They have no choice, depending on the jurisdiction products sold must be fit for purpose and free from manufacturing defects for a given period, usually a year...
The only thing they can refuse to do, is sell you an extended warranty period.
The UK is even worse off, since there is no requirement to provide cards that can be used in your own equipment...
You might be happy with your cable box, but what else have you used? Having used dreamboxes, mythtv and others i can say that i find the boxes supplied by sky or virgin to be extremely crippled in terms of features.
Traffic where all the packets are the same size and in a repetitive ping/pong sequence = boring and you can tell this even without decrypting it, you want something like tcpsic to generate totally random traffic.
And you have proof of this. Or is it just speculation.
One example would be http://www.phreedom.org/solar/exploits/msasn1-bitstring/ There was a disclosed vulnerability in the microsoft asn.1 library, but the patch for it brought along a fix for another vulnerability in the same library that was not disclosed. This vulnerability was subsequently found by third parties, who produced and released a working exploit forcing microsoft to admit to the vulnerability several months later.
There are other examples, you just have to google for them.
Yes, well, when it is not available any security bugs found during the testing/security push don't matter, do they? I mean, I expect the vendor to make a security push, reviews and fuzzing during both development and testing. The final product which is released is what should be judged.
The point is that something developed in the open is often unfairly punished here, as although the betas/nightlies are quite clearly marked "use at your own risk", and only intended to be used by appropriately clued up people, vulnerabilities in them are still disclosed even tho they are generally of no consequence.
IE has disappeared from this ranking because it is no longer ubiquitous enough to be worth targeting, having something like a 40% market share, while flash player, adobe acrobat reader and java are installed on well over 90% of systems (including non windows systems).
Hackers will always target software with the largest market share, because the more potentially vulnerable systems that exist the more an exploit is worth. It's only good business.
Microsoft have not really disappeared, because the vast majority of software being exploited still runs on their platforms. And part of the problem with adobe/java is that microsoft don't provide a centralised update mechanism that they could hook into.
BS. All the major vendors are obligated to report vulnerabilities through Mitre. All browser vulnerabilities are assigned unique CVEs.
Browser vendors are not obligated to do any such thing. Firefox reports every vulnerability discovered, even those discovered in alpha and beta versions (which is a normal function of beta testing)... By contrast, commercial software is rarely available to the general public at all until a late beta stage, bugs found and fixed during the early development phases will never be disclosed to the public.
Commercial companies, not just browser makers, generally only admit to vulnerabilities which have (or are threatened to be) independently published, because admitting to vulnerabilities is bad for business and not something any for-profit company would do if they have the chance not to. Vulnerabilities discovered internally, or those discovered by third parties who will not disclose them (e.g. NDA) are very unlikely to be made public... Fixes may not be made available, or may be hidden in amongst other updates. There have been many cases of security patches for a disclosed vulnerability also fixing an unpublished vulnerability, as well as newer versions of programs which include fixes for vulnerabilities present in older versions (with no equivalent patch being made available for the older version).
It's also worth noting that some firefox vulnerabilities are platform specific, where a browser such as ie only runs on a single platform there will be comparatively less vulnerabilities as a result of that too.
No. These days some 85% of infections derive from social engineering. Malware comes in through the user. Vulnerability exploits seems to be a lot less effective these days. Social engineering is precisely what the tested security (reputation) mechanisms are aimed at.
An even better defence against such attacks, is Apple's model... If you can't install/execute anything that's not come from a trusted source, social engineering simply isn't going to work...
People who aren't sufficiently technically competent to understand the dangers of social engineering and not fall for such scams, should only be using walled garden type systems such as Apple's. Current complex computer systems are just totally unsuitable for the vast majority of people. However what i will say, is that there should be a good selection of such systems, each operated by different gatekeepers. Having a single monoculture is a very bad thing.
In an ideal world, the majority market would be split evenly between 3/4 such players e.g. iOS/android/wm7/symbian, all of which come locked down by default and with non technical people using these. Then there would be non locked down, "advanced" versions of these systems available to those who understand how to use them properly and safely... Perhaps make the process of unlocking difficult so that only technical people will be able to do it on their own, and its won't be practical to social engineer someone through the process.
Firefox may not be the most hardened browser around these days, but were it not for firefox things would be a lot worse...
Without firefox taking significant market share away, MS looked likely to never bother updating IE...
But also the fact that no single browser still controls 95%+ of the browser market is a VERY good thing. It not only means that standards and interoperability become important which has made mobile browsers viable, it has kickstarted the alternative browser market (without firefox there would likely be no chrome or safari)... The task is hardest for the first alternative browser, as it has to fight against 90% of sites never being tested with it, and 90% of web masters simply not caring about it.
Most importantly from a security perspective however, you no longer have a single browser with 95% market share making an irresistible target... Browser exploits have lost their appeal to hackers, because even with an IE 0day over 50% of your potential victims will never be vulnerable. Instead, hackers are now concentrating on things that are still ubiquitous, like adobe pdf and flash (yes other pdf and flash readers exist, but their market share is trivial)...
So long as the browser market remains competitive, with no single browser obtaining a dominant share we are all better off. Now we just need similar splits of 3-4 players in other markets too.
Actually, Meego is arguably the only "neutral" mobile OS these days, since Nokia dropped it there's only really Intel pushing it, and they don't make phones. Windows may or may not have a special deal with Nokia... Also, Google haven't even completed the purchase of Motorola yet, and who's to tell what their strategy will be once they have? They might have bought Motorola purely for the patents, and shut down their (unprofitable) phone design and manufacture business, which would actually benefit rather than harm the other Android OEMs.
But switzerland seems to be an anomaly, everywhere else has poorly funded, poorly managed public transport combined with a government intent on forcing people to use it despite how poor the system is. And most of the people in government never have to use it themselves.
And public transport may be suitable for "many" people, but it simply cannot be appropriate for everything... If you make driving more expensive, then you are screwing everyone for whom public transport is not and never will be practical.
Increasing the price of driving seems to be the only policy, which means that those who can no longer afford to drive are forced to use public transport, despite it being clearly inferior for their needs.
Often they try to increase use of public transport without improving it, or the "improvements" are dubious, for instance london underground is increasing the "capacity" of their trains by reducing the number of seats and forcing more people to stand. While this means that more people can be crammed into the same space, it certainly doesn't make for a desirable situation.
The idea of "buses good, cars bad" is a stupid one... A bus still drives around, even if its empty... And with a small number of passengers onboard, it uses more fuel than a car would. Also buses travel pre determined routes, so you may have to take multiple buses and travel considerably more miles. And of course you still need to pay the driver, even when he's driving an empty bus around. During peak hours some of the buses are over congested, while at other times large buses drive around empty or close to empty.
There are many people who are disabled who utterly depend on their cars, imagine trying to get a wheelchair onto a crowded bus or train... Assuming its possible at all, you would cause delays while the ramps were brought out, and at peak times the wheelchair might not even physically fit onboard. Such people would be utterly lost without their own car, and yet their ability to use their cars is being eroded by the ever increasing prices.
There are people who need, for whatever reason, to transport more equipment than they can reasonably carry...
Taking kids on public transport is extremely stressful... It's difficult to carry all the things you will need, especially for young babies like a buggy, changes of clothes/diapers, feed bottles etc... You have to be constantly watching the kids for fear they will wander off, go somewhere dangerous (like onto the train tracks), get snatched by a pedophile, get knocked over by other passengers who didn't notice them among the crowds, pick up something nasty off the floor and/or trying to eat it. And you risk further irritating other passengers if your kids start making lots of noise.
If i take the train to work during the summer, i will arrive dripping with sweat, having spent an hour (or more if theres delays) standing in a train carriage with hundreds of other hot, sweaty, miserable people. If i drive to work, even if it takes me 2 hours due to congestion, i will arrive clean and fresh having spent 2 hours sitting on a comfortable seat in an air conditioned car.
Several places i travel to regularly are MUCH quicker to get to by car (20 mins vs 2.5 hours), and going by train also severely limits the times i can go... The last train i can practically get is about 8pm, since i need to change several times if i go any later i'm likely to miss the connecting trains and become stranded (also trains are less frequent at night, 2.5 hours at peak times with frequent trains becomes 3+ hours at night or weekends whereas the car journey becomes even quicker due to lack of traffic).
The fact is, public transport is not suitable for everyone, and forcing everyone into a one size fits all situation is a terrible thing to do and will reduce the quality of life for many. They should stop increasing the cost of driving, and instead try to make public transport more desirable... Positive incentive instead of negative punishment. Make the routes more useful and more frequent, make it cheaper, make the vehicles cleaner, more comfortable, safer and less congested at peak times. Reduce people's need to travel by encouraging telecommuting, and decrease congestion in the core business districts by encouraging companies to set up in less congested areas. Stagger working hours, so you don't get a massive block of congestion at one time of day, and empty buses driving around wasting fuel at other times. Make stations and bus stops less unpleasant and dangerous places to
Linux doesn't have much _DESKTOP_ market share. Linux has significant market share in servers, embedded devices and especially supercomputers and you could argue that servers and supercomputers are more attractive to hackers than random desktop machines for many reasons.
The GPL works much like modern society, in that it takes away some individual freedoms that when exercised by the few, would be extremely detrimental to the many...
In the case of society, there are laws against murder, slavery, etc... If you gave people absolute freedom then the strong would rapidly subjugate the weak, and then the weaker people would no longer have any freedoms at all.
GPL works much the same way, by ensuring that everyone remains equal. With a BSD like license, the strong (large companies) will take the source code, close it up and ensure that future versions are no longer available under the same free terms. There are a large number of BSD derived products out there which are now closed source and often very expensive.
Besides, how would a commercial software company react if someone incorporated portions of their source code into their own product without complying with whatever terms they demanded?
What if someone took the source code to windows that was leaked a couple of years back, and used it to produce their own clone version? You don't think MS would go after then with every lawyer they could find for copyright infringement?
It actually costs more to make, since they have to implement the process for selling the upgrades, and have to make some effort to stop people just doing it for free.
Back in the days when i used an Amiga, it booted in 6 seconds from cold (yes i know, i was sad enough to time it)... And i had to reboot fairly often because the AmigaOS used a flat memory model which suffered from gradual memory fragmentation, and allowed one errant program to take down the whole system.
Later, i moved onto Unix/Linux systems and although they sometimes took a long time to boot, it was extremely rare that you would reboot them.. One of my unix workstations clocked up 700 days of uptime before a power failure took it out for instance.
More recently, with laptops i can just suspend them...
I hate the concept of having to reboot, i usually have a large number of programs running and would hate having to load everything up again and lay them out across my workspaces.
Google track you, and if you search for geeky things regularly then it will learn thats what you are usually looking for and deliver relevant results. If you use a completely clean browser, from an IP you've not used before, you will get different results...
There is also the advantage of small marketshare... You have all the spammers out there trying their best to game google, but how many of them bother to try gaming bing or some of the other small engines? Same thing happened in the early days of google, altavista was full of spam while google had clean results.
Nothing to stop you fitting a much larger HDD to a 386, the BIOS won't handle it but Linux shouldn't have any trouble.
Also, there's always distcc for speeding up the compile, or just compile on a faster machine and copy the bins.... It's relatively easy to make a chroot for gentoo and then compile everything in it with 386 cpuflags, the resulting binaries will run just fine on newer hardware.
I have been to holland, stayed there for several months and made regular use of public transport... Public transport there is dirty, overcrowded, uncomfortable and often unreliable.
And funny you mention japan, have you seen the various videos circling the internet such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STNWc7Rlpfk ? It would be illegal in most countries to transport animals in conditions like that... At least if i'm sitting in a car in heavy traffic i have my personal space, a comfortable seat, my own music to listen to and can carry goods with me if i want.
Getting you to drive less improves everyone else's quality of life. Since they are all reducing their usage too, your net quality of life improves. It is not a zero-sum game: everyone can win at this.
No, your relative quality of life stays the same because everyone else's is lower too.. In fact, if financial penalties are the method of reducing car usage then the quality of life for the poor and middle classes goes down, while for the rich it goes up since they can still afford to drive and will now have empty roads to drive on.
As a counterexample, I offer the entire history of human civilization before 1920.
People had personal transportation before 1920, they were called horses and although not as convenient as cars they allowed individuals to travel higher distances than they could on foot, at greater speed, carry greater loads and do so whenever they wanted.
People should stop living in the current deep suburbs where you're dependent on long-range personal transportation for everything. That doesn't mean ghettos. That means smaller, locally-sufficient towns. That means when you want to buy milk, a box of nails and a fishing pole, you don't make a trip to Safeway, Home Depot and Big 5, busting your way through a dozen traffic lights, circling for a spot in three enormous parking lots (which are also an enormous waste of land), and wait in line for some minimum-wage checkout clerk who hates his job. Instead, you walk, bike, or drive around the corner to the town's General Store, hand your money to Tom who lives three doors down from you, and jot back home - less stressed, less financially burdened by your car, less alienated. Like you were saying, it's about quality of life.
Sure, they won't have the selection and rock-bottom prices you're used to, but for anything you don't need right this minute, you have the internet. Or just plan your occasional trips to those specialty stores - it's not like you won't have a car at all. You're just encouraged to use it less.
Exactly, prices will be higher, you will have to visit the stores more frequently since you won't be able to carry as much and you will also lose the price benefit of being able to buy in bulk. Also some things aren't really practical to buy on the internet, such as fresh goods.
This also isn't just about shopping, other entertainment facilities like swimming pools, cinemas, sports grounds etc. For virtually any of the places i travel to on a regular basis, going there via public transport is either impossible or would take considerably longer than it would by car.
Small locally sufficient towns are not going to happen... Companies don't want to have their offices in a small locally sufficient town, they want an office in the big city. Now chances are you can't afford to live there, so you will have to travel in along with the other thousands of people travelling to the same place at the same time... Forget about having a seat, sometimes you can't even physically get on the train/bus... And this is true in most large cities, new york, london, tokyo... Take a look at the japanese train loading videos on youtube.
Don't forget the lower quality of life because instead of having your own comfortable car which gets you straight from A to B as/when you want it, you now have to stand around on cold/wet bus stops or station platforms, get on overcrowded buses and trains where if you're very lucky you might get an uncomfortable seat, but chances are you will have to stand in conditions that would be illegal to transport animals in. And instead of going direct from A to B, you have to go via whatever route the public transport providers deem most profitable, which may involve a considerable detour, multiple buses/trains with long waits in between them etc.
I go to see a friend of mine who lives a few miles away, to drive there is between 20 and 40 minutes depending on traffic... To go there on public transport is a minim
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They have no choice, depending on the jurisdiction products sold must be fit for purpose and free from manufacturing defects for a given period, usually a year...
The only thing they can refuse to do, is sell you an extended warranty period.
If Warren truly believes he's paying too much tax, he simply has to overpay his taxes and refuse to collect any refund they offer him.
The UK is even worse off, since there is no requirement to provide cards that can be used in your own equipment...
You might be happy with your cable box, but what else have you used? Having used dreamboxes, mythtv and others i can say that i find the boxes supplied by sky or virgin to be extremely crippled in terms of features.
Traffic where all the packets are the same size and in a repetitive ping/pong sequence = boring and you can tell this even without decrypting it, you want something like tcpsic to generate totally random traffic.
You can still sync your contacts with activesync and i think carddav servers too.
And you have proof of this. Or is it just speculation.
One example would be http://www.phreedom.org/solar/exploits/msasn1-bitstring/
There was a disclosed vulnerability in the microsoft asn.1 library, but the patch for it brought along a fix for another vulnerability in the same library that was not disclosed. This vulnerability was subsequently found by third parties, who produced and released a working exploit forcing microsoft to admit to the vulnerability several months later.
There are other examples, you just have to google for them.
Yes, well, when it is not available any security bugs found during the testing/security push don't matter, do they? I mean, I expect the vendor to make a security push, reviews and fuzzing during both development and testing. The final product which is released is what should be judged.
The point is that something developed in the open is often unfairly punished here, as although the betas/nightlies are quite clearly marked "use at your own risk", and only intended to be used by appropriately clued up people, vulnerabilities in them are still disclosed even tho they are generally of no consequence.
IE has disappeared from this ranking because it is no longer ubiquitous enough to be worth targeting, having something like a 40% market share, while flash player, adobe acrobat reader and java are installed on well over 90% of systems (including non windows systems).
Hackers will always target software with the largest market share, because the more potentially vulnerable systems that exist the more an exploit is worth. It's only good business.
Microsoft have not really disappeared, because the vast majority of software being exploited still runs on their platforms. And part of the problem with adobe/java is that microsoft don't provide a centralised update mechanism that they could hook into.
BS. All the major vendors are obligated to report vulnerabilities through Mitre. All browser vulnerabilities are assigned unique CVEs.
Browser vendors are not obligated to do any such thing.
Firefox reports every vulnerability discovered, even those discovered in alpha and beta versions (which is a normal function of beta testing)... By contrast, commercial software is rarely available to the general public at all until a late beta stage, bugs found and fixed during the early development phases will never be disclosed to the public.
Commercial companies, not just browser makers, generally only admit to vulnerabilities which have (or are threatened to be) independently published, because admitting to vulnerabilities is bad for business and not something any for-profit company would do if they have the chance not to. Vulnerabilities discovered internally, or those discovered by third parties who will not disclose them (e.g. NDA) are very unlikely to be made public...
Fixes may not be made available, or may be hidden in amongst other updates. There have been many cases of security patches for a disclosed vulnerability also fixing an unpublished vulnerability, as well as newer versions of programs which include fixes for vulnerabilities present in older versions (with no equivalent patch being made available for the older version).
It's also worth noting that some firefox vulnerabilities are platform specific, where a browser such as ie only runs on a single platform there will be comparatively less vulnerabilities as a result of that too.
No. These days some 85% of infections derive from social engineering. Malware comes in through the user. Vulnerability exploits seems to be a lot less effective these days. Social engineering is precisely what the tested security (reputation) mechanisms are aimed at.
An even better defence against such attacks, is Apple's model... If you can't install/execute anything that's not come from a trusted source, social engineering simply isn't going to work...
People who aren't sufficiently technically competent to understand the dangers of social engineering and not fall for such scams, should only be using walled garden type systems such as Apple's. Current complex computer systems are just totally unsuitable for the vast majority of people.
However what i will say, is that there should be a good selection of such systems, each operated by different gatekeepers. Having a single monoculture is a very bad thing.
In an ideal world, the majority market would be split evenly between 3/4 such players e.g. iOS/android/wm7/symbian, all of which come locked down by default and with non technical people using these. Then there would be non locked down, "advanced" versions of these systems available to those who understand how to use them properly and safely... Perhaps make the process of unlocking difficult so that only technical people will be able to do it on their own, and its won't be practical to social engineer someone through the process.
Firefox may not be the most hardened browser around these days, but were it not for firefox things would be a lot worse...
Without firefox taking significant market share away, MS looked likely to never bother updating IE...
But also the fact that no single browser still controls 95%+ of the browser market is a VERY good thing. It not only means that standards and interoperability become important which has made mobile browsers viable, it has kickstarted the alternative browser market (without firefox there would likely be no chrome or safari)... The task is hardest for the first alternative browser, as it has to fight against 90% of sites never being tested with it, and 90% of web masters simply not caring about it.
Most importantly from a security perspective however, you no longer have a single browser with 95% market share making an irresistible target... Browser exploits have lost their appeal to hackers, because even with an IE 0day over 50% of your potential victims will never be vulnerable. Instead, hackers are now concentrating on things that are still ubiquitous, like adobe pdf and flash (yes other pdf and flash readers exist, but their market share is trivial)...
So long as the browser market remains competitive, with no single browser obtaining a dominant share we are all better off. Now we just need similar splits of 3-4 players in other markets too.
No, but you get your car serviced every few months...
Well it was the UK military that built the sealand platform in the first place...
Actually, Meego is arguably the only "neutral" mobile OS these days, since Nokia dropped it there's only really Intel pushing it, and they don't make phones.
Windows may or may not have a special deal with Nokia...
Also, Google haven't even completed the purchase of Motorola yet, and who's to tell what their strategy will be once they have?
They might have bought Motorola purely for the patents, and shut down their (unprofitable) phone design and manufacture business, which would actually benefit rather than harm the other Android OEMs.
Sure, it *can* be...
But switzerland seems to be an anomaly, everywhere else has poorly funded, poorly managed public transport combined with a government intent on forcing people to use it despite how poor the system is. And most of the people in government never have to use it themselves.
And public transport may be suitable for "many" people, but it simply cannot be appropriate for everything... If you make driving more expensive, then you are screwing everyone for whom public transport is not and never will be practical.
Increasing the price of driving seems to be the only policy, which means that those who can no longer afford to drive are forced to use public transport, despite it being clearly inferior for their needs.
Often they try to increase use of public transport without improving it, or the "improvements" are dubious, for instance london underground is increasing the "capacity" of their trains by reducing the number of seats and forcing more people to stand. While this means that more people can be crammed into the same space, it certainly doesn't make for a desirable situation.
The idea of "buses good, cars bad" is a stupid one... A bus still drives around, even if its empty... And with a small number of passengers onboard, it uses more fuel than a car would. Also buses travel pre determined routes, so you may have to take multiple buses and travel considerably more miles. And of course you still need to pay the driver, even when he's driving an empty bus around. During peak hours some of the buses are over congested, while at other times large buses drive around empty or close to empty.
There are many people who are disabled who utterly depend on their cars, imagine trying to get a wheelchair onto a crowded bus or train... Assuming its possible at all, you would cause delays while the ramps were brought out, and at peak times the wheelchair might not even physically fit onboard. Such people would be utterly lost without their own car, and yet their ability to use their cars is being eroded by the ever increasing prices.
There are people who need, for whatever reason, to transport more equipment than they can reasonably carry...
Taking kids on public transport is extremely stressful... It's difficult to carry all the things you will need, especially for young babies like a buggy, changes of clothes/diapers, feed bottles etc... You have to be constantly watching the kids for fear they will wander off, go somewhere dangerous (like onto the train tracks), get snatched by a pedophile, get knocked over by other passengers who didn't notice them among the crowds, pick up something nasty off the floor and/or trying to eat it. And you risk further irritating other passengers if your kids start making lots of noise.
If i take the train to work during the summer, i will arrive dripping with sweat, having spent an hour (or more if theres delays) standing in a train carriage with hundreds of other hot, sweaty, miserable people.
If i drive to work, even if it takes me 2 hours due to congestion, i will arrive clean and fresh having spent 2 hours sitting on a comfortable seat in an air conditioned car.
Several places i travel to regularly are MUCH quicker to get to by car (20 mins vs 2.5 hours), and going by train also severely limits the times i can go... The last train i can practically get is about 8pm, since i need to change several times if i go any later i'm likely to miss the connecting trains and become stranded (also trains are less frequent at night, 2.5 hours at peak times with frequent trains becomes 3+ hours at night or weekends whereas the car journey becomes even quicker due to lack of traffic).
The fact is, public transport is not suitable for everyone, and forcing everyone into a one size fits all situation is a terrible thing to do and will reduce the quality of life for many. They should stop increasing the cost of driving, and instead try to make public transport more desirable... Positive incentive instead of negative punishment.
Make the routes more useful and more frequent, make it cheaper, make the vehicles cleaner, more comfortable, safer and less congested at peak times. Reduce people's need to travel by encouraging telecommuting, and decrease congestion in the core business districts by encouraging companies to set up in less congested areas. Stagger working hours, so you don't get a massive block of congestion at one time of day, and empty buses driving around wasting fuel at other times.
Make stations and bus stops less unpleasant and dangerous places to
Only it's not a valid comparison...
Bing doesn't have much market share.
Linux doesn't have much _DESKTOP_ market share.
Linux has significant market share in servers, embedded devices and especially supercomputers and you could argue that servers and supercomputers are more attractive to hackers than random desktop machines for many reasons.
Does society allow us to be "free"?
The GPL works much like modern society, in that it takes away some individual freedoms that when exercised by the few, would be extremely detrimental to the many...
In the case of society, there are laws against murder, slavery, etc... If you gave people absolute freedom then the strong would rapidly subjugate the weak, and then the weaker people would no longer have any freedoms at all.
GPL works much the same way, by ensuring that everyone remains equal. With a BSD like license, the strong (large companies) will take the source code, close it up and ensure that future versions are no longer available under the same free terms. There are a large number of BSD derived products out there which are now closed source and often very expensive.
Besides, how would a commercial software company react if someone incorporated portions of their source code into their own product without complying with whatever terms they demanded?
What if someone took the source code to windows that was leaked a couple of years back, and used it to produce their own clone version? You don't think MS would go after then with every lawyer they could find for copyright infringement?
It actually costs more to make, since they have to implement the process for selling the upgrades, and have to make some effort to stop people just doing it for free.
Back in the days when i used an Amiga, it booted in 6 seconds from cold (yes i know, i was sad enough to time it)... And i had to reboot fairly often because the AmigaOS used a flat memory model which suffered from gradual memory fragmentation, and allowed one errant program to take down the whole system.
Later, i moved onto Unix/Linux systems and although they sometimes took a long time to boot, it was extremely rare that you would reboot them.. One of my unix workstations clocked up 700 days of uptime before a power failure took it out for instance.
More recently, with laptops i can just suspend them...
I hate the concept of having to reboot, i usually have a large number of programs running and would hate having to load everything up again and lay them out across my workspaces.
Google track you, and if you search for geeky things regularly then it will learn thats what you are usually looking for and deliver relevant results.
If you use a completely clean browser, from an IP you've not used before, you will get different results...
There is also the advantage of small marketshare...
You have all the spammers out there trying their best to game google, but how many of them bother to try gaming bing or some of the other small engines? Same thing happened in the early days of google, altavista was full of spam while google had clean results.
Nothing to stop you fitting a much larger HDD to a 386, the BIOS won't handle it but Linux shouldn't have any trouble.
Also, there's always distcc for speeding up the compile, or just compile on a faster machine and copy the bins.... It's relatively easy to make a chroot for gentoo and then compile everything in it with 386 cpuflags, the resulting binaries will run just fine on newer hardware.
I have been to holland, stayed there for several months and made regular use of public transport... Public transport there is dirty, overcrowded, uncomfortable and often unreliable.
And funny you mention japan, have you seen the various videos circling the internet such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STNWc7Rlpfk ? It would be illegal in most countries to transport animals in conditions like that... At least if i'm sitting in a car in heavy traffic i have my personal space, a comfortable seat, my own music to listen to and can carry goods with me if i want.
Getting you to drive less improves everyone else's quality of life. Since they are all reducing their usage too, your net quality of life improves. It is not a zero-sum game: everyone can win at this.
No, your relative quality of life stays the same because everyone else's is lower too..
In fact, if financial penalties are the method of reducing car usage then the quality of life for the poor and middle classes goes down, while for the rich it goes up since they can still afford to drive and will now have empty roads to drive on.
As a counterexample, I offer the entire history of human civilization before 1920.
People had personal transportation before 1920, they were called horses and although not as convenient as cars they allowed individuals to travel higher distances than they could on foot, at greater speed, carry greater loads and do so whenever they wanted.
People should stop living in the current deep suburbs where you're dependent on long-range personal transportation for everything. That doesn't mean ghettos. That means smaller, locally-sufficient towns. That means when you want to buy milk, a box of nails and a fishing pole, you don't make a trip to Safeway, Home Depot and Big 5, busting your way through a dozen traffic lights, circling for a spot in three enormous parking lots (which are also an enormous waste of land), and wait in line for some minimum-wage checkout clerk who hates his job. Instead, you walk, bike, or drive around the corner to the town's General Store, hand your money to Tom who lives three doors down from you, and jot back home - less stressed, less financially burdened by your car, less alienated. Like you were saying, it's about quality of life.
Sure, they won't have the selection and rock-bottom prices you're used to, but for anything you don't need right this minute, you have the internet. Or just plan your occasional trips to those specialty stores - it's not like you won't have a car at all. You're just encouraged to use it less.
Exactly, prices will be higher, you will have to visit the stores more frequently since you won't be able to carry as much and you will also lose the price benefit of being able to buy in bulk. Also some things aren't really practical to buy on the internet, such as fresh goods.
This also isn't just about shopping, other entertainment facilities like swimming pools, cinemas, sports grounds etc. For virtually any of the places i travel to on a regular basis, going there via public transport is either impossible or would take considerably longer than it would by car.
Small locally sufficient towns are not going to happen... Companies don't want to have their offices in a small locally sufficient town, they want an office in the big city. Now chances are you can't afford to live there, so you will have to travel in along with the other thousands of people travelling to the same place at the same time... Forget about having a seat, sometimes you can't even physically get on the train/bus... And this is true in most large cities, new york, london, tokyo... Take a look at the japanese train loading videos on youtube.
Don't forget the lower quality of life because instead of having your own comfortable car which gets you straight from A to B as/when you want it, you now have to stand around on cold/wet bus stops or station platforms, get on overcrowded buses and trains where if you're very lucky you might get an uncomfortable seat, but chances are you will have to stand in conditions that would be illegal to transport animals in. And instead of going direct from A to B, you have to go via whatever route the public transport providers deem most profitable, which may involve a considerable detour, multiple buses/trains with long waits in between them etc.
I go to see a friend of mine who lives a few miles away, to drive there is between 20 and 40 minutes depending on traffic... To go there on public transport is a minim