The difference is that even if there is no deity, the majority religions still provide useful and positive services to their members.
Granted. But I think the open question is whether religion, in general, does more good than bad. Maybe it's not fair to throw all religions together in a bunch and judge religion collectively. But I also don't think it's fair to cherry pick the parts of religion you like, and downplay the negative aspects.
I think the parent meant that you shouldn't (in theory) need ANY firewall, hardware OR software.
Maybe, but the author referenced the OS, not services that run on an OS.
Anyway, if we start talking about the way the world SHOULD be, there's a lot of things that'll come before all services being secure.
I'd be more interested in what's possible than what should be. I think there's a lot of improvements that can be made on multiple levels of the software stack. But that doesn't mean there's not always going to be the need for multiple levels of security that cover for each other. You really should never be trusting any single component to be perfect.
Its a nonsensical situation that operating systems in general cannot be relied upon for the security of their own network interfaces - after all it is down to the operating system to accept or reject user logins. In the same way it should be the operating system that sets policy about whether to accept or reject packets from arbitrary locations.
In general the software firewalls that come with Operating Systems are quite reliable and can be trusted.
What can't be trusted is that all the firewalls on every machine are configured properly. It's FAR easier to administrate one firewall than it is to administrate 10 or 100 different workstations/servers.
There's no need for some dumb.bank tld for users to hope to verify authenticity of a bank site. All we need is something akin to an electronic ATM card.
The card plugs into a USB port (or a reader plugs into USB and the card plugs into the reader). The card performs several functions:
authenticates the user to the bank (after you enter in a pin). authenticates the bank to the user. authenticates a secure connection to the bank has been established. authenticates each transaction.
for an added bonus, keeps the users authentication secrets INSIDE the magic card (authentication of the user performed via challenge-response).
This is NOT a terribly complicated system. Encryption has been doing authentication for years. If banks wanted to prevent fishing attacks, they'd develop a standard and not do any online banking without this device.
Could it still be hacked? Sure, but an attacker would have to compromise the users computer AND have the magic card inserted into it while performing the attack. Lose your magic card? No problem, it gets invalidated just like an ATM card and the bank sends you a new one, possibly for a small fee.
Of course, banks are too cheap and conservative to do this on their own. We need a regulatory body to start pushing this on them, otherwise it'll never happen.
It may very well be that 99% of the Thai sincerely adore the king, but that only 1% want to mock him. The existence of such laws do not necessarily imply that people are forced to like the king.
Right. And when Saddam Hussein got 99% of the vote several years ago it had nothing to do with the punishment that would happen if you didn't vote Saddam.
Most people will grudgingly accept the situation given to them if the alternative is unpleasant enough.
The article, and many of the comments seem to think a system is either Secure or Insecure. I.e. it's either Perfect or Imperfect. The article talks about every system having holes, blah blah blah.
I'm sorry to say, but security isn't about having a perfect solution. It's a mistake many people make in the IT industry because on a low-level, you can perfectly solve small problems. Many people think this scales up to larger, more complex problems. It doesn't.
My point is that security is a continuum. Pointing out that all systems have flaws doesn't mean that Windows is just as secure/insecure as some alternate reality OS that doesn't exist but in the mind of the article writer.
I'd rather have these folks a little paranoid because you never know when a suspicious looking item really is being used for espionage.
I'd rather the government have a little credibility rather than crying wolf about a coin that's been public knowledge for more than 2 years. I was suspicious if you didn't know anything about the coin, it just never should have been released as a public warning.
It really has little to do with violent crime. Violence is just a technique used by organized crime.
RICO actually stands for:
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act
according to Wikipedia Racketeering is:
The term racket comes from the Italian word ricatto (blackmail) and is also used as a pejorative term for legitimate businesses. Typically, this usage is based on the example of the "protection racket" and indicates that the speaker believes that the business is making money by selling a solution to a problem that it created (or that it intentionally allows to continue to exist), specifically so that continuous purchases of the solution are always needed.
(no, I'm not making that up)
Sound like any large software company we might all be familiar with?
I never thought of Bill Gates as just a non-violent, really smart version of Tony Soprano.. but damned if it doesn't fit.
You miss-understand who's the foolish one. The losses are MUCH greater for the Obama campaign than they are for this guy. He loses a little money, they lose a lot of people connected to Obama, some good will, and gain a little negative publicity. 50 grand is chump change to them. They also could have gained a little positive publicity by paying him the little bit of money he asked for.
Basically, a really dumb move on the part of the Obama campaign.
The situation just isn't analogous to yours. Politicians are a LOT more reliant on public opinion and personal connections than a game company is.
Is there anyone, anywhere who thinks Microsoft will ever do anything that's really free [gnu.org], and therefore portable, cross platform
Ever is a long time. Microsoft will do exactly what you describe shortly after they're losing badly to a competitor. Until then they'll continue to play the monopoly game.
What if some malware attacks in this while? That, I believe, is precisely why Microsoft didn't implement it this way.
There's a tendency for IT people to believe that ALL solutions have to be perfect solutions. Yes, there's some level of increased risk for a few minutes after a use authenticates. But if you have a short period of time where the extra rights stick around, you'll likely get people to actually USE the damn thing rather than running as root (or turning off UAC).
Security in particular is often a balance between usability and security. If the product isn't usable because of the security, the users will MAKE it usable by going around the security (thereby defeating the security). Hmm. Apart from installing/uninstalling software, controlling system settings, and for certain software that hasn't got its act together yet and needs admin permissions, exactly where does UAC pop up?
I couldn't tell you specifically, as I disabled it in Vista months ago. All I know is the damn thing came up waaay too often, so I killed it.
I don't think it's such a bad idea to have some extra means of making sure a user REALLY wants to do a special action. Ubuntu and Fedora handle this by asking a user to authenticate whenever an action requiring elevated rights occurs. It's actually done quite well and is only required for doing things like adding or deleting software, and the rights stick around for a while so you're not constantly typing in passwords.
The problem of course is that Microsoft went crazy and decided to lock down EVERYTHING. To the point where it's just plain annoying running the OS with it on. I tried it for a couple weeks just to see if I could get used to it. There's a tendency for people to crave the old way of doing something not because it's better, but just because that's what they're used to. I did eventually decide UAC was more trouble than it's worth, and disabled it.
I guess I tend to agree with the theory that UAC wasn't really real security, but about putting the blame more on the user. Microsoft can just claim "Well, you DID disable UAC didn't you?, so it's not our problem."
I just bought a Dell laptop last November, and the first thing I did was blow away XP Home, and install Ubuntu. A few months ago I got a new PC at work. First thing I did was blow away Vista home, and install Ubuntu.
For both systems, Linux compatibility was a must. I did my homework and made sure Linux was well supported as far as Wireless was concerned on the laptop. Really I HATE having to do research on hardware and figure out what's well supported, and what's not. If Dell offered Ubuntu back then, it would have been just one less step I had to go though, and more reason to just buy Dell.
It's not going to be a huge market. But even if Dell sales go up only 2% because of Dell offering Ubuntu, I'd guess it'll be a big win for them.
Yes and no. Your problem is you're grouping all CF bulbs together. Some have horrible colors and a relatively long (.5 to 1 second) warm up time. Others are quite close to incandescents in color, and have an effectively instant warm up time.
Yes. If you show up to a technical job interview with a dirty t-shirt on and are rude to the receptionist because you can't "deal with people" then you may not even get the interview after all.
Well, I think that actually goes towards being able to do the job rather than just being a cultural quality. I fear your extreme example has gone outside the bounds of what was being discussed.
I think perhaps what the OP was referring to was less universal "fit factors". It seems that Google wants people to "think like Google", which isn't always necessarily a good thing. A group bias of everyone thinking the same thing can be a dangerous thing indeed. Just look at the current Bush administration for the perfect example of how this can be a terrible, terrible thing.
( yes, i'm biased, i've run extremely large bsd environments, but currently running a linux one.. and trust me, i miss my bsd )
Huh. I've ran Linux servers doing various things for 12 years now. I used to have stability problems around 1995-1998 that weren't hardware related. But since then I can't recall any problems that weren't related to hardware. I have root access and at least partially manage somewhere around 12 different servers doing everything from mail, Samba, Fax serving, VoIP, and backup.
So I'm puzzled when people talk about stability problems. I've seen some stability problems on my Laptop, but they're mostly related to the UI becoming unstable, or the OS getting pissed off if I pull out a PC-Card.
And on another note, I find it hard to believe that so many people are deficient in vitamin D. We may spend a lot more time indoors than our ancestors, but I feel confident I am getting enough sunlight and enough D in foods i consume.
Why are you so confident? You're probbably getting enough vitamin D as established years ago to prevent rickets and other more obvious vitamin D deficiencies. But is the level established years ago high enough to exhibit these anti-cancer benefits? (assuming the vitamin D + cancer link is real).
I think that's part of it. The other part is there's a large group of miss-guided people who have a bug up their butt about some particular thing. The people who think cell phones are harmful blame cell-phones. The people who don't like GM crops blame GM crops. Forget about lack of mechanisms, or these causes not matching or being able to explain the observed pattern, it HAS to be those things, because those things are EVIL!
I think that's what the OP might have been getting at when he mentioned religion. Peoples lack of understanding of cause/effect relationships, and a basic unfamiliarity with how a certain cause would produce a different pattern over time/location/physical evidence can certainly be a contributing factor. But I think much of the driving force behind the kooky explanations is just simply bias and a hidden agenda.
Stephen King was arrested today after complaints from a reader about "disturbing content" in a recent book. The complainant , Marla Milquetoast was quite upset "Hokey Smokes! He had stuff about death in that book! I was sure disturbed!" Police captain Rob Roughup is quoted as saying "The guy clearly has a sick mind. It's unknown if Mr. King is planning any kind of mass killing, or terrorist plots. But we're investigating that possibility".
I haven't explored how much Ubuntu lets you do through GUIs because 'sudo aptitude install wireshark' is just so much easier.
Heh, sure, if you happen to know that you want to install wireshark (and that ethereal is now called wireshark). The thing that drove me crazy about previous Linux distributions was having to know the damn package name beforehand, or at best finding some crappy website that lists them.
Now it's just sudo synaptic (or applications add/remove), and I've got a nice GUI that's far superior to knowing all the package stuff. It doesn't work for everything. I have a dual monitor setup that I had to screw around a lot with using aptitude and google searches, but I was expecting that. Actually it turned out a little easier than I was expecting. No re-compiling the frickin OS and other god-awfull stuff required (though you really need to be a high-level techie to get it to work).
Before we get a bunch of people chiming in to say "but XXXXX is easy in ubuntu, you just open a terminal and type..."
The typing in a terminal days have been coming to an end for a long time. I can do about 95% of what I need to do in Ubuntu without going to a terminal screen. I'm also a developer, so I'm not just doing web browing, email and word processing.
For the average user, I don't see any need to go to a terminal. My dad just had his Windows installation become un-bootable for unknown reasons, so I installed Ubuntu 7.04 dual-booted with a new installation of XP in case he really wanted Windows for some reason. Everything works as advertised. In fact he put in a photo-CD as soon as he got it, and Ubuntu detected it was a photo-CD and brought up previews of the photos. I installed his printer, and it auto detected the printer just fine. I was even surprised it worked so well.
I switched him over to Firefox and Thunderbird years ago, so there's nothing different there.
I wouldn't have really considered putting Linux on his computer before Ubuntu. Fedora was OK I guess, but not really adequate. In many ways Ubuntu is far superior than Windows, especially for a non-tech. The software is all pre-chosen by Ubuntu, and integrates far better into the system than anything from Microsoft. There's really little worry that some package is going to screw up the system as is possible from random-package-from-windows.
Soo... I just can't buy the "have to use the terminal" argument. It's really just not true anymore unless you want to do expert type stuff like changing how authentication is performed, etc.
The quality of American chocolate is every bit fine as American cheese
There's a few good cheeses produced in the US. But I don't see many. Unless of course you mean that orange cheese-like substance. It's pretty good on burgers though. American Pizza
Huh? Good Chicago or NY style pizza stands toe-to-toe with anything else in the world. American Wine,
Maybe this was true 40 years ago, but there's nothing wrong with California wine. Some of it is quite excellent. There's crap jug wine of course, but what do you expect for $4? American beer
Huh? Maybe you haven't been tried anything but Schlitz for the past 25 years, but American beers have grown up. There's perhaps 100 different American micro-brews available at my local liquor store, and 3 different brew-pubs in town. The quality is quite excellent, and often meet or surpass imports.
As far as chocolate, Scharffen Berger is quite excellent. There's several other quality American chocolate manufacturers.
The problem for MS this time around is that everyone was happy with XP.
That's exactly how I feel about Windows 2000, and know several businesses that still run 2000. I only recently upgraded from 2000 to Vista from a free evaluation version from MS just to see what was new. I've got a laptop running Ubuntu and another desktop running Centos, so any problems with Vista are of minor importance.
The thing is though that 2000 is now falling out of support (no fix for the DST changeover), so it's getting a bit harder to keep using Win2K. XP isn't that much older than Win2k, so the push will soon be on for people to move towards Vista. I sure wouldn't recommend Win2K anymore, and someday that will probably be true for Vista as well (right now it's just too buggy).
Strangely enough though, I'm half considering just ditching Windows altogether and runnning Ubuntu on my main workstation. Run VMWare for the few minor "must have" software packages only available on Windows, and dual-boot for any game I can't live without.
Astrologists are freaking out across the world at the first sign of honest scientific news that shows a link between stars and life on earth
Unfortunately since the cycle is 64 million years long every person that's ever been born is the same "sign", and your horoscope doesn't change for millions of years. Astrologists are going to be out of a job if everyone has the same horoscope every day for several million years.
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The difference is that even if there is no deity, the majority religions still provide useful and positive services to their members.
Granted. But I think the open question is whether religion, in general, does more good than bad. Maybe it's not fair to throw all religions together in a bunch and judge religion collectively. But I also don't think it's fair to cherry pick the parts of religion you like, and downplay the negative aspects.
My guess is you're running Flash9 on Linux like me. The implementation is more than a little buggy.
I think the parent meant that you shouldn't (in theory) need ANY firewall, hardware OR software.
Maybe, but the author referenced the OS, not services that run on an OS.
Anyway, if we start talking about the way the world SHOULD be, there's a lot of things that'll come before all services being secure.
I'd be more interested in what's possible than what should be. I think there's a lot of improvements that can be made on multiple levels of the software stack. But that doesn't mean there's not always going to be the need for multiple levels of security that cover for each other. You really should never be trusting any single component to be perfect.
Its a nonsensical situation that operating systems in general cannot be relied upon for the security of their own network interfaces - after all it is down to the operating system to accept or reject user logins. In the same way it should be the operating system that sets policy about whether to accept or reject packets from arbitrary locations.
In general the software firewalls that come with Operating Systems are quite reliable and can be trusted.
What can't be trusted is that all the firewalls on every machine are configured properly. It's FAR easier to administrate one firewall than it is to administrate 10 or 100 different workstations/servers.
There's no need for some dumb .bank tld for users to hope to verify authenticity of a bank site. All we need is something akin to an electronic ATM card.
The card plugs into a USB port (or a reader plugs into USB and the card plugs into the reader). The card performs several functions:
authenticates the user to the bank (after you enter in a pin).
authenticates the bank to the user.
authenticates a secure connection to the bank has been established.
authenticates each transaction.
for an added bonus, keeps the users authentication secrets INSIDE the magic card (authentication of the user performed via challenge-response).
This is NOT a terribly complicated system. Encryption has been doing authentication for years. If banks wanted to prevent fishing attacks, they'd develop a standard and not do any online banking without this device.
Could it still be hacked? Sure, but an attacker would have to compromise the users computer AND have the magic card inserted into it while performing the attack. Lose your magic card? No problem, it gets invalidated just like an ATM card and the bank sends you a new one, possibly for a small fee.
Of course, banks are too cheap and conservative to do this on their own. We need a regulatory body to start pushing this on them, otherwise it'll never happen.
It may very well be that 99% of the Thai sincerely adore the king, but that only 1% want to mock him. The existence of such laws do not necessarily imply that people are forced to like the king.
Right. And when Saddam Hussein got 99% of the vote several years ago it had nothing to do with the punishment that would happen if you didn't vote Saddam.
Most people will grudgingly accept the situation given to them if the alternative is unpleasant enough.
The article, and many of the comments seem to think a system is either Secure or Insecure. I.e. it's either Perfect or Imperfect. The article talks about every system having holes, blah blah blah.
I'm sorry to say, but security isn't about having a perfect solution. It's a mistake many people make in the IT industry because on a low-level, you can perfectly solve small problems. Many people think this scales up to larger, more complex problems. It doesn't.
My point is that security is a continuum. Pointing out that all systems have flaws doesn't mean that Windows is just as secure/insecure as some alternate reality OS that doesn't exist but in the mind of the article writer.
I'd rather have these folks a little paranoid because you never know when a suspicious looking item really is being used for espionage.
I'd rather the government have a little credibility rather than crying wolf about a coin that's been public knowledge for more than 2 years. I was suspicious if you didn't know anything about the coin, it just never should have been released as a public warning.
RICO actually stands for:
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act
according to Wikipedia Racketeering is:
(no, I'm not making that up)
Sound like any large software company we might all be familiar with?
I never thought of Bill Gates as just a non-violent, really smart version of Tony Soprano.. but damned if it doesn't fit.
You miss-understand who's the foolish one. The losses are MUCH greater for the Obama campaign than they are for this guy. He loses a little money, they lose a lot of people connected to Obama, some good will, and gain a little negative publicity. 50 grand is chump change to them. They also could have gained a little positive publicity by paying him the little bit of money he asked for.
Basically, a really dumb move on the part of the Obama campaign.
The situation just isn't analogous to yours. Politicians are a LOT more reliant on public opinion and personal connections than a game company is.
Is there anyone, anywhere who thinks Microsoft will ever do anything that's really free [gnu.org], and therefore portable, cross platform
Ever is a long time. Microsoft will do exactly what you describe shortly after they're losing badly to a competitor. Until then they'll continue to play the monopoly game.
What if some malware attacks in this while? That, I believe, is precisely why Microsoft didn't implement it this way.
There's a tendency for IT people to believe that ALL solutions have to be perfect solutions. Yes, there's some level of increased risk for a few minutes after a use authenticates. But if you have a short period of time where the extra rights stick around, you'll likely get people to actually USE the damn thing rather than running as root (or turning off UAC).
Security in particular is often a balance between usability and security. If the product isn't usable because of the security, the users will MAKE it usable by going around the security (thereby defeating the security).
Hmm. Apart from installing/uninstalling software, controlling system settings, and for certain software that hasn't got its act together yet and needs admin permissions, exactly where does UAC pop up?
I couldn't tell you specifically, as I disabled it in Vista months ago. All I know is the damn thing came up waaay too often, so I killed it.
I don't think it's such a bad idea to have some extra means of making sure a user REALLY wants to do a special action. Ubuntu and Fedora handle this by asking a user to authenticate whenever an action requiring elevated rights occurs. It's actually done quite well and is only required for doing things like adding or deleting software, and the rights stick around for a while so you're not constantly typing in passwords.
The problem of course is that Microsoft went crazy and decided to lock down EVERYTHING. To the point where it's just plain annoying running the OS with it on. I tried it for a couple weeks just to see if I could get used to it. There's a tendency for people to crave the old way of doing something not because it's better, but just because that's what they're used to. I did eventually decide UAC was more trouble than it's worth, and disabled it.
I guess I tend to agree with the theory that UAC wasn't really real security, but about putting the blame more on the user. Microsoft can just claim "Well, you DID disable UAC didn't you?, so it's not our problem."
I just bought a Dell laptop last November, and the first thing I did was blow away XP Home, and install Ubuntu. A few months ago I got a new PC at work. First thing I did was blow away Vista home, and install Ubuntu.
For both systems, Linux compatibility was a must. I did my homework and made sure Linux was well supported as far as Wireless was concerned on the laptop. Really I HATE having to do research on hardware and figure out what's well supported, and what's not. If Dell offered Ubuntu back then, it would have been just one less step I had to go though, and more reason to just buy Dell.
It's not going to be a huge market. But even if Dell sales go up only 2% because of Dell offering Ubuntu, I'd guess it'll be a big win for them.
Is that just me?
Yes and no. Your problem is you're grouping all CF bulbs together. Some have horrible colors and a relatively long (.5 to 1 second) warm up time. Others are quite close to incandescents in color, and have an effectively instant warm up time.
Yes. If you show up to a technical job interview with a dirty t-shirt on and are rude to the receptionist because you can't "deal with people" then you may not even get the interview after all.
Well, I think that actually goes towards being able to do the job rather than just being a cultural quality. I fear your extreme example has gone outside the bounds of what was being discussed.
I think perhaps what the OP was referring to was less universal "fit factors". It seems that Google wants people to "think like Google", which isn't always necessarily a good thing. A group bias of everyone thinking the same thing can be a dangerous thing indeed. Just look at the current Bush administration for the perfect example of how this can be a terrible, terrible thing.
( yes, i'm biased, i've run extremely large bsd environments, but currently running a linux one.. and trust me, i miss my bsd )
Huh. I've ran Linux servers doing various things for 12 years now. I used to have stability problems around 1995-1998 that weren't hardware related. But since then I can't recall any problems that weren't related to hardware. I have root access and at least partially manage somewhere around 12 different servers doing everything from mail, Samba, Fax serving, VoIP, and backup.
So I'm puzzled when people talk about stability problems. I've seen some stability problems on my Laptop, but they're mostly related to the UI becoming unstable, or the OS getting pissed off if I pull out a PC-Card.
And on another note, I find it hard to believe that so many people are deficient in vitamin D.
We may spend a lot more time indoors than our ancestors, but I feel confident I am getting enough sunlight and enough D in foods i consume.
Why are you so confident? You're probbably getting enough vitamin D as established years ago to prevent rickets and other more obvious vitamin D deficiencies. But is the level established years ago high enough to exhibit these anti-cancer benefits? (assuming the vitamin D + cancer link is real).
Reaction: What's changed recently? Ahah! Global warming! Cell phones! VoIP! AppleTV!
I think that's part of it. The other part is there's a large group of miss-guided people who have a bug up their butt about some particular thing. The people who think cell phones are harmful blame cell-phones. The people who don't like GM crops blame GM crops. Forget about lack of mechanisms, or these causes not matching or being able to explain the observed pattern, it HAS to be those things, because those things are EVIL!
I think that's what the OP might have been getting at when he mentioned religion. Peoples lack of understanding of cause/effect relationships, and a basic unfamiliarity with how a certain cause would produce a different pattern over time/location/physical evidence can certainly be a contributing factor. But I think much of the driving force behind the kooky explanations is just simply bias and a hidden agenda.
Stephen King was arrested today after complaints from a reader about "disturbing content" in a recent book. The complainant , Marla Milquetoast was quite upset "Hokey Smokes! He had stuff about death in that book! I was sure disturbed!" Police captain Rob Roughup is quoted as saying "The guy clearly has a sick mind. It's unknown if Mr. King is planning any kind of mass killing, or terrorist plots. But we're investigating that possibility".
I haven't explored how much Ubuntu lets you do through GUIs because 'sudo aptitude install wireshark' is just so much easier.
Heh, sure, if you happen to know that you want to install wireshark (and that ethereal is now called wireshark). The thing that drove me crazy about previous Linux distributions was having to know the damn package name beforehand, or at best finding some crappy website that lists them.
Now it's just sudo synaptic (or applications add/remove), and I've got a nice GUI that's far superior to knowing all the package stuff. It doesn't work for everything. I have a dual monitor setup that I had to screw around a lot with using aptitude and google searches, but I was expecting that. Actually it turned out a little easier than I was expecting. No re-compiling the frickin OS and other god-awfull stuff required (though you really need to be a high-level techie to get it to work).
Before we get a bunch of people chiming in to say "but XXXXX is easy in ubuntu, you just open a terminal and type..."
The typing in a terminal days have been coming to an end for a long time. I can do about 95% of what I need to do in Ubuntu without going to a terminal screen. I'm also a developer, so I'm not just doing web browing, email and word processing.
For the average user, I don't see any need to go to a terminal. My dad just had his Windows installation become un-bootable for unknown reasons, so I installed Ubuntu 7.04 dual-booted with a new installation of XP in case he really wanted Windows for some reason. Everything works as advertised. In fact he put in a photo-CD as soon as he got it, and Ubuntu detected it was a photo-CD and brought up previews of the photos. I installed his printer, and it auto detected the printer just fine. I was even surprised it worked so well.
I switched him over to Firefox and Thunderbird years ago, so there's nothing different there.
I wouldn't have really considered putting Linux on his computer before Ubuntu. Fedora was OK I guess, but not really adequate. In many ways Ubuntu is far superior than Windows, especially for a non-tech. The software is all pre-chosen by Ubuntu, and integrates far better into the system than anything from Microsoft. There's really little worry that some package is going to screw up the system as is possible from random-package-from-windows.
Soo... I just can't buy the "have to use the terminal" argument. It's really just not true anymore unless you want to do expert type stuff like changing how authentication is performed, etc.
The quality of American chocolate is every bit fine as American cheese
There's a few good cheeses produced in the US. But I don't see many. Unless of course you mean that orange cheese-like substance. It's pretty good on burgers though.
American Pizza
Huh? Good Chicago or NY style pizza stands toe-to-toe with anything else in the world.
American Wine,
Maybe this was true 40 years ago, but there's nothing wrong with California wine. Some of it is quite excellent. There's crap jug wine of course, but what do you expect for $4?
American beer
Huh? Maybe you haven't been tried anything but Schlitz for the past 25 years, but American beers have grown up. There's perhaps 100 different American micro-brews available at my local liquor store, and 3 different brew-pubs in town. The quality is quite excellent, and often meet or surpass imports.
As far as chocolate, Scharffen Berger is quite excellent. There's several other quality American chocolate manufacturers.
The problem for MS this time around is that everyone was happy with XP.
That's exactly how I feel about Windows 2000, and know several businesses that still run 2000. I only recently upgraded from 2000 to Vista from a free evaluation version from MS just to see what was new. I've got a laptop running Ubuntu and another desktop running Centos, so any problems with Vista are of minor importance.
The thing is though that 2000 is now falling out of support (no fix for the DST changeover), so it's getting a bit harder to keep using Win2K. XP isn't that much older than Win2k, so the push will soon be on for people to move towards Vista. I sure wouldn't recommend Win2K anymore, and someday that will probably be true for Vista as well (right now it's just too buggy).
Strangely enough though, I'm half considering just ditching Windows altogether and runnning Ubuntu on my main workstation. Run VMWare for the few minor "must have" software packages only available on Windows, and dual-boot for any game I can't live without.
Astrologists are freaking out across the world at the first sign of honest scientific news that shows a link between stars and life on earth
Unfortunately since the cycle is 64 million years long every person that's ever been born is the same "sign", and your horoscope doesn't change for millions of years. Astrologists are going to be out of a job if everyone has the same horoscope every day for several million years.