There's not a hell of a lot of support for a land Iraq war over here. More than anywhere else, but not a hell of a lot. UK citizens (not gov't) are against it, and just about everyone else is against it.
It's more along the lines that we just don't *care* enough to run around lobbying to stop it. Lots of work, not much benefit. And Bush *really* likes waging war.
What are the cyber-warfare plans of OTHER countries? Is America in the lead on getting organized on this?
I just happened to spend time last week at a talk given by an Army Intelligence officer (keep in mind that the Army does about the least amount of high-tech crap of any of the armed forces).
Basically, there's only one country with major cyberwarfare plans, and it's China. China maintains a standing segment of its army trained specifically in cyberwarfare, and actively conducts research in it. We have far fewer resources in this than China does.
Is it just me, or is what used to be called the military-industrial complex's lobbeying for funds to persue 'cool' research areas undermining the country's ability to make appropriate military responses to novel threats
Oh, come on. Who really wants to make guns and bombs and things like that when you can reroute defense spending to research areas that will advance US tech, regardless of whether it will be any help in a war?
Seems to me that attacks aimed primarily at a civilian population, like depriving the Iraqi people of their porn fix, would be explicitly banned by the Geneva convention.
Minus the 30% duty for import. Unpredictable and more expensive shipping would also offset any savings, even if the import duty didn't exist.
Uh, huh. I don't see UPS opening up packages to check to see what's in there and whether duty has been paid, laddie buck.
more arbitrary than the existing sales tax law that's been in place for a very long time
Oh, really? So if I'm running a mail order shoes company, and I'm based in Oregon but have a small distribution center in Birmingham, do I have to pay taxes to Alabama residents? The answer is NO. A.com would. You don't find that arbitrary?
As for the "AFAIK" (not very far), all mail order is subject to sales tax when sales are made to any state where the mail order company has a physical presence.
I *meant* tax-free in the context of the conversation, which had nothing to do with in-state taxes and everything to do with nationwide taxes. Perhaps you had trouble grasping that.
Most mail order companies have a presence in only one state
Link please.
Saddly, as far as a few moderators know (and also didn't read the article) your post sounded insightful.
Fortunately, yours did not.
Likewise, shame on you moderators who give such clue challenged bitching about tax a +1. Just because it's bitching about paying tax doesn't make it interesting or insightful.
If you don't like the idea of a democratic mod system, find a different forum to post on. The rest of us would be most appreciative.
Troll, sales taxes come from STATES and the the FEDERAL goverment.
Yes. And the Clinton administration had a number of agreements to keep states from levying sales taxes on e-retailer sales. The Bush administration does not. Clinton leaves, lobbyists work hard, e-retailers get taxed. I didn't claim that it was a federal tax.
Troll, there are duties on goods bought on this level(I'm not sure about "industrial sized" purchases) that are levied against those coming into the US to stop this behavior.
Yeah? Try getting a spindle of CDs or something similar (single-unit size, one consumer) shipped from Canada. UPS sees a box, not a taxable CD spindle.
1. Bush is a Republican. Traditionally, Republicans are against the idea of levying new taxes. So, why, again, would he do something like this?
Because a major reason they avoid levying new taxes is because they have strong ties with established industry and the established wealthy. This tax has a minor impact on traditional retailers (who only sell a fraction of their goods over the Internet) and a *huge* impact on the smaller, purely e-retailers who were taking enormous amounts of their sales away last year.
2. If you read the article more closely, you will see that this is an "agreement" (I use the term loosely) between 38 states and online corporations. Bush has exactly zip to do with this.
I'm not blaming Bush for *actively* doing anything. The Clinton administration took a very strong stance that there should be no sales taxes levied on Internet companies. They rammed through a number of agreeements with states precisely not to do this. The Bush administration did *not* do this -- it's more a lack of Clinton's people than the presence of Bush's people.
Point is, the Bush *administration* has a tremendous amount to do with this going through.
3. And, if you read the article more closely, you will see that it's nothing more than extortion on these companies being performed by a cabal of state governments. The so-called "agreement" is nothing more than "pay up voluntarily or we'll come in there with our guns drawn". There's no "lobbying" going on here. Somebody's making money, and the government (or governments, in this case) is going to get a piece. That sounds more like good ol' liberal thinking to me.
Last year, brick-and-mortar sales dropped and gave piss-poor results. E-retail sales shot up, particularly in high-margin consumer electronics. That's a huge number of sales, lots of profit, that the brick-and-mortar types just lost.
Now, Wal-Mart and B&N doesn't do very much of their business online. The vast majority of it is from the store. So it doesn't hurt Wal-Mart or B&N very much to have a tax imposed on online goods. For e-retailers like Amazon, however, this is a nasty blow. E-retail is *very* price sensitive, and it's much easier to do online price comparison, and e-retailers just had their prices all jacked by about 7%. So, yes, B&N and Wal-Mart lost a bit of money, but they gain far more in sales from their upstart competitors.
Mexican products that attempt to compete with US or EU or Japanese products have (in my limited experience) proven to me to be cheap knock-offs or poorly produced versions of what we have here.
We're talking about different things -- I'm talking about e-retailers, you're talking about industry.
I can set up a e-retailer wherever the laws are most beneficial.
What does charging tax have to do with the big companies getting their way?
Helps keep brick-and-mortar competitive with Internet retailers, which overwhelmingly benefits large, established companies with a tremendous amount of capital.
Most of the drawbacks hit pure e-retailers, and put sales back in the pocket of brick-and-mortar.
Hell no. If I had to choose a particular party to back, I'd probably tend toward Republican (though having the entire Executive and Leglislative branch (and insofar as there's partisianship in the Judicial branch, the Supreme Court) controlled by the Republicans does *not* rub me the right way).
Who do you think allowed the DMCA to be approved.
They aren't perfect, that's for sure. However, they also took a *very* hands-off approach compared to radio, TV, etc.
Or started laying the foundation for corporations to control all?
Umm...what the heck are you *talking* about? Heck, if any party has a rep for helping big corporations, it's probably the Republicans.
Or allowed Microsoft to trample over everyone?
That would be Bush. Clinton had an anti-trust lawsuit going to try to penalize and break up Microsoft, which the Bush administration dropped like a hot potato once they got into office.
Next time stop spouting the party line, and learn a little.
If you can stand using another protocol, I'm probably most impressed with the security in Jabber (I've played with gabber), which encrypts everything under the sun and uses GPG for authentication...
It ain't hard to setup an FTP server at home, and most Universities (Colleges for the yanks) allow FTP access to their students.
Why not just use that?
Because FTP isn't designed for this. FTP is great if you have an always-on machine at the same IP (or at least hostname). It was originally designed to let a user work with files in *his* account's disk space.
AIM and other IM programs with file-transfer capabilites are far better suited to most home users. The IP of the user may change. The user may only come online at some time. The remote user is made aware of this ("Oh, John's on. I can send him that presentation file."), since an IM program handles registering and retransmitting this information.
Furthermore, FTP exposes a whole collection of directories, and generally (unless you hack things up) grants write and list access to *other* things in an upload directory. The user wants to make available a *single file*, and wants to know when the transfer is done, so that they can get offline. IM clients do a better job of providing this functionality than do FTP server/clients.
Often, file transfer is done at the same time people are talking to each other. This combines two frequently-used-together services, since an IM client would likely be necessary anyway.
Finally, even setting up an FTP system to approximate the model desired is *much* more work. You'd need a dynamic hostname, need to run a daemon to keep it up to date, the remote person would need to have a program that keeps trying to log in to tell when you're online, you'd need to set up permissions so that your server didn't let people see files that other people uploaded, you'd need some monitor for people logging in...
FTP was designed in an era where people didn't have goddamn filewalls or NAT all over. Frankly, they do now, and pose a major irritation if someone's trying to send a file. AIM is quite good at dealing with firewalls.
Also, FTP security sucks. Kerberized FTP is *very* rarely used, as is SSL-tunneled FTP. Plaintext passwords...not even MD5 support. Ick. Granted, most popular messaging protocols aren't much better, but they are improving.
So while FTP is better for the task that it was designed for, for the kind of thing this guy is doing, he's better off with IM.
And cars can be used to ram people. Should we ban them from the American public? You can drop chairs on people, use paint from art class to vandalize the school, stuff people in lockers, etc.
AIM et all should be banned from installation on institution owned student computers, or at the very least, used in a very selective manner.
At some point, you have to place some responsibility on the students. You can't simply control them throughout school (and then expect them to suddenly mature on graduation day).
If people are going to screw up, they're going to do it. I've never understood why IT personnel (more than general managers in the workplace or teachers in school) feel a deep-seated need to try to control behavior like this.
there is currently no way to monitor, filter, or track instant messages that go across it.
Just out of curiosity, do you *approve* of these policies? I'd have to say that I feel that the ability to privately say what you want to is fundamentally a fairly reasonable thing.
AIM is an extremely inexpensive, versatile tool that many people use in the workplace and in college. Why deny it to high-schoolers?
After having some incidents with AIM (including a bomb threat that AOL would not trace for us, even with a search warrant from the FBI), we shut down all Internet-based instant messaging programs.
This, also, I don't understand. It seems to me like AIM's getting scapegoated here. There are many, many ways to make untraceable bomb threats. Hell, take a computer, type it out, print it, and leave it somewhere, handling the paper with plastic gloves and leaving it in a plastic envelope. Bomb threats are sort of part of high school life -- I remember a couple in high school. AIM's not at fault here.
The liability of having Internet traffic that is basically untraceable without a sniffer is something we can't have.
Frankly, *I* found the constant monitoring of everything we did in high school abhorrent and Orwellian, and with a number of friends, constantly went around the school disabling monitoring systems (which happened to use a client-side system).
Local, state, and even federal programs require that we monitor and filter all Internet access by minors.
I hope you *tell* the students that you're doing this. Otherwise, you're committing a federal crime in monitoring what they're doing -- falls under the wiretapping laws.
So I can just buy from a Canadian e-retailer. Or a Mexican. Doesn't really affect me where they're based, and now they have a 7% price advantage over US-based companies. Way to go in a poor economy, US government. Now, instead of keeping the cash *in* the economy and picking it up on income taxes each time around, we throw it out to other countries. Kind of stupid. AFAIK, mail order companies are still tax-free, to show how arbitrary and lobbist-based this is.
I was wondering how long it would be from the time Bush took office (and left the Clinton/Gore approach of "fund the Internet to build it up, but keep it hands off as much as possible") to the time big companies (brick-and-mortar types) started getting their way legally.
The floppy issue is not a PC problem -- it's specific to the Windows disk scheduling system, and will probably never be fixed.
I can use floppies in my Linux box quite happily. It's just like another hard drive.
(Pet Peeve: that goddamn mechanical eject button *sucks*. Apple was smart enough not to use it, but it was devised in an age that didn't have enough memory to do buffered disk I/O, and it's a royal pain for those of us with OSes that can buffer up writes -- you *can* manually eject the thing w/o umounting it).
Mechanical ejects should only be used as an emergency measure...
Haven't seen what things are like in OS X (heck, may be hard to find an OS X system with a floppy), but I doubt things are that different from BSD -- probably works just fine too.
Don't take this the wrong way -- I liked your anecdote -- but I tended to think that *you* missed the point of your story. You were young, had a lot of ideas pressed into you about what you should do, and it was impossible for anyone to convince you otherwise, regardless of how hard they tried to ram it down their throat. They just plain needed experience to come to their own conclusions. Now, here *you* are trying to do exactly what the gardener did...which didn't work. Lord Bitman isn't going to change his mind without experience, I suspect.
You know, I really don't remember MacWrite taking forever to come out, but I *do* remember it being pretty damn bug-free -- unlike MS Office.
Writing apps that aren't bloated does *not* necessarily entail lots of debugging and excessive writing time.
Too many programmers have decided that doing a crummy job is good enough (since, thanks to hardware advances, people won't usually notice unless a crash turns up). As a result, the state of software engineering and the quality of the products turned out is downright awful compared to any other field of engineering.
I'd make more of the tons of bloat, custom widgets and statically linked libraries in Open Office than I would of 17k of header data in a Word doc.
Err...I hate to break this to you, but Word suffers from the same bloat, custom widgets and statically linked libraries (well, for all intents and purposes, since most Office code isn't shared with other apps).
Way back in the day there was a lot of talk about banning child pornography (which is something that everyone can actually agree is morally wrong, as well as illegal).
I think any time you try making blanket statements about morality, you're going to find that you've got a pretty tough task.
Oh, come on. Warez channels have had a major cultural impact on the world!
(AFAI can tell, warez speak came from people on AOL channels trying to avoid keyword-based systems for tagging warez channels, though I'd be interested if anyone knows that the source was other than AOL).
Slashdot Mirror
There's not a hell of a lot of support for a land Iraq war over here. More than anywhere else, but not a hell of a lot. UK citizens (not gov't) are against it, and just about everyone else is against it.
It's more along the lines that we just don't *care* enough to run around lobbying to stop it. Lots of work, not much benefit. And Bush *really* likes waging war.
What are the cyber-warfare plans of OTHER countries? Is America in the lead on getting organized on this?
I just happened to spend time last week at a talk given by an Army Intelligence officer (keep in mind that the Army does about the least amount of high-tech crap of any of the armed forces).
Basically, there's only one country with major cyberwarfare plans, and it's China. China maintains a standing segment of its army trained specifically in cyberwarfare, and actively conducts research in it. We have far fewer resources in this than China does.
Is it just me, or is what used to be called the military-industrial complex's lobbeying for funds to persue 'cool' research areas undermining the country's ability to make appropriate military responses to novel threats
Oh, come on. Who really wants to make guns and bombs and things like that when you can reroute defense spending to research areas that will advance US tech, regardless of whether it will be any help in a war?
...the Geneva convention...
Seems to me that attacks aimed primarily at a civilian population, like depriving the Iraqi people of their porn fix, would be explicitly banned by the Geneva convention.
Minus the 30% duty for import. Unpredictable and more expensive shipping would also offset any savings, even if the import duty didn't exist.
.com would. You don't find that arbitrary?
Uh, huh. I don't see UPS opening up packages to check to see what's in there and whether duty has been paid, laddie buck.
more arbitrary than the existing sales tax law that's been in place for a very long time
Oh, really? So if I'm running a mail order shoes company, and I'm based in Oregon but have a small distribution center in Birmingham, do I have to pay taxes to Alabama residents? The answer is NO. A
As for the "AFAIK" (not very far), all mail order is subject to sales tax when sales are made to any state where the mail order company has a physical presence.
I *meant* tax-free in the context of the conversation, which had nothing to do with in-state taxes and everything to do with nationwide taxes. Perhaps you had trouble grasping that.
Most mail order companies have a presence in only one state
Link please.
Saddly, as far as a few moderators know (and also didn't read the article) your post sounded insightful.
Fortunately, yours did not.
Likewise, shame on you moderators who give such clue challenged bitching about tax a +1. Just because it's bitching about paying tax doesn't make it interesting or insightful.
If you don't like the idea of a democratic mod system, find a different forum to post on. The rest of us would be most appreciative.
How the hell much longer is it going to be until we get patent reform?
It's pretty obvious to everyone that changes are necessary, but there's no movement to change things.
Troll, sales taxes come from STATES and the the FEDERAL goverment.
Yes. And the Clinton administration had a number of agreements to keep states from levying sales taxes on e-retailer sales. The Bush administration does not. Clinton leaves, lobbyists work hard, e-retailers get taxed. I didn't claim that it was a federal tax.
Troll, there are duties on goods bought on this level(I'm not sure about "industrial sized" purchases) that are levied against those coming into the US to stop this behavior.
Yeah? Try getting a spindle of CDs or something similar (single-unit size, one consumer) shipped from Canada. UPS sees a box, not a taxable CD spindle.
1. Bush is a Republican. Traditionally, Republicans are against the idea of levying new taxes. So, why, again, would he do something like this?
Because a major reason they avoid levying new taxes is because they have strong ties with established industry and the established wealthy. This tax has a minor impact on traditional retailers (who only sell a fraction of their goods over the Internet) and a *huge* impact on the smaller, purely e-retailers who were taking enormous amounts of their sales away last year.
2. If you read the article more closely, you will see that this is an "agreement" (I use the term loosely) between 38 states and online corporations. Bush has exactly zip to do with this.
I'm not blaming Bush for *actively* doing anything. The Clinton administration took a very strong stance that there should be no sales taxes levied on Internet companies. They rammed through a number of agreeements with states precisely not to do this. The Bush administration did *not* do this -- it's more a lack of Clinton's people than the presence of Bush's people.
Point is, the Bush *administration* has a tremendous amount to do with this going through.
3. And, if you read the article more closely, you will see that it's nothing more than extortion on these companies being performed by a cabal of state governments. The so-called "agreement" is nothing more than "pay up voluntarily or we'll come in there with our guns drawn". There's no "lobbying" going on here. Somebody's making money, and the government (or governments, in this case) is going to get a piece. That sounds more like good ol' liberal thinking to me.
Last year, brick-and-mortar sales dropped and gave piss-poor results. E-retail sales shot up, particularly in high-margin consumer electronics. That's a huge number of sales, lots of profit, that the brick-and-mortar types just lost.
Now, Wal-Mart and B&N doesn't do very much of their business online. The vast majority of it is from the store. So it doesn't hurt Wal-Mart or B&N very much to have a tax imposed on online goods. For e-retailers like Amazon, however, this is a nasty blow. E-retail is *very* price sensitive, and it's much easier to do online price comparison, and e-retailers just had their prices all jacked by about 7%. So, yes, B&N and Wal-Mart lost a bit of money, but they gain far more in sales from their upstart competitors.
Mexican products that attempt to compete with US or EU or Japanese products have (in my limited experience) proven to me to be cheap knock-offs or poorly produced versions of what we have here.
We're talking about different things -- I'm talking about e-retailers, you're talking about industry.
I can set up a e-retailer wherever the laws are most beneficial.
What does charging tax have to do with the big companies getting their way?
Helps keep brick-and-mortar competitive with Internet retailers, which overwhelmingly benefits large, established companies with a tremendous amount of capital.
Most of the drawbacks hit pure e-retailers, and put sales back in the pocket of brick-and-mortar.
You are a clueless Democrat aren't you?
Hell no. If I had to choose a particular party to back, I'd probably tend toward Republican (though having the entire Executive and Leglislative branch (and insofar as there's partisianship in the Judicial branch, the Supreme Court) controlled by the Republicans does *not* rub me the right way).
Who do you think allowed the DMCA to be approved.
They aren't perfect, that's for sure. However, they also took a *very* hands-off approach compared to radio, TV, etc.
Or started laying the foundation for corporations to control all?
Umm...what the heck are you *talking* about? Heck, if any party has a rep for helping big corporations, it's probably the Republicans.
Or allowed Microsoft to trample over everyone?
That would be Bush. Clinton had an anti-trust lawsuit going to try to penalize and break up Microsoft, which the Bush administration dropped like a hot potato once they got into office.
Next time stop spouting the party line, and learn a little.
Right back at you.
Now, where do I pick up encrypted AIM?
If you can stand using another protocol, I'm probably most impressed with the security in Jabber (I've played with gabber), which encrypts everything under the sun and uses GPG for authentication...
It ain't hard to setup an FTP server at home, and most Universities (Colleges for the yanks) allow FTP access to their students.
Why not just use that?
Because FTP isn't designed for this. FTP is great if you have an always-on machine at the same IP (or at least hostname). It was originally designed to let a user work with files in *his* account's disk space.
AIM and other IM programs with file-transfer capabilites are far better suited to most home users. The IP of the user may change. The user may only come online at some time. The remote user is made aware of this ("Oh, John's on. I can send him that presentation file."), since an IM program handles registering and retransmitting this information.
Furthermore, FTP exposes a whole collection of directories, and generally (unless you hack things up) grants write and list access to *other* things in an upload directory. The user wants to make available a *single file*, and wants to know when the transfer is done, so that they can get offline. IM clients do a better job of providing this functionality than do FTP server/clients.
Often, file transfer is done at the same time people are talking to each other. This combines two frequently-used-together services, since an IM client would likely be necessary anyway.
Finally, even setting up an FTP system to approximate the model desired is *much* more work. You'd need a dynamic hostname, need to run a daemon to keep it up to date, the remote person would need to have a program that keeps trying to log in to tell when you're online, you'd need to set up permissions so that your server didn't let people see files that other people uploaded, you'd need some monitor for people logging in...
FTP was designed in an era where people didn't have goddamn filewalls or NAT all over. Frankly, they do now, and pose a major irritation if someone's trying to send a file. AIM is quite good at dealing with firewalls.
Also, FTP security sucks. Kerberized FTP is *very* rarely used, as is SSL-tunneled FTP. Plaintext passwords...not even MD5 support. Ick. Granted, most popular messaging protocols aren't much better, but they are improving.
So while FTP is better for the task that it was designed for, for the kind of thing this guy is doing, he's better off with IM.
And cars can be used to ram people. Should we ban them from the American public? You can drop chairs on people, use paint from art class to vandalize the school, stuff people in lockers, etc.
AIM et all should be banned from installation on institution owned student computers, or at the very least, used in a very selective manner.
At some point, you have to place some responsibility on the students. You can't simply control them throughout school (and then expect them to suddenly mature on graduation day).
If people are going to screw up, they're going to do it. I've never understood why IT personnel (more than general managers in the workplace or teachers in school) feel a deep-seated need to try to control behavior like this.
there is currently no way to monitor, filter, or track instant messages that go across it.
Just out of curiosity, do you *approve* of these policies? I'd have to say that I feel that the ability to privately say what you want to is fundamentally a fairly reasonable thing.
AIM is an extremely inexpensive, versatile tool that many people use in the workplace and in college. Why deny it to high-schoolers?
After having some incidents with AIM (including a bomb threat that AOL would not trace for us, even with a search warrant from the FBI), we shut down all Internet-based instant messaging programs.
This, also, I don't understand. It seems to me like AIM's getting scapegoated here. There are many, many ways to make untraceable bomb threats. Hell, take a computer, type it out, print it, and leave it somewhere, handling the paper with plastic gloves and leaving it in a plastic envelope. Bomb threats are sort of part of high school life -- I remember a couple in high school. AIM's not at fault here.
The liability of having Internet traffic that is basically untraceable without a sniffer is something we can't have.
Frankly, *I* found the constant monitoring of everything we did in high school abhorrent and Orwellian, and with a number of friends, constantly went around the school disabling monitoring systems (which happened to use a client-side system).
Local, state, and even federal programs require that we monitor and filter all Internet access by minors.
I hope you *tell* the students that you're doing this. Otherwise, you're committing a federal crime in monitoring what they're doing -- falls under the wiretapping laws.
So I can just buy from a Canadian e-retailer. Or a Mexican. Doesn't really affect me where they're based, and now they have a 7% price advantage over US-based companies. Way to go in a poor economy, US government. Now, instead of keeping the cash *in* the economy and picking it up on income taxes each time around, we throw it out to other countries. Kind of stupid. AFAIK, mail order companies are still tax-free, to show how arbitrary and lobbist-based this is.
I was wondering how long it would be from the time Bush took office (and left the Clinton/Gore approach of "fund the Internet to build it up, but keep it hands off as much as possible") to the time big companies (brick-and-mortar types) started getting their way legally.
Women don't get drafted, either.
Despite having the vote.
Lovely world, isn't it...you don't hear feminists complaining about the benefits of being female, just the drawbacks.
The floppy issue is not a PC problem -- it's specific to the Windows disk scheduling system, and will probably never be fixed.
I can use floppies in my Linux box quite happily. It's just like another hard drive.
(Pet Peeve: that goddamn mechanical eject button *sucks*. Apple was smart enough not to use it, but it was devised in an age that didn't have enough memory to do buffered disk I/O, and it's a royal pain for those of us with OSes that can buffer up writes -- you *can* manually eject the thing w/o umounting it).
Mechanical ejects should only be used as an emergency measure...
Haven't seen what things are like in OS X (heck, may be hard to find an OS X system with a floppy), but I doubt things are that different from BSD -- probably works just fine too.
Try here for QuickTime/mplayer instructions.
Looks like he was just trying to play the initial frame (which is a different track, and appears to be specially stored as a JPEG image.
Don't take this the wrong way -- I liked your anecdote -- but I tended to think that *you* missed the point of your story. You were young, had a lot of ideas pressed into you about what you should do, and it was impossible for anyone to convince you otherwise, regardless of how hard they tried to ram it down their throat. They just plain needed experience to come to their own conclusions. Now, here *you* are trying to do exactly what the gardener did...which didn't work. Lord Bitman isn't going to change his mind without experience, I suspect.
You know, I really don't remember MacWrite taking forever to come out, but I *do* remember it being pretty damn bug-free -- unlike MS Office.
Writing apps that aren't bloated does *not* necessarily entail lots of debugging and excessive writing time.
Too many programmers have decided that doing a crummy job is good enough (since, thanks to hardware advances, people won't usually notice unless a crash turns up). As a result, the state of software engineering and the quality of the products turned out is downright awful compared to any other field of engineering.
I'd make more of the tons of bloat, custom widgets and statically linked libraries in Open Office than I would of 17k of header data in a Word doc.
Err...I hate to break this to you, but Word suffers from the same bloat, custom widgets and statically linked libraries (well, for all intents and purposes, since most Office code isn't shared with other apps).
Way back in the day there was a lot of talk about banning child pornography (which is something that everyone can actually agree is morally wrong, as well as illegal).
I think any time you try making blanket statements about morality, you're going to find that you've got a pretty tough task.
What are these "chat" channels you speak of?
Oh, come on. Warez channels have had a major cultural impact on the world!
(AFAI can tell, warez speak came from people on AOL channels trying to avoid keyword-based systems for tagging warez channels, though I'd be interested if anyone knows that the source was other than AOL).