Some day, some glorious day, slashdot's "editors" will realize that even though we're all geeks, we may not share the exact obsessions of submitters well enough to recognize their acronyms for obscure niche entities.
Of course, that'll probably be well before the day when we get to moderate submissions, submitters, and editors. Something we've been needing for about the past decade.
I see, because MS has an evil monopoly, Apple needs to be the only one to control the sale or resale of Apple computers...
Because Microsoft has a monopoly on desktop operating systems, Apple needs to operate in a different market: whole computers, hardware and software both.
Besides, Microsoft abused their power with the HW vendors. Here Apple is a HW vendor, and thus free from Microsoft's abuses.
Ah, yes, Apple can rely on the swift and reliable response of the Department of Justice to protect them from Microsoft's abuses. I have every confidence that it will save them from Microsoft's predation, just like it saved Netscape.
And there's nothing else that makes them money besides abusing the legal system to force a legal product off the market, thereby depriving the customers of that company and the company itself of their just profits.
The model of Psystar reselling OSX for its retail box price is not sustainable*. It would lead to Apple going out of business, which would harm Apple, and Psystar, and Apple's customers, and Psystar's customers. Tell me again how this is a better outcome?
* Operating systems cost far more to develop and maintain than $129 times a few tens of millions of users. Apple subsidizes their software development costs with profits from their hardware sales**, in the same way that Microsoft subsidizes their OS development costs with profits from their application sales. You presumably like the fact that Psystar machines would cost less than Apple machines, but you seem to be overlooking the fact that that free money doesn't come from nowhere. It comes out of what's funding further OS development, and its loss would kill that.
** And if you're about to say, "Then Apple should just charge whatever it costs them to develop it, and let the market decide!", I'll point out that charging upwards of a thousand dollars a copy would only lead to rampant piracy, which would again lead to Apple going out of business and everyone losing.
Aerons are pretty, and had sort of a cachet to them for a while, but I never found them especially comfortable. I was fairly indifferent to most chairs I had tried... until I started at Google, and sat in a Leap for the first time. I ordered one for home that week.
I'm habitually fidgety, constantly shifting around, sitting on one foot or the other, leaning way over to one side, slouching ridiculously far down, leaning forward over the desk, and so on. The Aeron is all hard plastic, and incredibly uncomfortable unless you're sitting in the exactly one prescribed position. The Leap, on the other hand, does an amazing job of being pleasant regardless of how one is sitting.
I suppose there are two schools of thought on ergonomics. The Aeron seems to be the "force people to sit one correct position by making everything else uncomfortable." The Leap seems closer to "encourage people to move around by making all positions comfortable." In my anecdotal experience, the latter is far more effective; there's nothing especially harmful about any of the positions in which people sit, it's just spending extended periods of time in them that makes them injurious.
If you'd like to refer me to a particular bit of the Congressional report that you feel disproves this, I'd be happy to take a look. But every part of the executive branch has long since admitted that the claims of Iraq seeking uranium were based on forged documents, and entirely incorrect.
b) Saddam definately wanted to harm the US. Alliances with terrorists, incl. Al qaida. You can also reference many of the translated documents recovered from Iraq for more proof of this. Even Gen Clark at one point said that if Bin Laden was driven from his base in Afghanistan he'd likely end up in Iraq. So, hardly one lone voice here.
What alliances with Al Qaeda would these be? Every single entity that has investigated it has claimed that there were no such alliances and that the two groups shared only mutual enmity, so please cite any sources you have that dispute this.
c) Re the lapdog: Wouldn't it have been a whole lot easier for the Bush administration to cozy up to Saddam, and get rid of the UN inspectors and the sanctions, in exchange for a good price on Iraqi oil? If he was so kind, that would've been so much easier. No rabid peacenik libs. Well, fewer anyways....well, rabid over different issues I guess. No war issue, etc.
Uh, yes. It would indeed have been easier, safer, cheaper, smarter, and in all ways better to have not invaded Iraq. I'm glad we're agreed.
Okay. It appears to be an attempt to claim that Iraq had some deteriorated old supplies that could (by the tortured definitions of this author, if not those of the UN, IAEA, or US intelligence) be called chemical weapons.
For the sake of argument, let's grant that. So what? How would that have consituted a threat to the United States that justified invasion?
The first stage of a nuclear bomb is a small quantity of conventional explosives. Without the bits that go nuclear-boom, it's about as dangerous a weapon as a hand grenade.
And Saddam's attempt to obtain yellow cake uranium?
So one news agency reported that one unnamed captive claimed that some people who were in some way tied to the Iraqi government and Bin Laden talked at some point about perhaps working together indirectly at some point in the future, which appears to have never come to pass? And this, you feel, constitutes a threat to the United States that justified invasion?
That last bit is the important one, by the way. At issue is not whether Hussein was a good person, but whether Iraq was a threat to the United States. (And even if that were somehow to be established, the next question would be whether it was a threat best handled by invasion and occupation.)
And the answer, of course, is that Hussein had neither the means nor the desire to harm the US. He in fact would have been quite happy to return to his status as the US's lapdog, if American politics hadn't instead turned him into a useful scapegoat.
> How could they have known that if they weren't allowed in the country to actually do the inspections?
By believing the completely unanimous UN and IAEA inspectors who, concurring with nearly all available intelligence, repeatedly said that Iraq had no meaningful weapons programs, and was a threat to exactly no one?
By realizing that even if Iraq had somehow mysteriously possessed significant weapons, it had no desire whatsoever to use them against the US?
I'm pretty indifferent to most of the things that seem to bother you, but one of your complaints stands out as especially backward: the display is "still" glass because it's a vastly better choice. Glass is harder to break, far harder to scratch, and easier to clean than plastic. The only downside is that it's a little heavier, but I find that to be quite worthwhile for never needing to worry about it getting scratched.
If you're finding yourself breaking a lot of glass iphone displays... well, I can't imagine how you treat your phone, but I'm sure that you'd be breaking plastic ones twice as often.
The fact that the phone continues to not play some obscure little sound format, which it never has, and has never implied that it at some point in the future will, now constitutes being "thrown under the bus"? Do you even know what that phrase means?
There are no barriers to entry into the online auction field.
I'm afraid I must disagree. The technical and financial hurdles are moderate, but the real barrier to entry is network effect.
Surely you don't believe that some technical facet of eBay is four or five orders of magnitude better than any other auction service that has ever existed? No, people post things to sell on eBay, because people looking to buy something look on eBay, because people post things to sell on eBay, because people looking to buy something look on eBay...
It is a self-reinforcing loop that favors one competitor to the exclusion of others, regardless of their merits. In other words, precisely the sort of thing that competition-regulating agencies are designed to monitor and control.
Your reactions might be appropriate if the intent was to deceive the ACCC or Australians citizens who might be swayed by the critique. But the article implies that Google's goal was to keep the criticism anonymous from eBay, out of concern for possible retaliation.
So while your feelings about the relative merits of corporations and individuals appear to be very strong, they do not seem to be very relevant to this case. The anonymity was about the interactions between two corporations.
(And since you feel very strongly about the idea of disclosure, I will point out that Google is my employer. But my work for them is not connected to this situation, I know nothing about this interaction beyond what I've read in this article, and I'm speaking for myself, not for them.)
The relationship between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government would be best summed up as "mutual loathing, verging on outright enmity." If you're going to insist upon world war analogies, the the equivalent to invading Iraq would have been for the US to respond to Pearl Harbor by invading Korea.
Because they were conquering nations left and right, killing tens of millions of people, working with and militarily supporting Japan, which was regularly attacking the US, and possessed huge military power with the stated and plausible aim of conquering the world.
Were they a threat to us?
Given that they were part of an active military alliance that was attacking the US and killing Americans by the thousands, yes.
Were they even there before we invaded, rather than being created by our occupation?
Yes, the Nazis were out doing all of the things described above well before the US went to war. I suppose you could make an argument that the National Socialist movement was engendered by the Treaty of Versailles, and thus partially the creation of the US. But in that case, you'd need to be evaluating both wars as one, in which case Germany had once again been actively conquering for years before the US became involved.
It may have come to your attention that every one of these answers is different than the ones regarding Iraq (which, I can't help but notice, you've still dodged answering). So tell me again why you're engaging in this silly exercise of equivocating two completely dissimilar situations?
Comparisons between Hussein and Hitler are pretty facile.
Hitler was quite openly intent upon conquering most of three continents, and was part of a functional alliance that was directly attacking the US. He was at the head of an enormously powerful and aggressive military force, and represented a huge threat to both the world in general and the United States in particular.
Hussein, on the other hand, only engaged in war with two other countries: Iran, with the US's urging and support, and Kuwait, with the US's permission. He was quite happy with his role as the US's pawn, and enjoyed only mutual opposition with the one group that had attacked America. He ruled a nation that had been so devastated by a decade of bombings and sanctions that it was mostly ineffectual even within its own borders, much less outside them. He could not have been less of a threat.
It's frustrating to reboot after quicktime updates, but there is a good reason for it. The whole point of quicktime is that it's a library used by many applications. Changing it out underneath them would, in the worst case, cause inconsistent or unpredictable behaviour, but even in the best case would not give them the benefits of the update.
Would you rather reboot or have your still-running browser continue to be vulnerable to a security vulnerability that you patched in quicktime months ago?
I'm curious as to what it is you feel would be the more correct behaviour when foregrounding an application whose windows are on another desktop.
Are you suggesting that the OS should focus some unknown windows on another desktop that's not currently visible to you? Such that if you were to switch to Terminal and start typing, you would be blinding typing into some unknown window?
Or are you suggesting that some new application behaviour should be created in which an application can be topped in some general sense, but with none of its windows focused? I have a hard time imagining many cases in which that would be anything other than the exact opposite of what a person would want. "Yes, I want to talk to this application. Yes, I want to talk to an actual fucking window this application has open, that's why I fucking switched to it!"
I've been an obsessive multiple desktop user for fifteen years now, and I have found Spaces to be the best implementation I've ever seen on any platform. I'm sorry that it makes you less happy.
(Oh, and for the particular case of wanting to create a new terminal window in your current space: right-click the terminal in the dock, and select New Window. It shows up where you are, no switching.)
Which does you what good, exactly, when malicious software already has control of the OS and can see (and alter) everything that passes through memory?
I'm aghast at all the people suggesting nonsense like copying and pasting or making silly efforts to run trusted copies of applications. If the OS is compromised, absolutely nothing you can do at higher layers that will not be compromised.
As (terrifyingly few) people have already said, the answer to the original question is that you can't. If the machine itself is untrusted, any attempts to add security atop that is just building castles on quicksand.
If you want to draw some pointless distinction between what the display "really" shows and what humans looking at it perceive, then I assume you're also interested in suing every display manufacturer for claiming that their displays can do more than three colors. They only "really" show red, green, and blue; it's just artifacting of the human visual system that merges those into seeming like other colors.
So are we going with what displays "really" show, in which case they all only do three colors, or what humans perceive, in which case TN displays do indeed cover "millions"? I'm happy either way, but you might want to sort out which flavor of pedantic you're interested in being.
But actually I can see Apple and Google becoming the next hated powerhouse companies. Just look at how Google is jumping more into politics and lobbying these days... and how we see more lawsuits from Apple each year.
Hm, I'm not actually sure that either one of those is the case.
I believe Google's only lobbying activity has been to argue in favor of network neutrality and open access to new spectrum. Pretty small on the scale of corporate lobbying, and both in favor of open access to everyone; I'm not sure how that would lead to hatred.
And by the admittedly-unscientific method of searching for headlines about Apple suing anyone, they appear to make it into the news for doing so around once a year, with no measurable increase of late. Obviously a very coarse measure, but it doesn't look as if the data support "more lawsuits from Apple each year".
Quite possible there's something I overlooked. I'd be happy to take a look at any evidence you have in support of these trends.
And we all know that companies selling antivirus software are the most impartial authorities on the risks of viruses, right?
The "virus" to which Sophos refers was an incredibly obscure little trojan that affected a vanishingly small number of people, required explicit user action to spread, was very quickly patched by Apple, and never did anything in the first place other than attempt (mostly unsuccessfully) to spread itself. Total harm done: zero.
In fact Symmantec's own alarmist page describes the total number of infections as "0 - 49".
So, really? That's your supporting evidence? Really? I should install incredibly invasive software that will chew up resources in order to do undocumented things in kernelspace because one time two years ago fewer than fifty people were not actually harmed at all?
By any reasonable definition, no, they don't. There have been a couple of extremely limited proof-of-concept viruses in the past few decades, which have infected approximately no one.
As to why you should deploy AV? Because it's a cheap way of adding another level of security protection to your machine.
But it's not cheap. The cost is, in fact, huge.
Antivirus software is incredibly invasive, mucking about to do secret things in kernelspace, inserting itself into nearly every action performed by a machine. It takes substantial resources to accomplish this dubious goal, and alters the system in unpredictable ways.
The "more security is always better" rationale that you propose is too simplistic. Security measures must always be evaluated by comparing their benefits against their costs. Your estimation wildly exaggerates the (nonexistent) benefits of antivirus software while completely glossing over its substantial costs.
Antivirus software is categorically a foolhardy and dangerous thing to ever run on one's machine at all. The only strange edge case in which it represents an improvement is if one is using software like Windows, which is so wildly hole-ridden that security is expected to come from third parties. But even there, the correct solution is not to add more layers to shore up a quicksand foundation, but to simply replace it with a sane operating system.
I'm not sure the Democrats ever really understood the Republican side of that equation and read too much into their own echo
chambers about the result.
I'd like to suggest that this type of thinking is something that it's very easy for all sides to fall into, and that it's a dangerous trap. Dehumanizing your opponents, and believing that the only way they could disagree with you is by being categorically too stupid to understand the situation, is a guaranteed route to endless polarization and no resolution. Usually when a statement like this could be (and is) used equally meaningfully by both sides, it's a sign that it's not especially true.
As to your policy points, Iraq already is a hell, crafted by two Bushes and a Rumsfeld over three decades. The US has murdered more than a million innocent people there in the last five years, after starving them and decimating their infrastructure over the previous ten years, after pushing them into a proxy war with Iran, after installing a brutal bastard that we thought we could push into a proxy war. I am not suggesting that things would be sweetness and light tomorrow if we were to walk away today, but our continued involvement has done nothing but make things worse and worse.
I quite agree with you that starting impeachment hearings now would be pointless and petty. But starting them the week that the new Congress was sworn in would have been effective and popular. It would not have seemed vindictive to simply get right to the job that they were voted in to do.
I'm intrigued by the vast difference between your and my interpretation of the 2006 election and Congress's subsequent approval ratings.
My read of things is that the sweeping overturn of Congress in 2006 was about the clearest possible mandate that our deeply flawed electoral system can transmit. Its message was complete disapproval of the Bush administration's policies (most especially its military adventurism), and a demand that they be curtailed.
I actually experienced some hope and excitement in November of 2006, thinking that this might introduce a tiny bit of restraint to Bush's insanity.
Unfortunately, the newly elected Democrat Congress proceeded to dither for months on end about whether or not to hold discussions on whether or not to hold a vote on the idea of passing a non-binding resolution suggesting that perhaps staying in Iraq forever might not be the most stellar plan--and then failed to do even that.
This seems clearly to be the source of Congress's low approval ratings: their complete ineffectuality at reigning in the white house. I think that if they had de-funded the war immediately their approval rating would be twice what it is now, and if they had followed it up with impeachment hearings it would be fourfold.
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You cannot directly compare a set of per-year values with one absolute, total value.
Some day, some glorious day, slashdot's "editors" will realize that even though we're all geeks, we may not share the exact obsessions of submitters well enough to recognize their acronyms for obscure niche entities.
Of course, that'll probably be well before the day when we get to moderate submissions, submitters, and editors. Something we've been needing for about the past decade.
Because Microsoft has a monopoly on desktop operating systems, Apple needs to operate in a different market: whole computers, hardware and software both.
Ah, yes, Apple can rely on the swift and reliable response of the Department of Justice to protect them from Microsoft's abuses. I have every confidence that it will save them from Microsoft's predation, just like it saved Netscape.
The model of Psystar reselling OSX for its retail box price is not sustainable*. It would lead to Apple going out of business, which would harm Apple, and Psystar, and Apple's customers, and Psystar's customers. Tell me again how this is a better outcome?
* Operating systems cost far more to develop and maintain than $129 times a few tens of millions of users. Apple subsidizes their software development costs with profits from their hardware sales**, in the same way that Microsoft subsidizes their OS development costs with profits from their application sales. You presumably like the fact that Psystar machines would cost less than Apple machines, but you seem to be overlooking the fact that that free money doesn't come from nowhere. It comes out of what's funding further OS development, and its loss would kill that.
** And if you're about to say, "Then Apple should just charge whatever it costs them to develop it, and let the market decide!", I'll point out that charging upwards of a thousand dollars a copy would only lead to rampant piracy, which would again lead to Apple going out of business and everyone losing.
Uh, no. Google officially deems perl unmaintainable, and its internal use is completely verboten.
You're quite welcome to write your own if you want it, but it's not something we'd ever use ourselves.
+1 Steelcase Leap
Aerons are pretty, and had sort of a cachet to them for a while, but I never found them especially comfortable. I was fairly indifferent to most chairs I had tried... until I started at Google, and sat in a Leap for the first time. I ordered one for home that week.
I'm habitually fidgety, constantly shifting around, sitting on one foot or the other, leaning way over to one side, slouching ridiculously far down, leaning forward over the desk, and so on. The Aeron is all hard plastic, and incredibly uncomfortable unless you're sitting in the exactly one prescribed position. The Leap, on the other hand, does an amazing job of being pleasant regardless of how one is sitting.
I suppose there are two schools of thought on ergonomics. The Aeron seems to be the "force people to sit one correct position by making everything else uncomfortable." The Leap seems closer to "encourage people to move around by making all positions comfortable." In my anecdotal experience, the latter is far more effective; there's nothing especially harmful about any of the positions in which people sit, it's just spending extended periods of time in them that makes them injurious.
It's not just Richard Clark, it's Bush's CIA Director ("These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President.") and the Bush Whitehouse itself ("Now, we've long acknowledged -- and this is old news, we've said this repeatedly -- that the information on yellow cake did, indeed, turn out to be incorrect.") who claim that Iraq never sought uranium from Niger and the Congo.
If you'd like to refer me to a particular bit of the Congressional report that you feel disproves this, I'd be happy to take a look. But every part of the executive branch has long since admitted that the claims of Iraq seeking uranium were based on forged documents, and entirely incorrect.
What alliances with Al Qaeda would these be? Every single entity that has investigated it has claimed that there were no such alliances and that the two groups shared only mutual enmity, so please cite any sources you have that dispute this.
Uh, yes. It would indeed have been easier, safer, cheaper, smarter, and in all ways better to have not invaded Iraq. I'm glad we're agreed.
Okay. It appears to be an attempt to claim that Iraq had some deteriorated old supplies that could (by the tortured definitions of this author, if not those of the UN, IAEA, or US intelligence) be called chemical weapons.
For the sake of argument, let's grant that. So what? How would that have consituted a threat to the United States that justified invasion?
The first stage of a nuclear bomb is a small quantity of conventional explosives. Without the bits that go nuclear-boom, it's about as dangerous a weapon as a hand grenade.
Uh, did you miss the part where it never existed?
So one news agency reported that one unnamed captive claimed that some people who were in some way tied to the Iraqi government and Bin Laden talked at some point about perhaps working together indirectly at some point in the future, which appears to have never come to pass? And this, you feel, constitutes a threat to the United States that justified invasion?
That last bit is the important one, by the way. At issue is not whether Hussein was a good person, but whether Iraq was a threat to the United States. (And even if that were somehow to be established, the next question would be whether it was a threat best handled by invasion and occupation.)
And the answer, of course, is that Hussein had neither the means nor the desire to harm the US. He in fact would have been quite happy to return to his status as the US's lapdog, if American politics hadn't instead turned him into a useful scapegoat.
> How could they have known that if they weren't allowed in the country to actually do the inspections?
By believing the completely unanimous UN and IAEA inspectors who, concurring with nearly all available intelligence, repeatedly said that Iraq had no meaningful weapons programs, and was a threat to exactly no one?
By realizing that even if Iraq had somehow mysteriously possessed significant weapons, it had no desire whatsoever to use them against the US?
I'm pretty indifferent to most of the things that seem to bother you, but one of your complaints stands out as especially backward: the display is "still" glass because it's a vastly better choice. Glass is harder to break, far harder to scratch, and easier to clean than plastic. The only downside is that it's a little heavier, but I find that to be quite worthwhile for never needing to worry about it getting scratched.
If you're finding yourself breaking a lot of glass iphone displays... well, I can't imagine how you treat your phone, but I'm sure that you'd be breaking plastic ones twice as often.
Waitaminutewaitaminute.
The fact that the phone continues to not play some obscure little sound format, which it never has, and has never implied that it at some point in the future will, now constitutes being "thrown under the bus"? Do you even know what that phrase means?
What cap? The current at&t plans are unlimited data, and I don't see any indicator that that will be changing.
I'm afraid I must disagree. The technical and financial hurdles are moderate, but the real barrier to entry is network effect.
Surely you don't believe that some technical facet of eBay is four or five orders of magnitude better than any other auction service that has ever existed? No, people post things to sell on eBay, because people looking to buy something look on eBay, because people post things to sell on eBay, because people looking to buy something look on eBay...
It is a self-reinforcing loop that favors one competitor to the exclusion of others, regardless of their merits. In other words, precisely the sort of thing that competition-regulating agencies are designed to monitor and control.
Your reactions might be appropriate if the intent was to deceive the ACCC or Australians citizens who might be swayed by the critique. But the article implies that Google's goal was to keep the criticism anonymous from eBay, out of concern for possible retaliation.
So while your feelings about the relative merits of corporations and individuals appear to be very strong, they do not seem to be very relevant to this case. The anonymity was about the interactions between two corporations.
(And since you feel very strongly about the idea of disclosure, I will point out that Google is my employer. But my work for them is not connected to this situation, I know nothing about this interaction beyond what I've read in this article, and I'm speaking for myself, not for them.)
Citation, as they say, needed.
The relationship between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government would be best summed up as "mutual loathing, verging on outright enmity." If you're going to insist upon world war analogies, the the equivalent to invading Iraq would have been for the US to respond to Pearl Harbor by invading Korea.
Uh, okay. Not sure why, but okay.
Because they were conquering nations left and right, killing tens of millions of people, working with and militarily supporting Japan, which was regularly attacking the US, and possessed huge military power with the stated and plausible aim of conquering the world.
Given that they were part of an active military alliance that was attacking the US and killing Americans by the thousands, yes.
Yes, the Nazis were out doing all of the things described above well before the US went to war. I suppose you could make an argument that the National Socialist movement was engendered by the Treaty of Versailles, and thus partially the creation of the US. But in that case, you'd need to be evaluating both wars as one, in which case Germany had once again been actively conquering for years before the US became involved.
It may have come to your attention that every one of these answers is different than the ones regarding Iraq (which, I can't help but notice, you've still dodged answering). So tell me again why you're engaging in this silly exercise of equivocating two completely dissimilar situations?
Comparisons between Hussein and Hitler are pretty facile.
Hitler was quite openly intent upon conquering most of three continents, and was part of a functional alliance that was directly attacking the US. He was at the head of an enormously powerful and aggressive military force, and represented a huge threat to both the world in general and the United States in particular.
Hussein, on the other hand, only engaged in war with two other countries: Iran, with the US's urging and support, and Kuwait, with the US's permission. He was quite happy with his role as the US's pawn, and enjoyed only mutual opposition with the one group that had attacked America. He ruled a nation that had been so devastated by a decade of bombings and sanctions that it was mostly ineffectual even within its own borders, much less outside them. He could not have been less of a threat.
It's frustrating to reboot after quicktime updates, but there is a good reason for it. The whole point of quicktime is that it's a library used by many applications. Changing it out underneath them would, in the worst case, cause inconsistent or unpredictable behaviour, but even in the best case would not give them the benefits of the update.
Would you rather reboot or have your still-running browser continue to be vulnerable to a security vulnerability that you patched in quicktime months ago?
I'm curious as to what it is you feel would be the more correct behaviour when foregrounding an application whose windows are on another desktop.
Are you suggesting that the OS should focus some unknown windows on another desktop that's not currently visible to you? Such that if you were to switch to Terminal and start typing, you would be blinding typing into some unknown window?
Or are you suggesting that some new application behaviour should be created in which an application can be topped in some general sense, but with none of its windows focused? I have a hard time imagining many cases in which that would be anything other than the exact opposite of what a person would want. "Yes, I want to talk to this application. Yes, I want to talk to an actual fucking window this application has open, that's why I fucking switched to it!"
I've been an obsessive multiple desktop user for fifteen years now, and I have found Spaces to be the best implementation I've ever seen on any platform. I'm sorry that it makes you less happy.
(Oh, and for the particular case of wanting to create a new terminal window in your current space: right-click the terminal in the dock, and select New Window. It shows up where you are, no switching.)
Which does you what good, exactly, when malicious software already has control of the OS and can see (and alter) everything that passes through memory?
I'm aghast at all the people suggesting nonsense like copying and pasting or making silly efforts to run trusted copies of applications. If the OS is compromised, absolutely nothing you can do at higher layers that will not be compromised.
As (terrifyingly few) people have already said, the answer to the original question is that you can't. If the machine itself is untrusted, any attempts to add security atop that is just building castles on quicksand.
If you want to draw some pointless distinction between what the display "really" shows and what humans looking at it perceive, then I assume you're also interested in suing every display manufacturer for claiming that their displays can do more than three colors. They only "really" show red, green, and blue; it's just artifacting of the human visual system that merges those into seeming like other colors.
So are we going with what displays "really" show, in which case they all only do three colors, or what humans perceive, in which case TN displays do indeed cover "millions"? I'm happy either way, but you might want to sort out which flavor of pedantic you're interested in being.
Hm, I'm not actually sure that either one of those is the case.
I believe Google's only lobbying activity has been to argue in favor of network neutrality and open access to new spectrum. Pretty small on the scale of corporate lobbying, and both in favor of open access to everyone; I'm not sure how that would lead to hatred.
And by the admittedly-unscientific method of searching for headlines about Apple suing anyone, they appear to make it into the news for doing so around once a year, with no measurable increase of late. Obviously a very coarse measure, but it doesn't look as if the data support "more lawsuits from Apple each year".
Quite possible there's something I overlooked. I'd be happy to take a look at any evidence you have in support of these trends.
And we all know that companies selling antivirus software are the most impartial authorities on the risks of viruses, right?
The "virus" to which Sophos refers was an incredibly obscure little trojan that affected a vanishingly small number of people, required explicit user action to spread, was very quickly patched by Apple, and never did anything in the first place other than attempt (mostly unsuccessfully) to spread itself. Total harm done: zero.
In fact Symmantec's own alarmist page describes the total number of infections as "0 - 49".
So, really? That's your supporting evidence? Really? I should install incredibly invasive software that will chew up resources in order to do undocumented things in kernelspace because one time two years ago fewer than fifty people were not actually harmed at all?
By any reasonable definition, no, they don't. There have been a couple of extremely limited proof-of-concept viruses in the past few decades, which have infected approximately no one.
But it's not cheap. The cost is, in fact, huge.
Antivirus software is incredibly invasive, mucking about to do secret things in kernelspace, inserting itself into nearly every action performed by a machine. It takes substantial resources to accomplish this dubious goal, and alters the system in unpredictable ways.
The "more security is always better" rationale that you propose is too simplistic. Security measures must always be evaluated by comparing their benefits against their costs. Your estimation wildly exaggerates the (nonexistent) benefits of antivirus software while completely glossing over its substantial costs.
Antivirus software is categorically a foolhardy and dangerous thing to ever run on one's machine at all. The only strange edge case in which it represents an improvement is if one is using software like Windows, which is so wildly hole-ridden that security is expected to come from third parties. But even there, the correct solution is not to add more layers to shore up a quicksand foundation, but to simply replace it with a sane operating system.
I'd like to suggest that this type of thinking is something that it's very easy for all sides to fall into, and that it's a dangerous trap. Dehumanizing your opponents, and believing that the only way they could disagree with you is by being categorically too stupid to understand the situation, is a guaranteed route to endless polarization and no resolution. Usually when a statement like this could be (and is) used equally meaningfully by both sides, it's a sign that it's not especially true.
As to your policy points, Iraq already is a hell, crafted by two Bushes and a Rumsfeld over three decades. The US has murdered more than a million innocent people there in the last five years, after starving them and decimating their infrastructure over the previous ten years, after pushing them into a proxy war with Iran, after installing a brutal bastard that we thought we could push into a proxy war. I am not suggesting that things would be sweetness and light tomorrow if we were to walk away today, but our continued involvement has done nothing but make things worse and worse.
I quite agree with you that starting impeachment hearings now would be pointless and petty. But starting them the week that the new Congress was sworn in would have been effective and popular. It would not have seemed vindictive to simply get right to the job that they were voted in to do.
I'm intrigued by the vast difference between your and my interpretation of the 2006 election and Congress's subsequent approval ratings.
My read of things is that the sweeping overturn of Congress in 2006 was about the clearest possible mandate that our deeply flawed electoral system can transmit. Its message was complete disapproval of the Bush administration's policies (most especially its military adventurism), and a demand that they be curtailed.
I actually experienced some hope and excitement in November of 2006, thinking that this might introduce a tiny bit of restraint to Bush's insanity.
Unfortunately, the newly elected Democrat Congress proceeded to dither for months on end about whether or not to hold discussions on whether or not to hold a vote on the idea of passing a non-binding resolution suggesting that perhaps staying in Iraq forever might not be the most stellar plan--and then failed to do even that.
This seems clearly to be the source of Congress's low approval ratings: their complete ineffectuality at reigning in the white house. I think that if they had de-funded the war immediately their approval rating would be twice what it is now, and if they had followed it up with impeachment hearings it would be fourfold.