Why not? They did almost the exact same thing in the US Antitrust trial -- completely broke Windows when told to remove IE....
Of course, the trial is a completely different situation. In the trial, MS demonstrated a single installation of windows for a judge, trying to get the judge to see things their way. TFA says that MS DELIBERATELY SHIPPED countless broken copies of Windows to European customers. How could that work out to their advantage?
...it's really insightful. I think it's much more likely that MS just screwed up the implementation of removing Media Player. I can't see how it's to their advantage to ship out millions of copies of Windows that they KNOW are defective - you might as well put a sign on the box saying "don't buy me!"
Would MS really be so stupid as to DELIBERATELY cripple a product sent to its consumers? Or is this just paranoia? Much has been made of MS' ham-fisted rigging of evidence to show that Windows didn't work properly without IE. But that was crippling Windows for a DEMONSTRATION, which is hardly the same as sending out millions of copies of a defective product.
Jacques Six-pacquet in Europe is not going to be thinking: "Damn the EU for crippling my Windows!" He'll be thinking "Sacre bleu! Windows sucks!"
I don't see how shipping a deliberately broken version of Windows helps MS.
Were you supposed to interpret this as the real reason? I've only read the short story, but it seemed to me like an excuse proffered by the authorities at the time rather than something you're expected to accept at face value. Not sure I'd bother to read the book, but the short story was good.
If it was an excuse, I was never able to figure out what the real reason was.
The real conflict goes on inside the child's head between authority and morality - the story is there.
Concur. But I couldn't ever suppress the thought that it was rather unbelievable that the child would be IN the situation postulated, which made it difficult to enjoy the book.
I thought it wasn't so much the complexity of war as it was the ability to come up with the best strategies.
There's really a problem of terminology happening here. The fact that the situation is very complex means that the tactics involved are very complex... how do you conduct 1 v 1, 1 v 2, 2 v 1, 2 v 2 air/space battles? It also means that the "operational art" is somewhat more complex... how do you manage your entire fleet of air/space vehicles to win the battle? But the "strategy", as it's defined by military science, doesn't care very much about the technology involved... "Engage a portion of the enemy's force with all of your force" is still a valid principle. So is "maintain the unity of command". Even at the tactical level, nothing goes on in Ender's Game that ordinary humans couldn't master today, given a few years training. And operationally/strategically, we already do this stuff.
The US has the best weapon technology on the planet. So it basically uses brute strength to win. But what if the enemy had an exact same weapons as the US ?
True today. But for most of the history of air combat, the US and its enemies were roughly equal in technology - in WWII, the US and Axis were about at the same level technologically speaking. Same deal during the Cold War - the Russians were not very far behind us technologically, and they made up for that with redundancy. Soviet airplanes not as good as the American ones? We'll throw more of them at you. But in neither case did it require any kind of superhuman capabilities to figure this stuff out.
The stated reason for recruiting children at a young age was that space combat was much more complex than what came before it - so much so that kids not only had to be recruited and trained almost from birth, you needed special selective breeding techniques to get likely candidates. But this is hogwash.
Think back to warfare at the turn of the last century - all combat was conducted at the surface of the earth, at relatively slow speeds. Within 50 years, we had fully developed air warfare, with ordinary mortals fighting 3d battles at hundreds of miles per hour... no genetic engineering or lifelong training required. And by the time the next 50 years went by, we were able to add long-range sensors & weapons, supersonic capabilities, multiple simultaneous engagement capabilities, etc, etc. Still no supermen required, and you could learn it with a few years of training.
I've read Ender's Game, and the battle Ender was ultimately asked to fight was no more complex than this. Given the same technology, a US Navy battlegroup staff could learn to fight a battle like Ender's within a few years at most! This problem was so jarring for me that I found it impossible to suspend my disbelief and enjoy the book.
Sean
P.S. for mods: just because the parent didn't like the book doesn't make him a troll. The level of groupthink around here is getting ridiculous.
Sometimes life just isnt worth living. Not everyone wants to be a cube-whore who has no life a mortgage 2.3 kids and an overpriced house in suburbia.
So your contention is that the only two choices people have in life are a) 2.3 kids and a life in suburbia or b) death? You might want to read this.
In my view, there are very few, if any, reasons to kill one's self. Depression is certainly not one of them - it's a disease that's very treatable with drugs and psychotherapy.
With the exception of the booty-wiping aspect, you can get all of this right now from a Treo 650. Caveat - I'm not sure of the pixel count of the included camera, but the pictures it takes are pretty good...
No. The link specifically refers to ActBlue and its preferred candidates, but it's generally true that campaign and other political contributions are not tax deductible.
... that torture isn't even effective. It's pretty generally recognized that you can't depend on information you get out of torturing someone, as they'll say anything to get you to stop.
So even if you put aside all the moral reasons why torture is a bad policy, there's no reason to do it.
all the advanced features in M$ Office that I use and does so without falling apart I'll switch
MS Word doesn't support all the advanced features of MS Word without falling apart. Ever tried to change the style of one type of heading and had ALL the heading styles inexplicably change (even if they aren't, at least apparently, based on each other)? Ever copied a bit of text from one Word document to another, and had styles all through the document mysteriously change? Ever try to troubleshoot bullets & numbering issues in Word?
For every problem I've heard OO.o accused of, I've seen at least one problem in Word.
... Oh wait, thats right the more money you make, the less you get taxed : )
This is absolutely false.
Not so fast. It's only false if you consider income tax alone. Once you add Social Security and Medicare taxes (into which the poor and middle class pay a proportionally larger amount than the wealthy), gasoline taxes, sales taxes, etc; the wealthy pay about the same proportion of taxes as the rest of us.
I object to the notion that a dollar (to a rich man) is somehow not as valuable as another dollar is to a poor man.
Objecting to facts only makes you look stupid. You should go look up the definition of "marginal value" sometime. Do the thought experiment: if you drop $5 in front of a bum, he'll scramble for it - for him, $5 holds off starvation for another day. If you drop $5 in front of Bill Gates, he wouldn't bend over to pick it up - an additional $5 dollars would make absolutely no difference in the way he lives his life.
If what you say is true, I'm sure Bill Gates would love to have you pay his tax bill.
Any time Bill G. wants to trade his net worth and tax bill for my net worth and tax bill, he just has to pick up the phone.
Mathematics is not a human invention. If it were, presumably we could invent any kind of mathematics we want, including one in which 2 + 2 = 5. In fact, numbers have inherent properties, which we are not at liberty to change.
Nature neither knows nor cares what 1+1 is, nor does it care that you can't divide by zero. Have you ever tried long division in Roman numerals?
The Romans used poor notation, therefore mathematics is a human invention? The logic there is lost on me.
What about in cultures where their numbers are 1, 2, 3, "many"?
Same problem as before. Some cultures didn't study math, therefore math is a human invention?
Mathematics is more properly characterized as a discovery. Nature neither knows nor cares whether we use Roman numerals, or if we know how to count beyond three, but it's a FACT that e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0.
Most people would rather have someone else change the oil in their cars, even though it takes 10 minutes and half the money than professionals charge.
Hogwash.
driving to the auto parts place to get oil, filters, etc - 20 minutes
draining oil, removing filter, installing new filter, adding oil - 10 minutes for this step only if you do this for a living. At least 15 minutes for ordinary mortals.
Driving halfway across the county to the only place that will take used oil for recycling - 45 minutes
Washing the clothes that got dirty while working on car - 30 minutes (with the possibility of doing other things during wash/dry cycle)
45 minutes/$30 spent getting Jiffy Lube to do it, while I shop, read, etc... priceless
Yes, I changed my own oil for years. Now I have better things to do with my life. Change a few words around in this reasoning, and you'll understand why "most people" don't want to fool around with their computers.
... with the link from Global Security. There were no truly "native inhabitants". The islands were unoccupied when the British took possession of them - the so-called "native inhabitants" were shipped in from other islands in the Indian Ocean to serve as plantation labor. When they were no longer useful as plantation laborers, the Brits shipped them to Mauritius.
Also, the island didn't become a "bomber base" for almost 30 years after the plantation workers were removed - it was nothing more than a communications station until about 1979, and serious bombing didn't start to happen from there until 1990, during the first Persian Gulf war. The "natives" had been shipped out in 1961.
... are also safety engineers, database developers, holders of advanced degrees, and other sorts of/. denizens. You might want to beware of generalizing.
It is simply a matter of keeping your address clean. The only way spammers can send me mail right now is if they brute force my email address, and that doesn't happen very often.
It only needs to happen once. Then that email address is screwed forever. It's happened to me, even though I've practiced good e-mail hygiene all along - and I can't easily change the address.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, because the EU ordered them to? The point was that MS forcing everyone to accept both the codecs AND the player was against the law.
Sean
Of course, the trial is a completely different situation. In the trial, MS demonstrated a single installation of windows for a judge, trying to get the judge to see things their way. TFA says that MS DELIBERATELY SHIPPED countless broken copies of Windows to European customers. How could that work out to their advantage?
Sean
...it's really insightful. I think it's much more likely that MS just screwed up the implementation of removing Media Player. I can't see how it's to their advantage to ship out millions of copies of Windows that they KNOW are defective - you might as well put a sign on the box saying "don't buy me!"
Sean
Would MS really be so stupid as to DELIBERATELY cripple a product sent to its consumers? Or is this just paranoia? Much has been made of MS' ham-fisted rigging of evidence to show that Windows didn't work properly without IE. But that was crippling Windows for a DEMONSTRATION, which is hardly the same as sending out millions of copies of a defective product.
Jacques Six-pacquet in Europe is not going to be thinking: "Damn the EU for crippling my Windows!" He'll be thinking "Sacre bleu! Windows sucks!"
I don't see how shipping a deliberately broken version of Windows helps MS.
Sean
If it was an excuse, I was never able to figure out what the real reason was.
Concur. But I couldn't ever suppress the thought that it was rather unbelievable that the child would be IN the situation postulated, which made it difficult to enjoy the book.
Sean
There's really a problem of terminology happening here. The fact that the situation is very complex means that the tactics involved are very complex... how do you conduct 1 v 1, 1 v 2, 2 v 1, 2 v 2 air/space battles? It also means that the "operational art" is somewhat more complex... how do you manage your entire fleet of air/space vehicles to win the battle? But the "strategy", as it's defined by military science, doesn't care very much about the technology involved... "Engage a portion of the enemy's force with all of your force" is still a valid principle. So is "maintain the unity of command". Even at the tactical level, nothing goes on in Ender's Game that ordinary humans couldn't master today, given a few years training. And operationally/strategically, we already do this stuff.
True today. But for most of the history of air combat, the US and its enemies were roughly equal in technology - in WWII, the US and Axis were about at the same level technologically speaking. Same deal during the Cold War - the Russians were not very far behind us technologically, and they made up for that with redundancy. Soviet airplanes not as good as the American ones? We'll throw more of them at you. But in neither case did it require any kind of superhuman capabilities to figure this stuff out.
Sean
The stated reason for recruiting children at a young age was that space combat was much more complex than what came before it - so much so that kids not only had to be recruited and trained almost from birth, you needed special selective breeding techniques to get likely candidates. But this is hogwash.
Think back to warfare at the turn of the last century - all combat was conducted at the surface of the earth, at relatively slow speeds. Within 50 years, we had fully developed air warfare, with ordinary mortals fighting 3d battles at hundreds of miles per hour... no genetic engineering or lifelong training required. And by the time the next 50 years went by, we were able to add long-range sensors & weapons, supersonic capabilities, multiple simultaneous engagement capabilities, etc, etc. Still no supermen required, and you could learn it with a few years of training.
I've read Ender's Game, and the battle Ender was ultimately asked to fight was no more complex than this. Given the same technology, a US Navy battlegroup staff could learn to fight a battle like Ender's within a few years at most! This problem was so jarring for me that I found it impossible to suspend my disbelief and enjoy the book.
Sean
P.S. for mods: just because the parent didn't like the book doesn't make him a troll. The level of groupthink around here is getting ridiculous.
... has been sacked. Obviously, the eWeek article, which I was at first unable to hit, bought the story of El Reg. My apologies.
Sean
In the future, when you copy text wholesale from an article from The Register, you might want to credit them.
Sean
So your contention is that the only two choices people have in life are a) 2.3 kids and a life in suburbia or b) death? You might want to read this.
In my view, there are very few, if any, reasons to kill one's self. Depression is certainly not one of them - it's a disease that's very treatable with drugs and psychotherapy.
Sean
With the exception of the booty-wiping aspect, you can get all of this right now from a Treo 650. Caveat - I'm not sure of the pixel count of the included camera, but the pictures it takes are pretty good...
Sean
Sean
... that torture isn't even effective. It's pretty generally recognized that you can't depend on information you get out of torturing someone, as they'll say anything to get you to stop.
So even if you put aside all the moral reasons why torture is a bad policy, there's no reason to do it.
Sean
Back in my day, when we wanted to slack off, we had to talk to the livestock... and we liked it!
MS Word doesn't support all the advanced features of MS Word without falling apart. Ever tried to change the style of one type of heading and had ALL the heading styles inexplicably change (even if they aren't, at least apparently, based on each other)? Ever copied a bit of text from one Word document to another, and had styles all through the document mysteriously change? Ever try to troubleshoot bullets & numbering issues in Word?
For every problem I've heard OO.o accused of, I've seen at least one problem in Word.
Sean
Not so fast. It's only false if you consider income tax alone. Once you add Social Security and Medicare taxes (into which the poor and middle class pay a proportionally larger amount than the wealthy), gasoline taxes, sales taxes, etc; the wealthy pay about the same proportion of taxes as the rest of us.
Objecting to facts only makes you look stupid. You should go look up the definition of "marginal value" sometime. Do the thought experiment: if you drop $5 in front of a bum, he'll scramble for it - for him, $5 holds off starvation for another day. If you drop $5 in front of Bill Gates, he wouldn't bend over to pick it up - an additional $5 dollars would make absolutely no difference in the way he lives his life.
Any time Bill G. wants to trade his net worth and tax bill for my net worth and tax bill, he just has to pick up the phone.
Sean
Mathematics is not a human invention. If it were, presumably we could invent any kind of mathematics we want, including one in which 2 + 2 = 5. In fact, numbers have inherent properties, which we are not at liberty to change.
The Romans used poor notation, therefore mathematics is a human invention? The logic there is lost on me.
Same problem as before. Some cultures didn't study math, therefore math is a human invention?
Mathematics is more properly characterized as a discovery. Nature neither knows nor cares whether we use Roman numerals, or if we know how to count beyond three, but it's a FACT that e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0.
Sean
Hogwash.
Yes, I changed my own oil for years. Now I have better things to do with my life. Change a few words around in this reasoning, and you'll understand why "most people" don't want to fool around with their computers.
Sean
Because of course, this guy's acquaintances MUST be a representative sample of the Finnish population.
Sean
... with the link from Global Security. There were no truly "native inhabitants". The islands were unoccupied when the British took possession of them - the so-called "native inhabitants" were shipped in from other islands in the Indian Ocean to serve as plantation labor. When they were no longer useful as plantation laborers, the Brits shipped them to Mauritius.
Also, the island didn't become a "bomber base" for almost 30 years after the plantation workers were removed - it was nothing more than a communications station until about 1979, and serious bombing didn't start to happen from there until 1990, during the first Persian Gulf war. The "natives" had been shipped out in 1961.
Here's the link again:
about dodgeSean
... that 3MB down ought to be enough for anybody?
A few years ago, similar arguments could have been made against ordinary broadband. What if I want to download full length movies?
Sean
I was wondering where the "hoagieslapper" nickname came from!
Sean
... where we all have polite, reasoned discussions about the wonders of Windows and the suckiness of Linux. You mean there's another version?
Sean
... are also safety engineers, database developers, holders of advanced degrees, and other sorts of /. denizens. You might want to beware of generalizing.
Sean
"Dictionary attack".
It only needs to happen once. Then that email address is screwed forever. It's happened to me, even though I've practiced good e-mail hygiene all along - and I can't easily change the address.
Sean