locking documents in proprietary formats, paying BIG bucks for windows/office and all the other plunder you need for a usable system (zip/rar, burn software, dvd player, image editing software,...) should not be taken for granted but rather weighed against the costs of their alternatives.
What makes you think you need those things on Windows? I have a site licensed copy of Office 97 on some of the PCs I use, but mainly use OpenOffice; I do use an ancient copy of Winzip sometimes, but more often use InfoZip; I use Burrrn, which is freeware. I've never paid for a dvd player or image editing software. I have installed the Gimp a couple of times, but mostly don't do those things.
Pretty much everything I want that exists on Linux also exists in Windows, with the same license terms. The reverse is not true.
The answer to your question depends upon what problem you are talking about.
That was a response to your message, where you said "the sooner the root problem here will be resolved." If you don't know what problem you're talking about, I certainly don't.
Sure, it's a little harder, but how is that going to help to resolve the problem? Nobody who is selling computers wants to make Windows installs harder.
Looking at this another way, could an "ordinary PC user" install Windows on a PC, having never used Windows before?
It's not at all hard. Put in the CDROM, reboot, answer a few questions. It's pretty much the same as using a machine that has a preload on it, just a bit slower.
While it is true that some multi-media content is a PITA on Linux, this is hardly the fault of open source but more a symptom of a lack of usable standards in the industry.
Blame isn't the issue. The issue is that some things that people want to do are easier in Windows than in Linux. Many things are easier in Linux than in out-of-the-box Windows, but more options (Cygwin, etc.) exist to make Windows do those than to make Linux to the things Windows is good at.
Linux is getting pretty close: most of the applications I use on Windows now are available there too. But there's no reason to switch, so far, because nothing that I want to do is *only* available there.
In the real world, the New Jersey state police do not close a rape case when partial prints are matched to a seventy-five year old war vet bound to a wheelchair in Petaluma.
That would be more comforting if I was a seventy-five year old war vet.
Fingerprinting everybody is just another version of mass screening. As is well-known from AIDS testing and the NSA phone screening, mass screening for rare events is a recipe for generating false positives. Right now fingerprints are useful and reliable because only targetted individuals are fingerprinted. If everybody was fingerprinted, the number of false positives would skyrocket.
See http://biometrics.cse.msu.edu/prabhakar_indiv_pami .pdf for a discussion of this. It suggests that the chances of "near identical" fingerprints in someone else whose fingerprints are collected carefully is pretty small, but the chance of a match to latent fingerprints (the ones someone left at the scene of a crime) are quite a bit higher. "A few dozen" people being able to leave latent prints that match yours is plausible.
"Not your ordinary treaty"? What do you mean by that?
I agree that other treaties also deal with the same issues that NAFTA deals with, but I don't think any are in conflict with it. The WTO rulings are less stringent than what NAFTA imposes. This means that the US could win at WTO and lose at NAFTA without any contradiction, and, if they chose to follow the treaties they had signed, they would have to follow the more stringent NAFTA rulings. They didn't.
"US would have had no choice but to back off"? Really? I guess it's too bad the Canadian trade officials didn't have you to explain the situation to them, or they wouldn't have made such a "weird" decision. To me it looked as though the Canadians thought (probably incorrectly) that backing down in this case would mean the US would follow NAFTA in other cases. I think it means that the dispute resolution parts of the NAFTA agreement are now worthless, because the US knows it can get away with ignoring them. Canada was foolish to think the US would agree to give up any sovereignty whatsoever, and should not have signed away its own sovereignty in agreeing to the deal: because you can bet the US won't let Canada renege on its parts of the agreement.
This is also why the grandparent's comment about the US "not sticking to treaties" is utter hogwash. Treaties that have been ratified become law in the United States, and unless the law is modified (thereby formally withdrawing from the treaty) the US government is legally required to stick to their provisions.
Is the North American Free Trade Agreement a treaty by your definition? Seems the US doesn't like the dispute settlement mechanisms they signed up for, and the Canadian government has given up trying to get them to follow the treaty as far as softwood lumber is concerned. Canada had mixed results in its challenges under the WTO, but won the NAFTA challenges: however, the US chose not to follow the rulings.
Nice try, and it would help. But please note that you're just plastering over the problem without really solving it. What happens when I use a non-constant function pointer and forget the parenthesis?
In that case you don't get a warning. But in this case the error would have been discovered much earlier.
Just because a warning won't solve every problem doesn't mean it's a waste of time.
In this case the likely real use of the code would be as an expansion of a macro, where the macro might be a function pointer, or might be a function. But a simple workaround to indicate intention would be to require parenthesis wrappers:
if ( (foo) == 0 ) is legal, no warning
if ( foo == 0 ) is legal, but generates a warning.
Greylisting is a PITA for confirmation emails. Not everyone who sends them lets you know who to whitelist, and generally the whitelisting itself is a PITA. So you have to wait for the confirmation to try again, and by that time, you've moved on to something else.
Adaptive filters seem like a better idea. I've got one email address with greylisting, one without. The greylisted one is the more public one, with about 50% more incoming spam than the other, but the "Bayesian" filters in SpamAssassin catch most of what gets through to both of them (around 500-1000 spam caught per day, 5-10 making it through).
f. And they should try offering "Customer Service" in response to questions/complaints.
I received a "free listing for new sellers" offer, listed an item at too high a price, and it didn't sell. After the auction, someone who had been asking questions during the auction wrote to me to ask if I would re-list it at a lower price. E-bay would not let me respond to the question, because I had "exceeded my daily limit of messages". I never did get a straight answer about what the limit was, just that I could raise it by giving them my credit card information. I had a "conversation" with 5 or 6 different monkeys passing me boilerplate FAQ answers, but never any answers to the questions I actually asked.
That includes the risk of a dis-satisfied customer or product failure.
Perhaps the EE's are interested in this, but the sales force isn't. I bought a Dell last August. Dell lost my online order, then left out several components (but kept the same price) when I phoned up to find out what was going on. It took several weeks of phone calls and letters before I got most of what I ordered. I never did get everything, though I was promised it at least three times, counting the original order and promises from "Customer Service".
I bought another computer a few months later, but from a local company, not from Dell. The price was higher than a similarly configured Dell in the ads, but I have a long memory when a company lies to me and wastes my time.
If you are developing or writing text files, then use the command line version of svn everywhere for version control, and TortoiseSVN as a front end in Windows.
For comparing files and directories and merging, use Beyond Compare.
Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system
Who has the veto power? Christian groups or the US? This sentence is confusing, though I would hope they meant US and not Christian.
This should be clear. "Which has" is singular, whereas "groups" is plural, so it couldn't be the antecedent. "The US" is singular, so it must have the veto.
Now don't complain about the fact that "US" is an abbreviation for "United States". It's singular, I tell you.
I thought the GGP post [mine, I think] was talking about missionaries as in proselytizers for Christianity. I didn't think it was a metaphor. Stupid me. Carry on.
As far as I know I was talking about literal missionaries, not metaphorical ones. I was responding to the parent of my message. I wasn't suggesting that these people should lie to their supporters, just that they should tell the truth about why Hotmail and AOL are too much trouble to be allowed to be used for mailing list subscriptions (and that they should do it in a way that would cause an uproar).
As someone else said, this is a bit more activism than pure "market forces", but isn't activism marketing of ideas, and isn't marketing part of market forces?
Presumably the worry is that the degree of access given to the Black Box Voting inspectors is greater than a voter would have. Did they spend several hours taking the machine apart? Did they put it back together properly? A clerk might have noticed this happening on voting day.
Of course, this raises the question: if the machine could be compromised in a few hours of hacking, are all the other machines stored securely enough that this couldn't have happened to them, too?
The obvious solution is to refuse to add hotmail or AOL addresses to the mailing list. Explain that hotmail wants to charge missionaries $2000 (or whatever) in order to accept their mail, start a letter writing campaign, etc.
If enough people do that, well that's a market solution.
The advantage of this, of course, is that it costs the same to call a landline as it does to call a cellphone. In Europe, for example, it generally costs more to call a cellphone.
No, it costs more to call a cellphone. But the owner of the cellphone pays the extra cost.
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locking documents in proprietary formats, paying BIG bucks for windows/office and all the other plunder you need for a usable system (zip/rar, burn software, dvd player, image editing software, ...) should not be taken for granted but rather weighed against the costs of their alternatives.
What makes you think you need those things on Windows? I have a site licensed copy of Office 97 on some of the PCs I use, but mainly use OpenOffice; I do use an ancient copy of Winzip sometimes, but more often use InfoZip; I use Burrrn, which is freeware. I've never paid for a dvd player or image editing software. I have installed the Gimp a couple of times, but mostly don't do those things.
Pretty much everything I want that exists on Linux also exists in Windows, with the same license terms. The reverse is not true.
how is that going to help to resolve the problem?
The answer to your question depends upon what problem you are talking about.
That was a response to your message, where you said "the sooner the root problem here will be resolved." If you don't know what problem you're talking about, I certainly don't.
Sure, it's a little harder, but how is that going to help to resolve the problem? Nobody who is selling computers wants to make Windows installs harder.
Looking at this another way, could an "ordinary PC user" install Windows on a PC, having never used Windows before?
It's not at all hard. Put in the CDROM, reboot, answer a few questions. It's pretty much the same as using a machine that has a preload on it, just a bit slower.
While it is true that some multi-media content is a PITA on Linux, this is hardly the fault of open source but more a symptom of a lack of usable standards in the industry.
Blame isn't the issue. The issue is that some things that people want to do are easier in Windows than in Linux. Many things are easier in Linux than in out-of-the-box Windows, but more options (Cygwin, etc.) exist to make Windows do those than to make Linux to the things Windows is good at.
Linux is getting pretty close: most of the applications I use on Windows now are available there too. But there's no reason to switch, so far, because nothing that I want to do is *only* available there.
In the real world, the New Jersey state police do not close a rape case when partial prints are matched to a seventy-five year old war vet bound to a wheelchair in Petaluma.
That would be more comforting if I was a seventy-five year old war vet.
Fingerprinting everybody is just another version of mass screening. As is well-known from AIDS testing and the NSA phone screening, mass screening for rare events is a recipe for generating false positives. Right now fingerprints are useful and reliable because only targetted individuals are fingerprinted. If everybody was fingerprinted, the number of false positives would skyrocket.
See http://biometrics.cse.msu.edu/prabhakar_indiv_pami .pdf for a discussion of this. It suggests that the chances of "near identical" fingerprints in someone else whose fingerprints are collected carefully is pretty small, but the chance of a match to latent fingerprints (the ones someone left at the scene of a crime) are quite a bit higher. "A few dozen" people being able to leave latent prints that match yours is plausible.
If I considered that punishment to be normal or reasonable I wouldn't have complained about it, would I?
I'm sure you'd ask the court to release someone who wandered into your house, read your personal information but didn't take any of it, right?
Perhaps not, but I wouldn't expect to be able to extradite him from overseas, and I wouldn't expect him to face many years in prison.
"Not your ordinary treaty"? What do you mean by that?
I agree that other treaties also deal with the same issues that NAFTA deals with, but I don't think any are in conflict with it. The WTO rulings are less stringent than what NAFTA imposes. This means that the US could win at WTO and lose at NAFTA without any contradiction, and, if they chose to follow the treaties they had signed, they would have to follow the more stringent NAFTA rulings. They didn't.
"US would have had no choice but to back off"? Really? I guess it's too bad the Canadian trade officials didn't have you to explain the situation to them, or they wouldn't have made such a "weird" decision. To me it looked as though the Canadians thought (probably incorrectly) that backing down in this case would mean the US would follow NAFTA in other cases. I think it means that the dispute resolution parts of the NAFTA agreement are now worthless, because the US knows it can get away with ignoring them. Canada was foolish to think the US would agree to give up any sovereignty whatsoever, and should not have signed away its own sovereignty in agreeing to the deal: because you can bet the US won't let Canada renege on its parts of the agreement.
This is also why the grandparent's comment about the US "not sticking to treaties" is utter hogwash. Treaties that have been ratified become law in the United States, and unless the law is modified (thereby formally withdrawing from the treaty) the US government is legally required to stick to their provisions.
Is the North American Free Trade Agreement a treaty by your definition? Seems the US doesn't like the dispute settlement mechanisms they signed up for, and the Canadian government has given up trying to get them to follow the treaty as far as softwood lumber is concerned. Canada had mixed results in its challenges under the WTO, but won the NAFTA challenges: however, the US chose not to follow the rulings.
There's probably a reason why a warning isn't generated, but I can't think of it at the moment :)
Probably they tried it out on the X11 code, and discovered that it would generate spurious warnings on known good code.
Comparison of a function constant?
Nice try, and it would help. But please note that you're just plastering over the problem without really solving it. What happens when I use a non-constant function pointer and forget the parenthesis?
In that case you don't get a warning. But in this case the error would have been discovered much earlier.
Just because a warning won't solve every problem doesn't mean it's a waste of time.
In this case the likely real use of the code would be as an expansion of a macro, where the macro might be a function pointer, or might be a function. But a simple workaround to indicate intention would be to require parenthesis wrappers:
if ( (foo) == 0 ) is legal, no warning
if ( foo == 0 ) is legal, but generates a warning.
Greylisting is a PITA for confirmation emails. Not everyone who sends them lets you know who to whitelist, and generally the whitelisting itself is a PITA. So you have to wait for the confirmation to try again, and by that time, you've moved on to something else.
Adaptive filters seem like a better idea. I've got one email address with greylisting, one without. The greylisted one is the more public one, with about 50% more incoming spam than the other, but the "Bayesian" filters in SpamAssassin catch
most of what gets through to both of them (around 500-1000 spam caught per day, 5-10 making it through).
f. And they should try offering "Customer Service" in response to questions/complaints.
I received a "free listing for new sellers" offer, listed an item at too high a price, and it didn't sell. After the auction, someone who had been asking questions during the auction wrote to me to ask if I would re-list it at a lower price. E-bay would not let me respond to the question, because I had "exceeded my daily limit of messages". I never did get a straight answer about what the limit was, just that I could raise it by giving them my credit card information. I had a "conversation" with 5 or 6 different monkeys passing me boilerplate FAQ answers, but never any answers to the questions I actually asked.
That includes the risk of a dis-satisfied customer or product failure.
Perhaps the EE's are interested in this, but the sales force isn't. I bought a Dell last August. Dell lost my online order, then left out several components (but kept the same price) when I phoned up to find out what was going on. It took several weeks of phone calls and letters before I got most of what I ordered. I never did get everything, though I was promised it at least three times, counting the original order and promises from "Customer Service".
I bought another computer a few months later, but from a local company, not from Dell. The price was higher than a similarly configured Dell in the ads, but I have a long memory when a company lies to me and wastes my time.
If you are developing or writing text files, then use the command line version of svn everywhere for version control, and TortoiseSVN as a front end in Windows.
For comparing files and directories and merging, use
Beyond Compare.
I think almost all statistics relating to guns and crime are distorted by people with an agenda to promote, so you should believe very few of them.
I don't know if it's true, but it does drive home the fact that criminals adopt to their environment.
I see how a statistic even you don't trust drives home anything.
Wasn't this a joke someone made trying to imitate Bush at the Jeff Foxworthy Roast on Comedy Central?
I think it was an old joke before Bush was born. But the old ones are the good ones.
"around the block" is about 3K'.
I don't think you're allowed to use "K" with feet. You should have said "around the block" is around 5 furlongs.
Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system
Who has the veto power? Christian groups or the US? This sentence is confusing, though I would hope they meant US and not Christian.
This should be clear. "Which has" is singular, whereas "groups" is plural, so it couldn't be the antecedent. "The US" is singular, so it must have the veto.
Now don't complain about the fact that "US" is an abbreviation for "United States". It's singular, I tell you.
I thought the GGP post [mine, I think] was talking about missionaries as in proselytizers for Christianity. I didn't think it was a metaphor. Stupid me. Carry on.
As far as I know I was talking about literal missionaries, not metaphorical ones. I was responding to the parent of my message. I wasn't suggesting that these people should lie to their supporters, just that they should tell the truth about why Hotmail and AOL are too much trouble to be allowed to be used for mailing list subscriptions (and that they should do it in a way that would cause an uproar).
As someone else said, this is a bit more activism than pure "market forces", but isn't activism marketing of ideas, and isn't marketing part of market forces?
Presumably the worry is that the degree of access given to the Black Box Voting inspectors is greater than a voter would have. Did they spend several hours taking the machine apart? Did they put it back together properly? A clerk might have noticed this happening on voting day.
Of course, this raises the question: if the machine could be compromised in a few hours of hacking, are all the other machines stored securely enough that this couldn't have happened to them, too?
The obvious solution is to refuse to add hotmail or AOL addresses to the mailing list. Explain that hotmail wants to charge missionaries $2000 (or whatever) in order to accept their mail, start a letter writing campaign, etc.
If enough people do that, well that's a market solution.
The advantage of this, of course, is that it costs the same to call a landline as it does to call a cellphone. In Europe, for example, it generally costs more to call a cellphone.
No, it costs more to call a cellphone. But the owner of the cellphone pays the extra cost.