Most non smokers are still subjected to passive smoking, which can also cause lung cancer... Even if your grandfather never smoked, how much time did he spend inhaling smoke produced by others?
That's actually the reason so many of us have a problem with smoking. We don't care what substances you want to consume as thats your choice, but by smoking in public you are taking away our choice not to.
It also seems utterly ridiculous to send most of it up into the air, there are far more efficient ways to consume drugs which don't impose on those around you.
Too much freedom gives a select few the ability to take away freedom from others... The GPL works much like society, you sacrifice some freedom in order to ensure a reasonable level for everyone.
Without laws and someone to enforce them, people would be free to torture, murder and enslave each other, so while you'd have more freedom without laws it wouldn't last very long. BSD code works much the same way, you have more freedom with the initial version but there's nothing to stop future versions offering you no freedom whatsoever.
What do you think will happen to all the money that gets saved because competition among manufacturers has pushed the price of drugs right down? It's not going to disappear... A lot of research isn't conducted by pharma companies anyway, its done by universities, charities and government funded healthcare systems... And those government funded healthcare systems will have more money to spend on research if they're spending less of it on buying drugs.
Also you will see better results, because the goal of the research will be "how can we better treat patients" and not "how can we make the most profit"... A for-profit company wants to keep you sick and treat the symptoms so they can extract rent from you for the rest of your life, a publicly funded healthcare system wants to cure you and keep you healthy so you demand less of their resources.
but they don't seem to make a distinction between cheating people out of their money and cheating them out of their lives
There isn't really a difference... If someone doesn't have money then you can't cheat it out of them, so the western companies will quite happily let such people suffer and die.
It's clearly not an expensive product as the indians are able to manufacture it cheaply enough. They're just gouging those who can afford it, and want anyone who can't afford to be gouged to suffer and die.
Mostly agreed, although i think pharm companies should just be manufacturing, with the formulae being readily available so that there is competition among manufacturing drugs. Research should be done by non profits (charities and nationalised health departments etc), if you allow for-profit companies to do research then you have a conflict of interest as they will always design treatments to maximise profits rather than for maximum benefit to the patient - eg keeping someone sick and treating their symptoms indefinitely is more profitable than curing them.
It's good to see a government actually putting the interests of its people (millions of them) above that of a few rich business owners...
It's a choice between a bit less profit for some rich drug companies, or millions of people suffering and dying, because these people simply cannot afford what the drug companies are trying to charge.
The whole idea of people profiting from human suffering is utterly abhorrent. As for research, research of this kind by for-profit companies is a huge conflict of interest - they don't want to cure people as thats not very profitable, they want to sell more drugs so their research is always going to focus on ways to reduce the symptoms while leaving the underlying problem so that the patient has to keep taking the drugs for as long as possible.
These companies should be reduced to pure competitive manufacturing, and research should be conducted by non profits - charities and government health departments, with the results being openly shared. The amount of money saved by the UK NHS alone would pay for a lot of research, and this would be pure research not "a little research and a lot of profit skimmed off the top".
So linux doesn't cater to your niche requirements? windows doesn't cater to my niche requirements.
were talking about end users who just want to browse the web safely and with the minimum of hassle, not the 0.0000001% of people who want to operate electron microscopes.
for the vast majority of people the only network they have to attach to is the router their isp supplied, and the only program they want to run is probably a web browser.
out of repository programs are a huge pain in the ass, its hard enough getting users to update using a single central tool, but getting them to update (and in many different ways) all the different applications they're running too? that's a completely unreasonable expectation of the average end user and the result has been an epidemic of malware. even microsoft recognise this and are trying to operate a central repository now.
it is your world that is narrow, in the consumer space users have very limited needs, and dont want to deal with all the hassles associated with windows.. thats why chromeos and android, both linux based and both considerably more hassle free than windows, are making inroads.
1, People were not familiar with ipads or android tablets, and yet people now use them...
2, theres plenty of linux related forums, calling microsoft gets you nowhere without a support contract and most people would call whoever they bought the machine from - if the machine came with linux then the supplier is just as likely to provide linux support.
3, there are very few actual windows experts, the system is simply far too opaque to understand it thoroughly... and besides, the same could be said about macos, android, ipad etc.
4, yes it is, and its designed that way for exactly this reason, but you assume people actually have something to move - many dont, a lot of people quite happily dropped their existing systems and started using ipads, or using different machines for different purposes.
And the primary reason for that is that the manufacturers are not promoting machines running it, and are sometimes even prevented from doing so by agreements with MS.
Very few people actually want to use windows either, most use whatever is available and don't actually care what it is. A lot of people actually hate windows, and only tolerate it because they are unaware or afraid of any alternatives.
Most of the arguments against linux are entirely bogus and have been proven untrue. With appropriate marketing from hardware manufacturers and a half decent distro (ie not the crap unsupportable distros netbooks often had), linux would sell just fine. At the very least a dual boot system could be offered, with appropriate marketing about the benefits of using it.
As for the arguments often levelled against linux:
Lack of drivers - this only matters for post-purchase install, if your supplying linux with the hardware then you're going to be supplying linux compatible hardware. Difficult to install - as above, if its supplied with hardware it will already be installed. plus linux is actually easier to install than windows these days anyway. Can't buy boxed software - as if people do this anyway, linux distros use a repository system, and apple/google have proven that users actually like this approach. Unfamiliar software - most people pretty much only browse the web, you have firefox and chrome on linux and you don't hear people complaining that safari on ipad is unfamiliar. Lack of games - true, although its improving with steam etc, and relatively few people play many games (hence the popularity of integrated gfx which arent up to the job of playing games), a lot play online flash games which work on linux,
And people who don't want to be customers of a private monopoly have to do without service at all. And for something which involves laying cable in the ground a monopoly is how it will always end up simply due to the cost and stupidity of having lots of competing cables down every street (or none at all in unprofitable areas).
The only real solution would be a non profit to operate the physical infrastructure, on the basis of providing the same service everywhere to anyone at the same cost... Any company can rent the physical lines from the non profit at the same cost and provide service to end users, and the non profit uses all revenue from doing so to maintain and upgrade the network.
your choice is between kerberos support (to join an ad domain), or having your plaintext password stored in memory and extractable with mimikatz (which would be a violation of virtually every security standard ever written but ms seem to get a free pass), they are very much related.
and yes hash passing is ad related too, because it uses authentication protocols which are vulnerable to such attacks. sure it can use others too like ldap, but is it ever actually configured that way? and is it possible to make windows clients join the domain only using ldap for auth?
mimikatz works *because* of the kerberos support introduced for AD (and two other modules which keep plain text passwords in memory but those are easier to disable)... You can also hash pass with NTLMv2 just fine.
Also assuming you actually wanted to crack passwords, the hashing is extremely weak by modern standards - weaker than the unsalted sha-1 that linkedin were panned for using.
Microsoft don't have a library of drivers for ARM, in fact it's the other way round where windows for arm has an extremely limited set of hardware support and linux is far ahead because a lot of the drivers for x86 can be trivially recompiled.
Animals build up a natural resistance to things they encounter all day, and nature kills off those who lack suitable resistance to the hazards of their environment... Wild animals often live in dirty environments and eat questionable foods, and yet they are usually just fine. It's when you keep an animal away from nature that its immune system is likely to be weaker.
Windows was never meant for servers, phones or tablets either... An android desktop is likely to be just as lacklustre but that doesn't mean it won't be successful.
They don't bother with small businesses, they bother with large ones... Small businesses tend to just follow what larger ones are doing.
And yes, decision makers in this respect are easily influenced because they generally don't understand technology, so they fall for flashy vendor presentations easily.
Apache and Linux are successful because they compete in more technical markets, where the decision makers are far more likely to understand technology. That's why the more technically competent an organisation is the more likely they are to not be using ms for everything.
Also, MS owe much of their success to "it's almost the same but cheaper"... They were always a cheap and somewhat crappy alternative to OS/2, Mac, Unix and Novell etc.
I respect everyone's choices and if you say you need MS Office then go ahead and use it. You use what you find best, I'll use what I find best.
I too would like to respect people's choices, however MS clearly do not, as through their use of proprietary file formats or intentionally poor implementation of standard formats they are trying to take the freedom of choice away from others.
I suspect that it does, because if people see calc providing a different answer to excel they will assume calc to be incorrect even if its not the one at fault.
And how about documenting what those features are, so that people can go ahead and start implementing them?
As for compatibility, this story is about government - its not their job to be compatible with business, if you want to do business with the government then you have to be compatible with them.
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Most non smokers are still subjected to passive smoking, which can also cause lung cancer... Even if your grandfather never smoked, how much time did he spend inhaling smoke produced by others?
That's actually the reason so many of us have a problem with smoking. We don't care what substances you want to consume as thats your choice, but by smoking in public you are taking away our choice not to.
It also seems utterly ridiculous to send most of it up into the air, there are far more efficient ways to consume drugs which don't impose on those around you.
Too much freedom gives a select few the ability to take away freedom from others...
The GPL works much like society, you sacrifice some freedom in order to ensure a reasonable level for everyone.
Without laws and someone to enforce them, people would be free to torture, murder and enslave each other, so while you'd have more freedom without laws it wouldn't last very long.
BSD code works much the same way, you have more freedom with the initial version but there's nothing to stop future versions offering you no freedom whatsoever.
What do you think will happen to all the money that gets saved because competition among manufacturers has pushed the price of drugs right down? It's not going to disappear...
A lot of research isn't conducted by pharma companies anyway, its done by universities, charities and government funded healthcare systems... And those government funded healthcare systems will have more money to spend on research if they're spending less of it on buying drugs.
Also you will see better results, because the goal of the research will be "how can we better treat patients" and not "how can we make the most profit"... A for-profit company wants to keep you sick and treat the symptoms so they can extract rent from you for the rest of your life, a publicly funded healthcare system wants to cure you and keep you healthy so you demand less of their resources.
but they don't seem to make a distinction between cheating people out of their money and cheating them out of their lives
There isn't really a difference... If someone doesn't have money then you can't cheat it out of them, so the western companies will quite happily let such people suffer and die.
It's clearly not an expensive product as the indians are able to manufacture it cheaply enough. They're just gouging those who can afford it, and want anyone who can't afford to be gouged to suffer and die.
Mostly agreed, although i think pharm companies should just be manufacturing, with the formulae being readily available so that there is competition among manufacturing drugs.
Research should be done by non profits (charities and nationalised health departments etc), if you allow for-profit companies to do research then you have a conflict of interest as they will always design treatments to maximise profits rather than for maximum benefit to the patient - eg keeping someone sick and treating their symptoms indefinitely is more profitable than curing them.
It's good to see a government actually putting the interests of its people (millions of them) above that of a few rich business owners...
It's a choice between a bit less profit for some rich drug companies, or millions of people suffering and dying, because these people simply cannot afford what the drug companies are trying to charge.
The whole idea of people profiting from human suffering is utterly abhorrent.
As for research, research of this kind by for-profit companies is a huge conflict of interest - they don't want to cure people as thats not very profitable, they want to sell more drugs so their research is always going to focus on ways to reduce the symptoms while leaving the underlying problem so that the patient has to keep taking the drugs for as long as possible.
These companies should be reduced to pure competitive manufacturing, and research should be conducted by non profits - charities and government health departments, with the results being openly shared. The amount of money saved by the UK NHS alone would pay for a lot of research, and this would be pure research not "a little research and a lot of profit skimmed off the top".
So linux doesn't cater to your niche requirements?
windows doesn't cater to my niche requirements.
were talking about end users who just want to browse the web safely and with the minimum of hassle, not the 0.0000001% of people who want to operate electron microscopes.
In *YOUR* world...
for the vast majority of people the only network they have to attach to is the router their isp supplied, and the only program they want to run is probably a web browser.
out of repository programs are a huge pain in the ass, its hard enough getting users to update using a single central tool, but getting them to update (and in many different ways) all the different applications they're running too? that's a completely unreasonable expectation of the average end user and the result has been an epidemic of malware. even microsoft recognise this and are trying to operate a central repository now.
it is your world that is narrow, in the consumer space users have very limited needs, and dont want to deal with all the hassles associated with windows.. thats why chromeos and android, both linux based and both considerably more hassle free than windows, are making inroads.
1, People were not familiar with ipads or android tablets, and yet people now use them...
2, theres plenty of linux related forums, calling microsoft gets you nowhere without a support contract and most people would call whoever they bought the machine from - if the machine came with linux then the supplier is just as likely to provide linux support.
3, there are very few actual windows experts, the system is simply far too opaque to understand it thoroughly... and besides, the same could be said about macos, android, ipad etc.
4, yes it is, and its designed that way for exactly this reason, but you assume people actually have something to move - many dont, a lot of people quite happily dropped their existing systems and started using ipads, or using different machines for different purposes.
choice...
with a single provider you're likely not to get advanced features like multiple ips, ipv6, reverse dns etc
And the primary reason for that is that the manufacturers are not promoting machines running it, and are sometimes even prevented from doing so by agreements with MS.
Very few people actually want to use windows either, most use whatever is available and don't actually care what it is. A lot of people actually hate windows, and only tolerate it because they are unaware or afraid of any alternatives.
Most of the arguments against linux are entirely bogus and have been proven untrue. With appropriate marketing from hardware manufacturers and a half decent distro (ie not the crap unsupportable distros netbooks often had), linux would sell just fine. At the very least a dual boot system could be offered, with appropriate marketing about the benefits of using it.
As for the arguments often levelled against linux:
Lack of drivers - this only matters for post-purchase install, if your supplying linux with the hardware then you're going to be supplying linux compatible hardware.
Difficult to install - as above, if its supplied with hardware it will already be installed. plus linux is actually easier to install than windows these days anyway.
Can't buy boxed software - as if people do this anyway, linux distros use a repository system, and apple/google have proven that users actually like this approach.
Unfamiliar software - most people pretty much only browse the web, you have firefox and chrome on linux and you don't hear people complaining that safari on ipad is unfamiliar.
Lack of games - true, although its improving with steam etc, and relatively few people play many games (hence the popularity of integrated gfx which arent up to the job of playing games), a lot play online flash games which work on linux,
And people who don't want to be customers of a private monopoly have to do without service at all. And for something which involves laying cable in the ground a monopoly is how it will always end up simply due to the cost and stupidity of having lots of competing cables down every street (or none at all in unprofitable areas).
The only real solution would be a non profit to operate the physical infrastructure, on the basis of providing the same service everywhere to anyone at the same cost... Any company can rent the physical lines from the non profit at the same cost and provide service to end users, and the non profit uses all revenue from doing so to maintain and upgrade the network.
http://digital-forensics.sans....
your choice is between kerberos support (to join an ad domain), or having your plaintext password stored in memory and extractable with mimikatz (which would be a violation of virtually every security standard ever written but ms seem to get a free pass), they are very much related.
and yes hash passing is ad related too, because it uses authentication protocols which are vulnerable to such attacks. sure it can use others too like ldap, but is it ever actually configured that way? and is it possible to make windows clients join the domain only using ldap for auth?
mimikatz works *because* of the kerberos support introduced for AD (and two other modules which keep plain text passwords in memory but those are easier to disable)...
You can also hash pass with NTLMv2 just fine.
Also assuming you actually wanted to crack passwords, the hashing is extremely weak by modern standards - weaker than the unsalted sha-1 that linkedin were panned for using.
If you're not intending to run a web server then you shouldn't even have one installed...
And if something is installed, it needs to be patched even if it isn't running.
"pass the hash" and "mimikatz"... two serious problems with AD...
Microsoft don't have a library of drivers for ARM, in fact it's the other way round where windows for arm has an extremely limited set of hardware support and linux is far ahead because a lot of the drivers for x86 can be trivially recompiled.
Animals build up a natural resistance to things they encounter all day, and nature kills off those who lack suitable resistance to the hazards of their environment... Wild animals often live in dirty environments and eat questionable foods, and yet they are usually just fine. It's when you keep an animal away from nature that its immune system is likely to be weaker.
Windows was never meant for servers, phones or tablets either... An android desktop is likely to be just as lacklustre but that doesn't mean it won't be successful.
They don't bother with small businesses, they bother with large ones... Small businesses tend to just follow what larger ones are doing.
And yes, decision makers in this respect are easily influenced because they generally don't understand technology, so they fall for flashy vendor presentations easily.
Apache and Linux are successful because they compete in more technical markets, where the decision makers are far more likely to understand technology. That's why the more technically competent an organisation is the more likely they are to not be using ms for everything.
Also, MS owe much of their success to "it's almost the same but cheaper"... They were always a cheap and somewhat crappy alternative to OS/2, Mac, Unix and Novell etc.
I respect everyone's choices and if you say you need MS Office then go ahead and use it. You use what you find best, I'll use what I find best.
I too would like to respect people's choices, however MS clearly do not, as through their use of proprietary file formats or intentionally poor implementation of standard formats they are trying to take the freedom of choice away from others.
I suspect that it does, because if people see calc providing a different answer to excel they will assume calc to be incorrect even if its not the one at fault.
They try to put a simple frontend on top of extremely complex underpinnings, a recipe for disaster... Unix systems tend to be the other way round.
And how about documenting what those features are, so that people can go ahead and start implementing them?
As for compatibility, this story is about government - its not their job to be compatible with business, if you want to do business with the government then you have to be compatible with them.