A very simple lesson in life. If you don't want something listened to, don't shout it in public(that's essentially what a blog is). If you don't want people to see what you're doing don't do it in public. You don't have that level of privacy in public. You can copyright your works to stop people from copying them, but if you stick it on a blog you're giving everyone license to read it and everyone includes marketing types.
So they set up windows so it always does a DNS lookup on microsoft sites? So bloody what?
They aren't spying on you any more than they already were. They're ensuring that you can always get to their sites for patches and support. They aren't doing it for anyone elses sites because it's not their business to do that.
I just really don't see what the big deal on this is, your average user will never use the hosts file, and you need to get to Microsoft sites to patch and maintain your microsoft system. If you don't want to deal with Microsoft don't use their OS, they're not doing anything particularly wrong here.
First, I'm talking about businesses, not individuals, or schools, neither of which have a monetary incentive to make sure their stuff is readable. According to TFA businesses were the target of this whole thing to start with. As a side note btw, the Corporate Office license is a hell of a lot more than $200 a seat, and businesses are still more than willing to pay for it.
Second, having an open standard does not actually ensure that people will be able to read the document 10 years down the line, because it doesn't ensure that anyone will bother to make something which can read it 10 years down the line. It simply means that, IF the standard is still available, and IF you have a team of qualified programmers(or enough money to hire someone elses), you can get one made, MAYBE without having to pay for a license(open standard doesn't mean free).
That's a whole lot of if's and maybes.
I know it's a cardinal sin to say this, but the open source revolution is NOT coming. To your average user, aside from price(and to be honest in today's society the average user is much more likely to pirate something they know than use a free equivilant they don't), there is no substantial reason to switch, and may reasons not to. I use linux, I like linux, but I use it mostly because it's fun for me, not because it actually offers me anything much I can't get otherwise.
I always see these arguments, and I always see people missing the point. I like open source, I like open standards, but I also live in the real world and can see things from the perspective of the business I work for.
Open Office is improving all the time, some of the components(I only really use word processing) are almost as good as the Microsoft equivilants. The document format is standard and can be replicated by any application which wants to do so.
However, it hasn't been, you can't just open an Open Office document, you have to install Open or Star Office, or possibly some other freeware application. Most specifically you can't open an Open Office document in Microsoft Office, which, no matter how much you dislike it, is the defacto industry standard.
If you send someone a word document, they will have something which can open it, and if they do any document editing at all, they'll be able to work with it and change it. If you send them an OpenOffice document, odds are they won't be able to open it. The purpose of these sorts of files is to store and transfer data, if the person I'm sending that document to can't open it, then it doesn't matter whether the file is open or closed, because it has no practical purpose.
You can argue about the value of open standards till you're blue in the face, but if everyone can't open it without substantial effort(downloading a 100 meg file is substantial effort), if they can't edit it without substantial effort, then it doesn't have any value at all.
You could design a language which was perfect, which had no exceptions to rules, which allowed for no ambiguity or misunderstanding, which was, in every way you can measure such a thing, perfect, but if no one speaks it it doesn't make any difference at all.
Actually the T-30 is only MTP if you buy it in the US or certain parts of Europe. If you buy one in Australia, Asia or a few other places then it's just a regular old mass storage device which mounts just fine on my linux boot.
Isolationism isn't the answer, it never has been and it never will be. It didn't even work back when it took weeks to get anywhere. Even assuming the US could survive without other countries economically, which it can't, it's too large now not to affect everyone else.
What the US needs to do is to learn to tell the difference between serving the interests of the world and serving their own interests and between expedience and a good solution.
Examples, Iraq vs Bosnia, in Bosnia help was needed and the US was capable of helping(there are some conflicts where as much as help is needed direct US, or for that matter European intervention will do more harm than good), in Iraq, as much as we(while I don't live in the US anymore I used to and did when this all went on) talked about how we were going to liberate the people and bring democracy to the country, and all that crap, we went into Iraq for reasons of self interest. The biggest problem is that no one has yet been able to determine what we got out of it.
As for expedience. We went into Afghanistan, and we removed a horrible oppressive, brutal theocratic dictatorship, and to do that we gave guns to a bunch of drug dealing warlords(the Norther Alliance), who don't like us anymore than they liked the Taliban. Then we set up in place of the Taliban an ineffective government(the warlords have new guns remember) which is just as brutal and theocratic as the old one.
Those figures actually help Vista more than not. Most of these users are going to have to upgrade soon anyway, 2000 is just not viable anymroe in a corporate environment, and if Microsoft times it right a lot of them are going to go straight to Vista.
Corporate users still on 2000 basically fall into three categories. The cheap, the paranoid, and those locked into supporting legacy products.
The cheap are usually small businesses who, like home users, will upgrade when they get new PC's. They're not really much of the market anyway.
The paranoid are sitting on a sinking ship, however much you may fear upgrading 2000 is a sinking ship, it's support is limited, it's features are limited and it's rapidly reaching the point where, corporate wise, it is rapidly becoming unusable. If it doesn't get replaced in time the paranoid will be fired and replaced with people who aren't so paranoid, so thye aren't a problem either. They might not upgrade straight to Vista, but it's going to look appealing as the work is the same.
The largest category, or at least from my experience the largest category is the people who can't upgrade becaues then stuff won't work, the company I work for is in this category, they don't have the resources to fix the things that need fixing, but even people in this category are going to have to do something soon and again, if you're going to have to go through the cost and expense of redoing systems you may as well do it for Vista as for XP.
Well, theoretically it would be nice to have backups of your $100 games(that's what they cost here folks). Optical media is a bit tempermental and most people's living rooms(where they keep their xbox) aren't exactly low on abuse for discs.
Camera's on the roads are very different, in public places you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. If you do something in a public space you are accepting that someone might come along and see you, all putting cameras in such places does is increase the probability of that might.
Cameras in your home are different, with certain exceptions(if what you are doing can be seen from a public space(aka sidewalk) then it's a bit iffy, but in your home you have an expectation of privacy which at least at present is still protected by the constitution and the courts.
We've had problems like that in our organization, reasonably simple updates taking far longer than they should, but it's not because I didn't put the item our, or provide the necessary information to the user. It was becaues finance didn't want to sign off on it despite it having all the relevant and required signatures. Then you end up waiting for the supply department to actually order it, the supplier to provide it, supply to get it to IT, and THEN, IT has to find time to do it.
In most large organizations, IT is risk averse, there are on average more managers than there are people who actually do things, and about 70% of the people who actually do things are so specialized that they would never go out and do a RAM upgrade. Then you throw in things like change control which was put in place to stop IT people from changing things willy nilly and upsetting people like you, and you find someone who can actually get the thing ordered this budget period, and it gets hard to get stuff done.
On top of this, people who actually do things like RAM upgrades tend to be lowly paid, poorly treated, and be the first people someone blames when something goes wrong. In a lot of cases their morale is so low they don't care about your problem.
You want nimble IT, fire your CIO, and senior IT management, replace them with new people, pay the people who do things a reasonable wage and stop whinging.
Internet browsers are free, or at least for the most part. Which basically means than unless a new version offers something you really don't like, there is, for the most part, no reason not to upgrade, and even if there is a problem with the new version there are plenty of alternatives. Short of total corporate inertia(in which case the support people will thank you for offering a reason to get management to update), there is no reason at all to be using an outdated version of any given browser. Not to mention that if you can browse the thing in lynx it'll work in anything.
What you need to be concerned about is whether all the types of browsers people might choose to use work with the site. Obviously Opera, Gecko based and IE are a given. You should also try to work with something like Lynx simply because if it works in lynx it'll work with accessibility software for the blind and that sort of thing, and accessibility for people with disabilities can be important. Anything else you want to support is fine, but if some idiot wants to use IE 3 and refuses to update to anything else the rest of their system is probably so crap they can't even get on the web.
All of this boils down rather simply. It may seem stupid for the government to fund projects which on the surface seem ridiculous, but that's not the way the airforce would see something like this. From their perspective, even if it's total bunk if they scientists are even remotely credible they'll probably discover something along the way, and if it isn't bunk it could be very useful. Not to mention the old standby in the military "What if it's possible and someone else does it first".
Am I the only person who doesn't actually want a smaller keyboard? I mean I don't have particularly huge hands, but I know I have a hell of a time typing on laptop keyboards, why would I want one even smaller. This would be great for laptops or PDA's I suppose, but for 98% of users those devices are essentially just toys and most people how use one seriously plug it into a docking station and use a regular keyboard before they do any serious work with it.
Amen, especially to part 2b. You have to remember, that the more money that gets spent on a project the more impossible it is to kill, even if it's stupid and pointless. If a manager approves a million dollars on something, to kill it they have to go explain to their manager why they just wasted the company a million dollars. Now even if it's bound to fail, most managers aren't going to do that because it will likely cost them their jobs or at least their dignity. Instead they'll sit with the project and jump ship just before it fails with a resume which says how they were involved in this wonderful project.
However, if you catch this project at the petty cash stage, then the manager is more likely to listen to you(unless of course it's their idea), because they will see how it failing might hurt them.
If IS isn't involved in things they tend to make your life miserable, because you'll end up supporting things which are broken in their natural state.
Microsoft isn't actually substantially different than any other large company, in fact all things considered they're substantially more ethical than most these days. Yeah they've bundled software, but from a convenience point for the consumer that's not such a bad thing and to be honest if your software can't convince people to switch on its own merit you need to improve your software. Plus without Microsoft bundling IE, we'd probably be paying for browsers which suck.
There are a few dozen other dodgy practices including a few IP violations(which for the most part slashdot doesn't seem to care about in other instances), but when it comes right down to it Microsoft doesn't pour toxic substances into the sea, hasn't to the best of my knowledge killed anybody, either deliberately or through negligence, and while they bought out everyone in competition for a while, people chose to accept those offers and must have felt they were getting a good deal at the time.
When it comes right down to it, Bill donates an awful lot of money and time to charity, which is something we should probably all be doing, but mostly aren't, as someone's got to do it, perhaps we should give him some credit.
Not to mention that it's always a great thing for the American media to be increasing the social standing of someone rich and powerful for doing the right thing, maybe more rich people will follow.
I don't disagree with all of your points, but some of them are either inane or show a belief that the medical profession is even more wasteful and idiotic than people think.
For the pharmaceutical companies, could they have perhaps done something to make the drug safer? Maybe, but not likely, most of what companies can do to make drugs safer is done by lowering dosages and if someone takes a whole bottle it's somewhat difficult. That's not to say that some drugs aren't unsafe, or that sometimes you can't get a new drug which doesn't work the same way(see the new sleeping pills people can't OD on), but for the most part when taken as directed medications are pretty safe, and there's often not much a manufacturer can do to save people from misuing their product that wouldn't detrimentally affect the effectiveness of the drug in a serious manner. As for making it taste foul, then the person who was supposed to take it probably wouldn't, not tom mention that sometimes kids are required to take these drugs. That's not to say they should taste like candy, but you know.
Doctors? Do some doctors do this sort of thing, prescribing things people don't need? Probably. Sometimes people expect a pill, but most doctors will have the common sense to give you something pretty simple and harmless in that case? Do some doctors prescribe pills just for profit, not really, they're much more likely to do unecessary tests or administer unnecessary things when you're with them, unless they've got a kickback deal with the pharmacist or drug company at least, and most GP's aren't likely to have something like that. As for smaller bottles, you'd probably be one of the first people screaming that doctors were trying to screw you if you had to go back to the pharmacist more often because you didn't have enough pills to finish your treatment, not to mention that as most people stop taking their pills too early now, they'd be very unlikely to go back and get more.
The pharmacist. Sure, invent me a pill bottle kids can't actually open, most of the current systems tend to be harder for me to open than for kids. Otherwise I approve of this.
Parents. BINGO!!
Kids, where do they learn this? See Parents.
That's not to say that sometimes such events aren't just tragic accidents and that parents are always to blame, but most of the ability to avoid these problems lies with parents. Most of the ability to protect children from anything lies with the people who spend the most time with them(parents, teachers, day care, etc), and parents are, or at least should be, the ones who spend the most time.
The problem I always seem to find with privatizing "public" transportation, is that when you privatize the system, even with tax incentives and government funding(by which point what's the point of privatizing it in the first place), you force the system to be run based on income generated vs costs, which isn't how public transportation really works. Providing a decent system of public transports decreases the number of cars on the road. This in turn decreases the congestion and wear and tear, which lowers mainainence and improvement costs. Fewer cars on the road, means fewer parking spaces are required in high density areas which means that you can build more things for more tax dollars and more investment potential, or for that matter leave spaces open and improve quality of life. Fewer cars also means a decrease in emmissions and that sort of thing which means, in addition to quality of life improvements that reduces any later costs associated with attempting to clean up those emmissions. It's also a loss leader system, in that in order to get most people to use it there have to already be more buses\trains\ferries\etc running than are currently in use.
In short public transportation is an industry which, when done properly, (which is to say with sufficient capacity and regularity that ordinary people will want to use it) provides the largest benefit to the government and to the tax payer, and should therefor be funded by the tax payer.
The problem with this sort of attitude is that it natural forces are fundamentally irrational and unfair. Some people are wealthy, some people are not, some people are stronger than others, etc. The role of government is to regulate these forces, and these forces are regulated pretty much everywhere in the civilized world(hint: this sort of regulation is what makes civilization).
You believe that the rich should be able to waste non-renewable resources(gas) or expensive to renew resources(water) and in some cases harm other people in the process, but I would bet you don't believe that some thug should get to take your oil or your water because he or she is bigger than you or has a gun, or any of a thousand other things which governments regulate. Just because forces are economic and not physical doesn't mean they shouldn't be regulated, and even in the US one of the most wealth for wealth, greed is the key, capitalism to it's unnatural extreme countries I have ever encountered(I lived their for 13 years), this is already the case.
The free market economy is a joke, it's not free, it can't be free, and the sooner we all face this fact and start working out what particular bits of freedom or control are most important to us, the better we'll all be. To use a non water metaphore, do I want people who don't need a offroad vehicle to drive one, to burn up resources we need, to pump crap into the air, because it amuses them to do so, no, I don't. On the other hand I don't want the government coming in and telling me I have to turn off my PC now because I've had it on for more than the regulated number of hours today and I'm using too much electricity. It's all about balance, and if we accept that we have to regulate some things and regulate them now things will be much better off for everyone.
Well perhaps I'm the exception to the rule, but I actually like shiny discs. I may rip them and play them off my computer most of the time, but I like owning the disc and being able to take it anywhere I like. To stick it in my CD player. To know that short of running over it(which I've done on occasion), it will be there even if my PC crashes. That may just be me though.
I also find it incredibly amusing when Americans complain about paying $20 for a movie or $15 for a CD, or $50 for brand new game. Now don't get me wrong, I used to do it to when I lived there, but after spending a year paying $20 for a CD $30 for a movie, and $100 for a video game(explain that one to me), and that's at the cheaper places, I've started to realize that most of the world would happily stop pirating if they could just pay the local equivilant of American prices.
Let me repeat that for any record execs who might possibly read this, most people in the rest of the world would gladly buy your product if you charged the local equivilant of what you do in the US. I know that would hit into your profits, and that some people would start exporting CD's from cheap countries to the states, but that's life.
Someone hasn't had history in a while
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The Demise of IP?
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The Boston Tea Party was about the citizens of Boston, as well as others. Objecting both to an unfair tax, and also to an unfair GOVERNMENT MANDATED monopoly on the importation of tea to the American colonies.
To give the metaphor a bit more clarity, The British government declared that the American people would only be able to use one proprietary format of tea when they wanted to drink any and the people of Massachusets said that they didn't want that, they wanted and open standard of tea which they could buy from and sell to anyone they liked.
So in the boston tea party, Massachusets forcibly rejected a closed economic system in favor of a more open one, and in this case the Massachusets is, perhaps not quite so forcibly, rejecting a closed standard in favor of an open one.
Lady, this is not a rejection of the Boston Tea Party, this is the bloody Boston Tea Party writ in modern terms. Nice to see that at least a few people in the US still believe in what the founding fathers stood for as opposed to simply following word for word their writings which were created before half of what we use in a given day was even possible.
Personally, while talking to India pisses me off no end. What annoys me most on tech support calls to companies like Dell and HP is the fact that no one believes I'm a technician and I have to spend an hour convincing the jackass that there actually is a problem with the hardware, so that they'll send someone out.
Dell is actually pretty good about this believe it or not, you only usually have to argue with them once and they'll send out a local tech who is nice and courteous and fixes the problem promptly and effectively. I'd rather talk to someone local in the first place, but that's better than nothing. I've admitedly had a few problems with dell, like them shipping my employer a replacement monitor 5 times before they got it right. Three of those times it was worse than the original and once it was the wrong size, but otherwise Dell hasn't been too bad. If you use their e-mail support system and can spell you don't even really have a communicaton problem.
HP on the other hand is hopeless, You've usually got to call them multiple times before they'll even believe there's a problem, then they'll try to convince you that it's your fault(had a user who photocopied a book, and they tried to convince me that because she'd done that she'd damaged the scanner assembly and it was her fault), and the last time a guy came out he was late, and spent most of the time whinging about how he hadn't had anywhere to park, which isn't my problem as they don't actually give me anywhere free to park and there are plenty of available spots in the public parking garage.
True linux has problems, particularly if you're using dodgy drivers and the like(before my wireless nic card drivers went open source my system used to crash all the time), and if you use bleeding edge software you can usually also fix it.
I'd also like to say that as someone who supports windows professionally that searching for solutions to problems isn't actually all that easy. I've seen all sorts of things which are almost impossible to google simply because they are impossible to describe. An app fails to start in linux I look at the terminal see what error it spat out and look it up, sometimes there's nothing but if there's something it's usually helpful. Try googling "my pc is slow" and see how much longer your sanity lasts.
The issue is cost of living, which is why American workers can't win the outsourcing game. Now just as a disclaimer I left the US and now work in Australia where I was born(dual citizenship), but it's an issue of math. I make 40k a year, which seems like a lot of money compared to 20. However after rent, food, utilities, and paying off my student loans(which are from the US and thus much higher than they'd be if I'd gone to school here), I could, assuming I did nothing fun at all save about 5-7k a year after taxes. Consider that the average home price in my city is over $300,000 and that even apartements are usually in the $200,000 range not including corporate fees and the like and this money doesn't look quite as good anymore.
Now I'm just new in the industry and I do support which will never pay as well as programming because we're a black hole to the bean counters, but the general point is that $40-50k is fuck all depending on where you live.
In defense of the PSP(not Sony), part of that is that the release dates for the PSP have been fucked up royally. There is a market there(as evidened by all the grey market importation Sony has been trying to stop), but they couldn't or wouldn't meet the demand themselves and wouldn't let anyone else do it either.
A lot of people can only really afford one handheld device and the DS is there to buy and the PSP wasn't, and in some cases I believe still isn't.
Finally, someone who has been paying attention. I hate reading anything on-line, but 99% of the time when I went to my university library I brought my own books. I didn't go there to find information, I didn't go there even for quiet, I went there so I had a nice atmosphere in which to read my books and maybe chat a bit with my fellow students.
This is what they've done here, they've made a place where you can do that, that is designed for the purpose, it's likely to be well lit, and reasonably comfortable and an ideal place to do group work, study, and do all sorts of other things.
Slashdot Mirror
A very simple lesson in life. If you don't want something listened to, don't shout it in public(that's essentially what a blog is). If you don't want people to see what you're doing don't do it in public. You don't have that level of privacy in public. You can copyright your works to stop people from copying them, but if you stick it on a blog you're giving everyone license to read it and everyone includes marketing types.
They aren't spying on you any more than they already were. They're ensuring that you can always get to their sites for patches and support. They aren't doing it for anyone elses sites because it's not their business to do that.
I just really don't see what the big deal on this is, your average user will never use the hosts file, and you need to get to Microsoft sites to patch and maintain your microsoft system. If you don't want to deal with Microsoft don't use their OS, they're not doing anything particularly wrong here.
Second, having an open standard does not actually ensure that people will be able to read the document 10 years down the line, because it doesn't ensure that anyone will bother to make something which can read it 10 years down the line. It simply means that, IF the standard is still available, and IF you have a team of qualified programmers(or enough money to hire someone elses), you can get one made, MAYBE without having to pay for a license(open standard doesn't mean free).
That's a whole lot of if's and maybes.
I know it's a cardinal sin to say this, but the open source revolution is NOT coming. To your average user, aside from price(and to be honest in today's society the average user is much more likely to pirate something they know than use a free equivilant they don't), there is no substantial reason to switch, and may reasons not to. I use linux, I like linux, but I use it mostly because it's fun for me, not because it actually offers me anything much I can't get otherwise.
Open Office is improving all the time, some of the components(I only really use word processing) are almost as good as the Microsoft equivilants. The document format is standard and can be replicated by any application which wants to do so.
However, it hasn't been, you can't just open an Open Office document, you have to install Open or Star Office, or possibly some other freeware application. Most specifically you can't open an Open Office document in Microsoft Office, which, no matter how much you dislike it, is the defacto industry standard.
If you send someone a word document, they will have something which can open it, and if they do any document editing at all, they'll be able to work with it and change it. If you send them an OpenOffice document, odds are they won't be able to open it. The purpose of these sorts of files is to store and transfer data, if the person I'm sending that document to can't open it, then it doesn't matter whether the file is open or closed, because it has no practical purpose.
You can argue about the value of open standards till you're blue in the face, but if everyone can't open it without substantial effort(downloading a 100 meg file is substantial effort), if they can't edit it without substantial effort, then it doesn't have any value at all.
You could design a language which was perfect, which had no exceptions to rules, which allowed for no ambiguity or misunderstanding, which was, in every way you can measure such a thing, perfect, but if no one speaks it it doesn't make any difference at all.
I'm just going to point and laugh now.
What the US needs to do is to learn to tell the difference between serving the interests of the world and serving their own interests and between expedience and a good solution.
Examples, Iraq vs Bosnia, in Bosnia help was needed and the US was capable of helping(there are some conflicts where as much as help is needed direct US, or for that matter European intervention will do more harm than good), in Iraq, as much as we(while I don't live in the US anymore I used to and did when this all went on) talked about how we were going to liberate the people and bring democracy to the country, and all that crap, we went into Iraq for reasons of self interest. The biggest problem is that no one has yet been able to determine what we got out of it.
As for expedience. We went into Afghanistan, and we removed a horrible oppressive, brutal theocratic dictatorship, and to do that we gave guns to a bunch of drug dealing warlords(the Norther Alliance), who don't like us anymore than they liked the Taliban. Then we set up in place of the Taliban an ineffective government(the warlords have new guns remember) which is just as brutal and theocratic as the old one.
Corporate users still on 2000 basically fall into three categories. The cheap, the paranoid, and those locked into supporting legacy products.
The cheap are usually small businesses who, like home users, will upgrade when they get new PC's. They're not really much of the market anyway.
The paranoid are sitting on a sinking ship, however much you may fear upgrading 2000 is a sinking ship, it's support is limited, it's features are limited and it's rapidly reaching the point where, corporate wise, it is rapidly becoming unusable. If it doesn't get replaced in time the paranoid will be fired and replaced with people who aren't so paranoid, so thye aren't a problem either. They might not upgrade straight to Vista, but it's going to look appealing as the work is the same.
The largest category, or at least from my experience the largest category is the people who can't upgrade becaues then stuff won't work, the company I work for is in this category, they don't have the resources to fix the things that need fixing, but even people in this category are going to have to do something soon and again, if you're going to have to go through the cost and expense of redoing systems you may as well do it for Vista as for XP.
Well, theoretically it would be nice to have backups of your $100 games(that's what they cost here folks). Optical media is a bit tempermental and most people's living rooms(where they keep their xbox) aren't exactly low on abuse for discs.
Cameras in your home are different, with certain exceptions(if what you are doing can be seen from a public space(aka sidewalk) then it's a bit iffy, but in your home you have an expectation of privacy which at least at present is still protected by the constitution and the courts.
In most large organizations, IT is risk averse, there are on average more managers than there are people who actually do things, and about 70% of the people who actually do things are so specialized that they would never go out and do a RAM upgrade. Then you throw in things like change control which was put in place to stop IT people from changing things willy nilly and upsetting people like you, and you find someone who can actually get the thing ordered this budget period, and it gets hard to get stuff done.
On top of this, people who actually do things like RAM upgrades tend to be lowly paid, poorly treated, and be the first people someone blames when something goes wrong. In a lot of cases their morale is so low they don't care about your problem.
You want nimble IT, fire your CIO, and senior IT management, replace them with new people, pay the people who do things a reasonable wage and stop whinging.
What you need to be concerned about is whether all the types of browsers people might choose to use work with the site. Obviously Opera, Gecko based and IE are a given. You should also try to work with something like Lynx simply because if it works in lynx it'll work with accessibility software for the blind and that sort of thing, and accessibility for people with disabilities can be important. Anything else you want to support is fine, but if some idiot wants to use IE 3 and refuses to update to anything else the rest of their system is probably so crap they can't even get on the web.
All of this boils down rather simply. It may seem stupid for the government to fund projects which on the surface seem ridiculous, but that's not the way the airforce would see something like this. From their perspective, even if it's total bunk if they scientists are even remotely credible they'll probably discover something along the way, and if it isn't bunk it could be very useful. Not to mention the old standby in the military "What if it's possible and someone else does it first".
Am I the only person who doesn't actually want a smaller keyboard? I mean I don't have particularly huge hands, but I know I have a hell of a time typing on laptop keyboards, why would I want one even smaller. This would be great for laptops or PDA's I suppose, but for 98% of users those devices are essentially just toys and most people how use one seriously plug it into a docking station and use a regular keyboard before they do any serious work with it.
However, if you catch this project at the petty cash stage, then the manager is more likely to listen to you(unless of course it's their idea), because they will see how it failing might hurt them.
If IS isn't involved in things they tend to make your life miserable, because you'll end up supporting things which are broken in their natural state.
There are a few dozen other dodgy practices including a few IP violations(which for the most part slashdot doesn't seem to care about in other instances), but when it comes right down to it Microsoft doesn't pour toxic substances into the sea, hasn't to the best of my knowledge killed anybody, either deliberately or through negligence, and while they bought out everyone in competition for a while, people chose to accept those offers and must have felt they were getting a good deal at the time.
When it comes right down to it, Bill donates an awful lot of money and time to charity, which is something we should probably all be doing, but mostly aren't, as someone's got to do it, perhaps we should give him some credit.
Not to mention that it's always a great thing for the American media to be increasing the social standing of someone rich and powerful for doing the right thing, maybe more rich people will follow.
For the pharmaceutical companies, could they have perhaps done something to make the drug safer? Maybe, but not likely, most of what companies can do to make drugs safer is done by lowering dosages and if someone takes a whole bottle it's somewhat difficult. That's not to say that some drugs aren't unsafe, or that sometimes you can't get a new drug which doesn't work the same way(see the new sleeping pills people can't OD on), but for the most part when taken as directed medications are pretty safe, and there's often not much a manufacturer can do to save people from misuing their product that wouldn't detrimentally affect the effectiveness of the drug in a serious manner. As for making it taste foul, then the person who was supposed to take it probably wouldn't, not tom mention that sometimes kids are required to take these drugs. That's not to say they should taste like candy, but you know.
Doctors? Do some doctors do this sort of thing, prescribing things people don't need? Probably. Sometimes people expect a pill, but most doctors will have the common sense to give you something pretty simple and harmless in that case? Do some doctors prescribe pills just for profit, not really, they're much more likely to do unecessary tests or administer unnecessary things when you're with them, unless they've got a kickback deal with the pharmacist or drug company at least, and most GP's aren't likely to have something like that. As for smaller bottles, you'd probably be one of the first people screaming that doctors were trying to screw you if you had to go back to the pharmacist more often because you didn't have enough pills to finish your treatment, not to mention that as most people stop taking their pills too early now, they'd be very unlikely to go back and get more.
The pharmacist. Sure, invent me a pill bottle kids can't actually open, most of the current systems tend to be harder for me to open than for kids. Otherwise I approve of this.
Parents. BINGO!!
Kids, where do they learn this? See Parents.
That's not to say that sometimes such events aren't just tragic accidents and that parents are always to blame, but most of the ability to avoid these problems lies with parents. Most of the ability to protect children from anything lies with the people who spend the most time with them(parents, teachers, day care, etc), and parents are, or at least should be, the ones who spend the most time.
In short public transportation is an industry which, when done properly, (which is to say with sufficient capacity and regularity that ordinary people will want to use it) provides the largest benefit to the government and to the tax payer, and should therefor be funded by the tax payer.
You believe that the rich should be able to waste non-renewable resources(gas) or expensive to renew resources(water) and in some cases harm other people in the process, but I would bet you don't believe that some thug should get to take your oil or your water because he or she is bigger than you or has a gun, or any of a thousand other things which governments regulate. Just because forces are economic and not physical doesn't mean they shouldn't be regulated, and even in the US one of the most wealth for wealth, greed is the key, capitalism to it's unnatural extreme countries I have ever encountered(I lived their for 13 years), this is already the case.
The free market economy is a joke, it's not free, it can't be free, and the sooner we all face this fact and start working out what particular bits of freedom or control are most important to us, the better we'll all be. To use a non water metaphore, do I want people who don't need a offroad vehicle to drive one, to burn up resources we need, to pump crap into the air, because it amuses them to do so, no, I don't. On the other hand I don't want the government coming in and telling me I have to turn off my PC now because I've had it on for more than the regulated number of hours today and I'm using too much electricity. It's all about balance, and if we accept that we have to regulate some things and regulate them now things will be much better off for everyone.
I also find it incredibly amusing when Americans complain about paying $20 for a movie or $15 for a CD, or $50 for brand new game. Now don't get me wrong, I used to do it to when I lived there, but after spending a year paying $20 for a CD $30 for a movie, and $100 for a video game(explain that one to me), and that's at the cheaper places, I've started to realize that most of the world would happily stop pirating if they could just pay the local equivilant of American prices.
Let me repeat that for any record execs who might possibly read this, most people in the rest of the world would gladly buy your product if you charged the local equivilant of what you do in the US. I know that would hit into your profits, and that some people would start exporting CD's from cheap countries to the states, but that's life.
To give the metaphor a bit more clarity, The British government declared that the American people would only be able to use one proprietary format of tea when they wanted to drink any and the people of Massachusets said that they didn't want that, they wanted and open standard of tea which they could buy from and sell to anyone they liked.
So in the boston tea party, Massachusets forcibly rejected a closed economic system in favor of a more open one, and in this case the Massachusets is, perhaps not quite so forcibly, rejecting a closed standard in favor of an open one.
Lady, this is not a rejection of the Boston Tea Party, this is the bloody Boston Tea Party writ in modern terms. Nice to see that at least a few people in the US still believe in what the founding fathers stood for as opposed to simply following word for word their writings which were created before half of what we use in a given day was even possible.
Dell is actually pretty good about this believe it or not, you only usually have to argue with them once and they'll send out a local tech who is nice and courteous and fixes the problem promptly and effectively. I'd rather talk to someone local in the first place, but that's better than nothing. I've admitedly had a few problems with dell, like them shipping my employer a replacement monitor 5 times before they got it right. Three of those times it was worse than the original and once it was the wrong size, but otherwise Dell hasn't been too bad. If you use their e-mail support system and can spell you don't even really have a communicaton problem.
HP on the other hand is hopeless, You've usually got to call them multiple times before they'll even believe there's a problem, then they'll try to convince you that it's your fault(had a user who photocopied a book, and they tried to convince me that because she'd done that she'd damaged the scanner assembly and it was her fault), and the last time a guy came out he was late, and spent most of the time whinging about how he hadn't had anywhere to park, which isn't my problem as they don't actually give me anywhere free to park and there are plenty of available spots in the public parking garage.
True linux has problems, particularly if you're using dodgy drivers and the like(before my wireless nic card drivers went open source my system used to crash all the time), and if you use bleeding edge software you can usually also fix it. I'd also like to say that as someone who supports windows professionally that searching for solutions to problems isn't actually all that easy. I've seen all sorts of things which are almost impossible to google simply because they are impossible to describe. An app fails to start in linux I look at the terminal see what error it spat out and look it up, sometimes there's nothing but if there's something it's usually helpful. Try googling "my pc is slow" and see how much longer your sanity lasts.
Now I'm just new in the industry and I do support which will never pay as well as programming because we're a black hole to the bean counters, but the general point is that $40-50k is fuck all depending on where you live.
A lot of people can only really afford one handheld device and the DS is there to buy and the PSP wasn't, and in some cases I believe still isn't.
This is what they've done here, they've made a place where you can do that, that is designed for the purpose, it's likely to be well lit, and reasonably comfortable and an ideal place to do group work, study, and do all sorts of other things.