Furthermore, Obama's policies are very, very socialist -- certainly not middle-of-the road, so he's definitely not "centrist". Rather, he leans so far left, he could pick up a ruble without even bending his knees.
Note that in pretty much any other civilised country, Obama would be considered well and truly Right. Not even Centrist-Right.
Socialist ? He's not even playing the same _game_ as Socialists, let alone being in the same ballpark.
Welcome to every developed country without anything remotely resembling a single exception. Universal health care is widely considered (in the actual world, not the US) a fundamental human right.
What the US will have is NOT universal health care, it is mandatory health insurance. While Switzerland manages to work well with this system, that's because it's full of Swiss people. It's not going to work so well in America because the strong regulations necessary to make the system workable won't be enforced (if they're put in place at all), because it's just not the sort of culture that exists here.
P.S. Also you didn't answer the question: How can Obama BE any more liberal? He's only a few steps away from where Lenin stood on the political spectrum (central planning).
Wow. Just.... wow.
Folks, this is probably the most graphic display of how far to the right the American political spectrum is skewed you're likely to see for some time.
Personally I find that Linux's security systems (bear in mind I also use a Gentoo Hardened system) make sense. If they don't make sense, I can spend a few minutes with Google and then they do make sense. I don't need the performance penalty of a malware scanner second-guessing every I/O operation.
I can say exactly the same for Windows. I've been using Windows NT as a non-admin user since 1996 and have never had a realtime anti-virus or anti-malware tool running. I do, occasionally, run one of the online scanners over my system but I've never had any infection so far as I know.
And I don't even make any special "hardening" attempts. I just implement some simple security (firewall) and practice common sense (don't run unknown binaries, etc).
You also have a software environment built around the idea that applications don't expect to have root privileges without good reason. Microsoft could have started encouraging that years ago but had other priorities. It's yet another lesson they could have learned from Unix, in fact.
Microsoft have been telling developers to build their software with least-privilege in mind for well over a decade now. The supporting structures for applications to not requir Administrator-level privileges have been in place, even in DOS-based Windows 9x, since around 1997 (and have always existed in Windows NT).
Specifically, I expect a package manager to need root before it installs system software; it makes sense and it is not a surprise. Likewise I don't expect my Web browser or e-mail client or word processor to need root and sure enough, they never ask for it.
Just like Windows, you mean ?
I think Windows is still trying to achieve that kind of simplicity with UAC. Imagine how easy it would be for their users if no UAC dialog was ever a surprise. They don't have that, and that's what they get for the years of encouraging sloppy security practices such as running Admin all the time. They are clearly reaping what they sow, well really their users are doing the reaping.
Encouraging ? I think you mean compromising. No-one at Microsoft has "wanted" people running as Admin all the time, but the reality of the situation is that in an unmanaged home-user situation it's essentially required so the bulk of software people actually wanted to use, could be. Are you seriously suggesting they should have released an OS that couldn't run the vast majority of software ? People grumble (well, on Slashdot they yell) _today_ about the perception of "forced upgrades", and you would have tried to introduce a platform that, for most people, simple didn't work ? Out in the real world, where you actually have to worry about things like customers and profit margins, that sort of thing doesn't fly. Even Apple has to make token attempts at legacy support, and they have one of the most fanatical customer bases around.
Note that in managed environments (Windows Domains), the default is not to have users be Administrators, and it's actually non-trivial to make them Administrators by default in a manageable way.
The whitelist sounds like a decent idea I suppose, yet I need no such whitelist on Linux.
Yes you do. They're the SUID and SGID bits - a hack around UNIX's primitive security model.
Linux handles this problem differently. Rather than tons of prompts and then a whitelist to reduce their number, there are few prompts to begin with. Very few things I do actually require superuser privileges. The most common is upgrading/installing system software (that is, software available to all users) and like I said, it makes sense that you don't want non-root users doing this. How many of UAC's prompts are so predictable and self-evident? Why was a whitelist necessary?
The only unexpected UAC prompts I receive are for poorly-written applications, and even these have been quite rare for 12+ months now (can't actually remember the last one I saw, except for IBM's Storage Manager, w
That's technically true but a security system that's simple enough but no simpler, for which the steps involved make sense and their efficacy is relatively self-evident, it subjectively doesn't seem like such an inconvenience.
I've never used any system that enhances security, anywhere, that doesn't also increase inconvenience.
This is what UAC failed to understand, at least initially. It also resembles virus scanners in the sense that it wants to validate all actions rather than encourage best practices.
UAC doesn't prompt for anything that's a) unreasonable and b) not equivalently prompted for in other systems - eg: OSX, Linux - and the same was as true in Vista as it is in Windows 7. In fact, it's better than them because it sacrifices a minimal amount of security while increasing convenience, by not requiring a username and password to be entered.
There's nothing wrong with UAC in and of itself. The problem is that a lot of poorly written programs trigger it with real justification. This was more true for the first year or two of Vista's life than it has been recently, plus the addition of the less-secure-but-more-convenient UAC whitelist has reduced the number of prompts (probably to less than those of other systems).
Compared to the taskbar of Windows XP, the taskbar of Windows 7 works a bit more like the dock of Mac OS X: Windows 7 has one button per app even when the taskbar isn't full, and Windows 7 unifies quick launch and open windows.
And suffers the same usability problem (albeit not as badly) as the Dock - makes it much slower to switch to an arbitrary window by burying it.
I know this may come as a shock to you but some people who have a keen interest in computers, electronics, technology and science really don't give a damn about MS Windows outside of what they're required to know for work (if any at all).
Someone who purports to have "a keen interest in computers, electronics, technology and science" but hasn't used Vista (and/or Windows 7) for more than 2 hours, is lying about one of those two things.
Sure, you can switch back to the old taskbar but how long will that last? The old start menu has been removed from Windows 7 so I'm sure the old task bar will probably be gone by Windows 8.
One significant difference there is that there's nothing the old Start Menu does better than the new one, since ignoring the right pane of the new Start Menu essentially makes them identical.
Let's assume we have exactly 10,000 employees, and the company spent on average $500 on every employee for a new computer. It would cost only $5 million to replace every employee's computer in the entire company.
You're ignoring the labour and lost productivity costs.
Really? You are unable to grasp the difference between me handing you a book I purchased, and me reproducing and distributing a million copies of a ripped off movie to a million anonymous "friends" of mine? Of course you know the difference, and you're just hoping nobody will call you on it.
I don't have any problem discerning the semantic difference at all. I'm just pointing out that *your argument* made no distinction because it spoke only of "ripping off the entertainment you want so you can have it with no money involved". None of that reasoning about an individual getting stuff for free has even the slightest relevance to "reproducing and distributing a million copies". You were railing against people getting stuff for free, not people handing it out.
That's the biggest problem, MS is able to release inferior products and then drive user's expectations down to match. When you tell people that they wouldn't have these problems using something else they don't believe you because it sounds "too good to be true".
That's because it *is* in the implicit context of "and it will provide the same functionality".
Security is inversely proportional to convenience.
No. Ripping off the entertainment you want so you can have it with "no money involved" is still a business thing. An artist or a business creates something and offers it for sale. You might want it, but you can choose to do business with them, or go without the thing they've made. Deciding to rip it off, instead, so that you can avoid paying for it, is not a "private" issue, because one half of the equation involves the person who created it and offered it up for sale.
Your argument applies equally to those who would borrow books (or CDs) from others rather than buy them themselves. Do you think people shouldn't be able to lend each other books ?
I spent a month in NZ at a friends house a year ago, and the internet connections where like we had in Finland 10 years ago... Or even worse. They had an ADSL connection limited to 1Mb/s down (and very slow up) with a 2GB monthly limit. After the limit is full it would throttle down to 5KB/s for the rest of the month. The price of the connection was more then I payed for a full rate (8/1) ADSL back at home, with no caps. I guess if this was somewhere far in the countryside I could understand it, but it was in one of the better areas of Auckland!
Finland has the luxury of being either next door to (Europe), or very well connected to (USA), the majority of internet content its residents might be interested in.
New Zealand (and Australia) do not.
A posh part of Auckland vs some place in the middle of nowhere is a relatively minor issue, compared to getting the data into the country from the USA or Europe in the first place. *That* is why internet access is relatively limited in those places.
Want to enter Australia? You have to declare you're carrying pornography (yes, I am naked under my clothes)!
IME, most countries have a question about whether you're in possession of pornography or other obscene material on their entry cards. Australia is hardly unique in that.
I believe PRK is similar to LASIK except it reshapes the cornea by removing tissue. I'm not sure why LASIK is so much more popular than PRK.
Recovery time and discomfort. With LASIK you have basic sight back pretty much straight away, and a full recovery in a few days (ie: go in Friday afternoon, be back at work Monday). With PRK you need to assume you'll be out of action for at least full week.
On the other hand, PRK has fewer complications and gives you much more leeway for future surgery.
At least, that's what the folks at the LASIK centre told me (looking to get it done later this year - still haven't decided on PRK vs LASIK).
After a quarter of a century, you would think that Windows would be so refined that you wouldn't need a 904-page, 3rd-party manual ($39.99).
I know what you mean. People have been building bridges for thousands of years, but you still need a 4-year engineering degree to learn how to do it. What a joke !
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Furthermore, Obama's policies are very, very socialist -- certainly not middle-of-the road, so he's definitely not "centrist". Rather, he leans so far left, he could pick up a ruble without even bending his knees.
Note that in pretty much any other civilised country, Obama would be considered well and truly Right. Not even Centrist-Right.
Socialist ? He's not even playing the same _game_ as Socialists, let alone being in the same ballpark.
Welcome to every developed country without anything remotely resembling a single exception. Universal health care is widely considered (in the actual world, not the US) a fundamental human right.
What the US will have is NOT universal health care, it is mandatory health insurance. While Switzerland manages to work well with this system, that's because it's full of Swiss people. It's not going to work so well in America because the strong regulations necessary to make the system workable won't be enforced (if they're put in place at all), because it's just not the sort of culture that exists here.
P.S. Also you didn't answer the question: How can Obama BE any more liberal? He's only a few steps away from where Lenin stood on the political spectrum (central planning).
Wow. Just.... wow.
Folks, this is probably the most graphic display of how far to the right the American political spectrum is skewed you're likely to see for some time.
Personally I find that Linux's security systems (bear in mind I also use a Gentoo Hardened system) make sense. If they don't make sense, I can spend a few minutes with Google and then they do make sense. I don't need the performance penalty of a malware scanner second-guessing every I/O operation.
I can say exactly the same for Windows. I've been using Windows NT as a non-admin user since 1996 and have never had a realtime anti-virus or anti-malware tool running. I do, occasionally, run one of the online scanners over my system but I've never had any infection so far as I know.
And I don't even make any special "hardening" attempts. I just implement some simple security (firewall) and practice common sense (don't run unknown binaries, etc).
You also have a software environment built around the idea that applications don't expect to have root privileges without good reason. Microsoft could have started encouraging that years ago but had other priorities. It's yet another lesson they could have learned from Unix, in fact.
Microsoft have been telling developers to build their software with least-privilege in mind for well over a decade now. The supporting structures for applications to not requir Administrator-level privileges have been in place, even in DOS-based Windows 9x, since around 1997 (and have always existed in Windows NT).
Specifically, I expect a package manager to need root before it installs system software; it makes sense and it is not a surprise. Likewise I don't expect my Web browser or e-mail client or word processor to need root and sure enough, they never ask for it.
Just like Windows, you mean ?
I think Windows is still trying to achieve that kind of simplicity with UAC. Imagine how easy it would be for their users if no UAC dialog was ever a surprise. They don't have that, and that's what they get for the years of encouraging sloppy security practices such as running Admin all the time. They are clearly reaping what they sow, well really their users are doing the reaping.
Encouraging ? I think you mean compromising. No-one at Microsoft has "wanted" people running as Admin all the time, but the reality of the situation is that in an unmanaged home-user situation it's essentially required so the bulk of software people actually wanted to use, could be. Are you seriously suggesting they should have released an OS that couldn't run the vast majority of software ? People grumble (well, on Slashdot they yell) _today_ about the perception of "forced upgrades", and you would have tried to introduce a platform that, for most people, simple didn't work ? Out in the real world, where you actually have to worry about things like customers and profit margins, that sort of thing doesn't fly. Even Apple has to make token attempts at legacy support, and they have one of the most fanatical customer bases around.
Note that in managed environments (Windows Domains), the default is not to have users be Administrators, and it's actually non-trivial to make them Administrators by default in a manageable way.
The whitelist sounds like a decent idea I suppose, yet I need no such whitelist on Linux.
Yes you do. They're the SUID and SGID bits - a hack around UNIX's primitive security model.
Linux handles this problem differently. Rather than tons of prompts and then a whitelist to reduce their number, there are few prompts to begin with. Very few things I do actually require superuser privileges. The most common is upgrading/installing system software (that is, software available to all users) and like I said, it makes sense that you don't want non-root users doing this. How many of UAC's prompts are so predictable and self-evident? Why was a whitelist necessary?
The only unexpected UAC prompts I receive are for poorly-written applications, and even these have been quite rare for 12+ months now (can't actually remember the last one I saw, except for IBM's Storage Manager, w
You notice that Apple, unlike Microsoft, was smart enough to stop doing the idiocy once the madness became apparent?
So far as I know, OSX still doesn't rely primarily on the extension to identify filetype, even today.
That's technically true but a security system that's simple enough but no simpler, for which the steps involved make sense and their efficacy is relatively self-evident, it subjectively doesn't seem like such an inconvenience.
I've never used any system that enhances security, anywhere, that doesn't also increase inconvenience.
This is what UAC failed to understand, at least initially. It also resembles virus scanners in the sense that it wants to validate all actions rather than encourage best practices.
UAC doesn't prompt for anything that's a) unreasonable and b) not equivalently prompted for in other systems - eg: OSX, Linux - and the same was as true in Vista as it is in Windows 7. In fact, it's better than them because it sacrifices a minimal amount of security while increasing convenience, by not requiring a username and password to be entered.
There's nothing wrong with UAC in and of itself. The problem is that a lot of poorly written programs trigger it with real justification. This was more true for the first year or two of Vista's life than it has been recently, plus the addition of the less-secure-but-more-convenient UAC whitelist has reduced the number of prompts (probably to less than those of other systems).
Compared to the taskbar of Windows XP, the taskbar of Windows 7 works a bit more like the dock of Mac OS X: Windows 7 has one button per app even when the taskbar isn't full, and Windows 7 unifies quick launch and open windows.
And suffers the same usability problem (albeit not as badly) as the Dock - makes it much slower to switch to an arbitrary window by burying it.
I know this may come as a shock to you but some people who have a keen interest in computers, electronics, technology and science really don't give a damn about MS Windows outside of what they're required to know for work (if any at all).
Someone who purports to have "a keen interest in computers, electronics, technology and science" but hasn't used Vista (and/or Windows 7) for more than 2 hours, is lying about one of those two things.
Sure, you can switch back to the old taskbar but how long will that last? The old start menu has been removed from Windows 7 so I'm sure the old task bar will probably be gone by Windows 8.
One significant difference there is that there's nothing the old Start Menu does better than the new one, since ignoring the right pane of the new Start Menu essentially makes them identical.
Let's assume we have exactly 10,000 employees, and the company spent on average $500 on every employee for a new computer. It would cost only $5 million to replace every employee's computer in the entire company.
You're ignoring the labour and lost productivity costs.
Really? You are unable to grasp the difference between me handing you a book I purchased, and me reproducing and distributing a million copies of a ripped off movie to a million anonymous "friends" of mine? Of course you know the difference, and you're just hoping nobody will call you on it.
I don't have any problem discerning the semantic difference at all. I'm just pointing out that *your argument* made no distinction because it spoke only of "ripping off the entertainment you want so you can have it with no money involved". None of that reasoning about an individual getting stuff for free has even the slightest relevance to "reproducing and distributing a million copies". You were railing against people getting stuff for free, not people handing it out.
Until you want to do something other than what the owners/manufacturers allow you to do with it.
The price you pay for a computing device that can do anything, is a computing device that can do anything, even things you might not want it to.
Microsoft should fire whatever idiot came up with that lame brained "feature".
That would have been Apple, back in the '80s.
That's the biggest problem, MS is able to release inferior products and then drive user's expectations down to match. When you tell people that they wouldn't have these problems using something else they don't believe you because it sounds "too good to be true".
That's because it *is* in the implicit context of "and it will provide the same functionality".
Security is inversely proportional to convenience.
No. Ripping off the entertainment you want so you can have it with "no money involved" is still a business thing. An artist or a business creates something and offers it for sale. You might want it, but you can choose to do business with them, or go without the thing they've made. Deciding to rip it off, instead, so that you can avoid paying for it, is not a "private" issue, because one half of the equation involves the person who created it and offered it up for sale.
Your argument applies equally to those who would borrow books (or CDs) from others rather than buy them themselves. Do you think people shouldn't be able to lend each other books ?
I spent a month in NZ at a friends house a year ago, and the internet connections where like we had in Finland 10 years ago... Or even worse. They had an ADSL connection limited to 1Mb/s down (and very slow up) with a 2GB monthly limit. After the limit is full it would throttle down to 5KB/s for the rest of the month. The price of the connection was more then I payed for a full rate (8/1) ADSL back at home, with no caps. I guess if this was somewhere far in the countryside I could understand it, but it was in one of the better areas of Auckland!
Finland has the luxury of being either next door to (Europe), or very well connected to (USA), the majority of internet content its residents might be interested in.
New Zealand (and Australia) do not.
A posh part of Auckland vs some place in the middle of nowhere is a relatively minor issue, compared to getting the data into the country from the USA or Europe in the first place. *That* is why internet access is relatively limited in those places.
Want to enter Australia? You have to declare you're carrying pornography (yes, I am naked under my clothes)!
IME, most countries have a question about whether you're in possession of pornography or other obscene material on their entry cards. Australia is hardly unique in that.
I believe PRK is similar to LASIK except it reshapes the cornea by removing tissue. I'm not sure why LASIK is so much more popular than PRK.
Forgot to add: I think LASIK is also quite a bit cheaper, since it's much more common - most people are budget driven.
I believe PRK is similar to LASIK except it reshapes the cornea by removing tissue. I'm not sure why LASIK is so much more popular than PRK.
Recovery time and discomfort. With LASIK you have basic sight back pretty much straight away, and a full recovery in a few days (ie: go in Friday afternoon, be back at work Monday). With PRK you need to assume you'll be out of action for at least full week.
On the other hand, PRK has fewer complications and gives you much more leeway for future surgery.
At least, that's what the folks at the LASIK centre told me (looking to get it done later this year - still haven't decided on PRK vs LASIK).
Even Apple realized that OS/X was not the thing to run on a smartphone [...]
Apple run a stripped down version of OS X on the iPhone and iPad.
There's no reason to think Microsoft couldn't do the same with Windows, either, if they were sufficiently motivated.
Quick pop quiz on the second article. There's 65 million people in the UK, so why are there 85 million tax records?
Corporations, duplicates, the deceased, non-resident taxpayers...
Quite frankly I'm surprised the difference is _only_ 20 million, for a country that's one of the world's economic powers.
Why would the DMV even have your SSN?
AZ, at least, requires it (or a damn good reason why you don't have one - eg: immigrant w/o a work permit) to get a license.
I think that any form of life that has to compete for resources would favour the evolution of a "propensity to violence".
Not true at all. Co-operation is nearly always more productive than conflict.
After a quarter of a century, you would think that Windows would be so refined that you wouldn't need a 904-page, 3rd-party manual ($39.99).
I know what you mean. People have been building bridges for thousands of years, but you still need a 4-year engineering degree to learn how to do it. What a joke !
No it doesn't. Non-trivial improvements - certainly. Completely new ? Not even close.