Most important: Your generalization of Americans as racists is itself a racist generalization.
Technically, no, it's not.
The American race, per se, is the Native American. The various immigrant groups that form up the bulk of the population categorised as "American" aren't a race. Therefore, making bigoted statements about them isn't being racist.
Racism is a prejudice based around appearance, not nationality.
Well, if it's an option in your area, you can go for Optus cable.
When you exceed your usage limits with them, you have your bandwidth constrainted to 28kbps.
It's still not cheap, but at least you don't get slammed with massive charges because you went over a little bit.
Also, when looking for a broadband provider, make sure they have a local file mirror. Popular files can be retrieved from there, at no cost to you (as the traffic is all local to the provider). Telstra, for example, finally woke up recently and started providing such a service. (Heck, this is important when choosing a dial-up provider, too!)
Once the general public* starts treating a trademarked term as generic, it is, regardless of how actively defended it was.
A company can defend its trademarks as aggressively as they like, but if the public perception is that the trademark is generic, sooner or later a judge will notice that and rule against the trademark owner. This is what happened with asprin, for example.
I suggest you read that article from Quicken you linked to, especially the first dot point.
Unix is well on the way to this, IMHO... especially with industry analysts constantly lobbing Linux into the "Unix category".
* General public, of course, being the appropriate section thereof that actually cares about the trademarked product.
Are we to understand that frequent use of a trademark renders it generic?
Actually, frequent use of a trademark is exactly what does render it generic.
In particular, frequent use of a trademark by customers to refer to a range of products from a variety of vendors (not necessarily by the vendors themselves) renders the trademark generic.
Damn, I can't help it... I'm going to feed the troll.
There's a big moral difference between the government putting a restriction on your behaviour because it puts a cost on society (wearing seatbelts) vs. forcing you to do things to aid society (conscription, being forced to go into particular types of careers, etc).
There's also a difference between legislating for something and enforcing something. Levying a fine for not wearing a seatbelt is different from having your car not start without your seatbelt on.
Take your '1984' quotes and your stupid paranoia elsewhere, or at least have the guts to not post AC. Both extremes (full government control, and no government control) are absurd and dangerous, and that implies that the right answer (if there is one) is in between.
All the more reason not to have seatbelt laws. If they don't actually help save your life, why should you have to wear them?
Because they cut down on injury. This is a better justification in any case.
BTW, where did you get your statistics? If I gave specific numbers, I made them up (and I think I made that clear). I don't have a good enough memory to recall the exact numbers.
The information came from an (Australian) government white paper on seat belt related injuries I stumbled across a few years ago. Unfortunately, I can't remember the URL.
A google search on "seat belt injury statistics" gave a few good sites, including this one. Of course, those are guvmint stats, and people so pro-individual as to oppose seat belt laws do tend to distrust the guvmint...
(The exact site I referenced has a flaw in that it doesn't compare similar types of accidents. It finds, for example, that not wearing a seatbelt makes it more likely you'll die in an accident. The Australian study I read implied that fatality rates were pretty even for really bad accidents, BUT that there was a correlation between people who don't wear seat belts and people who drive recklessly (big surprise). This helps explain why 64.5% of people in Illinois who died in car accidents in 1997 weren't wearing seat belts... they self select)
The problem in your argument is that, despite what the ads say, seatbelts don't save lives.
Yes, that's right. Your chances of death in a car accident (at least, death without getting to a hospital first) are not decreased significantly by wearing a seatbelt. Seatbelts prevent the "being tossed around the car, suffering massive bruising, broken bones, spinal damage and internal bleeding" type of injuries. Most quick deaths from car accidents occur due to broken necks from whiplash (seat belts don't help, may hinder), or foreign object intrusion.
So how are your feelings of someone risking greater, and more costly, injury, but without raising their chances of cheaply dying very much?
(Nice pragmatic attitude, BTW... reflects mine a lot)
The poster's argument wasn't about choice; it was about common sense.
No, it was about choice. He was saying you should not be forced to do something that is common sense; that's a debate about choice.
I'm going to ignore most of your post on the grounds that you either have deliberately missed my point, used your own strawman arguments, or are just thick (I'll let you decide which...). However, there's a key point I want to address:
Yes, sometimes wearing the seatbelt causes you to get hurt more than you would have if you didn't. Those cases are far less likely than the reverse.
So you're saying the government is allowed to (pre-)determine for me a choice that could affect my living or dying? Do you think they should be able to do this in every case? What if I am going to have surgery where I have a 10% chance that I could die or be severely maimed? Because it's "only a 10% chance" does that mean the government gets to decide for me?
Actually, in general, yes I do believe that.
Most modern societies believe that we have a duty of care to other members of our societies. This results in such things as publicly funded hospitals.
Such facilities are almost always heavily utilised. In such situations, most societies look at ways of reducing the need for these services.
The seatbelt case is an excellent example. When seatbelts first started being available in cars, some bright spark noticed that there were relatively fewer injuries amongst seatbelt wearers. Statistical studies were done and they showed that, on the whole, wearing a seatbelt meant you were less likely to be hurt. Local governments started passing seatbelt laws. Other studies were done showing a large correlation between seatbelt laws and reduced hospital demand. So everybody picked it up.
If seatbelts weren't required, hospitals would have even greater demands on them. Hence the law. I feel that governments have the perfect right to curtail behaviour that puts higher demand on government services.
So, that's how a private choice (the decision to wear or not wear a seatbelt) becomes something worth legislating.
This is the dumbest argument. Those people who die or are severly hurt by seat belts should not have been legally bound to wear them. Perhaps they would've worn them anyway, perhaps not, but at least it would've been their choice and not the government's.
First obvious point: It's always their choice. The car doesn't have a sensor in it to not let it start if the seatbelt isn't worn. They can drive without a seatbelt. It's just now, in addition to risking greater injury in the event of an accident, they also risk getting fined.
Second obvious point: Yes, seatbelts sometimes result in greater harm than they do good. Laws are aimed at the benefit of society as a whole, not individuals. On the whole, society is helped by seatbelt laws.
To take another example, some people think vaccinations should be a personal choice. Vaccinations occasionally have undesirable side effects. Despite that, high vaccination rates for measles, polio, chickenpox, whooping cough, dyptheria, and other nasty diseases have vastly reduced breakouts and associated fatalities. However, it's also been shown that when vaccination rates drop below a threshold (like, 80%), the breakouts start occuring again. Because of this, if a government wants to make vaccinations mandatory, then I think they have every right to.
The desire to have governments not intrude on these apparently individual (and often common sense) choices is, at heart, an entirely selfish one. It ignores the fact that these laws are not designed to curtail your rights, such as they are; they are designed to help society as a whole.
And to tie it back to the topic: a government body mandating that suppliers of software to it use a publicised data format is a good thing. It may be common sense ("Of course I want the ability to access my data in any way I want"), but that doesn't mean it's not something that should be legislated.
I'm always critical of legislating common sense. It's common sense that you should wear a seat belt and so I don't believe there should be a law which dictates that you must wear one.
Bad example. Not wearing a seat belt affects more than you (believe it or not).
Assume you get involved in an accident[1], and you weren't wearing your seatbelt. Because of that, you get hurt quite badly when you wouldn't have been if you had worn your seatbelt[2]. Emergency services have to come out and help you now, you go to a hospital, and you tie up doctors, nurses, and space that other people need.
Even if you pay for all of those services 100%, you still can't deny that you tied up resources that may have been needed elsewhere.
And that's why you should wear your seatbelt; it's got nothing to do with your right to risk your own safety, and everything to do with the consequences to others should the risk eventuate.
What's the penalty for not wearing a seatbelt where you are? Here, it's a fine; considering that the partial reimbursement back to society.
Laws designed to curtail behaviour that has negative impacts on other people, or society as a whole, are not wasteful.
Or would you prefer a law that if you weren't wearing a seatbelt, then you don't get medical treatment in the event of an accident? I'd accept either...
[1] If you never get into an accident, then it wouldn't matter.
[2] Yes, sometimes wearing the seatbelt causes you to get hurt more than you would have if you didn't. Those cases are far less likely than the reverse.
Oh, and ObQuote: "Common sense is very uncommon" -- Horace Greeley
Compare this with Word, which probably has a comparable number of features, but they're all in the menus all the time. It takes forever to load all of this code (versus a mere moment to load enough of Emacs to do the thing you're trying to do), and you have to sort through all of the features to find the one you want to use.
Two things worth noting:
1) Just because they're in the menu, doesn't mean that they are loaded and in memory.
2) MS, with all that effort that they put into their "Personalised Menu" guff, could have decided to use that knowledge so that only frequently-used actions are loaded up. They don't, but they could. Heck, isn't that one of the points of Dynamically Linked Libraries?
I would hope that it would require more than simply waving it around. At the least, I would like to see, say, a button on the card you have to press at the same time.
Otherwise, as you say, someone will come up with something to read them for sufficent distance to go through clothing, your wallet, etc, without you knowing. Sure, the range (according to the article) is only 20 cms, but even that's too far for my peace of mind.
Not so; the availability of the nightly build means that if someone really requires this functionality, then they can get it now (albeit at the cost of losing support). Try that for IE.
While I don't bother using nightly builds of Mozilla, I have used nightly builds of other open-source products to get around bugs that would otherwise have been showstoppers. It's very useful when needed.
Of course, why someone would need the crash bug fixed is an interesting question. But imagine if the next email virus included the crash HTML?
There are a bunch of asteriods that are known to have orbits co-inciding with Earth's. These orbits tend to be elliptical, and the other end is usually out near Jupiter's orbit. Most scientists think that we have identified and tracked most asteriods that are in this category, and the ones that are left are probably the smaller ones anyway.
However, there are a bunch of other types of objects that come into Earth's orbit that we don't know about. Comets are a great example; most comets come way inside of Earth's orbit, and new comets are being discovered all the time.
With comets, at least, you tend to spot them fairly early on, because of the characteristic halo they develop as they approach the Sun. But comets aren't the only objects that share similar orbits; there are rocks on those hyperbolic orbits as well, and rocks tend to be a lot harder to spot.
There was a Near-Earth asteriod event a few months ago; the asteriod passed within the orbit of the Moon, and it was only spotted three days after it passed us by. If it had hit, we quite possibly wouldn't have seen it coming in at all. How many more objects like this are there?
Besides, viruses are seldom 100% effective. Even a 99.99% fatal virus, that everyone on Earth catches, will still leave 0.01% of the population alive. That's still over 600,000 people; enough to continue the species. Sure, civilisation will fall apart for a while, but that's nothing new.
A big enough fireball, however, will sterilise the surface of the Earth. I doubt the human race would survive that; we don't have that many cave dwellers left.
Depends. Some craters are huge. Look at the Barrington Meteor Crater in Arizona. While that one is fairly recent (about 49,000 years), there's lot of other identifed that are significantly older.
No. I fully support Microsoft's right to price their products as they feel like, including special discounts for targetted markets such as non-profits. Subject, of course, to the anti-competitive constraints that their legally recognised status as a monopoly imposes.
What I object to is MS marketting the giveaway as free, now and forever, thus putting themselves at the same level as, say, Linux. It's not.
As for wether the non-profits are so financially inept as to recognise it, that's their problem. Do you think that they are so brillant that a clear and open discussion of the problem doesn't have some benefit?
It's because Microsoft isn't giving away software. It's giving away limited (mostly time-limited) licenses to software. There's no certainty that they'll extend the license next time.
An organisation makes a substantial investment into IT above and beyond the cost of purchasing software. People get skilled up, you go and get other software to interact with the software you were given (especially if the software you were given was an OS), and you generally build up an infrastructure, which makes you dependant on the underlying pieces.
In this scenario, MS can, two or three years down the track, reduce their level of charity, which means that only some of the charities will get upgrades (or even be permitted to keep the licenses they were "given" earlier). If you're one of the charities that's just had your license revoked, you've got three options:
Buy a real license
Drop your infrastructure investment and go back to the manual way. Please bear in mind here that the workload of the charity may have increased beyond their ability to do it the manual way; IT's about improving productivity, after all.
Migrate your infrastructure to another platform, possibly the one you would have picked if you weren't given the free software in the first place.
Guess which one is going to be initially cheaper for the charity? And what's the bet it proves to be the more expensive in the longer term?
In the meantime, the free software companies, who have a revenue stream based of services, not sales, lose valuable reference customers, as well as possibly income (or at least tax dodges).
Here's a similar scenario: let's say you run a farm in a third-world country. All of the produce of the farm goes to feed the local community (it's a charity) Because you can't afford tractors, you have to use manual labour to run the farm, and this greatly limits the amount of food you can grow. General Motors comes along and says "Here's a bunch of tractors you can have. It's a five-year lease, it costs you nothing, all you have to do is sign on the bottom line". You think "Great! I can use the tractors, which means I don't have to go and buy that horse-drawn plough".
Five years go by. Your farm is running a lot better, and you're feeding not only your village, but three of the neighbouring villages as well. Then GM comes along and says "Okay, we'll have our tractors back now, please. Oh, if you want, you can buy some new ones, at retail". What do you do? You need tractors, after all; you can't run your farm without them anymore, and too many people depend on your farm.
Of course, in this scenario, you might be able to source tractors from someone else; tractors are all pretty similar, after all, and the cost to switch to a different type of tractor isn't high. Not the case with operating systems, and software in general.
Slashdot Mirror
Not so... race refers to subspecies or breeds, and there are definitely those in the human species.
The classic breakdown is African, Caucasian, and Asian. This is highly simplistic, and there are more.
All up, there's about 20 or so human sub-species, and (believe it or not) not all can breed easily with all the other sub-species.
Most important: Your generalization of Americans as racists is itself a racist generalization.
Technically, no, it's not.
The American race, per se, is the Native American. The various immigrant groups that form up the bulk of the population categorised as "American" aren't a race. Therefore, making bigoted statements about them isn't being racist.
Racism is a prejudice based around appearance, not nationality.
Well, if it's an option in your area, you can go for Optus cable.
When you exceed your usage limits with them, you have your bandwidth constrainted to 28kbps.
It's still not cheap, but at least you don't get slammed with massive charges because you went over a little bit.
Also, when looking for a broadband provider, make sure they have a local file mirror. Popular files can be retrieved from there, at no cost to you (as the traffic is all local to the provider). Telstra, for example, finally woke up recently and started providing such a service. (Heck, this is important when choosing a dial-up provider, too!)
And read the rest of mine, please...
Once the general public* starts treating a trademarked term as generic, it is, regardless of how actively defended it was.
A company can defend its trademarks as aggressively as they like, but if the public perception is that the trademark is generic, sooner or later a judge will notice that and rule against the trademark owner. This is what happened with asprin, for example.
I suggest you read that article from Quicken you linked to, especially the first dot point.
Unix is well on the way to this, IMHO... especially with industry analysts constantly lobbing Linux into the "Unix category".
* General public, of course, being the appropriate section thereof that actually cares about the trademarked product.
Are we to understand that frequent use of a trademark renders it generic?
Actually, frequent use of a trademark is exactly what does render it generic.
In particular, frequent use of a trademark by customers to refer to a range of products from a variety of vendors (not necessarily by the vendors themselves) renders the trademark generic.
That's what happened to asprin, for example.
I never said seatbelts prevent all injuries; just some of them.
No trolling, and completely correct.
Damn, I can't help it... I'm going to feed the troll.
There's a big moral difference between the government putting a restriction on your behaviour because it puts a cost on society (wearing seatbelts) vs. forcing you to do things to aid society (conscription, being forced to go into particular types of careers, etc).
There's also a difference between legislating for something and enforcing something. Levying a fine for not wearing a seatbelt is different from having your car not start without your seatbelt on.
Take your '1984' quotes and your stupid paranoia elsewhere, or at least have the guts to not post AC. Both extremes (full government control, and no government control) are absurd and dangerous, and that implies that the right answer (if there is one) is in between.
All the more reason not to have seatbelt laws. If they don't actually help save your life, why should you have to wear them?
Because they cut down on injury. This is a better justification in any case.
BTW, where did you get your statistics?
If I gave specific numbers, I made them up (and I think I made that clear). I don't have a good enough memory to recall the exact numbers.
The information came from an (Australian) government white paper on seat belt related injuries I stumbled across a few years ago. Unfortunately, I can't remember the URL.
A google search on "seat belt injury statistics" gave a few good sites, including this one. Of course, those are guvmint stats, and people so pro-individual as to oppose seat belt laws do tend to distrust the guvmint...
(The exact site I referenced has a flaw in that it doesn't compare similar types of accidents. It finds, for example, that not wearing a seatbelt makes it more likely you'll die in an accident. The Australian study I read implied that fatality rates were pretty even for really bad accidents, BUT that there was a correlation between people who don't wear seat belts and people who drive recklessly (big surprise). This helps explain why 64.5% of people in Illinois who died in car accidents in 1997 weren't wearing seat belts... they self select)
The problem in your argument is that, despite what the ads say, seatbelts don't save lives.
Yes, that's right. Your chances of death in a car accident (at least, death without getting to a hospital first) are not decreased significantly by wearing a seatbelt. Seatbelts prevent the "being tossed around the car, suffering massive bruising, broken bones, spinal damage and internal bleeding" type of injuries. Most quick deaths from car accidents occur due to broken necks from whiplash (seat belts don't help, may hinder), or foreign object intrusion.
So how are your feelings of someone risking greater, and more costly, injury, but without raising their chances of cheaply dying very much?
(Nice pragmatic attitude, BTW... reflects mine a lot)
No, it was about choice. He was saying you should not be forced to do something that is common sense; that's a debate about choice.
I'm going to ignore most of your post on the grounds that you either have deliberately missed my point, used your own strawman arguments, or are just thick (I'll let you decide which...). However, there's a key point I want to address:
So you're saying the government is allowed to (pre-)determine for me a choice that could affect my living or dying? Do you think they should be able to do this in every case? What if I am going to have surgery where I have a 10% chance that I could die or be severely maimed? Because it's "only a 10% chance" does that mean the government gets to decide for me?
Actually, in general, yes I do believe that.
Most modern societies believe that we have a duty of care to other members of our societies. This results in such things as publicly funded hospitals.
Such facilities are almost always heavily utilised. In such situations, most societies look at ways of reducing the need for these services.
The seatbelt case is an excellent example. When seatbelts first started being available in cars, some bright spark noticed that there were relatively fewer injuries amongst seatbelt wearers. Statistical studies were done and they showed that, on the whole, wearing a seatbelt meant you were less likely to be hurt. Local governments started passing seatbelt laws. Other studies were done showing a large correlation between seatbelt laws and reduced hospital demand. So everybody picked it up.
If seatbelts weren't required, hospitals would have even greater demands on them. Hence the law. I feel that governments have the perfect right to curtail behaviour that puts higher demand on government services.
So, that's how a private choice (the decision to wear or not wear a seatbelt) becomes something worth legislating.
This is the dumbest argument. Those people who die or are severly hurt by seat belts should not have been legally bound to wear them. Perhaps they would've worn them anyway, perhaps not, but at least it would've been their choice and not the government's.
First obvious point: It's always their choice. The car doesn't have a sensor in it to not let it start if the seatbelt isn't worn. They can drive without a seatbelt. It's just now, in addition to risking greater injury in the event of an accident, they also risk getting fined.
Second obvious point: Yes, seatbelts sometimes result in greater harm than they do good. Laws are aimed at the benefit of society as a whole, not individuals. On the whole, society is helped by seatbelt laws.
To take another example, some people think vaccinations should be a personal choice. Vaccinations occasionally have undesirable side effects. Despite that, high vaccination rates for measles, polio, chickenpox, whooping cough, dyptheria, and other nasty diseases have vastly reduced breakouts and associated fatalities. However, it's also been shown that when vaccination rates drop below a threshold (like, 80%), the breakouts start occuring again. Because of this, if a government wants to make vaccinations mandatory, then I think they have every right to.
The desire to have governments not intrude on these apparently individual (and often common sense) choices is, at heart, an entirely selfish one. It ignores the fact that these laws are not designed to curtail your rights, such as they are; they are designed to help society as a whole.
And to tie it back to the topic: a government body mandating that suppliers of software to it use a publicised data format is a good thing. It may be common sense ("Of course I want the ability to access my data in any way I want"), but that doesn't mean it's not something that should be legislated.
I'm always critical of legislating common sense. It's common sense that you should wear a seat belt and so I don't believe there should be a law which dictates that you must wear one.
Bad example. Not wearing a seat belt affects more than you (believe it or not).
Assume you get involved in an accident[1], and you weren't wearing your seatbelt. Because of that, you get hurt quite badly when you wouldn't have been if you had worn your seatbelt[2]. Emergency services have to come out and help you now, you go to a hospital, and you tie up doctors, nurses, and space that other people need.
Even if you pay for all of those services 100%, you still can't deny that you tied up resources that may have been needed elsewhere.
And that's why you should wear your seatbelt; it's got nothing to do with your right to risk your own safety, and everything to do with the consequences to others should the risk eventuate.
What's the penalty for not wearing a seatbelt where you are? Here, it's a fine; considering that the partial reimbursement back to society.
Laws designed to curtail behaviour that has negative impacts on other people, or society as a whole, are not wasteful.
Or would you prefer a law that if you weren't wearing a seatbelt, then you don't get medical treatment in the event of an accident? I'd accept either...
[1] If you never get into an accident, then it wouldn't matter.
[2] Yes, sometimes wearing the seatbelt causes you to get hurt more than you would have if you didn't. Those cases are far less likely than the reverse.
Oh, and ObQuote: "Common sense is very uncommon" -- Horace Greeley
Compare this with Word, which probably has a comparable number of features, but they're all in the menus all the time. It takes forever to load all of this code (versus a mere moment to load enough of Emacs to do the thing you're trying to do), and you have to sort through all of the features to find the one you want to use.
Two things worth noting:
1) Just because they're in the menu, doesn't mean that they are loaded and in memory.
2) MS, with all that effort that they put into their "Personalised Menu" guff, could have decided to use that knowledge so that only frequently-used actions are loaded up. They don't, but they could. Heck, isn't that one of the points of Dynamically Linked Libraries?
It's backed by Visa, the world's largest credit card company?
That's a pretty substantive difference in and of itself.
I would hope that it would require more than simply waving it around. At the least, I would like to see, say, a button on the card you have to press at the same time.
Otherwise, as you say, someone will come up with something to read them for sufficent distance to go through clothing, your wallet, etc, without you knowing. Sure, the range (according to the article) is only 20 cms, but even that's too far for my peace of mind.
Not so; the availability of the nightly build means that if someone really requires this functionality, then they can get it now (albeit at the cost of losing support). Try that for IE.
While I don't bother using nightly builds of Mozilla, I have used nightly builds of other open-source products to get around bugs that would otherwise have been showstoppers. It's very useful when needed.
Of course, why someone would need the crash bug fixed is an interesting question. But imagine if the next email virus included the crash HTML?
No, it doesn't.
There are a bunch of asteriods that are known to have orbits co-inciding with Earth's. These orbits tend to be elliptical, and the other end is usually out near Jupiter's orbit. Most scientists think that we have identified and tracked most asteriods that are in this category, and the ones that are left are probably the smaller ones anyway.
However, there are a bunch of other types of objects that come into Earth's orbit that we don't know about. Comets are a great example; most comets come way inside of Earth's orbit, and new comets are being discovered all the time.
With comets, at least, you tend to spot them fairly early on, because of the characteristic halo they develop as they approach the Sun. But comets aren't the only objects that share similar orbits; there are rocks on those hyperbolic orbits as well, and rocks tend to be a lot harder to spot.
There was a Near-Earth asteriod event a few months ago; the asteriod passed within the orbit of the Moon, and it was only spotted three days after it passed us by. If it had hit, we quite possibly wouldn't have seen it coming in at all. How many more objects like this are there?
Besides, viruses are seldom 100% effective. Even a 99.99% fatal virus, that everyone on Earth catches, will still leave 0.01% of the population alive. That's still over 600,000 people; enough to continue the species. Sure, civilisation will fall apart for a while, but that's nothing new.
A big enough fireball, however, will sterilise the surface of the Earth. I doubt the human race would survive that; we don't have that many cave dwellers left.
Depends. Some craters are huge. Look at the Barrington Meteor Crater in Arizona. While that one is fairly recent (about 49,000 years), there's lot of other identifed that are significantly older.
And large circular bodies of water... think the Gulf of Mexico.
So what do you "avise" me to do?
Well, for starters you can not be so picky about spelling. After all, the "sligtest" spelling typos are nothing to fret about.
Secondly, stop being so deliberately offensive to someone offering valid advice, backed with historical precedent.
Or forget it, just go and stick your head in the sand. It's all up to you.
Why should he? He doesn't get paid for working on Linux; it's something he does off his own back.
Big businesses like IBM can stick up for themselves.
Linus is just this guy, you know...
Follow standards like they were law.
;)
Isn't that what they do already?
No. I fully support Microsoft's right to price their products as they feel like, including special discounts for targetted markets such as non-profits. Subject, of course, to the anti-competitive constraints that their legally recognised status as a monopoly imposes.
What I object to is MS marketting the giveaway as free, now and forever, thus putting themselves at the same level as, say, Linux. It's not.
As for wether the non-profits are so financially inept as to recognise it, that's their problem. Do you think that they are so brillant that a clear and open discussion of the problem doesn't have some benefit?
Prick.
An organisation makes a substantial investment into IT above and beyond the cost of purchasing software. People get skilled up, you go and get other software to interact with the software you were given (especially if the software you were given was an OS), and you generally build up an infrastructure, which makes you dependant on the underlying pieces.
In this scenario, MS can, two or three years down the track, reduce their level of charity, which means that only some of the charities will get upgrades (or even be permitted to keep the licenses they were "given" earlier). If you're one of the charities that's just had your license revoked, you've got three options:
Guess which one is going to be initially cheaper for the charity? And what's the bet it proves to be the more expensive in the longer term?
In the meantime, the free software companies, who have a revenue stream based of services, not sales, lose valuable reference customers, as well as possibly income (or at least tax dodges).
Here's a similar scenario: let's say you run a farm in a third-world country. All of the produce of the farm goes to feed the local community (it's a charity) Because you can't afford tractors, you have to use manual labour to run the farm, and this greatly limits the amount of food you can grow. General Motors comes along and says "Here's a bunch of tractors you can have. It's a five-year lease, it costs you nothing, all you have to do is sign on the bottom line". You think "Great! I can use the tractors, which means I don't have to go and buy that horse-drawn plough".
Five years go by. Your farm is running a lot better, and you're feeding not only your village, but three of the neighbouring villages as well. Then GM comes along and says "Okay, we'll have our tractors back now, please. Oh, if you want, you can buy some new ones, at retail". What do you do? You need tractors, after all; you can't run your farm without them anymore, and too many people depend on your farm.
Of course, in this scenario, you might be able to source tractors from someone else; tractors are all pretty similar, after all, and the cost to switch to a different type of tractor isn't high. Not the case with operating systems, and software in general.
Um, did you read my entire post? Like, oh, the next paragraph, when I said that?
And you do know that, by default, there is no security manager for a Java application (as opposed to an applet)?