If I were a poor person in Canada I would be outraged that I was forced to pay for highways for everyone in the country when I couldn't even come close to affording a car for myself!
Interesting but a little short-sighted. Most poor people can afford to ride a bus. There's also a clever phrase "if you've got it, a truck brought it." No modern economy or society would function without a massive transportation infrastructure. You are critically dependent on this whether you own a car or not.
As many others have pointed out, MS is unlike most other OS vendors in that the OS is their premier product, not something they make so they can sell their expensive hardware. If OSOSes ever replace MSOSes on commodity hardware, MS is toast.
Also, OS dominance has tremendous strategic benefit to Microsoft since it uses it as the base to launch into other markets. While being illegal, of course, this has been MS's main MO for the past decade and it has been extraordinarily successful. If MS loses its OS dominance, it will have a much more difficult time expanding into new markets and dominating old ones. They would be just another player on the field, rather than the owner of the playing field.
Yes, the U.S. government does have a gold store locked up at Fort Knox, but not enough to make up for the trillions of U.S. dollar value floating around.
Also, the US government would very much like to get rid of the gold that it has in Fort Knox, now that it is financially useless. This is true of most governments that have gold reserves.
It explains (in part) why some currencies can change value compared to others by several percent each year (or in some cases, dozens of percent).
Currencies can change value dramatically overnight entirely because of speculation, the same as stocks. A national economy doesn't fundamentally change overnight; only the perception of it can change that quickly. Also, foreign-exchange traders are given to torpedoing currencies in order to move markets and turn quick-and-dirty profits.
The Ruble (Russian currency) would not be so low in value if there was gold backing up each ruble.
The Ruble has a low value because the Russian government and economy are in political and financial chaos. The Russian government probably has a stockpile of gold somewhere, but it's financially useless in the modern world. Anyone with enough money to buy lots of gold would probably understand how useless it is.
like Diamonds, which again are worth money purely because they're worth money and pretty
Diamonds, having fewer industrial applications than gold, would be sold by the pound if it wasn't for a marketing campaign. In the 1940's(?), De Beers made deals with the Hollywood studios to have them portray diamonds as symbols of everlasting love. Nowadays, people are brainwashed into spending two months of income to buy a pretty looking rock.
If you're using a credit card, it doesn't cost you anything to "exchange" currency.
Well, the credit-card companies will, of course, charge you for the service of exchanging currency. They don't put this directly on your bill, but there will always be a difference between the rates for exchanging one currency into another and then back.
But there is also another cost. Foreign currency exchange rates are based on supply, demand, and speculation, not on actual "value". "Value" is a nebulous term, but, to take an example, the current exchange rate of Canadian dollars into American dollars is about $0.64 US. However, by a different and more accurate representation of the "value" of money called "purchasing power parity", the Canadian dollar is worth about $0.80 US. That is to say, if a Canadian buys stuff in Canada, he gets about $0.80 US for his money, but if he buys it in the US, he only gets about $0.64 worth of stuff.
Of course, some commodities are less expensive in the US to compensate for the difference, but there is still an additional "cost" to exchanging currencies, caused by supply, demand, and speculation on the supplies and stability of currencies themselves, never minding what they will actually buy for you.
One of the biggest mistakes made in designing the Web is probably allowing clients and servers to identify their brands and versions. Then web-site designers would have the fewest headaches only if their pages were actually interoperable.
OTOH, spending money on computers could be justified as a financial investment that will produce more income in the future. If I hadn't dropped my life's savings on a VIC-20 eighteen years ago (when I was 14), I might not have been as well off as I am today.
HTTP allows you to determine the type and version of browser that is accessing a page. You could always write a little script that detected whether a smart-tag-capable browser was accessing your page, and redirect it to an "error" page, instructing the reader to get a different browser before visiting the page again.
Or Apache could just be modified to have an option send back the special disabling meta-tag with all content returned to an IE client. Of course, this option would be enabled by default...
(It's a good thing that Microsoft doesn't own the web-server market.)
Microsoft doesn't need to bother with anything like this; they just need to purchase new legislation to create SULAs (Start-User License Agreements). "By having any user access your site with a Microsoft product, you hereby agree to the following terms...". You would, of course, be free to opt-out of this agreement by including a special meta-tag to deny your page to all users of Microsoft products.
And as you said, for the 99.99% of users who aren't "aware" of any possible web options, they're going to absent-mindedly click OK, thinking that it's some required part of the internet.
This almost reads as if you would expect Microsoft to include a "Decline" button on that panel.
What's the difference between this and something like if Microsoft made it so that any program that runs on Windows has to add an extra command at the beginning telling it that you want it to come up with a random number when you use a randomiser, rather thanthe new added functionality where it always comes up with 0.5
Oh, you mean like Microsoft's anti-interoperability socket-initialization crap. Too bad they couldn't have stuck to the core when they scarfed the open-source BSD socket-handling code.
They did a really clever thing of identifying long "runs" of code that nobody ever jumped into the middle of, then they treated them as one big instruction with a lot of side effects, and optimized them as a block. (Not one instruction at a time, but the whole mess into the most optimal set of new platform instructions they could.)
"Basic-block analysis", which is basically what this is, is a common technique that all good compilers perform on source code or intermediate representations of source code for optimization. This technique has probably been around since the 1960's.
It was quite clever. It's also quite patented, and has been since before the Power PC came out. (And in a sane world those patents would have expired by now, but with patent lengths going the way of copyright...)
The patent application must have read "basic-block analysis...but on machine code!", to match all of the "...but on the web!" patents that have been granted in recent years. Innovation is truly dead.
Conversely, if you were to have every mobile-phone base station and every radio tower broadcasting signals, wouldn't you frequently be lucky enough to catch some of them bouncing off the aircraft into your radar receiver?
Slashdot Mirror
Are Americians really this stupid?!?
Hey, it's a valid concern now that global warming is causing the ice blocks that the Parlaiment buildings are made out of to melt!
Sounds like they're in trouble. Maybe it's the BSD license. GPL == immortality.
If I were a poor person in Canada I would be outraged that I was forced to pay for highways for everyone in the country when I couldn't even come close to affording a car for myself!
Interesting but a little short-sighted. Most poor people can afford to ride a bus. There's also a clever phrase "if you've got it, a truck brought it." No modern economy or society would function without a massive transportation infrastructure. You are critically dependent on this whether you own a car or not.
how many inhabitants does Canada have? 20 millions?
31 million. Australia is in the 20-million range.
"RIAA in France." Recording Industry Association of America... In France... That alone is incredibly silly
Like "AOL Canada" and "AT&T Canada".
IIRC The stylus silo has a hole in it for some reason
That's for the ink to drain away... Well, maybe it's to prevent vacuum/compression resistance when removing/inserting the stylus.
As many others have pointed out, MS is unlike most other OS vendors in that the OS is their premier product, not something they make so they can sell their expensive hardware. If OSOSes ever replace MSOSes on commodity hardware, MS is toast.
Also, OS dominance has tremendous strategic benefit to Microsoft since it uses it as the base to launch into other markets. While being illegal, of course, this has been MS's main MO for the past decade and it has been extraordinarily successful. If MS loses its OS dominance, it will have a much more difficult time expanding into new markets and dominating old ones. They would be just another player on the field, rather than the owner of the playing field.
Yes, the U.S. government does have a gold store locked up at Fort Knox, but not enough to make up for the trillions of U.S. dollar value floating around.
Also, the US government would very much like to get rid of the gold that it has in Fort Knox, now that it is financially useless. This is true of most governments that have gold reserves.
It explains (in part) why some currencies can change value compared to others by several percent each year (or in some cases, dozens of percent).
Currencies can change value dramatically overnight entirely because of speculation, the same as stocks. A national economy doesn't fundamentally change overnight; only the perception of it can change that quickly. Also, foreign-exchange traders are given to torpedoing currencies in order to move markets and turn quick-and-dirty profits.
The Ruble (Russian currency) would not be so low in value if there was gold backing up each ruble.
The Ruble has a low value because the Russian government and economy are in political and financial chaos. The Russian government probably has a stockpile of gold somewhere, but it's financially useless in the modern world. Anyone with enough money to buy lots of gold would probably understand how useless it is.
like Diamonds, which again are worth money purely because they're worth money and pretty
Diamonds, having fewer industrial applications than gold, would be sold by the pound if it wasn't for a marketing campaign. In the 1940's(?), De Beers made deals with the Hollywood studios to have them portray diamonds as symbols of everlasting love. Nowadays, people are brainwashed into spending two months of income to buy a pretty looking rock.
If you're using a credit card, it doesn't cost you anything to "exchange" currency.
Well, the credit-card companies will, of course, charge you for the service of exchanging currency. They don't put this directly on your bill, but there will always be a difference between the rates for exchanging one currency into another and then back.
But there is also another cost. Foreign currency exchange rates are based on supply, demand, and speculation, not on actual "value". "Value" is a nebulous term, but, to take an example, the current exchange rate of Canadian dollars into American dollars is about $0.64 US. However, by a different and more accurate representation of the "value" of money called "purchasing power parity", the Canadian dollar is worth about $0.80 US. That is to say, if a Canadian buys stuff in Canada, he gets about $0.80 US for his money, but if he buys it in the US, he only gets about $0.64 worth of stuff.
Of course, some commodities are less expensive in the US to compensate for the difference, but there is still an additional "cost" to exchanging currencies, caused by supply, demand, and speculation on the supplies and stability of currencies themselves, never minding what they will actually buy for you.
Maybe they have more integrity than censoring news stories that put their community in a bad light
It will be interesting to see just how much "integrity" MSN has now that this story has been "spotted".
One of the biggest mistakes made in designing the Web is probably allowing clients and servers to identify their brands and versions. Then web-site designers would have the fewest headaches only if their pages were actually interoperable.
I'll give up one of my "Funny"s if you give up one of yours.
The server must respond with:
Server: Microsoft-IIS
(or maybe that's IE6.1...)
OTOH, spending money on computers could be justified as a financial investment that will produce more income in the future. If I hadn't dropped my life's savings on a VIC-20 eighteen years ago (when I was 14), I might not have been as well off as I am today.
we can go back to high school to get Work=Power/Time.
Maybe you need to refresh yourself with high school physics, because:
Work = Power * Time. This derives:
Work = Knowledge * Money (this should be intuitive), and:
Money = Work / Knowledge
I'm not sure what comical conclusions can be derived from the last formula.
It'll be neat when Fidel Castro sues the US government for violating the ideals of communism, and wins.
YOU GOTTA FIGHT...FOR YOUR RIGHT...TO PARODY!!!!
You'd better watch it, buddy, because right after finish outlawing parodies, they'll outlaw puns.
HTTP allows you to determine the type and version of browser that is accessing a page. You could always write a little script that detected whether a smart-tag-capable browser was accessing your page, and redirect it to an "error" page, instructing the reader to get a different browser before visiting the page again.
Or Apache could just be modified to have an option send back the special disabling meta-tag with all content returned to an IE client. Of course, this option would be enabled by default...
(It's a good thing that Microsoft doesn't own the web-server market.)
There is some middle ground. Perhaps Microsoft could check the page for the '©' symbol, and if it is found, then search for the inclusionary tag, granting them license to modify the page.
Microsoft doesn't need to bother with anything like this; they just need to purchase new legislation to create SULAs (Start-User License Agreements). "By having any user access your site with a Microsoft product, you hereby agree to the following terms...". You would, of course, be free to opt-out of this agreement by including a special meta-tag to deny your page to all users of Microsoft products.
And as you said, for the 99.99% of users who aren't "aware" of any possible web options, they're going to absent-mindedly click OK, thinking that it's some required part of the internet.
This almost reads as if you would expect Microsoft to include a "Decline" button on that panel.
What's the difference between this and something like if Microsoft made it so that any program that runs on Windows has to add an extra command at the beginning telling it that you want it to come up with a random number when you use a randomiser, rather thanthe new added functionality where it always comes up with 0.5
Oh, you mean like Microsoft's anti-interoperability socket-initialization crap. Too bad they couldn't have stuck to the core when they scarfed the open-source BSD socket-handling code.
ASPs and Data Hostaging could be the .com boom-bust of 2001/2002.
They did a really clever thing of identifying long "runs" of code that nobody ever jumped into the middle of, then they treated them as one big instruction with a lot of side effects, and optimized them as a block. (Not one instruction at a time, but the whole mess into the most optimal set of new platform instructions they could.)
...but on machine code!", to match all of the "...but on the web!" patents that have been granted in recent years. Innovation is truly dead.
"Basic-block analysis", which is basically what this is, is a common technique that all good compilers perform on source code or intermediate representations of source code for optimization. This technique has probably been around since the 1960's.
It was quite clever. It's also quite patented, and has been since before the Power PC came out. (And in a sane world those patents would have expired by now, but with patent lengths going the way of copyright...)
The patent application must have read "basic-block analysis
Conversely, if you were to have every mobile-phone base station and every radio tower broadcasting signals, wouldn't you frequently be lucky enough to catch some of them bouncing off the aircraft into your radar receiver?