This isn't related to OO.o vs. MS Office, but with respect to your copy-and-paste problems:
copying and pasting from OO.o into Dreamweaver results in some spurious HTML crap for which I blame OO.o (a fucking DOCTYPE actually makes it in there!)
I'm that guessing OO.o exports, in addition to plain and formatted text, an HTML clipboard element when copying. While most programs will ignore this, Dreamweaver knows how to read HTML and it might prefer that over the plain/formatted text version. If Dreamweaver doesn't provide an option to paste the formatted text (IIRC switching to design mode before pasting might be that option) it would be pretty trivial to write a program/AppleScript that dropped to HTML version of the clipboard (which could be linked to a hotkey), forcing OO.o to use one of the text versions. Obviously it would be best if you could choose what goes to the clipboard and what you take from it, but until there's a standard OS interface for that you're unlikely to see it in either Dreamweaver or OO.o.
You could argue that this is modified since MS is a monopoly but what if I become a monopoly thats been convicted of unfair trade practices. But what if I got a monopoly through fair dealing - the competition just wasn't good enough?
If you obtained a monoploy and dealt fairly you presumably wouldn't lose a trial about your unfair trade practices. But Microsoft did, in fact, lose such a trial. This is the penalty phase of that trial, not a ruling that being applied to someone dealt fairly and happened to be best.
There was nothing wrong with ST:X. Just pretend it was ST:II with a new cast:
Evil clone dude hates Enterprise captain. Evil clone dude plants mind-controlled spy with Enterprise captain. Spy fails, but evil clone dude gets starship and nearly destroys Enterprise in conventional battle. Enterprise eventually hides in nebula, causes significant damage to clone dude's ship. Clone dude is mostly disabled but activates super-destructo-weapon with a really, really long countdown sequence. Enterprise is no longer being shot at but cannot escape the super-destructo-weapon in time. Science officer transfers his mind into another character, then sacrifices himself to save Enterprise. Evil clone dude dies when the super-destructo-weapon goes off, Enterprise makes it away safely.
I agree that there would be less reward for fraud if credit were harder to obtain. But are you really suggesting that we do something to make it complicated to obtain large amounts of credit? I could never run my business without having access to at least $25k in credit -- you try selling someone a whole set of new computers and making them pay before you even order (let alone deliver) the equipment.
And in either case, wouldn't you like to know that someone can't take out a mortgage in your name without doing something reasonably effective to prove their identity? Even if there were less fraud, I'd still like to be protected from it if the costs of protection are low. Authenticating your identity in some meaningful way before being issued credit based on that identity doesn't seem like a terrible price to pay.
Notaries are, of course, still subject to fraud, just like anyone else. But they're a lot less subject to fraud then someone who just asks for your ID number.
If you're vicimized because of mistake by a notary you can take action against them -- in most places they're required to be bonded and are strictly liable up to several thousand dollars.
You can still apply online, the account just isn't active until they get their notarized copy of your acceptance.
By the time they've approved you for credit paying an extra couple of dollars to actually open the account is no problem -- it's not like they have to process notarized paperwork at the pre-approval stage.
The problem isn't that SSN are used as public identifiers -- having another public identifer would just shift the problem to that number instead of your SSN. And it's unlikely that having a stolen SSN would actually affect your ability ot make SS claims anyway, at least not for very long.
The problem is that your SSN is both a public ID and a secret used to validate that ID. So long as a single bit of information is used as both the public and private bits of that equation there's no way to solve this problem no matter how many ID numbers you generate.
Would is really be so hard to require that new credit accounts can only be issued with a notarized signature? Notary publics are intended to serve just this kind of purpose -- to validate that a particular person really did execute an agreement. It's pretty easy to find a notary public even in rural areas, and they don't report their specific activities to the government, so there's aren't a lot of big-brother concerns with respect to having your documents notarized. Seriously, this seems like a problem we solved 100 years ago.
I didn't admit that anyone did a poor job managing their oversubscription ratios. I only suggested that you weren't unreasonable for expecting those ratios to be reasonable. And if your ISP sucks I don't think you are unreasonable for expecting them to adjust their oversubscription ratio, though your original post read with a much no-oversubscription-period tone.
But you are silly for suggesting that there is no other option. There may be other *cheap* option, but if your office is someplace where a $120/month package is available then your office is almost someplace where a dedicated optical link is available, and I'll eat my hat if you buy a dedicated link and can't get access to an ISP that would guarantee upstream bandwidth.
So in effect, you *are* asking for free broadband, becuase you want more service than you get now and don't want to pay for it. That's not to say that you shouldn't get better service from you ISP, but saying there are no options is just whinny.
I didn't assume I knew everything, or that no providers existed that had reasonable policies about contract vs. non-contract service. All I said with all the providers I tried, I was unable to obtain service without a contract and/or buying a phone from them. In fact, in my first post, I specifically asked for information about carriers that would let me bring in my own equipment.
Oversubscription isn't exactly a new trick and it's not necessarily a bad thing for many if not most users. It's also not your only choice.
I have a hard time taking complaints like this seriously. It's not like you can't get a dedicated line with guaranteed upstream bandwidth, it's just that it's more expensive than you'd like. Even in fairly rural areas, you *can* get a dedicated line with guaranteed upstream bandwidth, it's just pricey.
The idea of oversubscription is not unique to ISPs. Telcos have significantly more in-town lines than they could possibly connect to the backbone. Airlines routinely overbook flights, and even some logistics companies and doctors use similar techniques. For the most part this works out just fine, because it reduces costs by maximizing efficiency; the cost of course is occasional conflicts between users/subscribers/customers/etc. when capacity is actually insufficient. But there's good historical evidence that some people will fail to show up for their flights and doctor's appointments, some shipments will not make their ship date, not everyone in town will be making long distance calls simultaneously, and not everyone will be using 100% of the bandwidth 24/7; most people are willing to trade occasional reduced capacity in exchange for reduced costs.
That's not to say that ISPs shouldn't have a reasonable oversubscription rate -- you should be able to use most of your bandwidth most of the time -- but to suggest that ISPs should provide every subscriber with upstream access 24/7 at 100% of their local link speed is silly, becuase most of that bandwidth would go unused most of the time, and it would cost a fortune while doing it.
And the phone I was trying to activate *had* a GPS unit and that GPS unit was e911-enabled. They were simply unwilling to re-activate it. They were in fact still selling the phone I was trying to activate in some parts of the country, but that particular model was "not available in my market" after I moved and I was not allowed to re-activate it in my new location.
Which is all true. I'm just saying it's disingenuous to suggest that the poll was rigged or the statistic are invalid. They may be meaningless, but we have no reason to assume they are wrong.
Because obviously as the child of the president you deserve to be forced into military service. After all, you always could have chosen other parents, or been a more obedient child so your mother wouldn't have to start a war.
They won't let me bring in my own equipment. I've tried. They won't even let me re-activate equipment that I bought from them and which is still 100% compatible with their network. I've tried that too.
If you know of a carrier who will allow me to buy my own equipment (not buy new equipment from them) I'd be happy to do just as you suggest. Until then it's contracts with ridiculous fees or a requirement that I buy the newest, fanciest equipment at a price they dictate without any competition. Suggesting that the later doesn't carry the same financial disadvantages as the former because there's "no contract" is ignorant at best.
Unless you had both a high and low power DC bus in your home. Certainly you don't want to run your water heater on 12VDC, but now-standard ~14-gauge wiring could carry enough 12VDC power for a lot of little devices that currently have AC power bricks. There'd still have be a DC-DC converter, but it could just be one 50-amp one for all the low-power devices in your house, rather than 50 small converters.
You're correct in assuming that most people buying machine from Dell probably *are* happy without a pre-installed linux configuration option, but that doesn't mean the statistics in the poll aren't representative of some portion of Dell's actual machine-buying customers, or that the poll results are somehow rigged or invalid. All the statistics say is that, of people not happy with the existing configuration options, the most popular change request is pre-installed Linux, not that most customers would prefer Linux to Windows. Having Windows pre-installed is not a change, and therefore that configuration option is not represented in the statistics.
You'd get the standard level-1 equipment and gold. If you want the stuff that comes from level 1-50 you have to go get it. You'd get talent points to match your level with none of them spent, so you can choose whatever skillset you want. And you'd learn to use the character by, um, playing, just like you would if you started at level 1 -- if you've already got a level 50 character you can probably skip a lot of the "learning" parts, as you only need to learn how the new character is different, not all the mechanics of the game.
I'm not sure it's a great idea to let new characters start at any level, since it is a game and grinding is part of that game, but I also don't see huge problems with the plan. A useful compromise might be something like (at user choice) double-experience point awards to new characters in accounts that already have a top-level character; accelerated leveling would make it easier to start new characters but would still force players though the entire skill tree, if you think that's important.
You only have to restart things that cache a copy of the time zone data and can't be convinced to re-read that file with a HUP (or other limited-interruption reconfiguation signal/command). Some things (fcron and syslog for example) really needed to be killed. Other things I tried (Apache, Samba) seemed to do okay with a reload command -- or at least that's what I got from the open(/etc/localtime) that strace showed me, I guess we'll see in a few weeks. Most low-level long-running programs (init, watchdogs, etc.) don't care much about time in the absolute sense, and relative times still work out fine without updating.
And if you're running a system that takes 10 minutes to get all the hardware up and settled, even killing everything under init is preferable to genuine reboot.
Or you could put configuration data like say, time zone rules, into an external file so they could be easily updated without recompiling the kernel or rebooting. Yeah, I vote for that plan.
Traditionally the "nobody" user has been used by various daemons that need only read-only disk access (and often which can accept strict ulimits). It's generally not possible to log in as nobody, and nobody usually does not own any files, but it's still useful as daemon account.
It's becoming more common to assign each daemon its own user, but so long as your process doesn't write any files there's not much security benefit to having your own user, and there is a convience aspect to having fewer users to manage. In particular, it can become a hassle to ensure that each of 25 different daemon users has an account that prevents logins and owns no files; having fewer such accounts makes security verification simplier.
But in the US your tax returns cannot be used as evidence against you in other crimes -- such use would be in conflict with the 5th amendment. So you have to report your income to the IRS, but if you file a schedule detailing your drug-related income the IRS cannot legally share that schedule with law enforcement.
First, let's get past this binaries thing. Who said I didn't download the source and compile it locally? It's not like the FF source is hard to come by.
And second, if you trust me enough to use your computer and Internet connection in an fashion outside of a kiosk-like setup (where I presumably wouldn't have access to execute anything, binary or otherwise), why do you care if I use my web browser or yours?
I was specifically discussing a scenario where I have my own, non-admin account on an OS X machine. Unless I missing something, and if I am please let me know what, the worst I could do is muck with my own files, and/or use 100% of the local disk/network/CPU resources. All of those problem go away when my account is logged out/removed and all of those same problems can be caused with built-in tools. By granting me an account on the machine you're already letting me use 100% of the local resources -- what's it to you that I do that with FireFox instead of Safari?
Which is why Firefox shouldn't try to write to/Library. If it just installed in my home directory it wouldn't bother you at all -- it wouldn't affect the system outside my account, when you deleted my files it would be gone.
I would have been using Firefox for years if they'd get keychain support working. Between that and the cranky kerberos support (it can usually be made to work, but it rarely "just works") it's hard for me to use FF in my day-to-day browsing.
It's also a bit of a hassle the FF needs to write into/Library the first time it's launched, so you can't install it from a non-admin account, not even into your own home directory. It only needs to write there once, but it gets very angry if you don't let it. That's not a big problem for my home machine, but it's a hassle if you want to use FF on someone else's computer.
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This isn't related to OO.o vs. MS Office, but with respect to your copy-and-paste problems:
copying and pasting from OO.o into Dreamweaver results in some spurious HTML crap for which I blame OO.o (a fucking DOCTYPE actually makes it in there!)
I'm that guessing OO.o exports, in addition to plain and formatted text, an HTML clipboard element when copying. While most programs will ignore this, Dreamweaver knows how to read HTML and it might prefer that over the plain/formatted text version. If Dreamweaver doesn't provide an option to paste the formatted text (IIRC switching to design mode before pasting might be that option) it would be pretty trivial to write a program/AppleScript that dropped to HTML version of the clipboard (which could be linked to a hotkey), forcing OO.o to use one of the text versions. Obviously it would be best if you could choose what goes to the clipboard and what you take from it, but until there's a standard OS interface for that you're unlikely to see it in either Dreamweaver or OO.o.
You could argue that this is modified since MS is a monopoly but what if I become a monopoly thats been convicted of unfair trade practices. But what if I got a monopoly through fair dealing - the competition just wasn't good enough?
If you obtained a monoploy and dealt fairly you presumably wouldn't lose a trial about your unfair trade practices. But Microsoft did, in fact, lose such a trial. This is the penalty phase of that trial, not a ruling that being applied to someone dealt fairly and happened to be best.
There was nothing wrong with ST:X. Just pretend it was ST:II with a new cast:
Evil clone dude hates Enterprise captain. Evil clone dude plants mind-controlled spy with Enterprise captain. Spy fails, but evil clone dude gets starship and nearly destroys Enterprise in conventional battle. Enterprise eventually hides in nebula, causes significant damage to clone dude's ship. Clone dude is mostly disabled but activates super-destructo-weapon with a really, really long countdown sequence. Enterprise is no longer being shot at but cannot escape the super-destructo-weapon in time. Science officer transfers his mind into another character, then sacrifices himself to save Enterprise. Evil clone dude dies when the super-destructo-weapon goes off, Enterprise makes it away safely.
I agree that there would be less reward for fraud if credit were harder to obtain. But are you really suggesting that we do something to make it complicated to obtain large amounts of credit? I could never run my business without having access to at least $25k in credit -- you try selling someone a whole set of new computers and making them pay before you even order (let alone deliver) the equipment.
And in either case, wouldn't you like to know that someone can't take out a mortgage in your name without doing something reasonably effective to prove their identity? Even if there were less fraud, I'd still like to be protected from it if the costs of protection are low. Authenticating your identity in some meaningful way before being issued credit based on that identity doesn't seem like a terrible price to pay.
Notaries are, of course, still subject to fraud, just like anyone else. But they're a lot less subject to fraud then someone who just asks for your ID number.
If you're vicimized because of mistake by a notary you can take action against them -- in most places they're required to be bonded and are strictly liable up to several thousand dollars.
You can still apply online, the account just isn't active until they get their notarized copy of your acceptance.
By the time they've approved you for credit paying an extra couple of dollars to actually open the account is no problem -- it's not like they have to process notarized paperwork at the pre-approval stage.
The problem isn't that SSN are used as public identifiers -- having another public identifer would just shift the problem to that number instead of your SSN. And it's unlikely that having a stolen SSN would actually affect your ability ot make SS claims anyway, at least not for very long.
The problem is that your SSN is both a public ID and a secret used to validate that ID. So long as a single bit of information is used as both the public and private bits of that equation there's no way to solve this problem no matter how many ID numbers you generate.
Would is really be so hard to require that new credit accounts can only be issued with a notarized signature? Notary publics are intended to serve just this kind of purpose -- to validate that a particular person really did execute an agreement. It's pretty easy to find a notary public even in rural areas, and they don't report their specific activities to the government, so there's aren't a lot of big-brother concerns with respect to having your documents notarized. Seriously, this seems like a problem we solved 100 years ago.
I didn't admit that anyone did a poor job managing their oversubscription ratios. I only suggested that you weren't unreasonable for expecting those ratios to be reasonable. And if your ISP sucks I don't think you are unreasonable for expecting them to adjust their oversubscription ratio, though your original post read with a much no-oversubscription-period tone.
But you are silly for suggesting that there is no other option. There may be other *cheap* option, but if your office is someplace where a $120/month package is available then your office is almost someplace where a dedicated optical link is available, and I'll eat my hat if you buy a dedicated link and can't get access to an ISP that would guarantee upstream bandwidth.
So in effect, you *are* asking for free broadband, becuase you want more service than you get now and don't want to pay for it. That's not to say that you shouldn't get better service from you ISP, but saying there are no options is just whinny.
I didn't assume I knew everything, or that no providers existed that had reasonable policies about contract vs. non-contract service. All I said with all the providers I tried, I was unable to obtain service without a contract and/or buying a phone from them. In fact, in my first post, I specifically asked for information about carriers that would let me bring in my own equipment.
Oversubscription isn't exactly a new trick and it's not necessarily a bad thing for many if not most users. It's also not your only choice.
I have a hard time taking complaints like this seriously. It's not like you can't get a dedicated line with guaranteed upstream bandwidth, it's just that it's more expensive than you'd like. Even in fairly rural areas, you *can* get a dedicated line with guaranteed upstream bandwidth, it's just pricey.
The idea of oversubscription is not unique to ISPs. Telcos have significantly more in-town lines than they could possibly connect to the backbone. Airlines routinely overbook flights, and even some logistics companies and doctors use similar techniques. For the most part this works out just fine, because it reduces costs by maximizing efficiency; the cost of course is occasional conflicts between users/subscribers/customers/etc. when capacity is actually insufficient. But there's good historical evidence that some people will fail to show up for their flights and doctor's appointments, some shipments will not make their ship date, not everyone in town will be making long distance calls simultaneously, and not everyone will be using 100% of the bandwidth 24/7; most people are willing to trade occasional reduced capacity in exchange for reduced costs.
That's not to say that ISPs shouldn't have a reasonable oversubscription rate -- you should be able to use most of your bandwidth most of the time -- but to suggest that ISPs should provide every subscriber with upstream access 24/7 at 100% of their local link speed is silly, becuase most of that bandwidth would go unused most of the time, and it would cost a fortune while doing it.
And the phone I was trying to activate *had* a GPS unit and that GPS unit was e911-enabled. They were simply unwilling to re-activate it. They were in fact still selling the phone I was trying to activate in some parts of the country, but that particular model was "not available in my market" after I moved and I was not allowed to re-activate it in my new location.
Which is all true. I'm just saying it's disingenuous to suggest that the poll was rigged or the statistic are invalid. They may be meaningless, but we have no reason to assume they are wrong.
Because obviously as the child of the president you deserve to be forced into military service. After all, you always could have chosen other parents, or been a more obedient child so your mother wouldn't have to start a war.
They won't let me bring in my own equipment. I've tried. They won't even let me re-activate equipment that I bought from them and which is still 100% compatible with their network. I've tried that too.
If you know of a carrier who will allow me to buy my own equipment (not buy new equipment from them) I'd be happy to do just as you suggest. Until then it's contracts with ridiculous fees or a requirement that I buy the newest, fanciest equipment at a price they dictate without any competition. Suggesting that the later doesn't carry the same financial disadvantages as the former because there's "no contract" is ignorant at best.
Unless you had both a high and low power DC bus in your home. Certainly you don't want to run your water heater on 12VDC, but now-standard ~14-gauge wiring could carry enough 12VDC power for a lot of little devices that currently have AC power bricks. There'd still have be a DC-DC converter, but it could just be one 50-amp one for all the low-power devices in your house, rather than 50 small converters.
You're correct in assuming that most people buying machine from Dell probably *are* happy without a pre-installed linux configuration option, but that doesn't mean the statistics in the poll aren't representative of some portion of Dell's actual machine-buying customers, or that the poll results are somehow rigged or invalid. All the statistics say is that, of people not happy with the existing configuration options, the most popular change request is pre-installed Linux, not that most customers would prefer Linux to Windows. Having Windows pre-installed is not a change, and therefore that configuration option is not represented in the statistics.
You'd get the standard level-1 equipment and gold. If you want the stuff that comes from level 1-50 you have to go get it. You'd get talent points to match your level with none of them spent, so you can choose whatever skillset you want. And you'd learn to use the character by, um, playing, just like you would if you started at level 1 -- if you've already got a level 50 character you can probably skip a lot of the "learning" parts, as you only need to learn how the new character is different, not all the mechanics of the game.
I'm not sure it's a great idea to let new characters start at any level, since it is a game and grinding is part of that game, but I also don't see huge problems with the plan. A useful compromise might be something like (at user choice) double-experience point awards to new characters in accounts that already have a top-level character; accelerated leveling would make it easier to start new characters but would still force players though the entire skill tree, if you think that's important.
You only have to restart things that cache a copy of the time zone data and can't be convinced to re-read that file with a HUP (or other limited-interruption reconfiguation signal/command). Some things (fcron and syslog for example) really needed to be killed. Other things I tried (Apache, Samba) seemed to do okay with a reload command -- or at least that's what I got from the open(/etc/localtime) that strace showed me, I guess we'll see in a few weeks. Most low-level long-running programs (init, watchdogs, etc.) don't care much about time in the absolute sense, and relative times still work out fine without updating.
And if you're running a system that takes 10 minutes to get all the hardware up and settled, even killing everything under init is preferable to genuine reboot.
Or you could put configuration data like say, time zone rules, into an external file so they could be easily updated without recompiling the kernel or rebooting. Yeah, I vote for that plan.
The GPL says: "If you don't allow people you shared with to share with others, then you also can't share at all."
Which is nothing at all like a restriction on the way you're allowed to share, thus proving the parent's point totally invalid. Good job.
Traditionally the "nobody" user has been used by various daemons that need only read-only disk access (and often which can accept strict ulimits). It's generally not possible to log in as nobody, and nobody usually does not own any files, but it's still useful as daemon account.
It's becoming more common to assign each daemon its own user, but so long as your process doesn't write any files there's not much security benefit to having your own user, and there is a convience aspect to having fewer users to manage. In particular, it can become a hassle to ensure that each of 25 different daemon users has an account that prevents logins and owns no files; having fewer such accounts makes security verification simplier.
But in the US your tax returns cannot be used as evidence against you in other crimes -- such use would be in conflict with the 5th amendment. So you have to report your income to the IRS, but if you file a schedule detailing your drug-related income the IRS cannot legally share that schedule with law enforcement.
First, let's get past this binaries thing. Who said I didn't download the source and compile it locally? It's not like the FF source is hard to come by.
And second, if you trust me enough to use your computer and Internet connection in an fashion outside of a kiosk-like setup (where I presumably wouldn't have access to execute anything, binary or otherwise), why do you care if I use my web browser or yours?
I was specifically discussing a scenario where I have my own, non-admin account on an OS X machine. Unless I missing something, and if I am please let me know what, the worst I could do is muck with my own files, and/or use 100% of the local disk/network/CPU resources. All of those problem go away when my account is logged out/removed and all of those same problems can be caused with built-in tools. By granting me an account on the machine you're already letting me use 100% of the local resources -- what's it to you that I do that with FireFox instead of Safari?
Which is why Firefox shouldn't try to write to /Library. If it just installed in my home directory it wouldn't bother you at all -- it wouldn't affect the system outside my account, when you deleted my files it would be gone.
I would have been using Firefox for years if they'd get keychain support working. Between that and the cranky kerberos support (it can usually be made to work, but it rarely "just works") it's hard for me to use FF in my day-to-day browsing.
/Library the first time it's launched, so you can't install it from a non-admin account, not even into your own home directory. It only needs to write there once, but it gets very angry if you don't let it. That's not a big problem for my home machine, but it's a hassle if you want to use FF on someone else's computer.
It's also a bit of a hassle the FF needs to write into