On short flights I don't mind not getting meals. 5+ hours and I do prefer to get a hot meal, but only if it's a decent airline. BA usually has nice food, though quality seems to have dropped, at least in economy, the business ("Club") food with BA has been great the few times I've had a chance to try it.
United is tolerable in economy on the transatlantic flights, though generally far less healthy food than BA. When flying economy with United I usually leave quite a bit of the food, and bring lots of snacks of my own. When flying business with United, the food and snacks are usually really good, and I don't feel compelled to bring much with me.
Both BA and United will typically regularly serve fairly good steaks or roasts in business class on transatlantic flights as one of the options, for example, and have decent wine selections. I'm picky about my meat, and I can honestly say I've had better steak on both BA and United flights than in any restaurants I've been to in the UK (Of course that doesn't say that much, because most steaks you get served in the UK are atrocious - I get my "fix" whenever I go to the US where they know how to prepare meat without ruining it)
Scandinavian/SAS serves quite good food on at least some of their longhaul flights, often with some hint of "local cuisine" of the locations they are flying to, though the authenticity varies (my last one was London-Beijing via Denmark, and they served some quite nice noodle dishes and replaced their usual boring tea with jasmin tea). Their meal service is shitty to non-existent on shorthaul flights though.
Virgin Atlantic is usually fairly good, though it's been a while since I've flown with them. Generally I'd rate them as being at the same level as BA (for food; for everything else I'd clearly prefer Virgin).
I think BA offers a service like that, with door to door delivery. Obviously you can do it yourself too, but the convenience being that you can order it at the same time and just pay a surcharge and have them handle most of the documents etc., and make sure it's timed so delivery is before or around the same time as you arrive at your location.
Well, you get what you pay for. And of course they pick their routes based on where there's little competition.
From London the problem is that only Heathrow has a comprehensive set of routes. Gatwick, Stanstead and Luton are all pretty small and mostly cater to charter, domestic and low cost airlines. So if Heathrow is convenient there's plenty of choice, though mostly full price airlines. If you want any of the others, you're limited in choice, but generally can find a lower priced airline.
The quality differs hugely, but you do get what you pay for. If I want top quality I'll fly BA or Virgin when I can. BA and Virgin are clearly more expensive than many of the others, but for longer trips the difference is absolutely worth it for the occasional trip (if you travel more than 25k miles or so internationally between cities well covered by United, always pick United over BA - their food and service isn't as good, and their inflight entertainment systems are poorer quality, but Mileage Plus is far better value than BA's program, and you actually have very high odds of getting regular business class upgrades even on the cheaper economy tickets, and once you make Premier/Silver at 20k or 25k you get premium economy seats for free as long as there are available seats).
You're not American by any chance? Living in Europe, trains are competitive on a lot of stretches. It's now even faster than planes for a lot people between London and Paris. It's a two hour flight, but unless you're really near the airport and are going somewhere really near the airports around Paris, you're increasingly likely to be better off taking the Eurostar, for example. I can get from my front door to most of central Paris in less than 4 hours by train + the metro when I get there, while it would take me two and half hours from my door until the plane even takes off from Heathrow if I pushed it, 4-4.5 hours total until landing at Charles de Gaulle or Orly, and at least another hour to get out of the airport and get in to the city centre. Most likely I'd end up with at least 6-7 hours door to door.
I've done day trips for business from London to several cities including Paris, and getting to Paris by train has by far been more pleasant than any of the trips I've done by plane.
Of course it's not saving you time everywhere, but unless the train ride is more than 5-6 hours I'd prefer that to flying, and even from London that leaves quite a lot alternatives. From more centrally placed European cities, it covers a lot of ground.
BAA security is very strict about it, the airlines are not. For those unaware, when flying out of Heathrow, you are not allowed through security with more than one standard size carry on plus any electronics they demand you run through separately (laptop, large camcorder etc.) and the small bag for liquids.
Once you are through though, you can bulk up more or less as much as you like. But obviously the BAA limit means that the total extra weight is pretty limited, so I guess they don't need to be very strict at the gate.
United is always the most expensive airline and prices are generally high, not low. If ticket prices were taking care of the things they should, this would not be bad but they are not.
I think you have to qualify that with what routes you are talking about. They are nearly always the cheapest alternative for me.
He went from a four hour limit for how long he'd be prepared to drive to avoid flying. I fly every 6-8 weeks. Travel to/from the airport, security and checkin adds 5-6 hours to any flight for me, so unless the drive is at least 6-7 hours or more, it would be faster to drive than fly. A few hours more for more convenience I can certainly understand. Unfortunately for me most of my flights are intercontinental (UK to California) so I don't really have a choice. And no, I don't check in early - I typically check in 1-2 hours in advance at most. At airports like London Heathrow, checking in less than 2 hours in advance is stressful, as you might easily take half an hour through security and have up to 25 minutes to walk to the gate.
United works great for me, so I'm not sure about the customer service comment.
I've flown over 60.000 miles on United this year alone, and they've always been great, with friendly and helpful staff.
What matters more to me is that contrary to many of the other airlines I've used (British Airways springs to mind as a particularly bad choice unless you want to cough up for Business or First) their frequent flyers program is great if you fly at least 25k miles a year or more even if it's on the cheapest economy tickets (on BA, that kind of number of miles would give you nothing unless you buy really expensive tickets). I automatically get economy plus/premium economy seats at no added charge, frequent upgrades to business etc.. Now, United's business class is far away from the quality of BA's (or Virgin's), but it's getting better, and given that the odds of getting upgrades with BA unless your tickets are booked by a major customer of theirs seems at par with the odds of flying pigs, it's still a huge step up from what you get for the same money with many of the alternatives.
As for their ethics, I don't know. If they're particularly nasty I'd consider finding someone else to fly with, but given that I usually fly returns from London to SFO, United, BA and Virgin are generally the easiest alternatives and there's no way I'm going back to BA at least.
Only if you allow people to access anything non-public by userid only, which is kind of stupid.
Reminds me of a company I worked for that did that, and where they were surprised when I showed them how to "hack" the system by sequentially trying every possible user id...
By far the most code is NOT written to be sold, but are written by engineers working for companies that need custom software, or "to scratch an itch". Only a small minority of software engineers work in software houses that ever release software for sale.
The argument falls apart just based on the sheer amount of code that IS available that was written by people that didn't make a living selling it.
I find it bizarre that this argument pops up time and time again on a site like Slashdot where most people should know this. Look at the typical software jobs available. Hardly any of them are for companies that make a living selling software.
And far fewer software houses would be around if even a small fraction of the companies not selling code started opening up the source for projects that don't have a major competitive impact, as the incremental costs for everyone involved would drop as the amount of stuff that has to be written from scratch by everyone would drop.
There are places, such as fancy dress parties or parties where the dress code is specifically part of creating an athmosphere for the sake of it, where I would consider it rude of people to show up in jeans and a t-shirt.
But as guest speaker in a student union? If they seriously expect suit and tie for something like that and are the slightest bit offended at someone who show up without it, then they are too far up their asses to be worthy of respect.
If you invite Stallmann you know what you get.
As you said, there are certain expectations when you are a GUEST speaker. Amongst them that YOU get shown respect for the message you are there to convey and for your personal beliefs and principles. Noone forced anyone to invite Stallmann.
As it is, you are showing far more disrespect than what Stallmann does - he's just sticking to his principles while you're just being an ass.
It's pretty telling that when Virgin Mobile merged with NTL-Telewest, they expected (and got) a massive increase in customer service calls, and had to staff up their call centers. Not because service got worse, but because people expect better of a Virgin branded company, and had previously just given and resigned themselves to not getting any service from either NTL or Telewest...
Now, it's too early for me at least to tell if it's made a genuine difference - I haven't had to deal with support since the merger - but I do remember trying to order extra services from Telewest and giving up because they were so unhelpful. Way to throw away revenue.
Common for all of these civilizations are that they have left fairly substantial traces, and all of the ones we have found are from recent history. The logical conclusion is that they started arising once humanity had reached a level sufficient to build civilizations of that size of sophistication, and that that time was just a few thousand years ago.
Otherwise, where would the traces be? We've even found traces of humans or hominids going back much further than any of these "advanced" civilizations (I'd strongly argue that most of them were only advanced compared to the rest of humanity at the time) - if those traces survived, why are there no trace of civilizations if any existed?
Why would you assume that progress was fast enough to create an advanced civilization in a population vanishingly small compared to today, when we only have to go a few hundred years back to find progress almost slowed to nothing, even with the aid of writing to make exchange of knowledge so much easier than it was a few thousand years ago?
Consider how few people were around, and how short they lived.
The total population of the world has increased by around 7-8 times in just the last 250 years, and more than doubled in the last 50.
This page gives an interesting overview of estimates of population sizes back to 10.000 BC.
Extrapolating backwards, you end up with incredibly tiny populations very quickly, and until a few hundred years ago, the effective size of groups that shared knowledge was far smaller simply because of distances.
Before 1854, travel from the town I grew up in to Oslo, a 20-30 minute car ride away, was a trip most people in that town would never make a single time in their lifetime - they had the choice between riding a horse or carriage (most people wouldn't have one) or walking and for most people it was a pointless trip. Then came the train line, and an explosion in travel.
Go back a few hundred more years, and population density was far lower, and while some people certainly traveled and traveled far, they were by now means the norm. Exchange of knowledge quickly slows down over the centuries, meaning the same things would either need to be discovered over and over in different groups, or spread extremely slowly.
All you need to look at is how slow the spread of knowledge has been in the time we have written history for, and how the process of building on knowledge has accelerated with population growth and improved communications. Look at all the things people in the ancient Greek, Egyptian, Chinese and Arab cultures knew, for example, that took hundreds of years to spread and become common knowledge or even to be used by well educated people, and that often only survived at all because of the invention of writing that allowed the ideas to survive years, decades and even centuries of scorn, ridicule, outright suppression or just lack of understanding.
Now, slow that process down hundreds and thousands of time as you go back century by century, until humanity is just a tiny scattering of small tribes, isolated enough to not have much contact. Take away writing as a way of preserving knowledge, and shorten the lifespan. Then see little knowledge would ever get transferred from one generation to the next.
Agriculture takes good pattern matching. Someone would have to connect seeds falling on the ground with the growth of more plants of the same type in the same spot later in the season or even the following year, or alternatively to deduce that plants must come from "something" and that seeds must have a "purpose" and connect the two.
Neither alternative is simple if you don't have anything to go by to start with.
You may argue that the people are stupid not to see the evidence, but it is possible that the evidence isn't convincing either. Some how people cannot fully believe that something as complex as life and all the creatures around came about by pure chance.
Well, a core part of the problem is that people have no idea what natural selection and evolution mean, and if you people evolution is based on "pure chance" rather than present that as the view of "people", then that includes you.
In fact, chance is completely peripheral to evolution.
To take an example: I'm sure as a child you at some point played a game or heard about a game where someone would tell you "warmer" or "colder" as you moved around the room to guide you to a target.
Now, on average, even assuming you'd make each move randomly with only one rule - to move back to the previous location if someone says "colder" - you will demonstrably find the target faster than someone who just moves about randomly.
To bring the example closer to evolution, consider a group of children doing this. Each time one of them gets told "colder", he/she "dies" (is out of the game) and each time one of them gets told "warmer", a new child (possibly played by one of the "dead" ones) gets "born" at the same location.
THAT is how much "chance" is part of evolution. It doesn't even particularly matter - ANY algorithm for picking permutations that eventually converge towards exploring all possible options can give the same result as pure chance as an input to natural selection.
Natural selection is simply a natural method for pruning a search tree to remove branches that are unlikely to yield a good result.
Any good software engineer could quickly whip up a program to demonstrate how insanely much more effective it is at reaching a good result than pure chance.
Either you accept that something of high intelligence can develop or evolve from something of less intelligence and abilities, or you have to either assume that God has existed forever, or that there is an endless chain of creators of increasing intelligence and/or abilities.
If you are going to bring an infinite chain into it, even a chain of universes where random chance controls would eventually result in a universe like this one. But natural selection is provably far more efficient than a random "search".
So the choice is between believing in some eternally living creator we've never observed, or an endless chain of creators, each more unbelievable than the one before him, or the extension of a process that there's plenty of data to support. Easy choice.
(And if you're even thinking of the "but what are the chances that I'd happen to live in just this one?", the answer is: exactly 100%. If you hadn't lived in exactly this universe you wouldn't be able to have this discussion - or you'd be having it in another one where the answer would also be exactly 100%. Go read up on the anthropic principle)
Piracy is copyright infringement, not theft. Unless the work was explicitly distributed with a license that allowed redistribution it is just as much infringement to copy a work you got for free as one you paid for.
You are only right that it cannot be stolen because copyright infringement and theft are two entirely separately legal issues.
Frankly, if you have to "redo everything" for people with bad vision, the web developers or the managers or both are grossly incompetent. Making a site accessible is fairly easy, and in fact if you adhere to good design principles and follow standards you're already 95% there.
And while you are right a lot of people want "accomodation for them", the law (the ADA for example) just require you to make "reasonable effort" for people with disabilities.
By your own argument denying access based on race, gender, religious or political beliefs would all be acceptable.
The property may be privately owned, but the business operated on the property is operated under permission of the government, because society always have recognized that the public has a common interest in regulating how business is carried out because it is so fundamental to the functioning of society overall and can have so significant effects on society.
Amongst those interest, there is a common interest in preventing discrimination and ensuring equal access wherever possible - the moment you allow discrimination there will always be someone who'll want to discriminate against you.
Nobody will force you to make your property accessible to people with disabilities - it is YOUR choice whether or not you want to run a business on your property that admits the general public and abide by the laws that would subject you to or not.
And before you start whining about this, you should start thinking about all the other regulations you have to abide by if you want to run a business depending on your jurisdiction: Health and safety regulations; paying taxes; treatment of employees and working time; opening hours; type of business/zoning regulations etc. etc. Running a business on your property has never been a license to do whatever you want.
Sounds like someone forgot to remove some text somewhere, or possibly they may still have limits for some of the international versions (I used to work at Yahoo - many of the international subsidiaries at least used to get to set different policies for core products like mail depending on competitive pressures, cost and whether or not they have premium products that would be affected).
Most of his major roles have been in British movies and series, such as Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Spaced that hasn't really been major successes outside Britain - that's probably why you haven't heard of him.
From what I understand (not being American, but working with lots of them...) holidays in the US generally refer to days off you can't schedule yourself, equivalent to the UK bank holidays, while vacation time is taken individually. Some US companies will have additional holidays apart from the "official" holidays - it's fairly normal to have part of the christmas/new year period as paid holidays for example (the word "holiday" itself is a distortion of "holy day") . So 10 days paid holiday is more or less the same as for the UK. In other words you likely still have more vacation time than the poster you replied to.
I don't think any reasonably modern OS actually does what you suggest, other than possibly as a last resort fallback (though I'm not even sure anybody does that). Linux for example can run perfectly fine on a BIOS-less system with only extremely minor modifications in the boot/init code (I don't know if even that is needed anymore - it's been years since I did that last).
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United is tolerable in economy on the transatlantic flights, though generally far less healthy food than BA. When flying economy with United I usually leave quite a bit of the food, and bring lots of snacks of my own. When flying business with United, the food and snacks are usually really good, and I don't feel compelled to bring much with me.
Both BA and United will typically regularly serve fairly good steaks or roasts in business class on transatlantic flights as one of the options, for example, and have decent wine selections. I'm picky about my meat, and I can honestly say I've had better steak on both BA and United flights than in any restaurants I've been to in the UK (Of course that doesn't say that much, because most steaks you get served in the UK are atrocious - I get my "fix" whenever I go to the US where they know how to prepare meat without ruining it)
Scandinavian/SAS serves quite good food on at least some of their longhaul flights, often with some hint of "local cuisine" of the locations they are flying to, though the authenticity varies (my last one was London-Beijing via Denmark, and they served some quite nice noodle dishes and replaced their usual boring tea with jasmin tea). Their meal service is shitty to non-existent on shorthaul flights though.
Virgin Atlantic is usually fairly good, though it's been a while since I've flown with them. Generally I'd rate them as being at the same level as BA (for food; for everything else I'd clearly prefer Virgin).
I think BA offers a service like that, with door to door delivery. Obviously you can do it yourself too, but the convenience being that you can order it at the same time and just pay a surcharge and have them handle most of the documents etc., and make sure it's timed so delivery is before or around the same time as you arrive at your location.
From London the problem is that only Heathrow has a comprehensive set of routes. Gatwick, Stanstead and Luton are all pretty small and mostly cater to charter, domestic and low cost airlines. So if Heathrow is convenient there's plenty of choice, though mostly full price airlines. If you want any of the others, you're limited in choice, but generally can find a lower priced airline.
The quality differs hugely, but you do get what you pay for. If I want top quality I'll fly BA or Virgin when I can. BA and Virgin are clearly more expensive than many of the others, but for longer trips the difference is absolutely worth it for the occasional trip (if you travel more than 25k miles or so internationally between cities well covered by United, always pick United over BA - their food and service isn't as good, and their inflight entertainment systems are poorer quality, but Mileage Plus is far better value than BA's program, and you actually have very high odds of getting regular business class upgrades even on the cheaper economy tickets, and once you make Premier/Silver at 20k or 25k you get premium economy seats for free as long as there are available seats).
I've done day trips for business from London to several cities including Paris, and getting to Paris by train has by far been more pleasant than any of the trips I've done by plane.
Of course it's not saving you time everywhere, but unless the train ride is more than 5-6 hours I'd prefer that to flying, and even from London that leaves quite a lot alternatives. From more centrally placed European cities, it covers a lot of ground.
Once you are through though, you can bulk up more or less as much as you like. But obviously the BAA limit means that the total extra weight is pretty limited, so I guess they don't need to be very strict at the gate.
I think you have to qualify that with what routes you are talking about. They are nearly always the cheapest alternative for me.
He went from a four hour limit for how long he'd be prepared to drive to avoid flying. I fly every 6-8 weeks. Travel to/from the airport, security and checkin adds 5-6 hours to any flight for me, so unless the drive is at least 6-7 hours or more, it would be faster to drive than fly. A few hours more for more convenience I can certainly understand. Unfortunately for me most of my flights are intercontinental (UK to California) so I don't really have a choice. And no, I don't check in early - I typically check in 1-2 hours in advance at most. At airports like London Heathrow, checking in less than 2 hours in advance is stressful, as you might easily take half an hour through security and have up to 25 minutes to walk to the gate.
I've flown over 60.000 miles on United this year alone, and they've always been great, with friendly and helpful staff.
What matters more to me is that contrary to many of the other airlines I've used (British Airways springs to mind as a particularly bad choice unless you want to cough up for Business or First) their frequent flyers program is great if you fly at least 25k miles a year or more even if it's on the cheapest economy tickets (on BA, that kind of number of miles would give you nothing unless you buy really expensive tickets). I automatically get economy plus/premium economy seats at no added charge, frequent upgrades to business etc.. Now, United's business class is far away from the quality of BA's (or Virgin's), but it's getting better, and given that the odds of getting upgrades with BA unless your tickets are booked by a major customer of theirs seems at par with the odds of flying pigs, it's still a huge step up from what you get for the same money with many of the alternatives.
As for their ethics, I don't know. If they're particularly nasty I'd consider finding someone else to fly with, but given that I usually fly returns from London to SFO, United, BA and Virgin are generally the easiest alternatives and there's no way I'm going back to BA at least.
Reminds me of a company I worked for that did that, and where they were surprised when I showed them how to "hack" the system by sequentially trying every possible user id...
The argument falls apart just based on the sheer amount of code that IS available that was written by people that didn't make a living selling it.
I find it bizarre that this argument pops up time and time again on a site like Slashdot where most people should know this. Look at the typical software jobs available. Hardly any of them are for companies that make a living selling software.
And far fewer software houses would be around if even a small fraction of the companies not selling code started opening up the source for projects that don't have a major competitive impact, as the incremental costs for everyone involved would drop as the amount of stuff that has to be written from scratch by everyone would drop.
But as guest speaker in a student union? If they seriously expect suit and tie for something like that and are the slightest bit offended at someone who show up without it, then they are too far up their asses to be worthy of respect.
If you invite Stallmann you know what you get.
As you said, there are certain expectations when you are a GUEST speaker. Amongst them that YOU get shown respect for the message you are there to convey and for your personal beliefs and principles. Noone forced anyone to invite Stallmann.
As it is, you are showing far more disrespect than what Stallmann does - he's just sticking to his principles while you're just being an ass.
Now, it's too early for me at least to tell if it's made a genuine difference - I haven't had to deal with support since the merger - but I do remember trying to order extra services from Telewest and giving up because they were so unhelpful. Way to throw away revenue.
Otherwise, where would the traces be? We've even found traces of humans or hominids going back much further than any of these "advanced" civilizations (I'd strongly argue that most of them were only advanced compared to the rest of humanity at the time) - if those traces survived, why are there no trace of civilizations if any existed?
Why would you assume that progress was fast enough to create an advanced civilization in a population vanishingly small compared to today, when we only have to go a few hundred years back to find progress almost slowed to nothing, even with the aid of writing to make exchange of knowledge so much easier than it was a few thousand years ago?
The total population of the world has increased by around 7-8 times in just the last 250 years, and more than doubled in the last 50.
This page gives an interesting overview of estimates of population sizes back to 10.000 BC.
Extrapolating backwards, you end up with incredibly tiny populations very quickly, and until a few hundred years ago, the effective size of groups that shared knowledge was far smaller simply because of distances.
Before 1854, travel from the town I grew up in to Oslo, a 20-30 minute car ride away, was a trip most people in that town would never make a single time in their lifetime - they had the choice between riding a horse or carriage (most people wouldn't have one) or walking and for most people it was a pointless trip. Then came the train line, and an explosion in travel.
Go back a few hundred more years, and population density was far lower, and while some people certainly traveled and traveled far, they were by now means the norm. Exchange of knowledge quickly slows down over the centuries, meaning the same things would either need to be discovered over and over in different groups, or spread extremely slowly.
All you need to look at is how slow the spread of knowledge has been in the time we have written history for, and how the process of building on knowledge has accelerated with population growth and improved communications. Look at all the things people in the ancient Greek, Egyptian, Chinese and Arab cultures knew, for example, that took hundreds of years to spread and become common knowledge or even to be used by well educated people, and that often only survived at all because of the invention of writing that allowed the ideas to survive years, decades and even centuries of scorn, ridicule, outright suppression or just lack of understanding.
Now, slow that process down hundreds and thousands of time as you go back century by century, until humanity is just a tiny scattering of small tribes, isolated enough to not have much contact. Take away writing as a way of preserving knowledge, and shorten the lifespan. Then see little knowledge would ever get transferred from one generation to the next.
Neither alternative is simple if you don't have anything to go by to start with.
Well, a core part of the problem is that people have no idea what natural selection and evolution mean, and if you people evolution is based on "pure chance" rather than present that as the view of "people", then that includes you.
In fact, chance is completely peripheral to evolution.
To take an example: I'm sure as a child you at some point played a game or heard about a game where someone would tell you "warmer" or "colder" as you moved around the room to guide you to a target.
Now, on average, even assuming you'd make each move randomly with only one rule - to move back to the previous location if someone says "colder" - you will demonstrably find the target faster than someone who just moves about randomly.
To bring the example closer to evolution, consider a group of children doing this. Each time one of them gets told "colder", he/she "dies" (is out of the game) and each time one of them gets told "warmer", a new child (possibly played by one of the "dead" ones) gets "born" at the same location.
THAT is how much "chance" is part of evolution. It doesn't even particularly matter - ANY algorithm for picking permutations that eventually converge towards exploring all possible options can give the same result as pure chance as an input to natural selection.
Natural selection is simply a natural method for pruning a search tree to remove branches that are unlikely to yield a good result.
Any good software engineer could quickly whip up a program to demonstrate how insanely much more effective it is at reaching a good result than pure chance.
Either you accept that something of high intelligence can develop or evolve from something of less intelligence and abilities, or you have to either assume that God has existed forever, or that there is an endless chain of creators of increasing intelligence and/or abilities.
If you are going to bring an infinite chain into it, even a chain of universes where random chance controls would eventually result in a universe like this one. But natural selection is provably far more efficient than a random "search".
So the choice is between believing in some eternally living creator we've never observed, or an endless chain of creators, each more unbelievable than the one before him, or the extension of a process that there's plenty of data to support. Easy choice.
(And if you're even thinking of the "but what are the chances that I'd happen to live in just this one?", the answer is: exactly 100%. If you hadn't lived in exactly this universe you wouldn't be able to have this discussion - or you'd be having it in another one where the answer would also be exactly 100%. Go read up on the anthropic principle)
If you can't find the contradictions in the gospels, you are either retarded or completely brainwashed, there are huge numbers of them.
You are only right that it cannot be stolen because copyright infringement and theft are two entirely separately legal issues.
And while you are right a lot of people want "accomodation for them", the law (the ADA for example) just require you to make "reasonable effort" for people with disabilities.
The property may be privately owned, but the business operated on the property is operated under permission of the government, because society always have recognized that the public has a common interest in regulating how business is carried out because it is so fundamental to the functioning of society overall and can have so significant effects on society.
Amongst those interest, there is a common interest in preventing discrimination and ensuring equal access wherever possible - the moment you allow discrimination there will always be someone who'll want to discriminate against you.
Nobody will force you to make your property accessible to people with disabilities - it is YOUR choice whether or not you want to run a business on your property that admits the general public and abide by the laws that would subject you to or not.
And before you start whining about this, you should start thinking about all the other regulations you have to abide by if you want to run a business depending on your jurisdiction: Health and safety regulations; paying taxes; treatment of employees and working time; opening hours; type of business/zoning regulations etc. etc. Running a business on your property has never been a license to do whatever you want.
Sounds like someone forgot to remove some text somewhere, or possibly they may still have limits for some of the international versions (I used to work at Yahoo - many of the international subsidiaries at least used to get to set different policies for core products like mail depending on competitive pressures, cost and whether or not they have premium products that would be affected).
Most of his major roles have been in British movies and series, such as Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Spaced that hasn't really been major successes outside Britain - that's probably why you haven't heard of him.
From what I understand (not being American, but working with lots of them...) holidays in the US generally refer to days off you can't schedule yourself, equivalent to the UK bank holidays, while vacation time is taken individually. Some US companies will have additional holidays apart from the "official" holidays - it's fairly normal to have part of the christmas/new year period as paid holidays for example (the word "holiday" itself is a distortion of "holy day") . So 10 days paid holiday is more or less the same as for the UK. In other words you likely still have more vacation time than the poster you replied to.
I don't think any reasonably modern OS actually does what you suggest, other than possibly as a last resort fallback (though I'm not even sure anybody does that). Linux for example can run perfectly fine on a BIOS-less system with only extremely minor modifications in the boot/init code (I don't know if even that is needed anymore - it's been years since I did that last).