...the ITU represents what is laughingly called the "United Nations".
Funny how outside a certain country in North America, which got very upset twelve months ago when it found out that international opinion wasn't always going to be on its side, the United Nations is still well respected.
I find it the very height of hypocrisy that the US has been happy to veto otherwise unanimous Security Council and General Assembly resolutions condemning Israel for its heavy-handedness in the occupied territories but feels the need to shout it from the rooftops when the overwhelming majority of both bodies oppose a resolution that gives the US carte blanche to wage war.
Somehow, the US standing in the way of world opinion when it comes to Israel is called "diplomacy in action" but when world opinion doesn't tow the line and is heavily opposed to a US plan of action the United Nations is somehow "broken". Gee, nice double standards you've got there, pal.
The current US administrations, through its actions and words, has done more to harm the UN than any other country has ever done. Yet, somehow, that administration and the largely sycophantic US media continues to paint a picture of the UN being the one to blame. Flippant comments, such as the one made in the parent post, only serve to reinforce this absurd state of affairs.
Click Continue to order iPod battery service for $99 USD. This program is not available in Europe at this time.
So, either:
1) iPods shipped in Europe have batteries that never wear down or need replacing; or
2) European customers just got shafted again.
Hint: the answer's an even number. Why is it that iPod owners who don't live in North America should have to wait to buy something that's probably smaller than a box of matches? And how long will they have to wait? Three months? Six months? A year?
Already happens...
on
Recycling TV Ads
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· Score: 2, Informative
The number of ads that I've seen in Britain with badly dubbed over voices with lip-synching that's totally screwed has risen dramatically over the last five years.
In most cases, the lip-synching is slightly out, meaning that the ad was probably filmed in English but originally shot overseas somewhere (US, Australia, etc). Companies that have done this include Coca-Cola for Diet Coke, Just For Men hair colourant and, ridiculously, a hair product for women that dubbed out Andie McDowell's beautiful southern drawl with that of another American!
However, on at least one ad i've seen the lip-synching was totally screwed and there was no correlation between the lip movements and the words being spoken - clearly, this was an ad that was shot in another European country and in another language but with English voices dubbed over the top. Frankly, I felt that it was so tacky that it made the product look bad.
I'm sure your post is particularly interesting to former steel workers in Wales and elsewhere around the world that have lost their jobs because of the hefty import tarriffs on foreign steel introduced by the Bush administration.
Seriously, if you're going to talk about free markets, then feel free to do so. But first have the decency to acknowledge that the US definition of free trade isn't 100 percent free.
What I find amazing that it's the same people who think nothing of paying $20 dollars for a t-shirt or $150 dollars for pair of sports shoes that they know are made by workers earning next to nothing in sweatshops in South East Asia that are the first to complain when jobs in their own industries start being lost to overseas firms.
If you're happy to reap the benefits of a global economy when you go to Gap or Footlocker then you should be ready to accept the consequences when the same global economy dictates that you're easily replaced by someone who lives half way around the world. Otherwise, you're just a hypocrite.
Evolve and adapt. It's what workers in other industries have had to do for decades if not centuries. Now it's our turn. The sooner we accept that the better off we'll be.
Slashdot has kept its HTML 3.2 design for a long time ("because it works"), but perhaps this effort will be a catalyst for change...
Translation of what Taco said: We couldn't get off our collective asses to update the site so that it worked with anything newer than HTML 3.2 but, now that somebody's gone and done all that not-so-hard work for us and handed it to us on a plate, we might consider joining the 21st century. If we can pull ourselves away from Quake III/UT/EverQuest/Warcraft III/Neverwinter Nights.
Anyone else think it was way past the time that the editors actually did something along these lines?
I doubt they built a fab plant in Germany to keep down labour costs.
As an EU nation, Germany has employment rights that are a lot more stringent than in the US or South East Asia - we're talking about a higher minimum wage, a cap on weekly working hours, sick pay, maternity and paternity leave, pension contributions by the employer, favourable redundancy payments, etc.
More likely is that other economic factors - tax breaks, being inside the Euro zone, etc - were the deciding factors.
Actually I think if sherman (The RIAA one not the Kazaa one) feared for his life he might think twice before filing more bullshit lawsuits. If he was killed I highly doubt his successor would do what got Sherman killed.
Oh, yeah? They'd find someone who'd still be willing to do the job.
Want proof? Look at people who administer abortions. Those pro-life nuts give them hell every day, blowing up clinics, sending letter bombs, assassinating doctors in their homes, etc just because they cannot stand someone else making a decision about their own body. They know violence is wrong, they know assassination is wrong, but they still do it. (Wasn't there one of these pro-lifers recently sentenced to the death penalty? And wasn't he a preacher of some sort? Crazy.)
People who work in abortion clinics live with death threats all the time. Yet still they show up for work. You were saying something about how assassinations work?
...a disgruntled Philadelphia Phillies fan who hacked into computers nationwide and launched spam e-mails criticizing the baseball team...
Jeez, those Philly fans never give up do they? I don't think they'd be satisfied even if their teams won the World Series, Super Bowl, Stanley Cup and the NBA Championship. They'd still find something to complain about - haven't these guys heard of rooting for the home team? No wonder the old Veteran's Stadium had a courthouse and jail added to its basement.
If it's by a percentage rather than the actual total, please bare in mind that the population of New Zealand is not very large, it only hit 4 million this year, so all it would take is a few hundred phone taps on the lines of organised criminals and suspected terrorists to give you a relatively high percentage figure for NZ.
So, NZ might have a few hundred phone taps and the US might have a few hundred thousand. But because of their relative population sizes, you're going to call out NZ as a country that's big on tapping? Are you kidding me?
Next time, if you're going to editorialise in your story submission, at least try to be fair rather than comparing apples and oranges.
The most natural position for your eyes, neck, back, etc is to have the top of the screen at eye level, face on and parallel to your body. That way, your posture is more natural, and your eyes, neck, back, etc aren't strained by constant deviation from the norm.
If you're staring upwards at your screen, then your eyes are doing more work or your neck is, or a combination of both. Either way, the posture you'll adopt and the knock on effects it has on the rest of your anatomy is damaging to your long term health.
No, being hunched down over a monitor isn't good for you but, equally, having to arch your back and look upwards isn't good for you either.
What you said was "every other", as in "Mom, I can't wear blue! Every other girl is wearing black!" or "turn every other glass upside down."
Gee, thanks for telling me what I meant. There was me thinking that I knew what I meant without having to be told by someone else. Yes, I'll admit that having re-read my original sentence it could have better worded to avoid ambiguity but, just because you assumed the wrong meaning, it doesn't make the statement any less valid.
I still think that you fail to appreciate how much enterprises have invested in Microsoft software on the desktop. As I've said, it goes way beyond the per seat cost of the software - there's a lot more money invested in training, etc that you're ignoring. Simply saying that people will defect when a superior alternative becomes clear is rather niave.
And as for your statement that "end-user adoption of software is the only real measure of how 'good' it is", well, all I have to say to that is Internet Explorer.
I said "every other" version, not "every" version. I take it you don't know what the phrase "every other" means. Well it means every two versions. Basic english, bub.
Word XP uses the same format as Word 2000, but it's a different format to the one used in Word 97 and Word 95, which is a different format to that used in Word 6.x for Windows. Oh, and look, Word 2003 will have a different format too. QED.
As to switching from Microsoft Office to other application suites, I guess you've never worked in an enterprise environment. There is no way a company that has thousands of seats is going to up and change its default desktop package unless it has to. Can you imagine how much work there is in reimaging thousands of PCs and retraining thousands of users? Do you want to be the one to tell the CEO that he can no longer use the software that he's just about got used to? Dream on, buddy.
You yourself say that there's nothing in the latest versions of Office worth spending $500 a seat to upgrade. Yet you think that corporations will willingly spend as much as that if not more rejigging their desktops and retraining their staff?
WordPerfect got ousted by Microsoft Word because of a unique combination of factors. Firstly, WordPerfect Corp. fumbled the ball badly, and they were very late in producing a Windows version of their product when the market was screaming for it. Secondly, Microsoft did everything it could to undermine their efforts, including releasing an upgrade (Windows 3.1) that broke the existing software. Thirdly, Microsoft became very aggressive with its marketing and released Microsoft Office, meaning that for a little more than users were used to paying for one application, they could have three major ones (Word, Excel and PowerPoint). And as Excel was already by and far the best spreadsheet available for Windows (partiallly because Microsoft had used the same tactics on Lotus), buying Office became a no-brainer.
Face it, Microsoft is a unique position of dominance. That it can use that dominance to control markets in which it has inferior products has been shown. So, I'll ask you again, what makes you think that Microsoft will "focus on making Word the best DOC writer"?
I've lived and worked in London all my life. I've lived in the middle of town (Soho, Bloomsbury, Fitrovia Clerkenwell, Camden Town) as well the suburbs. I know what I'm talking about.
Traffic monitoring cameras point at the roads. They're not geared towards tracking you on foot. Yes, there are cameras around areas like Kings Cross but these are concentrated around the stations and major buildings, such as the British Library - just move a few streets across away from any major edifices and you won't find a single one.
What does that tell you? Well, the cameras sure aren't there to track you from point to point. How could they be without blanket coverage? What they are there to do is discourage petty crime and drug dealing, as you rightly suggested, and, more importantly, act as the first line of defence against terrorism.
To suggest that the cameras are part of a "Big Brother is watching you"-type network, as the original poster suggested, is completely misleading.
Seriously, without knowing how much work is involved, would it be possible for NASA to retreive Hubble with a shuttle after a routine mission had been completed? Hubble has taught us so much it deserves to be retained in a museum somewhere. In a way, it's been as important to astronomers and astrophysicists as perhaps the Wright brothers' flyer was to aviators. It would be a crying shame to let it just burn up in the atmosphere.
MS keeps things closed when they think that they can make money off of them.
Which is why every other version of Microsoft Office has introduced a new file format. To force people into upgrading.
When OpenOffice et al can read and write DOC files as well as a majority of the Office installations, MS is best served to abandon the idea of proprietary DOC and focus on making word the best DOC writer.
If the playing field was level then this argument might be valid, but it isn't, so it's not. Now that it dominates the word processing market there is little or no reason for Microsoft to really innovate and make Word "the best DOC writer". Even if OpenOffice was a hundred or a thousand times superior to Microsoft Word for creating documents do you think there would be a widescale switch away from the Microsoft product? When companies and individuals have so much invested in Microsoft Word (especially training) and are so reluctant to change?
If you want proof look at Microsoft's web browser. Internet Explorer clearly dominates the browser market, but is it the best browser? Hardly. Compared to Opera, Firebird or Safari, Internet Explorer is absolute rubbish, and I'd challenge any Microsoft employee to argue otherwise. Microsoft's dominanace of the browser market means that it isn't important to Microsoft that Internet Explorer is the best. Similarly, Microsoft's dominance of the word processing market means that it is no longer important that Word is the best at what it does either.
Just how long will it be before Microsoft releases a Word Document ML Plus format that is not so open?
Let's face it, Microsoft loves proprietary technology that it owns and that it controls. There's no long-term advantage to it whatsoever in creating a truly open file format - the biggest reason why Microsoft Office applications are so ubiquitous is because people need to read Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access documents they've been sent, not necessarily because those are the best tools for everybody.
Word Document ML is a PR exercise. It's Microsoft saying "See, we're nice and friendly and open, too", at a time when its revenues are beginning (perhaps not significantly yet) to be threatened by open source alternatives. Long-term though, Microsoft will shut up shop again and bring users back to the fold with a proprietary version that's "improved", "enhanced" or "more secure" in some way.
Want proof? Just look at Hotmail. When Microsoft bought it, it promised that the Hotmail service wouldn't be compromised in any way, and that it would continue to remain free. Well, the basic service might still be free but it's been crippled in so many ways - mail filtering that says it will delete junk mail in 24 hours but doesn't, incredibly bad junk mail filtering in the first place, even fewer mail sorting rules allowed now than were allowed a few years ago, a very limited number of addresses and domains that can be blocked, etc. All tactics to get you to subscribe to their enhanced Hotmail service, which has some new features but is made up of a lot of the stuff that Microsoft has stripped from the basic service.
Will people use Word Document ML format? If it becomes standard in Microsoft Word then of course they will. They'll have no choice - Microsoft has a practical monopoly when it comes to everyday file formats. Will Microsoft eventually hijack Word Document ML format by making a future iteration proprietary once more and hence shut out any competing product when it releases them via a patch or whatever? Of course it will.
Why am I so sure of this? Because Microsoft is just like the scorpion in the tale of the scorpion and the frog. It's in its nature.
It's also the nation that puts up monitoring cameras in many public areas.
What planet are you on? The CCTV cameras installed by retail outlets or in shopping centres are their to deter shoplifters and for customer safety. The CCTVs installed in Underground stations and airports are there to observe passenger flow, to prevent platform overcrowding and for passenger safety. The CCTVs installed around prominent buildings are there to deter terrorists like the IRA.
Presumably, you live in the US. Next time you go out to the mall, check how many CCTVs there are. Now do the same at the airport. And then do the same the next time you're near a government building or other sensitive location.
The CCTVs installed in the UK aren't one big monitoring network. You can't use them to track a person. And you can't use them to see where a person has been in the past. So where's your "monitoring"?
Put yourself in the shoes of a Palistinean for a moment. First of all, you're treated worse than a second class citizen. Secondly, your life and the life of your loved ones is constantly under threat from Israeli military forces. The world's one superpower provides billions in dollars each year to arm those forces, it's US tanks, US planes and US gunships that fire US shells, drop US bombs and launch US rockets at you and your neighbours. Wouldn't you be pissed at America as well as at Israel?
How is it that you can condemn France for selling arms and technology to apartheid South Africa but you can't see any reason why someone acutally being hit by the shells, bombs and rockets would condemn the US for giving those shells, bombs and rockets to Israel? You didn't answer my previous question, if you gave a loaded gun to your 12-year-old kid and he shot the kid next door with it, wouldn't you be partially to blame? And wouldn't that kid and his parents have a right to be mad at you? To want justice, or even revenge?
It's OK for baseball crowds to chant "USA, USA!", and less savoury things when news of bombings in Afghanistan is announced to them but it's not understandable why a downtrodden Palistinean who's suffered for decades under an oppressive regime backed by US might of arms would be happy to see someone else suffer for a change? If I taught someone kung fu specifically so they could beat you up on a daily basis wouldn't you show the slightest bit of emotion when someone finally gave me a good beating in retaliation? Is it really that hard to see where those people cheering in the streets were coming from? It isn't for me.
(By the way, I find it stunning that the state of Israel, built with the horrors of the WW2 and the Hitler's "Final Solution" still fresh in the memory of many of its founding citizens, can be so callous with regards to the treatment of non-Jewish citizens and residents of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Lest you forget, those two territories are illegally occupied by Israel.)
You want to talk about appeasement? Fine, we'll do that. Yes, Britain and France (and others) appeased Germany in the 1930s. They (mistakenly) sought diplomatic solutions that cost them nothing but ruined others rather than seek out conflict. But they did draw a line in the sand. And when that line was crossed (the Nazi invasion of Poland), they acted and declared war on Germany. Contrary to what most Americans think, WW2 started in September 1939, not December 1941. And while Britain and France fought the Axis powers, America watched on the sidelines, not wanting to involve itself in someone else's war. In fact, even when the US did involve itself with the war in Europe it wasn't out of choice - after Pearl Harbour, Germany declared war on the US, not the other way around. Perhaps you've forgotten about US isolationism?
I'm curious though, why is it you don't want to talk about ousting democracies and installing dictators? Or about the dozens of other countries where people are oppressed and/or at risk? No mention of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, China (at least not in this context) or Congo in your reply. Why is that?
And why is it OK for you to condemn France as long as you comment on the bravery of its soldiers but it isn't OK for me to condemn US foreign policy fuck-ups without having to say something nice in return? Is it relevant to this discussion? If I say that the people of Kuwait are grateful for what the US, Britain et al did for them in 1991 does it then make everything alright? Why do I have to qualify a justifiable criticism with a compliment? Do Republicans tell Democrats how much they like their education plans before savaging them on their economic strategy?
Seriously, read my first post in this thread and the subsequent ones again. All I have done is be consistent in my attempt to drive home one point - there are negative things we can point out about any nation. You and I can both rattle off a list of positive achievements and say "I'm p
First of all, my original post illustrated that if you want to run down China's attempt to start a lunar programme because 80 percent of its population are farmers and thus it has other priorities then you should be prepared to look at your own country just as critically. You still seemed to have missed that point - ie, it is possible to list dozens of reasons why money should be spent elsewhere for any nation, including the US.
You accuse me of America-bashing. Fine, that's your perogative. But all I've done is present the facts. If history makes you feel uncomfortable then I'm not the one to blame. Again, for every point you raise that makes France look bad, I can match it with a similar example that does the same for the US. And vice versa. Which is the very point I was trying to bring to the attention of the person to whom I originally replied.
France wouldn't allow its airspace to be used for a bombing mission? So what? So the USAF had to do a bit of in-flight refuelling to get the job done. Do you have any appreciation of how many North African immigrants there are in France? Or of how many terrorist threats and attacks they've faced over the decades from groups with North African connections? If you were the French President, charged with protecting French lives, what would you do, put your ally to a minor inconvenience or put your countrymen at risk or a major terrorist reprisal?
Remember, until recently the US attitude to terrorism that affected its allies was nonchalant at best - When Margaret Thatcher's government asked George Bush Sr's administration for help in stemming the flow of funds from the US to the IRA they were told to politely fuck off, as funding terrorism against the US's closest ally was "free speech", and protected by the First Amendment. Gee, thanks George. Nice to know that helping fund the murder of British men, women and children, of British civilians, politicians, policemen and armed forces was a God-given right that a President lining up to fight the biggest war since WW2 couldn't give his staunchest ally.
Oh, and the "you should be supporting us now regardless of how you feel" argument just doesn't wash. For one thing, it's now OK to start wars under false pretences and then expect everyone to rally round, is it? Yeah right. And, for another thing, where does your "you have to support us" doctrine fit in with regards to the Vietnam War? Wasn't it the protests of those Americans opposed to the continued US presence in South East Asia that ended the war?
And as for the "the Iraqis deserve freedom" argument, so do billions around the world. What about key US allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? Hardly glowing examples of democracy are they? In Saudi Arabia, women aren't even allowed to drive. In Pakistan, those that dare teach children have had acid thrown in their faces. What about their emancipation? Elsewhere, what about Zimbabwe or China? Why not throw resources at Congo, where the civil war has killed 5 million in the last few years and where cannibalism is now being used as a instrument of terror? Actually, can even you tell me when was the last time Congo even made the news in your daily paper or on your TV?
Muslims (By the way, why choose that word and not Palistineans? Would you prefer it if I referred to Israelis as Jews?) blowing up people in pizzerias is awful. But is it any more awful than indescriminate Israeli bombing and bulldozing of populated civilian centres in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Why condemn one but not the other? Isn't a Palistinean child's life as valuable as an Israeli child's? Is it ethical for the US to supply Israel with F-16s, AH-64s and M1A1s then ignore the destruction wreaked upon innocent civilians with those weapons? Doesn't the US have any moral responsibility when US-built and US-supplied armour is reigning death and destruction upon hte Palistinean people? If you gave a loaded gun to your 12-year-old kid and he shot the kid next door with it, wouldn't you be partially to blame?
Slashdot Mirror
...the ITU represents what is laughingly called the "United Nations".
Funny how outside a certain country in North America, which got very upset twelve months ago when it found out that international opinion wasn't always going to be on its side, the United Nations is still well respected.
I find it the very height of hypocrisy that the US has been happy to veto otherwise unanimous Security Council and General Assembly resolutions condemning Israel for its heavy-handedness in the occupied territories but feels the need to shout it from the rooftops when the overwhelming majority of both bodies oppose a resolution that gives the US carte blanche to wage war.
Somehow, the US standing in the way of world opinion when it comes to Israel is called "diplomacy in action" but when world opinion doesn't tow the line and is heavily opposed to a US plan of action the United Nations is somehow "broken". Gee, nice double standards you've got there, pal.
The current US administrations, through its actions and words, has done more to harm the UN than any other country has ever done. Yet, somehow, that administration and the largely sycophantic US media continues to paint a picture of the UN being the one to blame. Flippant comments, such as the one made in the parent post, only serve to reinforce this absurd state of affairs.
Click Continue to order iPod battery service for $99 USD. This program is not available in Europe at this time.
So, either:
1) iPods shipped in Europe have batteries that never wear down or need replacing; or
2) European customers just got shafted again.
Hint: the answer's an even number. Why is it that iPod owners who don't live in North America should have to wait to buy something that's probably smaller than a box of matches? And how long will they have to wait? Three months? Six months? A year?
The number of ads that I've seen in Britain with badly dubbed over voices with lip-synching that's totally screwed has risen dramatically over the last five years.
In most cases, the lip-synching is slightly out, meaning that the ad was probably filmed in English but originally shot overseas somewhere (US, Australia, etc). Companies that have done this include Coca-Cola for Diet Coke, Just For Men hair colourant and, ridiculously, a hair product for women that dubbed out Andie McDowell's beautiful southern drawl with that of another American!
However, on at least one ad i've seen the lip-synching was totally screwed and there was no correlation between the lip movements and the words being spoken - clearly, this was an ad that was shot in another European country and in another language but with English voices dubbed over the top. Frankly, I felt that it was so tacky that it made the product look bad.
I'm sure your post is particularly interesting to former steel workers in Wales and elsewhere around the world that have lost their jobs because of the hefty import tarriffs on foreign steel introduced by the Bush administration.
Seriously, if you're going to talk about free markets, then feel free to do so. But first have the decency to acknowledge that the US definition of free trade isn't 100 percent free.
What I find amazing that it's the same people who think nothing of paying $20 dollars for a t-shirt or $150 dollars for pair of sports shoes that they know are made by workers earning next to nothing in sweatshops in South East Asia that are the first to complain when jobs in their own industries start being lost to overseas firms.
If you're happy to reap the benefits of a global economy when you go to Gap or Footlocker then you should be ready to accept the consequences when the same global economy dictates that you're easily replaced by someone who lives half way around the world. Otherwise, you're just a hypocrite.
Evolve and adapt. It's what workers in other industries have had to do for decades if not centuries. Now it's our turn. The sooner we accept that the better off we'll be.
Slashdot has kept its HTML 3.2 design for a long time ("because it works"), but perhaps this effort will be a catalyst for change...
Translation of what Taco said: We couldn't get off our collective asses to update the site so that it worked with anything newer than HTML 3.2 but, now that somebody's gone and done all that not-so-hard work for us and handed it to us on a plate, we might consider joining the 21st century. If we can pull ourselves away from Quake III/UT/EverQuest/Warcraft III/Neverwinter Nights.
Anyone else think it was way past the time that the editors actually did something along these lines?
I doubt they built a fab plant in Germany to keep down labour costs.
As an EU nation, Germany has employment rights that are a lot more stringent than in the US or South East Asia - we're talking about a higher minimum wage, a cap on weekly working hours, sick pay, maternity and paternity leave, pension contributions by the employer, favourable redundancy payments, etc.
More likely is that other economic factors - tax breaks, being inside the Euro zone, etc - were the deciding factors.
It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase googlewhack.
One night at Neverland with Michael Jackson.
I'm sure that would stop any sane individual from downloading ever again.
Actually I think if sherman (The RIAA one not the Kazaa one) feared for his life he might think twice before filing more bullshit lawsuits. If he was killed I highly doubt his successor would do what got Sherman killed.
Oh, yeah? They'd find someone who'd still be willing to do the job.
Want proof? Look at people who administer abortions. Those pro-life nuts give them hell every day, blowing up clinics, sending letter bombs, assassinating doctors in their homes, etc just because they cannot stand someone else making a decision about their own body. They know violence is wrong, they know assassination is wrong, but they still do it. (Wasn't there one of these pro-lifers recently sentenced to the death penalty? And wasn't he a preacher of some sort? Crazy.)
People who work in abortion clinics live with death threats all the time. Yet still they show up for work. You were saying something about how assassinations work?
...a disgruntled Philadelphia Phillies fan who hacked into computers nationwide and launched spam e-mails criticizing the baseball team...
Jeez, those Philly fans never give up do they? I don't think they'd be satisfied even if their teams won the World Series, Super Bowl, Stanley Cup and the NBA Championship. They'd still find something to complain about - haven't these guys heard of rooting for the home team? No wonder the old Veteran's Stadium had a courthouse and jail added to its basement.
Doh! I must be going blind. I read the link as .nz not .nl. Simple mistake, but pretty stupid at the same time.
Nevertheless, the relatively small population of the Netherlands skews these results.
If it's by a percentage rather than the actual total, please bare in mind that the population of New Zealand is not very large, it only hit 4 million this year, so all it would take is a few hundred phone taps on the lines of organised criminals and suspected terrorists to give you a relatively high percentage figure for NZ.
So, NZ might have a few hundred phone taps and the US might have a few hundred thousand. But because of their relative population sizes, you're going to call out NZ as a country that's big on tapping? Are you kidding me?
Next time, if you're going to editorialise in your story submission, at least try to be fair rather than comparing apples and oranges.
Nah, it's more like Ebola turns them to jelly/jello.
Put your monitor on your PC (if it's a desktop) or on a stand. Heck, if you can't stretch to that then put your LCD on a pile of books.
By the way, better LCD monitors come with stands that tilt, swivel and are height adjustable.
The most natural position for your eyes, neck, back, etc is to have the top of the screen at eye level, face on and parallel to your body. That way, your posture is more natural, and your eyes, neck, back, etc aren't strained by constant deviation from the norm.
If you're staring upwards at your screen, then your eyes are doing more work or your neck is, or a combination of both. Either way, the posture you'll adopt and the knock on effects it has on the rest of your anatomy is damaging to your long term health.
No, being hunched down over a monitor isn't good for you but, equally, having to arch your back and look upwards isn't good for you either.
What you said was "every other", as in "Mom, I can't wear blue! Every other girl is wearing black!" or "turn every other glass upside down."
Gee, thanks for telling me what I meant. There was me thinking that I knew what I meant without having to be told by someone else. Yes, I'll admit that having re-read my original sentence it could have better worded to avoid ambiguity but, just because you assumed the wrong meaning, it doesn't make the statement any less valid.
I still think that you fail to appreciate how much enterprises have invested in Microsoft software on the desktop. As I've said, it goes way beyond the per seat cost of the software - there's a lot more money invested in training, etc that you're ignoring. Simply saying that people will defect when a superior alternative becomes clear is rather niave.
And as for your statement that "end-user adoption of software is the only real measure of how 'good' it is", well, all I have to say to that is Internet Explorer.
I said "every other" version, not "every" version. I take it you don't know what the phrase "every other" means. Well it means every two versions. Basic english, bub.
Word XP uses the same format as Word 2000, but it's a different format to the one used in Word 97 and Word 95, which is a different format to that used in Word 6.x for Windows. Oh, and look, Word 2003 will have a different format too. QED.
As to switching from Microsoft Office to other application suites, I guess you've never worked in an enterprise environment. There is no way a company that has thousands of seats is going to up and change its default desktop package unless it has to. Can you imagine how much work there is in reimaging thousands of PCs and retraining thousands of users? Do you want to be the one to tell the CEO that he can no longer use the software that he's just about got used to? Dream on, buddy.
You yourself say that there's nothing in the latest versions of Office worth spending $500 a seat to upgrade. Yet you think that corporations will willingly spend as much as that if not more rejigging their desktops and retraining their staff?
WordPerfect got ousted by Microsoft Word because of a unique combination of factors. Firstly, WordPerfect Corp. fumbled the ball badly, and they were very late in producing a Windows version of their product when the market was screaming for it. Secondly, Microsoft did everything it could to undermine their efforts, including releasing an upgrade (Windows 3.1) that broke the existing software. Thirdly, Microsoft became very aggressive with its marketing and released Microsoft Office, meaning that for a little more than users were used to paying for one application, they could have three major ones (Word, Excel and PowerPoint). And as Excel was already by and far the best spreadsheet available for Windows (partiallly because Microsoft had used the same tactics on Lotus), buying Office became a no-brainer.
Face it, Microsoft is a unique position of dominance. That it can use that dominance to control markets in which it has inferior products has been shown. So, I'll ask you again, what makes you think that Microsoft will "focus on making Word the best DOC writer"?
I've lived and worked in London all my life. I've lived in the middle of town (Soho, Bloomsbury, Fitrovia Clerkenwell, Camden Town) as well the suburbs. I know what I'm talking about.
Traffic monitoring cameras point at the roads. They're not geared towards tracking you on foot. Yes, there are cameras around areas like Kings Cross but these are concentrated around the stations and major buildings, such as the British Library - just move a few streets across away from any major edifices and you won't find a single one.
What does that tell you? Well, the cameras sure aren't there to track you from point to point. How could they be without blanket coverage? What they are there to do is discourage petty crime and drug dealing, as you rightly suggested, and, more importantly, act as the first line of defence against terrorism.
To suggest that the cameras are part of a "Big Brother is watching you"-type network, as the original poster suggested, is completely misleading.
Hubble bubble, toil and trouble...
Seriously, without knowing how much work is involved, would it be possible for NASA to retreive Hubble with a shuttle after a routine mission had been completed? Hubble has taught us so much it deserves to be retained in a museum somewhere. In a way, it's been as important to astronomers and astrophysicists as perhaps the Wright brothers' flyer was to aviators. It would be a crying shame to let it just burn up in the atmosphere.
MS keeps things closed when they think that they can make money off of them.
Which is why every other version of Microsoft Office has introduced a new file format. To force people into upgrading.
When OpenOffice et al can read and write DOC files as well as a majority of the Office installations, MS is best served to abandon the idea of proprietary DOC and focus on making word the best DOC writer.
If the playing field was level then this argument might be valid, but it isn't, so it's not. Now that it dominates the word processing market there is little or no reason for Microsoft to really innovate and make Word "the best DOC writer". Even if OpenOffice was a hundred or a thousand times superior to Microsoft Word for creating documents do you think there would be a widescale switch away from the Microsoft product? When companies and individuals have so much invested in Microsoft Word (especially training) and are so reluctant to change?
If you want proof look at Microsoft's web browser. Internet Explorer clearly dominates the browser market, but is it the best browser? Hardly. Compared to Opera, Firebird or Safari, Internet Explorer is absolute rubbish, and I'd challenge any Microsoft employee to argue otherwise. Microsoft's dominanace of the browser market means that it isn't important to Microsoft that Internet Explorer is the best. Similarly, Microsoft's dominance of the word processing market means that it is no longer important that Word is the best at what it does either.
Just how long will it be before Microsoft releases a Word Document ML Plus format that is not so open?
Let's face it, Microsoft loves proprietary technology that it owns and that it controls. There's no long-term advantage to it whatsoever in creating a truly open file format - the biggest reason why Microsoft Office applications are so ubiquitous is because people need to read Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access documents they've been sent, not necessarily because those are the best tools for everybody.
Word Document ML is a PR exercise. It's Microsoft saying "See, we're nice and friendly and open, too", at a time when its revenues are beginning (perhaps not significantly yet) to be threatened by open source alternatives. Long-term though, Microsoft will shut up shop again and bring users back to the fold with a proprietary version that's "improved", "enhanced" or "more secure" in some way.
Want proof? Just look at Hotmail. When Microsoft bought it, it promised that the Hotmail service wouldn't be compromised in any way, and that it would continue to remain free. Well, the basic service might still be free but it's been crippled in so many ways - mail filtering that says it will delete junk mail in 24 hours but doesn't, incredibly bad junk mail filtering in the first place, even fewer mail sorting rules allowed now than were allowed a few years ago, a very limited number of addresses and domains that can be blocked, etc. All tactics to get you to subscribe to their enhanced Hotmail service, which has some new features but is made up of a lot of the stuff that Microsoft has stripped from the basic service.
Will people use Word Document ML format? If it becomes standard in Microsoft Word then of course they will. They'll have no choice - Microsoft has a practical monopoly when it comes to everyday file formats. Will Microsoft eventually hijack Word Document ML format by making a future iteration proprietary once more and hence shut out any competing product when it releases them via a patch or whatever? Of course it will.
Why am I so sure of this? Because Microsoft is just like the scorpion in the tale of the scorpion and the frog. It's in its nature.
It's also the nation that puts up monitoring cameras in many public areas.
What planet are you on? The CCTV cameras installed by retail outlets or in shopping centres are their to deter shoplifters and for customer safety. The CCTVs installed in Underground stations and airports are there to observe passenger flow, to prevent platform overcrowding and for passenger safety. The CCTVs installed around prominent buildings are there to deter terrorists like the IRA.
Presumably, you live in the US. Next time you go out to the mall, check how many CCTVs there are. Now do the same at the airport. And then do the same the next time you're near a government building or other sensitive location.
The CCTVs installed in the UK aren't one big monitoring network. You can't use them to track a person. And you can't use them to see where a person has been in the past. So where's your "monitoring"?
Put yourself in the shoes of a Palistinean for a moment. First of all, you're treated worse than a second class citizen. Secondly, your life and the life of your loved ones is constantly under threat from Israeli military forces. The world's one superpower provides billions in dollars each year to arm those forces, it's US tanks, US planes and US gunships that fire US shells, drop US bombs and launch US rockets at you and your neighbours. Wouldn't you be pissed at America as well as at Israel?
How is it that you can condemn France for selling arms and technology to apartheid South Africa but you can't see any reason why someone acutally being hit by the shells, bombs and rockets would condemn the US for giving those shells, bombs and rockets to Israel? You didn't answer my previous question, if you gave a loaded gun to your 12-year-old kid and he shot the kid next door with it, wouldn't you be partially to blame? And wouldn't that kid and his parents have a right to be mad at you? To want justice, or even revenge?
It's OK for baseball crowds to chant "USA, USA!", and less savoury things when news of bombings in Afghanistan is announced to them but it's not understandable why a downtrodden Palistinean who's suffered for decades under an oppressive regime backed by US might of arms would be happy to see someone else suffer for a change? If I taught someone kung fu specifically so they could beat you up on a daily basis wouldn't you show the slightest bit of emotion when someone finally gave me a good beating in retaliation? Is it really that hard to see where those people cheering in the streets were coming from? It isn't for me.
(By the way, I find it stunning that the state of Israel, built with the horrors of the WW2 and the Hitler's "Final Solution" still fresh in the memory of many of its founding citizens, can be so callous with regards to the treatment of non-Jewish citizens and residents of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Lest you forget, those two territories are illegally occupied by Israel.)
You want to talk about appeasement? Fine, we'll do that. Yes, Britain and France (and others) appeased Germany in the 1930s. They (mistakenly) sought diplomatic solutions that cost them nothing but ruined others rather than seek out conflict. But they did draw a line in the sand. And when that line was crossed (the Nazi invasion of Poland), they acted and declared war on Germany. Contrary to what most Americans think, WW2 started in September 1939, not December 1941. And while Britain and France fought the Axis powers, America watched on the sidelines, not wanting to involve itself in someone else's war. In fact, even when the US did involve itself with the war in Europe it wasn't out of choice - after Pearl Harbour, Germany declared war on the US, not the other way around. Perhaps you've forgotten about US isolationism?
I'm curious though, why is it you don't want to talk about ousting democracies and installing dictators? Or about the dozens of other countries where people are oppressed and/or at risk? No mention of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, China (at least not in this context) or Congo in your reply. Why is that?
And why is it OK for you to condemn France as long as you comment on the bravery of its soldiers but it isn't OK for me to condemn US foreign policy fuck-ups without having to say something nice in return? Is it relevant to this discussion? If I say that the people of Kuwait are grateful for what the US, Britain et al did for them in 1991 does it then make everything alright? Why do I have to qualify a justifiable criticism with a compliment? Do Republicans tell Democrats how much they like their education plans before savaging them on their economic strategy?
Seriously, read my first post in this thread and the subsequent ones again. All I have done is be consistent in my attempt to drive home one point - there are negative things we can point out about any nation. You and I can both rattle off a list of positive achievements and say "I'm p
First of all, my original post illustrated that if you want to run down China's attempt to start a lunar programme because 80 percent of its population are farmers and thus it has other priorities then you should be prepared to look at your own country just as critically. You still seemed to have missed that point - ie, it is possible to list dozens of reasons why money should be spent elsewhere for any nation, including the US.
You accuse me of America-bashing. Fine, that's your perogative. But all I've done is present the facts. If history makes you feel uncomfortable then I'm not the one to blame. Again, for every point you raise that makes France look bad, I can match it with a similar example that does the same for the US. And vice versa. Which is the very point I was trying to bring to the attention of the person to whom I originally replied.
France wouldn't allow its airspace to be used for a bombing mission? So what? So the USAF had to do a bit of in-flight refuelling to get the job done. Do you have any appreciation of how many North African immigrants there are in France? Or of how many terrorist threats and attacks they've faced over the decades from groups with North African connections? If you were the French President, charged with protecting French lives, what would you do, put your ally to a minor inconvenience or put your countrymen at risk or a major terrorist reprisal?
Remember, until recently the US attitude to terrorism that affected its allies was nonchalant at best - When Margaret Thatcher's government asked George Bush Sr's administration for help in stemming the flow of funds from the US to the IRA they were told to politely fuck off, as funding terrorism against the US's closest ally was "free speech", and protected by the First Amendment. Gee, thanks George. Nice to know that helping fund the murder of British men, women and children, of British civilians, politicians, policemen and armed forces was a God-given right that a President lining up to fight the biggest war since WW2 couldn't give his staunchest ally.
Oh, and the "you should be supporting us now regardless of how you feel" argument just doesn't wash. For one thing, it's now OK to start wars under false pretences and then expect everyone to rally round, is it? Yeah right. And, for another thing, where does your "you have to support us" doctrine fit in with regards to the Vietnam War? Wasn't it the protests of those Americans opposed to the continued US presence in South East Asia that ended the war?
And as for the "the Iraqis deserve freedom" argument, so do billions around the world. What about key US allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? Hardly glowing examples of democracy are they? In Saudi Arabia, women aren't even allowed to drive. In Pakistan, those that dare teach children have had acid thrown in their faces. What about their emancipation? Elsewhere, what about Zimbabwe or China? Why not throw resources at Congo, where the civil war has killed 5 million in the last few years and where cannibalism is now being used as a instrument of terror? Actually, can even you tell me when was the last time Congo even made the news in your daily paper or on your TV?
Muslims (By the way, why choose that word and not Palistineans? Would you prefer it if I referred to Israelis as Jews?) blowing up people in pizzerias is awful. But is it any more awful than indescriminate Israeli bombing and bulldozing of populated civilian centres in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Why condemn one but not the other? Isn't a Palistinean child's life as valuable as an Israeli child's? Is it ethical for the US to supply Israel with F-16s, AH-64s and M1A1s then ignore the destruction wreaked upon innocent civilians with those weapons? Doesn't the US have any moral responsibility when US-built and US-supplied armour is reigning death and destruction upon hte Palistinean people? If you gave a loaded gun to your 12-year-old kid and he shot the kid next door with it, wouldn't you be partially to blame?
Has France