"Cookies need love like everything does". It's actually a quote from the Oracle to Sati and only became Smith's after he had assimilated Sati into his "collective" and the Oracle asked what Smith had done to Sati.;-)
I hear you.. been there. I see MDB files in action all day with Access processing thousands upon thousands of records inside them.. waiting for that inevitable collapse. And I'm sure there are plenty of other offices around the world where Access is stretched way beyond its means because it's below the radar of the IT department.
Many departments develop their own solutions on Access, totally unaware of the way a RDMS works. I've literally seen such projects escalate into inventory/maintenance status management apps for half a million different types of parts inside god knows how many production installations. All inside MDB files..
Only for projects that follow corporate procedure does the IT department step in and point them to the big shiny and robust SQL server. Most pet projects inside corporations get started to scratch a small itch, but they tend to grow out of control.
..erm.. oh well.. at least it *LOOKS* like a database. Better make sure you have a decent backup strategy in place before you trust anything important to a.MDB file.
Ever since the Windows NT era, I've been able to lock computers down quite well. Put a BIOS password on there, disable booting from any device other than the local HDD and lock down XP.
I don't know about Home Edition (which is crap) but you can surely lock down XP to allow login only at set times. It's also very well possible to lock down which files are executable, what folders your child has write-access to etc.
A more important point, though, is that way too many parents don't know jack shit about computers. It's never good to give your child unlimited access to a magical black box that show pretty pictures, when you as a parent don't know what the box is capable of in the right hands.
There is no such law here (The Netherlands, we have more funny laws) so that's where things may be different. In my daily practice employees of larger businesses are more or less trained to immediately plug my phonecall through to a PR person. Which is what I think any responsible company should implement as a policy. I still don't feel particularly sorry for Apple. If a company wants something kept secret, they'd better make sure their employees don't go talking to every joe about it.. especially not the press.
Now a journalist misrepresenting himself as just a regular private citizen is where I personally draw the line and it's a legal problem as well. Also, I often get information that is clearly stated as off the record. Publish that, and you'll never get any useful info from that source again plus it's usually plausibly deniable so your reputation is instantly down the plughole. It's a kind of checks and balances system that works fairly well in my daily practice. No real need for trade secrets laws. It's everyone's own responsibility to keep your private things secret. Goes for corporations and individuals alike. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I regularly protect individuals against themselves by not publishing things that could possibly harm them.
Company employees should be smart enough not to divulge any information to any outside party without permission from management. If they do, well that's just plain stupidity. I personally would have no qualms about publishing information I get from an employee of any company _on the record_ , as long as it's newsworthy. I'm free to gather my news in whatever way I see fit, as long as I don't break any laws doing it. If someone incriminates themselves when I ask them a question, that's not _my_ problem. It's common decency among normal journalist to protect the innocent source, such as private individuals who don't have any experience in dealing with media (this excludes movie stars, politicians, big company CEO's etc.), against themselves. I'm not going to protect any company or public person against itself. They should have hired proper PR or just suffer the consequences of their own stupidity.
Gee, I actually hold a degree in journalism.. sweet. This is about the first topic on slashdot that actually fits with what I studied for.
On topic though. It may not be journalism in the traditional sense of mass push-publishing that the older generation is used to..;-) It is however still free speech, which should be protected just like every other instance of free speech. I don't care if the author writes his articles under the banner of some large media company or on his private blog. The articles don't change and neither should their rights.
If not blindly, then at least for reasons that would not do very well under public scrutiny.. It's highly convenient for the UK to feign indignation and shove the full blame onto the US for starting a war. Fact is Britain was just as eager to start an offensive war as the US was at the time. How can there even be evidence that actually warrants a war like this (without a UN mandate) when, as we all know now, there weren't even any WMD's in Iraq to begin with!? This reeks of foul play and Britain acting like it's been tricked into this war only makes it look sad at the least. This war should have been started on a UN mandate. I have absolutely no respect for the way this was started but feel sorry for the guys who are there right now attempting to make the best of the situation that their warmongering governments got them into.
I've seen the UK's closest ally, the USA, in the person of at least Colin Powell and several other key people in the first Bush administration say on TV that Iraq did not have any WMD's and did not have the ability to acquire them anytime in the near future. That was in 2000. Then I saw a similar news item again in Fahrenheit 9/11 that came from around the same period of time.
You can say what you want about Michael Moore's ethics and bias in documentary making, but the footage of the above that also got into Fahrenheit 9/11 leaves nothing at all to the imagination: the US government was convinced that there were no WMD's in Iraq.
Suddenly that all changes, the US forces an offensive war for no clear reason even while the UN hadn't even properly finished its weapons inspections (to which Iraq was being more and more cooperative) and the UK blindly followed. If that's not leading soldiers to their deaths based on a lie, then at least it's based on gross neglect of duty.
What does SP2 seriously add to the corporate desktop? Admittedly I haven't been in charge of windows desktops since Win2K, but I can't immediately see any advantage. Only support nightmares concerning the builtin firewall. Is a personal firewall really needed on every secretary's desk? I would hope not... they're not supposed to run any unauthorized services other than those required for remote control/remote software deployment.
Same goes for tech.. We don't listen to end users proposing a solution to their problem when they call the helpdesk. In fact, it's annoying to get wise-ass end users on the line. We're just as guilty as the doctors!
It appears you know little about prepress. I work as a graphics designer (print) as well, and it's almost always HELL to get colour right when working across platforms and/or fileformats. There's no way you could reliably convert format A to format B and still get proper colour output on the press/proofer every time. PANTONE is nice for spot colours but won't help you in full-colour print work. There you have a couple of colour matching systems that need to be supported in exactly identical ways across platforms to work. Apple and Windows have proper colour management that is interchangeable to a certain degree, mostly thanks to Adobe's dominance (which is bad in itself, but at least it keeps colour consistent). I know of no other OS that has proper colour management. Last time I checked the GIMP, it had utterly lousy support for CMYK.. and the CMYK colour model is the proverbial life blood of the professional printing industry.
Current test builds of YDL have this problem solved. The fans run properly on my dual 2GHz. G5. It may just be me, but YDL seems to run the machine even quieter than OSX. And yes, they do accellerate when the system is under load or room temperature rises significantly.
What parallels? The situation is totally different. Did Dubya run for office on a platform of "It's all the Jews/Muslims/favorite evil race fault?" If anything I think Bush's comments after 9/11 about Islam being hijacked and subverted by evil people struck the right tone. There's no war on Islam (or any other religion) being waged by the USA.
It's not "Jews" this time, but "Terrorists". As long as there is no strict definition of what a "terrorist" is, this term is highly dangerous in the wrong hands. Heck, you're this close to being called a terrorist if you copy some music! And then there's that base on Cuba. Of course this extraterritorial base evades the constitutional right to a fair and due process, which is smart but also dangerous!
I think the memory of the Holocaust is more lively in the United States then it is in Europe. Mainstream Europe seems to have forgotten the lessons of the Holocaust. The EU seems to regard Israel as an annoying problem that should go away so they could get on doing business with the Arab World. Meanwhile the individual lessons of the Holocaust themselves are being forgotten -- the French recently passed a law forbidding Muslims from wearing their headdress in public schools or Jews from wearing the Yarmulke. Did they learn nothing from the lessons of the past?
Israel is a mostly artificial country created by the international community after WWII in an attempt to compensate the jews for the Holocaust. Had it stayed at that, things would have been alright. Israel however is occupying areas that it has no business being in. This behavior is highly disputable but sadly the finger-pointing between palestinians and Israelis continues.. The French law you're referring to counts for all religions (and only in public spaces) and is thus not discriminatory. Quite unlike the Nurnberg laws of Nazi Germany. Those laws were intended to isolate a single group. The French law against religious symbols is an attempt at preventing isolation/segreation. It's very drastic, and I personally don't agree with it, but it's not at all comparable to the Nurnberg laws.
What big electrified fence? Several friends of mine just got back from a trip to Niagra Falls (Canada). They were able to walk back and forth between the border with little more then a state issued ID card (drivers license) that doesn't even prove American or Canadian citizenship. We have upgraded our security procedures but there's no big electrified fence.
The electrified fence was meant metaphorically. I'm from the Netherlands (born and raised into the umpteenth generation..), a country which is one of the US's allies in the war on terror.. yet if I go to the US I'll be fingerprinted and photographed like a common thief. To me that feels overly harsh, and it's an insult to the US's allies. On a sidenote.. try the ID-card at the border with Mexico;o)
You're right, "Fourth Reich" goes too far. However there are some frightening parallels to be seen with pre-WWII Germany.. Depending on where you put the exact starting date it took between 10 and 20 years for the situation in Germany to escalate into what we now call the Holocaust.
We're now approx 2.5 years away from 9/11/01 and the USA is at this moment showing parallels to Germany in the early 30's when Hitler obtained power even though he had didn't have the majority of votes (Bush also didn't have majority), and laws like PATRIOT put large restraints on civil liberties just like many of the early Nazi laws did.
Now I'm not saying the US can't be corrected in its policies and I certainly won't put the Nazi party at the same level as the current administration but still.. it gets you thinking. I can imagine people are worried.
People will always be people. Germans aren't especially cruel compared to any other country so there's always the danger of a new Holocaust occuring. The Holocaust wasn't carried out on US soil so the memory of it may be less lively there. I just hope sometime soon the US government will see the error of its ways. There's no such thing as a "land of the free" with a big electrified fence around it. Many jews behind the Nazi ghetto walls thought they were safe then, many Americans think their modern "walls" will secure them now..
FYI I'm European and worried about developments in the US, Russia AND the EU at present.. the world is a mess and it rapidly got worse when Bush became president of the USA.
So if you suddenly realized Safari could not be uninstalled, your position would change and you'd go after Apple? I've been using OS X for several months and I haven't any idea how to uninstall the system apps. There doesn't seem to be an "add-remove programs" feature.
Pick up the app, drag it to the trash, and you're done
My Shell analogy may have been flawed, but whatever way you put it: abusive monopolies are a bad thing. My comment wasn't about problems with Shell producing other goods. It's about using a monopoly in one market to penetrate another. This is always a bad development since it's not about competition but abuse.
The difference with Apple is that I can easily rip out the iLife apps, Safari and Quicktime Player and install third party apps instead.
Just try doing the same with Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer or Windows Messenger. Sure you can _hide_ them, but it's a hell of an ordeal to actually remove and/or replace them.
The whole fuss isn't about Linux per se. How come everyone always thinks solely of Linux when someone mentions "other operating systems". The computing world consists of much more than just Windows and Linux but most options get smothered by the Windows monopoly and Linux's popularity as the poster child of open source. I would be VERY quick to swap Win2K(3) server for OpenBSD with a proper implementation of Windows networking services like Active Directory (some super-Samba app springs to mind). Why? OpenBSD is the proverbial million times more secure than Win2K(3). I wouldn't be sad at all to see Microsoft forced to compete on a level playing field again with product quality as the only differentiating factor between competitors.
I wonder what you would say if Shell suddenly turned to producing cars. Not regular cars but cars that only run on Shell fuel while other cars can't use Shell fuel. To sell their cars, they stop selling regular gas and attempt to strong-arm their competitors off the fuel market, thereby gaining a monopoly on fuel and through it also on cars. Of course Shell by itself isn't big enough to do this, but in the software world Microsoft is and they have done the exact same thing with Windows. How anyone can agree with such practices is beyond me unless they have a personal interest in keeping this monopoly in place. Sadly, in many cases, such people exist in key positions (Bush administration anyone?).
I'm not "obsessed with the idea of strong political parties", but this two-party alternative that's seen in the US and the UK isn't exactly great either.
So yes, governments in a two-party system get installed very quickly compared to democracies that have multi-party coalitions. They also usually have more leverage than coalition governments. The problem with _present day_ America is the fact that Democrats and Republicans are not essentially very different anymore. Republicants have a slightly conservative preference, while Democrats like to keep up the idea of being progressive. Other than that, it's more of the same in practice. They both try to undo eachother's previous policies when they swap places in power.
Multi-party coalition governments, like many European countries have, may be less stable and based on mutual compromise but they're a more accurate reflection of the electorate. Arguing about which is better is pointless. They're _both_ a form of necessary evil to keep a democratic government manageable. Both have obious advantages and disadvantages. Research has shown that in an ideal world, democracies are no larger than 5 million inhabitants. Go bigger than that, and participation drops, people don't feel connected with their representatives anymore, and ugly kludges are needed to keep the whole process running smoothly. (ref. Heineken, A. H. (1992).The United States of Europe: a Eurotopia? Amsterdam: Amsterdamsche Stichting voor de Historische Wetenschap.)
It's easy to call someone who doesn't immediately agree with your views 'obsessed' and 'limited'. As this thread was originally about putting the internet under US-government control, I'm not going to discuss politics anymore in this thread. I'll just repeat that I won't give up _my_ part of the free internet without a court fight. And yes, I _own_ a tiny part of the internet: my computer and the bandwidth that I buy. Using this I can publish anything I like as long as it's within the laws of my country, which is pretty much anything except child pornography and other obviously criminal things (though it's ok to publish bomb-building handbooks) and I'd like to keep it that way.
The US is run by republicrats, nothing else. You call two practically similar parties choice? It's not my idea of a democracy. Corps buying politicians by funding their campaigns is also not my idea of democracy. That'll lead to a corporate state, which was tried before in 1922 in Italy. Hopefully you remember where that experiment ended. Other than that, my statement was a response to the argument "the internet was created in the US, so it should stay here". Democracy wasn't created in the US, but Americans are still making pretty intensive use of the idea and controlling their implementation of it. Democracy, like the internet, has its use outside the place where it was created. American democracy doesn't look like anything the Greeks and Celts created.. but neither does the internet today look like anything its creators first put down. This argument is therefore completely ridiculous.
There is no issue of enforcement because the US has no legal power outside its own borders. There is no way the US is going to get a UN mandate to invade a country over some website that's not conforming to US government norms. We've all seen very recently what the lack of a UN-mandate does to the international reputation of the US and its faithful allies.
Your third comment is exactly what is wrong with the idea of putting the internet under the control of any government. I don't want anyone to define for me what 'playing nice' is. I live by the laws of MY country, where only my elected government has the power to enforce any regulations. There is no way I'm giving up my personal freedom of expression to some foreign control body without putting up a legal fight. If I lose that fight, and can't publish what I want to publish anymore, I'll leave for a country with saner laws. And yes, I'm a professional journalist, so I actually do publish.
Slashdot Mirror
"Cookies need love like everything does". It's actually a quote from the Oracle to Sati and only became Smith's after he had assimilated Sati into his "collective" and the Oracle asked what Smith had done to Sati. ;-)
I hear you.. been there. I see MDB files in action all day with Access processing thousands upon thousands of records inside them.. waiting for that inevitable collapse. And I'm sure there are plenty of other offices around the world where Access is stretched way beyond its means because it's below the radar of the IT department. Many departments develop their own solutions on Access, totally unaware of the way a RDMS works. I've literally seen such projects escalate into inventory/maintenance status management apps for half a million different types of parts inside god knows how many production installations. All inside MDB files.. Only for projects that follow corporate procedure does the IT department step in and point them to the big shiny and robust SQL server. Most pet projects inside corporations get started to scratch a small itch, but they tend to grow out of control.
But we have Access for that!!
..erm.. oh well.. at least it *LOOKS* like a database. Better make sure you have a decent backup strategy in place before you trust anything important to a .MDB file.
Ever since the Windows NT era, I've been able to lock computers down quite well. Put a BIOS password on there, disable booting from any device other than the local HDD and lock down XP. I don't know about Home Edition (which is crap) but you can surely lock down XP to allow login only at set times. It's also very well possible to lock down which files are executable, what folders your child has write-access to etc. A more important point, though, is that way too many parents don't know jack shit about computers. It's never good to give your child unlimited access to a magical black box that show pretty pictures, when you as a parent don't know what the box is capable of in the right hands.
Combined with HylaFax software I've made quite a few 14k4 modems "desirable" again. Cheap fax server!!
Scribus is a complete joke compared to the likes of InDesign or even the later Pagemaker releases.
There is no such law here (The Netherlands, we have more funny laws) so that's where things may be different. In my daily practice employees of larger businesses are more or less trained to immediately plug my phonecall through to a PR person. Which is what I think any responsible company should implement as a policy. I still don't feel particularly sorry for Apple. If a company wants something kept secret, they'd better make sure their employees don't go talking to every joe about it.. especially not the press.
Now a journalist misrepresenting himself as just a regular private citizen is where I personally draw the line and it's a legal problem as well. Also, I often get information that is clearly stated as off the record. Publish that, and you'll never get any useful info from that source again plus it's usually plausibly deniable so your reputation is instantly down the plughole. It's a kind of checks and balances system that works fairly well in my daily practice. No real need for trade secrets laws. It's everyone's own responsibility to keep your private things secret. Goes for corporations and individuals alike. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I regularly protect individuals against themselves by not publishing things that could possibly harm them.
Company employees should be smart enough not to divulge any information to any outside party without permission from management. If they do, well that's just plain stupidity. I personally would have no qualms about publishing information I get from an employee of any company _on the record_ , as long as it's newsworthy. I'm free to gather my news in whatever way I see fit, as long as I don't break any laws doing it. If someone incriminates themselves when I ask them a question, that's not _my_ problem. It's common decency among normal journalist to protect the innocent source, such as private individuals who don't have any experience in dealing with media (this excludes movie stars, politicians, big company CEO's etc.), against themselves. I'm not going to protect any company or public person against itself. They should have hired proper PR or just suffer the consequences of their own stupidity.
I sometimes write for highly respected news outlets. Yet when I blog, I'm suddenly not a journalist anymore?
Gee, I actually hold a degree in journalism.. sweet. This is about the first topic on slashdot that actually fits with what I studied for. On topic though. It may not be journalism in the traditional sense of mass push-publishing that the older generation is used to.. ;-) It is however still free speech, which should be protected just like every other instance of free speech. I don't care if the author writes his articles under the banner of some large media company or on his private blog. The articles don't change and neither should their rights.
If not blindly, then at least for reasons that would not do very well under public scrutiny.. It's highly convenient for the UK to feign indignation and shove the full blame onto the US for starting a war. Fact is Britain was just as eager to start an offensive war as the US was at the time. How can there even be evidence that actually warrants a war like this (without a UN mandate) when, as we all know now, there weren't even any WMD's in Iraq to begin with!? This reeks of foul play and Britain acting like it's been tricked into this war only makes it look sad at the least. This war should have been started on a UN mandate. I have absolutely no respect for the way this was started but feel sorry for the guys who are there right now attempting to make the best of the situation that their warmongering governments got them into.
I've seen the UK's closest ally, the USA, in the person of at least Colin Powell and several other key people in the first Bush administration say on TV that Iraq did not have any WMD's and did not have the ability to acquire them anytime in the near future. That was in 2000. Then I saw a similar news item again in Fahrenheit 9/11 that came from around the same period of time. You can say what you want about Michael Moore's ethics and bias in documentary making, but the footage of the above that also got into Fahrenheit 9/11 leaves nothing at all to the imagination: the US government was convinced that there were no WMD's in Iraq. Suddenly that all changes, the US forces an offensive war for no clear reason even while the UN hadn't even properly finished its weapons inspections (to which Iraq was being more and more cooperative) and the UK blindly followed. If that's not leading soldiers to their deaths based on a lie, then at least it's based on gross neglect of duty.
What does SP2 seriously add to the corporate desktop? Admittedly I haven't been in charge of windows desktops since Win2K, but I can't immediately see any advantage. Only support nightmares concerning the builtin firewall. Is a personal firewall really needed on every secretary's desk? I would hope not... they're not supposed to run any unauthorized services other than those required for remote control/remote software deployment.
Let's just hope the EU is sensible enough not to allow software patents so MS could walk all the way to hell with their patent on some XML schema's.
Maybe have a look at Mandrake/Suse/Fedora Linux.. they're newbie-friendly and contain Wine for your needed Windows apps.
And I understand he made them five times thicker than even today's highway. For what? Tanks! They're heavier than your average SUV.. ;-)
Same goes for tech.. We don't listen to end users proposing a solution to their problem when they call the helpdesk. In fact, it's annoying to get wise-ass end users on the line. We're just as guilty as the doctors!
It appears you know little about prepress. I work as a graphics designer (print) as well, and it's almost always HELL to get colour right when working across platforms and/or fileformats. There's no way you could reliably convert format A to format B and still get proper colour output on the press/proofer every time. PANTONE is nice for spot colours but won't help you in full-colour print work. There you have a couple of colour matching systems that need to be supported in exactly identical ways across platforms to work. Apple and Windows have proper colour management that is interchangeable to a certain degree, mostly thanks to Adobe's dominance (which is bad in itself, but at least it keeps colour consistent). I know of no other OS that has proper colour management. Last time I checked the GIMP, it had utterly lousy support for CMYK.. and the CMYK colour model is the proverbial life blood of the professional printing industry.
Current test builds of YDL have this problem solved. The fans run properly on my dual 2GHz. G5. It may just be me, but YDL seems to run the machine even quieter than OSX. And yes, they do accellerate when the system is under load or room temperature rises significantly.
What parallels? The situation is totally different. Did Dubya run for office on a platform of "It's all the Jews/Muslims/favorite evil race fault?" If anything I think Bush's comments after 9/11 about Islam being hijacked and subverted by evil people struck the right tone. There's no war on Islam (or any other religion) being waged by the USA.
;o)
It's not "Jews" this time, but "Terrorists". As long as there is no strict definition of what a "terrorist" is, this term is highly dangerous in the wrong hands. Heck, you're this close to being called a terrorist if you copy some music! And then there's that base on Cuba. Of course this extraterritorial base evades the constitutional right to a fair and due process, which is smart but also dangerous!
I think the memory of the Holocaust is more lively in the United States then it is in Europe. Mainstream Europe seems to have forgotten the lessons of the Holocaust. The EU seems to regard Israel as an annoying problem that should go away so they could get on doing business with the Arab World. Meanwhile the individual lessons of the Holocaust themselves are being forgotten -- the French recently passed a law forbidding Muslims from wearing their headdress in public schools or Jews from wearing the Yarmulke. Did they learn nothing from the lessons of the past?
Israel is a mostly artificial country created by the international community after WWII in an attempt to compensate the jews for the Holocaust. Had it stayed at that, things would have been alright. Israel however is occupying areas that it has no business being in. This behavior is highly disputable but sadly the finger-pointing between palestinians and Israelis continues.. The French law you're referring to counts for all religions (and only in public spaces) and is thus not discriminatory. Quite unlike the Nurnberg laws of Nazi Germany. Those laws were intended to isolate a single group. The French law against religious symbols is an attempt at preventing isolation/segreation. It's very drastic, and I personally don't agree with it, but it's not at all comparable to the Nurnberg laws.
What big electrified fence? Several friends of mine just got back from a trip to Niagra Falls (Canada). They were able to walk back and forth between the border with little more then a state issued ID card (drivers license) that doesn't even prove American or Canadian citizenship. We have upgraded our security procedures but there's no big electrified fence.
The electrified fence was meant metaphorically. I'm from the Netherlands (born and raised into the umpteenth generation..), a country which is one of the US's allies in the war on terror.. yet if I go to the US I'll be fingerprinted and photographed like a common thief. To me that feels overly harsh, and it's an insult to the US's allies. On a sidenote.. try the ID-card at the border with Mexico
You're right, "Fourth Reich" goes too far. However there are some frightening parallels to be seen with pre-WWII Germany.. Depending on where you put the exact starting date it took between 10 and 20 years for the situation in Germany to escalate into what we now call the Holocaust.
We're now approx 2.5 years away from 9/11/01 and the USA is at this moment showing parallels to Germany in the early 30's when Hitler obtained power even though he had didn't have the majority of votes (Bush also didn't have majority), and laws like PATRIOT put large restraints on civil liberties just like many of the early Nazi laws did.
Now I'm not saying the US can't be corrected in its policies and I certainly won't put the Nazi party at the same level as the current administration but still.. it gets you thinking. I can imagine people are worried.
People will always be people. Germans aren't especially cruel compared to any other country so there's always the danger of a new Holocaust occuring. The Holocaust wasn't carried out on US soil so the memory of it may be less lively there. I just hope sometime soon the US government will see the error of its ways. There's no such thing as a "land of the free" with a big electrified fence around it. Many jews behind the Nazi ghetto walls thought they were safe then, many Americans think their modern "walls" will secure them now..
FYI I'm European and worried about developments in the US, Russia AND the EU at present.. the world is a mess and it rapidly got worse when Bush became president of the USA.
Pick up the app, drag it to the trash, and you're done
My Shell analogy may have been flawed, but whatever way you put it: abusive monopolies are a bad thing. My comment wasn't about problems with Shell producing other goods. It's about using a monopoly in one market to penetrate another. This is always a bad development since it's not about competition but abuse.
The difference with Apple is that I can easily rip out the iLife apps, Safari and Quicktime Player and install third party apps instead.
Just try doing the same with Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer or Windows Messenger. Sure you can _hide_ them, but it's a hell of an ordeal to actually remove and/or replace them.
The whole fuss isn't about Linux per se. How come everyone always thinks solely of Linux when someone mentions "other operating systems". The computing world consists of much more than just Windows and Linux but most options get smothered by the Windows monopoly and Linux's popularity as the poster child of open source. I would be VERY quick to swap Win2K(3) server for OpenBSD with a proper implementation of Windows networking services like Active Directory (some super-Samba app springs to mind). Why? OpenBSD is the proverbial million times more secure than Win2K(3). I wouldn't be sad at all to see Microsoft forced to compete on a level playing field again with product quality as the only differentiating factor between competitors.
I wonder what you would say if Shell suddenly turned to producing cars. Not regular cars but cars that only run on Shell fuel while other cars can't use Shell fuel. To sell their cars, they stop selling regular gas and attempt to strong-arm their competitors off the fuel market, thereby gaining a monopoly on fuel and through it also on cars. Of course Shell by itself isn't big enough to do this, but in the software world Microsoft is and they have done the exact same thing with Windows. How anyone can agree with such practices is beyond me unless they have a personal interest in keeping this monopoly in place. Sadly, in many cases, such people exist in key positions (Bush administration anyone?).
I'm not "obsessed with the idea of strong political parties", but this two-party alternative that's seen in the US and the UK isn't exactly great either.
So yes, governments in a two-party system get installed very quickly compared to democracies that have multi-party coalitions. They also usually have more leverage than coalition governments. The problem with _present day_ America is the fact that Democrats and Republicans are not essentially very different anymore. Republicants have a slightly conservative preference, while Democrats like to keep up the idea of being progressive. Other than that, it's more of the same in practice. They both try to undo eachother's previous policies when they swap places in power.
Multi-party coalition governments, like many European countries have, may be less stable and based on mutual compromise but they're a more accurate reflection of the electorate. Arguing about which is better is pointless. They're _both_ a form of necessary evil to keep a democratic government manageable. Both have obious advantages and disadvantages. Research has shown that in an ideal world, democracies are no larger than 5 million inhabitants. Go bigger than that, and participation drops, people don't feel connected with their representatives anymore, and ugly kludges are needed to keep the whole process running smoothly. (ref. Heineken, A. H. (1992).The United States of Europe: a Eurotopia? Amsterdam: Amsterdamsche Stichting voor de Historische Wetenschap.)
It's easy to call someone who doesn't immediately agree with your views 'obsessed' and 'limited'. As this thread was originally about putting the internet under US-government control, I'm not going to discuss politics anymore in this thread. I'll just repeat that I won't give up _my_ part of the free internet without a court fight. And yes, I _own_ a tiny part of the internet: my computer and the bandwidth that I buy. Using this I can publish anything I like as long as it's within the laws of my country, which is pretty much anything except child pornography and other obviously criminal things (though it's ok to publish bomb-building handbooks) and I'd like to keep it that way.
Cheap troll, but I'll bite..
The US is run by republicrats, nothing else. You call two practically similar parties choice? It's not my idea of a democracy. Corps buying politicians by funding their campaigns is also not my idea of democracy. That'll lead to a corporate state, which was tried before in 1922 in Italy. Hopefully you remember where that experiment ended. Other than that, my statement was a response to the argument "the internet was created in the US, so it should stay here". Democracy wasn't created in the US, but Americans are still making pretty intensive use of the idea and controlling their implementation of it. Democracy, like the internet, has its use outside the place where it was created. American democracy doesn't look like anything the Greeks and Celts created.. but neither does the internet today look like anything its creators first put down. This argument is therefore completely ridiculous.
There is no issue of enforcement because the US has no legal power outside its own borders. There is no way the US is going to get a UN mandate to invade a country over some website that's not conforming to US government norms. We've all seen very recently what the lack of a UN-mandate does to the international reputation of the US and its faithful allies.
Your third comment is exactly what is wrong with the idea of putting the internet under the control of any government. I don't want anyone to define for me what 'playing nice' is. I live by the laws of MY country, where only my elected government has the power to enforce any regulations. There is no way I'm giving up my personal freedom of expression to some foreign control body without putting up a legal fight. If I lose that fight, and can't publish what I want to publish anymore, I'll leave for a country with saner laws. And yes, I'm a professional journalist, so I actually do publish.