder the "snitch" that talks to prosecutors. IA is a joke for exactly this reason.
This is why completely independent prosecutors who do NOTHING else and have their OWN non-union investigators are necessary. The police can't police themselves, this has been proven time and time again.
It is unreasonable to expect to be allowed to. Why? Because of the impact on the other users. Because it isn't what the network is designed to support.
Fine, then they should specifically say in their advertising, in LARGE PRINT, that their service is Email and Web only and that everything else will be blocked. They shouldn't even be allowed to call it "3G" or "internet" at all (since that's completely inaccurate) and should be forced to call the FEATURE "improved email and web access" which is accurate. Of course, that's a lot less attractive than real 3G internet, to they engage in deceptive advertising.
Not to mention that 3G is not "primarily targeted at business users" anywhere else in the world.
Mod the parent up because he's 100% correct.
3G is marketed specifically as a video and audio downloading service, look at AT&T's website on 3G, but they're saying they're going to block everything EXCEPT THEIR OWN PAY-TO-PLAY SERVICES. This is the very definition of anti-competitive and is exactly why the FCC ruled against Comcast who is trying to pull the same crap.
This is actually a very different thing to a regular ISP contract, and is not related to copyright law. They're banning P2P because their network cannot handle P2P. That may be their own damn fault, but it's not an argument about users rights so much as an argument about their network infrastructure and QoS management.
Absolute and complete nonsense. ANY ISP could make this same claim: that their network can't "handle" P2P, so they have to block it. It's garbage. P2P works just fine on DIALUP. If their routers can't handle 100s of requests from hosts than their network is REALLY broken and they should stop being such morons and spend a few thousand on new routers. If a few P2P users can bring their routers to their knees they've got bigger problems than P2P.
Net neutrality means that ALL ISPs can only provide a pipe, not content filtering (unless it's by consumer request) and not protocol filtering. The sole reason AT&T wants to do this is to grace their extremely pricey video and audio downloading services. They don't want competition.
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It doesn't cost more to ship TO Europe, it costs more to ship WITHIN Europe. European postal, shipping, and trucking rates are MUCH higher than in the US. So while it costs about the same to get it to the dock on the container ship, it costs a lot more to truck it from the dock to the store.
For electronic products, there are also internationalization costs. Those costs are reduced for very popular languages, like Chinese and American English. Everyone else pays a premium.
And remember, that's MSRP, not the wholesale cost. That higher price is suggested because of the higer costs related to retail sales in Europe, especially staff cost. So the wholesale price might be $400 USD, the same as the US retail price, which pushes up the retail price.
When evaluating these products it's very important to remember that while one of your laptops MIGHT get stolen, MANY of your users WILL forget the password for their laptop and WILL get locked out. So key recovery is BY FAR the most important feature of these products. This really can't be stressed enough.
Which is why I'll tentatively recommend Bitlocker, since it's got the best data recovery capabilities (keys are automatically backed up to the AD server, etc.).
In the case of Word Perfect, ... their product was clearly superior,
I agree. I used WordPerfect during that era, as did many others. I kept using the DOS versions long after Win3 was around, because I (an many organizations) never used Win3. I did switch to Word after Windows 95 came out. WordPerfect dragged their feet on releasing a Win32 version (Win32 WAS well-documented), and when they did it sucked. That isn't MS' fault.
Microsoft is clearly losing due to real competition (yet they still have more than 4/5 of the market share). But this is the exception rather than the rule.
My point is you haven't shown this. And in every case where you have claimed to do so I've shown you how it was "real competition". MS HAS engaged in unfair practices, but it's the unfair practices that are the exception. For the most part, MS competes fairly, it's just that they have large advantages so their competitors want to claim it's "unfair".
Just try reading the .DOCX format without access to Office.
So don't use the .DOCX format. I explained, at length, that the issues with .DOC and DOCX are unique to that format and an artifact of the screwy development process for Word. Maybe MS SHOULD break backwards compatibility and just tell everyone to use old versions of Word to open old documents, but I don't think they CAN do to contract obligations. There are lots of historical format quirks people are forced to live with in Unix, this is the equivalent for Windows. It sucks, but it's not intentional.
With the case of OEMs, however, they were intimidated from offering alternate bundles because Microsoft would simply retaliate and damage them economically for even offering the opportunity for competitors to include their products.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. If you're talking about Be and MS' licensing deals that prevented OEMs from installing other operating systems (like Be) on desktops, you're wrong. Exclusivity is a standard feature of these kids of contracts. Linux vendors have OEMs sign deals saying they won't bundle OTHER versions of Linux with their products. The fact that Linux has succeeded against MS' supposedly "unfair practices" is just proof that Be wasn't a compelling enough product, which was TRUE. Be failed because if inadequate business acumen, period.
I used to believe otherwise, that MS was evil and screwing people left and right. Then I talked to the Be people. I worked for Novell and Netscape. And THEN I worked for Microsoft. MS was/is just better run. Novell, and especially Netscape, were clusterfucks comparatively. Novell deliberately rested on their laurels when MS was beating at their door arguing, loudly, that "nobody wanted" graphical administration tools. At Netscape it was pretty clear to me that by the time I got there (shortly before the AOL buyout) most of the engineers either didn't give a fuck or were deliberately trying to run the company into the ground. Those that did care were demoted or fired. Really.
So, yes, sometimes Microsoft has had superior products, although it's arguable whether anything of theirs today is the best in its field (I'd nominate Excel as a possibility, but I haven't used any competing products).
Active Directory. This is the directory service that works. LDAP, in all implementations, is totally broken. At Netscape I worked on the LDAP and IMAP servers, and the specs are basically broken. I'm convinced it's NOT POSSIBLE to make a good LDAP or IMAP server. That leaves NDS as the only directory service that sort of works, and it doesn't work as well as AD.
Exchange. Other groupware solutions, which nowadays means "Domino", are horrible in comparison. The only other groupware platform that was halfway decent was HP OpenMail, and that was a direct Exchange knockoff.
IAS/NPS. Shockingly, to me a least, MS has the best RADIUS/802.1x server currently available. FreeRADIUS is broken as is Cisco's server, so the only remaining competitor is Steel Belted RADIUS, which is really expensive compared to MS' solution ($15,000 vs. $650). Navis is discontinued (I think).
I'd also throw in SharePoint and Groove.
Health care for individuals is ridiculously cheap if you do it correctly
Health care for people that are perfectly healthy is cheap. Health care for people that have actual health problems (anything from MS to asthma), is NOT cheap.
The wealthy always know what insurance is for: life catastrophes, not common colds, hail damage or minor floods. You pay for those out of your emergency savings, not out of your insurer's pocket. Insurance is CHEAP if you use it for emergencies only.
This is just batshit crazy. You do have any idea what REAL medical expenses cost? My father recently died from prostate cancer. He was wealthy and had very good insurance (the best private insurance available) that cost $1000 per individual per month. In the last few months of of his life his expenses were around $150,000 PER MONTH. If he had to pay that out of pocket, how wealthy would he be? How much wealth (and how many debts) would have been left for his children?
Do you have any idea how much it costs to go to an emergency room without insurance? It's $5,000 just to walk in the door, treatment is ADDED to that. It isn't uncommon to walk away from a 1 hour visit to an emergency room having spent $50,000-$100,000.
You have obviously never had to deal with a serious medical condition which is why you can give such boneheaded advice. I hope you continue to stay so lucky.
401Ks are also for idiots, IMHO. You're usually stuck in restrictive funds that issue no dividend profit distributions or anything worth investing in.
It all depends on whether or not the company does MATCHING. If you have access to a MATCHING 401K you should ALWAYS contribute up to the matching amount. That's a guaranteed 100% return on your investment. No private plan can come close to matching that.
Otherwise, they are basically useless.
Should I just bite the bullet and develop my prototype for Windows?
Do you actually want lots of people to play your game and/or do you want a possibility of a chance that you might make money?
If the answer is "yes" you're going to have to bite the bullet and work with the consoles. Anyone who says differently is setting you up for disaster. I'd go with Microsoft, they have a program called "Microsoft XNA" for indie developers.
When I was in the UK a few years ago they spent almost 15 minutes talking to me -- asked me where I came from, where I was going to, how I liked my trip, what my hometown was like, etc, etc, etc. I suppose I was technically being interrogated (presumably they are watching your facial reactions and listening for inconsistencies in your story?) but they were polite and courteous about it.
That's because in the UK, and in many other countries, airport security is a "make work" project. We don't do what you recommend in the US because it's time consuming which means either long(er) delays at the security checkpoints or lots more screeners. In the UK, the GOAL is to have as many screeners as possible, both to "create jobs" and for security (more eyes means more security). In the USA, the goal is the exact opposite, to "do the job" (the job being passing people through checkpoints) as quickly as possible with as small as staff as possible. The USA doesn't really care about security.
"I know all you guys watch this stuff and care, but I'm going to pretend like I believe that the only reason you watch it is because your girl makes you."
Let's be honest: The reason men watch gymnastics is to watch nubile young girls in skimpy outfits contort their bodies. They couldn't care less about the scoring.
And yeah, there is an ephebophile element to this. Get used to it. Many men are ephebophiles.
In which case you are arguing that a boxing match that is won by a knock-out is a sport, but if it's a points decision it's not.
Absolutely, 100%, correct. Anyone who follows boxing will tell you that the judges fuck it all up. The ideal situation is the "classic" boxing format which is 100 rounds (that's ONE HUNDRED), you go until someone quits or is knocked out. If it goes all 100 it's a draw. Early UFC fights worked in a similar format, except there were no rounds, just unlimited time. MANY observers agreed this was a "purer" competition. The downside of this format is that it can be really boring, with opponents circling each other for HOURS (this happened in the UFC). It's also really rough on the fighters. Just 10 or 12 rounds is extremely grueling, 100 rounds is life threatening. But the main reason is that it's boring for spectators, and doesn't work well on TV.
There are a lot of concessions made in sports for TV. One of the big reasons I don't watch televised sports.
do you even understand scoring in gymnastics?
Actually, NOBODY does. That's the whole point. In order to increase "fairness" in gymnastic scoring, byzantine systems requiring certain moves in a certain order and "reverse scoring", deducting for "errors" rather than awarding points for successful marks, etc. Again, NOBODY really understand these rules which is why in EVERY major gymnastics competition there are controversies with scoring. It's been shown that all of these attempts at "objectivity" don't seem to help. The Russians still always win, largely because they play to the judges as much as possible.
Game developers over the last ten years have been tied to the idea that something can only be spooky if it's dark brown and gray, and is also a sewer.
It's a basic lack of originality in general. The "space marine" or variant is the protagonist in virtually all FPS. How many warehouses and office buildings have you seen? The weapons are pretty much the same too. As are the enemies. Gears of War, the best FPS I've played recently, follows this pattern to a T. The only saving grace is the improved gameplay, otherwise it's cliche' city.
Actually, black men could vote before women.
Many would argue, myself included, that Jim Crow-type laws prevented blacks from full exercising their voting rights until the 1960s. Even today, voter suppression of non-white Americans remains a serious issue.
Really? Then you would be familiar with the fact that it was impossible to compete with Office without access to all the undocumented functionality in Windows 3.
No it wasn't. Just because someone bungled their suite for Windows 3 doesn't make it MS' fault. People seem to forget that Windows 3 did NOT have monolithic control over the market and many companies weren't interested in developing for it. I never used it, I used PC Tools and GeoWorks and lots of other crap. And there was lots of undocumented functionality in Windows 3 because, shock, it was badly documented. They began to fix this for 3.1, but for 95 they wrote better documentation form scratch.
Ask Be, for instance.
Microsoft wanted exclusivity deals with their OEMs. If Be got enough money together, they could also have an exclusivity deal. Be's inability to raise money is not MS' fault. I was a huge supporter of Commodore and Amiga and Be, but they ran THEMSELVES into the ground.
Microsoft's file formats have largely over history been partially or poorly documented,
Microsoft for many years constantly broke backwards compatibility in products like Office,
How is Microsoft supposed to add new features without changing the file format? What versions of Office didn't allow you to save in older formats? Really, I'm curious.
What happens is that .DOC files were exchanged between organizations and if one organization saved their files in the new format the other would have to upgrade to use their upgraded files. How is this situation different from other word processors? New versions of StarOffice, for example, save files in a format incompatible with old StarOffice and new files open broken, just like Word.
The .DOC format is a mess due to it's wonky development history (DOSHowever, customers won't have a choice to stay with XP, even though it is perfectly adequately and superior to Vista in almost every measurable way.
Name 10 new features in Vista. Since there are literally dozens this should be no problem if you've actually examined the product. This is the same rant we hear from the anti-MS crowd ever time a new version of Windows is released. I heard the exact, word for word, criticisms made of Windows XP when it was launched. Nobody ever mentions Vista's new features or that Vista is more stable or that Vista has the best out-of-the-box hardware support of any operating system EVER. Somehow Areo is a bad idea, even though it looks and performs better than Quartz and everyone else (Gnome, KDE, etc.) is switching to 3D desktops as well. Somehow MS sucks because WinFS didn't make it into Vista despite the fact that no other OS (except Be) has a similar feature. etc. People just bitch about a handful of bugs and how various controls are moved around (again, just like XP).
Yes, Vista has steep entry requirements. Steeper than the jump between 2000 Pro and XP, largely because of Aero. Of course, any $500 entry-level PC sold TODAY runs Vista and Aero just fine. The problem was that wasn't true at launch. I blame the OEMs for insisting on this "Vista Capable" crap.
In a few years everyone will be using Vista and all this anti-Vista FUD will be remembered as well as the anti-XP FUD.
It was Windows 3 that was artificially rendered incompatible with DR-DOS (4DOS was a shell, not a full-blown OS).
No, this was code in the beta. There were patches for DR-DOS and PC-DOS before Windows 3 was even released. The DR-DOS people claimed this was a deliberate attempt at incompatibility. Windows 3 was NEVER incompatible with DR-DOS or PC-DOS. I think there might have been problems with WIndows For Workgroups 3.11 due to the 32-bit system.
Windows 95 did not use a separate DOS, so it wouldn't make sense to consider using it with something like DR-DOS.
Digital Research and others argued t
Microsoft doesn't compete fairly. Microsoft has never competed fairly. I'm not even sure Microsoft _could_ have ever competed fairly.
Examples? I've very familiar with MS and I can only come up with a few. Most notably the changes made to Windows 95 to prevent it from running on other vendor's DOS (DR-DOS, 4DOS, etc.). And even then, there is some merit to MS' argument about not wanting to support Windows 95 on DOS variants.
Google's no corporate saint, but they also don't have a 30-year history of deceit, intimidation and downright theft.
Google's business model revolves around gathering as much personal information about you as possible and selling it to advertisers, governments, and anyone else who asks. They're the ones who argue that "Privacy does not exist" and will happily hand their customers over to foreign governments to face torture and death. I consider this fundamental attack on privacy a far more serious issue than anything MS has done.
Also, if you care about open source, Google actively spits on the concept. They exploit a loophole in the GPL to take open source code from the community, make "internal changes", and then market/sell those products (that are 95% open source code) as "software as a service", like Gmail and Google Apps. They're ripping off open source contributors. Google, IBM, etc. were successfully able to pressure the FSF from closing the loophole in GPLv3. Instead it's a separate license called the "Affero General Public License" that the Linux kernel (and Google, IBM, etc.) WON'T be adopting.
Microsoft has no interest in providing good products.
That's your opinion. It is not borne out by facts.
When your neighbour who has thrown rocks in all your windows, cut down your trees, slashed your tyres and poisoned your cat suddenly acts friendly and invites you to have dinner, what's your first move ?
Other than the SCO debacle, it's pretty difficult to come up with ACTUAL harms Microsoft has inflicted on the OSS community.
AT&T (like other mobile operators) would like you to pay extra for the privilege of using your phone as a modem.
For the record, this appears to be part of at least some versions of the "Unlimited Data Plan". The corporate Blackberry phones we get through AT&T don't have "phone as modem", but my girlfriend's AT&T Tilt with an unlimited data plan CAN be used as a modem.
The tools will help Western journalist reporting from Beijing, but they really won't do all that much for Chinese dissidents that are under state surveillance and face the constant threat of imprisonment, torture, and death.
The West needs to start cracking down the the Chinese, starting with the media. You want our money? Then mainland Chinese must have uncensored access to Western media. Media is the US' major export, buy blocking and stealing Western media the Chinese are furthering the trade imbalance and it should no longer be tolerated.
would you quit over it if they don't fire the cubicle mate that reads your email?
I'm assuming you cubicle mate isn't an authorized mail administrator.
In your scenario you wouldn't quit, you'd sue the company. It's negligence on the part of the company. I'd draw an analogy with sexual harassment, if the company is informed that an employee is sexually harassing other employees and they do nothing about it, they take on the liability of the employee's actions. In fact, there really isn't any requirement to inform because companies have tried to weasel out of liability by claiming they were never informed (lying). The standard is actually "they should have known". Or even "There was no way they could have known, but they are still liable because they were inadequately monitoring their employees to begin with".
Basically, if they don't immediately fire the employee that looked at your email they're looking at liability.
Possibly. We'll never know because of the outside pressure Nintendo faces.
It's unlikely this title will be picked up by the other, less "family friendly", consoles because they face the same pressures. THere is virtually no sexual content in video games. And it's certainly not because of the lack of demand, it's because of outside pressure groups. Remember the stir over "Hot Coffee" and the sex scenes in Mass Effect?
He was held from 1967 to 1973
He campaigned against MLK's birthday being made a national holiday, and it's hard not to interpret that as a campaign against MLK. From the same Wikipedia article:
In 1983, McCain was elected to lead the incoming group of Republican representatives.[57] Also that year, he opposed creation of a federal Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but admitted in 2008: "I was wrong and eventually realized that, in time to give full support [in 1990] for a state holiday in Arizona."[71][72]
What's more likely is that the officer starts acting with utmost professionalism, smiles, and fines you for various things, with which he would not have bothered otherwise.
No, the camera's going to get taken or smashed.
Remember, there is no way he can know FOR SURE that you didn't catch him doing something bad. In fact, he's very likely to interpret your informing him that hes' being recorded as a threat that you're going to reveal unflattering information about him. Since there is ABSOLUTELY NO PENALTY WHATSOEVER attached to taking or destroying your camera he has no incentive NOT to do so. Hell, around here the cops often flat-out rob people, so I doubt they would think twice about a camera.
We need real accountability. The incident was recorded. Recording the police is a great start, but doesn't do much good if prosecutors ignore it.
The problem is that the prosecutors have to work with the police, and the police tell them flat-out that they'll sabotage the cases of prosecutors who go after them. Because of the "blue shield" if you go after one officer, ALL of them have to sabotage the prosecutor otherwise the other officers will sabotage the one that doesn't "play ball". If he pushes it far enough, they'll kill him. And I mean other cops will murder the "snitch" that talks to prosecutors. IA is a joke for exactly this reason.
This is why completely independent prosecutors who do NOTHING else and have their OWN non-union investigators are necessary. The police can't police themselves, this has been proven time and time again.
It is unreasonable to expect to be allowed to. Why? Because of the impact on the other users. Because it isn't what the network is designed to support.
Fine, then they should specifically say in their advertising, in LARGE PRINT, that their service is Email and Web only and that everything else will be blocked. They shouldn't even be allowed to call it "3G" or "internet" at all (since that's completely inaccurate) and should be forced to call the FEATURE "improved email and web access" which is accurate. Of course, that's a lot less attractive than real 3G internet, to they engage in deceptive advertising.
Not to mention that 3G is not "primarily targeted at business users" anywhere else in the world.
Mod the parent up because he's 100% correct.
3G is marketed specifically as a video and audio downloading service, look at AT&T's website on 3G, but they're saying they're going to block everything EXCEPT THEIR OWN PAY-TO-PLAY SERVICES. This is the very definition of anti-competitive and is exactly why the FCC ruled against Comcast who is trying to pull the same crap.
Here's how it works:
Case law USED to say that if any part of a contract was ruled illegal, the whole contract was unenforceable. This is what lawmakers intended.
Now, case law says that if parts of contracts are ruled illegal, only those provisions and dependent provisions are illegal.
So in this example, even if part of the AT&T contract is ruled illegal, the remainder of the contract is considered valid.
You can thank corrupt judges for this one.
This is actually a very different thing to a regular ISP contract, and is not related to copyright law. They're banning P2P because their network cannot handle P2P. That may be their own damn fault, but it's not an argument about users rights so much as an argument about their network infrastructure and QoS management.
Absolute and complete nonsense. ANY ISP could make this same claim: that their network can't "handle" P2P, so they have to block it. It's garbage. P2P works just fine on DIALUP. If their routers can't handle 100s of requests from hosts than their network is REALLY broken and they should stop being such morons and spend a few thousand on new routers. If a few P2P users can bring their routers to their knees they've got bigger problems than P2P.
Net neutrality means that ALL ISPs can only provide a pipe, not content filtering (unless it's by consumer request) and not protocol filtering. The sole reason AT&T wants to do this is to grace their extremely pricey video and audio downloading services. They don't want competition.