There are no terrorists. You might as well be talking about the intentions and capabilities of magical elves. If you were simply trying to be witty and sarcastic about the truthers, you should have just added a sarcasm tag... a lot of people here are taking you seriously.
I'll ask mom when she comes down with the laundry. Maybe she's heard of it. Judging from A) your troll rating, and B) the small number of responses to this story (42 at present), I'd say you're probably closer than most readers here would want to admit.
Surely 10.5.x and 10.4.x will continue working anyway when 10.6.0 comes out? Presumably that may mean a hit on resale prices for G3, G4 and G5 Macs but the machines will still work! The problem is that a lot of support for things like software updates runs a very short span. A lot of software for OS X doesn't support Panther anymore.
BeOS tried that. NeXT tried that. IBM (OS/2) tried that. It doesn't work. They didn't work because they were small companies, and Microsoft crushed them when they tried to negotiate OEM deals with companies like Dell and HP by threatening to penalize those OEM's. Apple isn't a small company. They have big income outside of the PC market now, and they wouldn't be intimidated or defeated . And the last time they let cloners run their OS, Mac usage picked up dramatically.
You can argue whether it makes financial sense for Apple to license their OS to OEMs, but you can't really argue that it wouldn't work when it already has. And Michael Dell has openly stated that he'd love to offer OS X on Dell machines.
Apple's hardware has always been a strength... well designed and attractive. But their stuff is looking less and less attractive (or even distinctive), and more like ugly European kitchen hardware. I've gotten to the point where I'd welcome running OS X on third party hardware.
"I don't necessarily get the compulsory education to 18 thing. "
I've come to the conclusion that we'd be much better off as a nation (we USians, that is) if we viewed education as a privilege to be earned rather than a right. We simply don't appreciate education enough in this country, but not always for the reasons that you might think. That "right" to an education has turned into an unwanted burden for many people. Michael Foucault wasn't right about much, but he was right about state supported schools being much like prisons. Your kids have to go to a place against their will (unless you homeschool or can afford private school), and they're forced to sit in front of a chalkboard 6 to 8 hours a day. What joy for a child. In addition, we tried to impose a one-size-fits all system on kids that are nothing alike. We try to pretend that every kid can be an Einstein, that every kid can be a Mozart, when the terrible truth is that most kids will be, at best, average. We keep pushing for all kids to take things like Trig and Calculus in high school, but if they have no interest in the fields, why? They'll never use it. I'd much rather that we require all kids to take courses in practical math. If everyone knew how to calculate interest on a loan, perhaps we wouldn't have a subprime mess today.
Our kids, rather than having too little access to school, spend too much time in classrooms as kids. Everyone admits that we could shave a couple of years off of primary, middle, and high school, with the student no worse for it. And yet we keep trying put kids in class more hours per day, more days per year, and at earlier and earlier ages. We brought in Kindergarten. Then we brought in preschool. And now we're trying to make pre-K programs mandatory in many areas. Where does it end?
In other countries, Finland being a prominent example, kids start school later, graduate earlier, and still test better, all at a lower cost. "More" is not always the answer to education problems.
I call BS. The USN knew exactly where the Thresher when down as if failed durring monitored sea trials, and knew that the Scorpion didn't go down in the North Atlantic. That's an interesting point. The Navy had searched for, found, and even photographed the remains of both the Thresher and the Scorpion long before Ballard took his trip in the 80's. The only reason I can think of for the secrecy of Ballard's mission was that perhaps the Soviets still didn't know the location of either sub, and the Navy still considered some of the technology in the wreck classified.
I think what we're looking at is what will be an evolutionary step like we saw going from Win95 to Win98. And as I recall, it was quite an improvement. Not to say of course that Win98 was perfect, it had its (huge) flaws, but it was quite a step in the right direction. I don't think it's quite the same thing. While Win95 was notorious for being unstable, it didn't have a reputation for being a resource hog, and it was still fun to use. Even with its instability, admit it or not, Win95 was a revolutionary OS. It was popular with its users, even when they griped about it. Everyone agreed it was a huge step up from Win 3.1. So Win98 was then just icing on the cake.
I challenge you to find me a significant number of Vista users that would dare describe it as "fun" or "revolutionary". Better yet, I challenge you to find someone that would claim Vista is an improvement over XP. I see the reverse happening.... people that bought Vista machines that want to "downgrade" to XP.
So in other words, the only thing really going for Windows 7 has been dropped. I feel that many businesses were holding out for Windows 7 to fix all the problems that Vista introduced.. it looks likely that this is not the case. If this shift is confirmed, then I really suspect that a lot of Microsoft houses will begin to dump the platform altogether. Yup, we passed on Vista, and were waiting to see what Windows 7 would be like. We're evaluating the Mac as a desktop replacement. If Windows 7 is just going to be Vista with yet more crap piled on, we might well become an Apple shop here. The big barrier is financial stuff (we use Microsoft's Dynamics currently), but I suppose if we had to, we could just put the financial people in a Microsoft ghetto, while everyone else moves to the Mac.
"The Windows database filesystem is something MS has been developing, announcing, and then killing off since the early 90s. It's sort of the Redmond equivalent of a phoenix, or maybe a Terminator."
Sounds more like the Redmond equivalent of Duke Nukem' Forever.
Of course the drivers and software that run on vista are going to run on Windows 7. Clearly, all they're going to do is rebrand Vista, change some eye candy, and pray it sells thistime around!
They'd be doing it now, but they need to wait long enough that people will believe they've done some actual work on it.
Yeah, I think you nailed it. I was hopeful when talk of the MiniWin kernel hit the press, because I think that's exactly what they needed to do. Windows has just become too damn bloated for the end user, and Vista is a nightmare. But instead of actually making radical changes, it looks like they're just going to toss some eye-candy on Vista and re-sell it. In other words, Windows 7 will suck as bad as Vista. Microsoft simply has no respect for what their customers want at all. Their attitude is "you're going to buy our bloatware and you're going to like it. Now pay up, suckers".
No, we couldn't, because the US has moved most manufacturing overseas and is completely dependent on Europe and China economically. China is as dependent on us as we are of them... and I'd argue that we're still at the point where, if they want continued economic growth, they're more reliant on us than the opposite. Remember, China has to have someone to sell all that stuff to. If the American market disappears tomorrow, so does China's prosperity. They only have our balls in a vise if we refuse to squeeze theirs.
Same thing with Europe... they're farther ahead in terms of infrastructure than China (well, Western Europe is, anyway), but the same thing applies. Europe needs American markets and dollars too. Look at all of the stuff Americans buy from Europeans. Airliners, petroleum (hello BP and Dutch Shell), automobiles, etc. I'd wager that Sweden would be less of a social-democratic paradise if Americans weren't putting significant money into their economy buying their Volvos, Saabs, and Ikea furniture. Germany would be hard hit if the BMW's and Benz's stopped rolling off the docks. Add to that the fact that US companies have factories in Europe and China, and European companies have factories in America and China, and that shows just how tightly integrated and interdependent we all are economically. Even China is now looking to build plants in America. Economic dependency isn't a one-way street.
When I hear arguments for cutting DARPA's budget, or for eliminating it completely because "the Cold War's over, and China won't be a threat for 30 years", I think of how long the agencies successes took to come to fruition... GPS, the Internet, etc. It took decades of work. Its not like we could shut DARPA down, re-open it in 20 years, and then just magically start churning out big results again.
"The M$ buy of Yahoo had nothing to do with making M$ a better company,"
Well, yes it did, and it depends on how you define "better". In this case, better means "acquiring Yahoo's ad revenue stream and getting Yahoo's users" to better compete with Google in those areas. When MS bought Hotmail, most Hotmail users didn't abandoning their accounts and go elsewhere. They stayed with MS. Microsoft probably bets the same thing would be true with a Yahoo purchase. Where are those users going to jump ship to? Google does things in such a different way that most would be unlikely to jump from Yahoo. And Yahoo still has pretty good ad revenues, which is a priority for Microsoft's emerging online business.
Now that AOL's search presence is basically non-existent, the big three search providers are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. In buying Yahoo, MS would have knocked it down to two. You and I may not like that, but it certainly makes sense to Microsoft.
Ironically, now that Yahoo's stock is tanking from the aftermath of this deal, they may get snatched up by Google.
"Monopoly abuse ("that's a nice little program you've got there, Stac...")
If I hear one more Slashdot poster frothing at the mouth with "He's a convicted monopolist!!!"...
Slashdotters are a funny bunch. By and large they laugh at the very notion of copyright, but at the same time seem to think monopoly = genocide or something. Many throw the words "convicted monopolist!" around as if it were the moral equivilant of murder or worse. Priorities here can be pretty skewed. And for those of you forever holding Microsoft guilty for monopoly, do you watch MLB baseball games? The NFL? Do you avoid any products made with metals from US Steel? Do you demand that your local farmer not use seeds from Monsanto? Just how far does your moral outrage go?
"Running competitors into the ground (no, that's not business as usual)"
But it IS business as usual for the most part. The whole idea of competing in business is to get the customer to buy your product, not the other guy's. Netscape didn't die because of any conspiracy. They died because the software business evolved quickly, and many products that were sold individually at great cost came to be available cheaply or free in just a few years. Remember when things like HTML editors cost a lot of money? Whether Microsoft plays "fair" is basically a matter of opinion outside of the court system. Is Apple guilty of "strangling their competitors" because they make their own browser and bundle it? Microsoft never prevented people from installing a third party browser. They never prevented anyone from installing WordPerfect or Lotus Notes. Microsoft never held a gun to the heads of IT departments and made them buy NT instead of NetWare. People bought these things because they thought it was the best purchasing decisions.
"Raw hypocrisy ("Open Source is Evil. Just don't look at ftp.exe.")"
Is Microsoft the only company that you hold in contempt for "raw hypocrisy"? Apple ripped off Xerox. The BSD people were sued because they basically cut and pasted a bunch of AT&T code. Steve Jobs said it best. "Great companies steal". It's not like Microsoft invented it.
"Flat-out fraud ("sure, IBM, I have an OS I can sell you")"
This has to be the worst, most whiny of charges. Please. In business history, it was one of the most brilliant bluffs of all time. The guy bluffed IBM. And it led to a multi-billion dollar empire. You're extremely naive if you don't think this kind of bluffing goes on all the time. Fortunes are made and lost by it.
"The guy's an ass who's held computing back for the last 25 years through actions that'd get you and me imprisoned, or at least run out of business."
Held it back how? He's certainly altered the course of computing, but held it back? Specifically how? Microsoft, whether you like their products or not, is more responsible for ubiquitous computer use by average people than by any other company. I think what you meant to say was "My preferred platform didn't win, so I'm gonna take my ball and go home".
"By your logic, it doesn't matter how he got his wealth as long as he gives a little bit away. Well, nuts to that. Warren Buffett's doing pretty OK for himself and I'm unaware of any similar allegations against him."
And yet that same man, Buffett, holds Gates in such high regards, he's donated almost his entire fortune to the Gates Foundation. By most accounts, he's Bill Gates best friend. Buffett certainly doesn't seem to think Gates is evil.
"It's OK that Bill's fake-donating money to charity, but he's still an ass."
I think if anyone has demonstrated that they're an ass, it's you. You post a petty, jealous tirade, and insinuate that Gates is evil because, lets get down to it, you're pissed that Microsoft is the dominant company in computing. Calling Gates evil isn't just silly, its a shame on your part. Evil? Sir, if you think the guy that ran Microsoft is evil, then you have no idea what the word really mea
That written, I view the demise of Bletchley Park the same way I look at copyrights: Doing something great a long time ago shouldn't guarantee you a lifetime of financial benefits. Even if you saved the world. When it comes to historical landmarks, I'm all in favor of saving the most important ones, even at public expense. I'm involved myself in some Civil War battlefield preservation efforts. That said, not every landmark deserves to be saved. Not every square inch of battlefield, nor ever house or building should be preserved forever in all cases.
Bletchley was picked because the Brits thought it more likely that code breaking would stay secret longer if done in some old civilian houses instead of military facilities. It was the equivalent of the NSA setting up shop in your next door neighbor's house, and hiding all the activity within so that no one would suspect anything. After the war, wasn't all of that activity then moved elsewhere? So it's not like Bletchley has been the home of British code breaking all this time.
The Bletchley houses are old and in need of repair, but many are quite lovely. I certainly wouldn't let a developer tear them down to put up monstrous post-modern architecture condos or anything, but really, let people live in those houses again. Just specify to developers what they can and can't do with those houses when renovating them. I don't know how it's done in Britain, but here in the States, we designate certain houses and buildings as historical landmarks while still allowing their sale and use to new parties. We just put certain limits on what the owners can do with that property. If those restrictions aren't agreeable, we don't let them buy the property. This is a reasonable compromise, and we do it all the time. My great aunt and uncle lived in an old plantation mansion in Alabama that was designated a historical landmark... there was a sign in their front yard placed by the state of Alabama giving a brief history of the place and acknowledging its landmark status. They were able to modernize certain things... plumbing, utilities, etc, as long as they didn't alter the essential character of the place. They found this a reasonable compromise, and I don't see why the same thing couldn't be done at Bletchley.
Look, I'm all for helping Africa get great colleges and postgrad institutions. It's a good thing, and certainly can't hurt. But if these people think that a postgrad center for math and physics is going to help pump great wealth into Africa, I'm afraid they'll be dissapointed. They'd be better off building business and engineering institutes. People like Patrice Motsepe will do far more to bring wealth to Africa than someone like Hawking.
You can choose not to use Google. You know up front, before you use their site, what Google does. You either decide if the loss of privacy is worth it or not, and then choose appropriately. You can use any number of competing search engines.
But most places have no more than three choices of broadband access, with expensive satellite connections one of them. In reality, if customers really won't stand for Charter's actions on this, it means changing their ISP to whoever their local DSL provider is.
I'm fairly sympathetic to ISP companies trying to get the most revenue out of customers in different ways, as long as its not a matter of forcing something on customers... after all, those networks, with a lot of physical infrastructure, in addition to network administration and staffing, cost a lot of money to set up and operate. And these companies are for-profit businesses, after all, not charities. But this goes way too far. This isn't just violating a customer's privacy. That's too simple. It's violating their very user experience. Not what I'd call "enhanced" at all.
Look at an analogy from the old phone company days, pre-Internet. Imagine talking on your phone to friends or family about, oh, say a camping trip, and then having an operator break into your conversation to sell you tents and sleeping bags. Not only would it annoy the hell out of you, you certainly wouldn't like the idea of always having an operator listening in on you during every phone call.
This is going to be a situation where my Congressman and Senators and various FCC functionaries get letters from me.This crosses the line.
What the USA has, the right wingers of Canada desire. And since the Conservative party is in power in Canada, what the USA does, Canada does a year later. Some of Canada's most egregious and proto-fascist laws and institutions were enacted by the liberals, under the aegis of "fairness". Their "Human Rights Commission", with its 100 percent conviction rate, is basically a Kangaroo court Mussolini would have admired. Don't be shocked if this proposed policy was in the works long before Harper was elected.
I know this comes as a shock to you, but "Democracy" does not always result in justice... neither does liberalism, for that matter.
I'm Surprised that they are not doing this already. That begs the question, who's computers would host the bots? Does Hugo Chavez use Windows? Raul Castro? Bashir Assad?
Seems like a hell of a way to kill two birds with one stone...
With modern transportation, and international trade flourishing across the globe, "invasive species" are the cost of doing business. There's simply no way we'll be able to stop many of these migrations in the long run. Life will simply have to adapt.
I don't think these people have ever seen bad workspaces. Adobe is "unfriendly"? They have lots of light, lots of space, good furniture, palm trees... oh yeah, they have a fsckin' basketball court. Piss poor facilities, obviously.
Of all of the "bad" choices, only facebook's could possibly deserve to be on that list, as it looks like a high school cafeteria with monitors. Otherwise... I'd say the problem is that the tastes of the Valleywag people are ridiculous.
"You know, the ones repealed and/or not passed in the late 80's and 90's in order to help the economy grow...which then led to shady banking practices that begat our current 'credit crunch'."
Wow, put on the hipwaders. The bullshit is thick today.
Our current "credit crunch" had nothing to do with banking deregulation of the late 80's and early 90's. It has everything to do with three issues.
One, the subprime mess. That's the fault of people buying houses they knew they couldn't afford, and banks lending them money they couldn't pay back. But why were the banks lending them that money, then? Because politicians decided that it wasn't fair that people with bad credit couldn't get home loans, so they created laws authorizing subprime mortgages, and indeed pressed banks to give these loans to "disadvantaged" borrowers. That's right, your beloved government regulations helped create this mess. And now these same politicians are promising to spend taxpayer funds to bail out these irresponsible people and banks, while people that played by the rules... the ones that only bought houses they knew they could afford, or when they couldn't, rented instead... well, your beloved regulators are about to stab those people in the back. The ones that played by the rules? Suckers and chumps, apparently, because they could have gone hog wild and let Uncle Sugar bail them out. THATS the fruits of your nanny regulation, not true free market economics.
The other two reasons are strictly because of monetary policy, not banking regulation. The Fed decided on too much liquidity, and the Bush Adminstration adopted a weak dollar policy, mainly because of complaints by people much like you that "our trade deficit is too high! Get the Chinese to buy more from US!". So Bush bought into that fraudulent thinking that if we made our domestic products cheaper via a weak dollar, foreign countries would come running to buy more of our products (never mind that in the US, throughout 400 years of our history, has had a trade deficit for 350+ of those years, and it hasn't retarded our economic growth. The trade deficit is a useless measure of overall economic health).
"I like the regulations, they are necessary for capitalism to work in the real world"
Ahh, the old bullshit that capitalism isn't "efficient" enough without government regulation.
The only thing capitalism needs to work "in the real world" is a seller that has something a buyer wants, and a buyer that has the means to pay for that product or service. Period. Regulation that does anything other than prevent fraud is nothing more than a drag on markets.
guess what! Doom is whatever the creators wanted it to be. not what you want. Guess what! If they make it what customers want it to be, customers will buy it!
Slashdot Mirror
You can argue whether it makes financial sense for Apple to license their OS to OEMs, but you can't really argue that it wouldn't work when it already has. And Michael Dell has openly stated that he'd love to offer OS X on Dell machines.
Apple's hardware has always been a strength... well designed and attractive. But their stuff is looking less and less attractive (or even distinctive), and more like ugly European kitchen hardware. I've gotten to the point where I'd welcome running OS X on third party hardware.
Dash: "Dad says our powers make us special"
Mom: "Everyone's special, Dash"
Dash: "Which is another way of saying that nobody is"
"I don't necessarily get the compulsory education to 18 thing. "
I've come to the conclusion that we'd be much better off as a nation (we USians, that is) if we viewed education as a privilege to be earned rather than a right. We simply don't appreciate education enough in this country, but not always for the reasons that you might think. That "right" to an education has turned into an unwanted burden for many people. Michael Foucault wasn't right about much, but he was right about state supported schools being much like prisons. Your kids have to go to a place against their will (unless you homeschool or can afford private school), and they're forced to sit in front of a chalkboard 6 to 8 hours a day. What joy for a child. In addition, we tried to impose a one-size-fits all system on kids that are nothing alike. We try to pretend that every kid can be an Einstein, that every kid can be a Mozart, when the terrible truth is that most kids will be, at best, average. We keep pushing for all kids to take things like Trig and Calculus in high school, but if they have no interest in the fields, why? They'll never use it. I'd much rather that we require all kids to take courses in practical math. If everyone knew how to calculate interest on a loan, perhaps we wouldn't have a subprime mess today.
Our kids, rather than having too little access to school, spend too much time in classrooms as kids. Everyone admits that we could shave a couple of years off of primary, middle, and high school, with the student no worse for it. And yet we keep trying put kids in class more hours per day, more days per year, and at earlier and earlier ages. We brought in Kindergarten. Then we brought in preschool. And now we're trying to make pre-K programs mandatory in many areas. Where does it end?
In other countries, Finland being a prominent example, kids start school later, graduate earlier, and still test better, all at a lower cost. "More" is not always the answer to education problems.
I challenge you to find me a significant number of Vista users that would dare describe it as "fun" or "revolutionary". Better yet, I challenge you to find someone that would claim Vista is an improvement over XP. I see the reverse happening.... people that bought Vista machines that want to "downgrade" to XP.
So in other words, the only thing really going for Windows 7 has been dropped. I feel that many businesses were holding out for Windows 7 to fix all the problems that Vista introduced.. it looks likely that this is not the case. If this shift is confirmed, then I really suspect that a lot of Microsoft houses will begin to dump the platform altogether. Yup, we passed on Vista, and were waiting to see what Windows 7 would be like. We're evaluating the Mac as a desktop replacement. If Windows 7 is just going to be Vista with yet more crap piled on, we might well become an Apple shop here. The big barrier is financial stuff (we use Microsoft's Dynamics currently), but I suppose if we had to, we could just put the financial people in a Microsoft ghetto, while everyone else moves to the Mac.
"The Windows database filesystem is something MS has been developing, announcing, and then killing off since the early 90s. It's sort of the Redmond equivalent of a phoenix, or maybe a Terminator."
Sounds more like the Redmond equivalent of Duke Nukem' Forever.
Of course the drivers and software that run on vista are going to run on Windows 7. Clearly, all they're going to do is rebrand Vista, change some eye candy, and pray it sells thistime around!
Yeah, I think you nailed it. I was hopeful when talk of the MiniWin kernel hit the press, because I think that's exactly what they needed to do. Windows has just become too damn bloated for the end user, and Vista is a nightmare. But instead of actually making radical changes, it looks like they're just going to toss some eye-candy on Vista and re-sell it. In other words, Windows 7 will suck as bad as Vista. Microsoft simply has no respect for what their customers want at all. Their attitude is "you're going to buy our bloatware and you're going to like it. Now pay up, suckers".They'd be doing it now, but they need to wait long enough that people will believe they've done some actual work on it.
Same thing with Europe... they're farther ahead in terms of infrastructure than China (well, Western Europe is, anyway), but the same thing applies. Europe needs American markets and dollars too. Look at all of the stuff Americans buy from Europeans. Airliners, petroleum (hello BP and Dutch Shell), automobiles, etc. I'd wager that Sweden would be less of a social-democratic paradise if Americans weren't putting significant money into their economy buying their Volvos, Saabs, and Ikea furniture. Germany would be hard hit if the BMW's and Benz's stopped rolling off the docks. Add to that the fact that US companies have factories in Europe and China, and European companies have factories in America and China, and that shows just how tightly integrated and interdependent we all are economically. Even China is now looking to build plants in America. Economic dependency isn't a one-way street.
When I hear arguments for cutting DARPA's budget, or for eliminating it completely because "the Cold War's over, and China won't be a threat for 30 years", I think of how long the agencies successes took to come to fruition... GPS, the Internet, etc. It took decades of work. Its not like we could shut DARPA down, re-open it in 20 years, and then just magically start churning out big results again.
"The M$ buy of Yahoo had nothing to do with making M$ a better company,"
Well, yes it did, and it depends on how you define "better". In this case, better means "acquiring Yahoo's ad revenue stream and getting Yahoo's users" to better compete with Google in those areas. When MS bought Hotmail, most Hotmail users didn't abandoning their accounts and go elsewhere. They stayed with MS. Microsoft probably bets the same thing would be true with a Yahoo purchase. Where are those users going to jump ship to? Google does things in such a different way that most would be unlikely to jump from Yahoo. And Yahoo still has pretty good ad revenues, which is a priority for Microsoft's emerging online business.
Now that AOL's search presence is basically non-existent, the big three search providers are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. In buying Yahoo, MS would have knocked it down to two. You and I may not like that, but it certainly makes sense to Microsoft.
Ironically, now that Yahoo's stock is tanking from the aftermath of this deal, they may get snatched up by Google.
"Monopoly abuse ("that's a nice little program you've got there, Stac...")
If I hear one more Slashdot poster frothing at the mouth with "He's a convicted monopolist!!!"...
Slashdotters are a funny bunch. By and large they laugh at the very notion of copyright, but at the same time seem to think monopoly = genocide or something. Many throw the words "convicted monopolist!" around as if it were the moral equivilant of murder or worse. Priorities here can be pretty skewed. And for those of you forever holding Microsoft guilty for monopoly, do you watch MLB baseball games? The NFL? Do you avoid any products made with metals from US Steel? Do you demand that your local farmer not use seeds from Monsanto? Just how far does your moral outrage go?
"Running competitors into the ground (no, that's not business as usual)"
But it IS business as usual for the most part. The whole idea of competing in business is to get the customer to buy your product, not the other guy's. Netscape didn't die because of any conspiracy. They died because the software business evolved quickly, and many products that were sold individually at great cost came to be available cheaply or free in just a few years. Remember when things like HTML editors cost a lot of money? Whether Microsoft plays "fair" is basically a matter of opinion outside of the court system. Is Apple guilty of "strangling their competitors" because they make their own browser and bundle it? Microsoft never prevented people from installing a third party browser. They never prevented anyone from installing WordPerfect or Lotus Notes. Microsoft never held a gun to the heads of IT departments and made them buy NT instead of NetWare. People bought these things because they thought it was the best purchasing decisions.
"Raw hypocrisy ("Open Source is Evil. Just don't look at ftp.exe.")"
Is Microsoft the only company that you hold in contempt for "raw hypocrisy"? Apple ripped off Xerox. The BSD people were sued because they basically cut and pasted a bunch of AT&T code. Steve Jobs said it best. "Great companies steal". It's not like Microsoft invented it.
"Flat-out fraud ("sure, IBM, I have an OS I can sell you")"
This has to be the worst, most whiny of charges. Please. In business history, it was one of the most brilliant bluffs of all time. The guy bluffed IBM. And it led to a multi-billion dollar empire. You're extremely naive if you don't think this kind of bluffing goes on all the time. Fortunes are made and lost by it.
"The guy's an ass who's held computing back for the last 25 years through actions that'd get you and me imprisoned, or at least run out of business."
Held it back how? He's certainly altered the course of computing, but held it back? Specifically how? Microsoft, whether you like their products or not, is more responsible for ubiquitous computer use by average people than by any other company. I think what you meant to say was "My preferred platform didn't win, so I'm gonna take my ball and go home".
"By your logic, it doesn't matter how he got his wealth as long as he gives a little bit away. Well, nuts to that. Warren Buffett's doing pretty OK for himself and I'm unaware of any similar allegations against him."
And yet that same man, Buffett, holds Gates in such high regards, he's donated almost his entire fortune to the Gates Foundation. By most accounts, he's Bill Gates best friend. Buffett certainly doesn't seem to think Gates is evil.
"It's OK that Bill's fake-donating money to charity, but he's still an ass."
I think if anyone has demonstrated that they're an ass, it's you. You post a petty, jealous tirade, and insinuate that Gates is evil because, lets get down to it, you're pissed that Microsoft is the dominant company in computing. Calling Gates evil isn't just silly, its a shame on your part. Evil? Sir, if you think the guy that ran Microsoft is evil, then you have no idea what the word really mea
Bletchley was picked because the Brits thought it more likely that code breaking would stay secret longer if done in some old civilian houses instead of military facilities. It was the equivalent of the NSA setting up shop in your next door neighbor's house, and hiding all the activity within so that no one would suspect anything. After the war, wasn't all of that activity then moved elsewhere? So it's not like Bletchley has been the home of British code breaking all this time.
The Bletchley houses are old and in need of repair, but many are quite lovely. I certainly wouldn't let a developer tear them down to put up monstrous post-modern architecture condos or anything, but really, let people live in those houses again. Just specify to developers what they can and can't do with those houses when renovating them. I don't know how it's done in Britain, but here in the States, we designate certain houses and buildings as historical landmarks while still allowing their sale and use to new parties. We just put certain limits on what the owners can do with that property. If those restrictions aren't agreeable, we don't let them buy the property. This is a reasonable compromise, and we do it all the time. My great aunt and uncle lived in an old plantation mansion in Alabama that was designated a historical landmark... there was a sign in their front yard placed by the state of Alabama giving a brief history of the place and acknowledging its landmark status. They were able to modernize certain things... plumbing, utilities, etc, as long as they didn't alter the essential character of the place. They found this a reasonable compromise, and I don't see why the same thing couldn't be done at Bletchley.
Look, I'm all for helping Africa get great colleges and postgrad institutions. It's a good thing, and certainly can't hurt. But if these people think that a postgrad center for math and physics is going to help pump great wealth into Africa, I'm afraid they'll be dissapointed. They'd be better off building business and engineering institutes. People like Patrice Motsepe will do far more to bring wealth to Africa than someone like Hawking.
"Second, how is this any different than Google?
You can choose not to use Google. You know up front, before you use their site, what Google does. You either decide if the loss of privacy is worth it or not, and then choose appropriately. You can use any number of competing search engines.
But most places have no more than three choices of broadband access, with expensive satellite connections one of them. In reality, if customers really won't stand for Charter's actions on this, it means changing their ISP to whoever their local DSL provider is.
I'm fairly sympathetic to ISP companies trying to get the most revenue out of customers in different ways, as long as its not a matter of forcing something on customers... after all, those networks, with a lot of physical infrastructure, in addition to network administration and staffing, cost a lot of money to set up and operate. And these companies are for-profit businesses, after all, not charities. But this goes way too far. This isn't just violating a customer's privacy. That's too simple. It's violating their very user experience. Not what I'd call "enhanced" at all.
Look at an analogy from the old phone company days, pre-Internet. Imagine talking on your phone to friends or family about, oh, say a camping trip, and then having an operator break into your conversation to sell you tents and sleeping bags. Not only would it annoy the hell out of you, you certainly wouldn't like the idea of always having an operator listening in on you during every phone call.
This is going to be a situation where my Congressman and Senators and various FCC functionaries get letters from me.This crosses the line.
And since the Conservative party is in power in Canada, what the USA does, Canada does a year later. Some of Canada's most egregious and proto-fascist laws and institutions were enacted by the liberals, under the aegis of "fairness". Their "Human Rights Commission", with its 100 percent conviction rate, is basically a Kangaroo court Mussolini would have admired. Don't be shocked if this proposed policy was in the works long before Harper was elected.
I know this comes as a shock to you, but "Democracy" does not always result in justice... neither does liberalism, for that matter.
Seems like a hell of a way to kill two birds with one stone...
With modern transportation, and international trade flourishing across the globe, "invasive species" are the cost of doing business. There's simply no way we'll be able to stop many of these migrations in the long run. Life will simply have to adapt.
"He SHOULD Be On Trial"
The cobbler called. He said your jackboots are ready. He's already polished them for you, and says they look nice with that spiffy new brown shirt.
Are you kidding me?
I don't think these people have ever seen bad workspaces. Adobe is "unfriendly"? They have lots of light, lots of space, good furniture, palm trees... oh yeah, they have a fsckin' basketball court. Piss poor facilities, obviously.
Of all of the "bad" choices, only facebook's could possibly deserve to be on that list, as it looks like a high school cafeteria with monitors. Otherwise... I'd say the problem is that the tastes of the Valleywag people are ridiculous.
"You know, the ones repealed and/or not passed in the late 80's and 90's in order to help the economy grow...which then led to shady banking practices that begat our current 'credit crunch'."
Wow, put on the hipwaders. The bullshit is thick today.
Our current "credit crunch" had nothing to do with banking deregulation of the late 80's and early 90's. It has everything to do with three issues.
One, the subprime mess. That's the fault of people buying houses they knew they couldn't afford, and banks lending them money they couldn't pay back. But why were the banks lending them that money, then? Because politicians decided that it wasn't fair that people with bad credit couldn't get home loans, so they created laws authorizing subprime mortgages, and indeed pressed banks to give these loans to "disadvantaged" borrowers. That's right, your beloved government regulations helped create this mess. And now these same politicians are promising to spend taxpayer funds to bail out these irresponsible people and banks, while people that played by the rules... the ones that only bought houses they knew they could afford, or when they couldn't, rented instead... well, your beloved regulators are about to stab those people in the back. The ones that played by the rules? Suckers and chumps, apparently, because they could have gone hog wild and let Uncle Sugar bail them out. THATS the fruits of your nanny regulation, not true free market economics.
The other two reasons are strictly because of monetary policy, not banking regulation. The Fed decided on too much liquidity, and the Bush Adminstration adopted a weak dollar policy, mainly because of complaints by people much like you that "our trade deficit is too high! Get the Chinese to buy more from US!". So Bush bought into that fraudulent thinking that if we made our domestic products cheaper via a weak dollar, foreign countries would come running to buy more of our products (never mind that in the US, throughout 400 years of our history, has had a trade deficit for 350+ of those years, and it hasn't retarded our economic growth. The trade deficit is a useless measure of overall economic health).
"I like the regulations, they are necessary for capitalism to work in the real world"
Ahh, the old bullshit that capitalism isn't "efficient" enough without government regulation.
The only thing capitalism needs to work "in the real world" is a seller that has something a buyer wants, and a buyer that has the means to pay for that product or service. Period. Regulation that does anything other than prevent fraud is nothing more than a drag on markets.