The Irish war of independence was fought with great restrain: check the number of casualties - just a few hundred. Low level insurgency followed by negotiated peace is a better description of it than a war.
News flash: Windows' "folders" aren't real folders
You are only saying that because Linux does not have real folders. You have to use something called directories instead. My friend who is a hard drive expert told me that someone told him in the pub that if you open a hard drive you can see all the little folders windows made, and with a microscope you can see the tiny files.
Twitter's "tweets" do not come from little birds
They do. Why do you think there is a picture of a bird on the site.
you are not in physical contact with your Linkedin "connections."
One screen saver, available for download on one site, and was never in the repos, is of course, as great a danger as the tens of thousands of security threats Windows users face.
Completely different: the evidence is that MMR does not cause autism. On the other hand the evidence is pretty clear that GM foods are GM.
Also vaccines go through testing and there are studies of safety. They also have undeniable benefits. None of this is true for GM foods. The only clear substantial benefits are cost savings.
Supposedly healthier versions of foods are a stupid idea because it makes it impossible to track what you are eating. Take adding vitamin A to rice: if it is enough to make up the deficiency in the average poor person's diet, then it may well lead to over doses in people who already have lots from other sources (the tolerable upper limit is only about three times the RDA, and some people eat a lot of rice).
How is the EU not a country? It has a parliament, a flag, a national anthem. It has common enforcement of criminal law (e.g. no need for extradition, just issue a warrant).
It is a sovereign body and its laws supersede those of its constituent parts. It controls things that would be under state control in the US (e.g. seatbelt laws) as well as everything to do with commerce between constituent states.
The UK has multiple national teams, of which at least two have qualified to play in some World Cups.
Not really, if people are deliberately careless its primarily their fault. Its more as though you gave the STD to someone who says "yes, I know you might be carrying it, but I cannot be bothered with precautions".
The banks and credit ratings agencies said exactly the same thing. All financial models that get used are thoroughly back tested
When you are predicting a change that is very different from what happened in your historical data your back testing has no real value.
I am sure you can make good prediction if things stay broadly similar to your historical data, but if you are predicting changes well outside that range.
Telling me how limited your test dataset is has done more to make me sceptical about climate change than anything I have every read before. I am going to try to find something to confirm what you have said (it is just a slashdot comment, after all), and if it is true it is enough to make me a "denialist".
Yes, we need better government at the federal level (to put in in American terms), and the only way we will get that is by getting better constitutional arrangements, which will only happen if the EU actually gets a proper constitution - but that will reduce the power of state governments even further.
As the Afghan way of life seems to be based on intolerance, blood feuds, petty local dictatorships, the oppression of women and other such charming traditions, I am not overly impressed by their right to keep it.
On the other hand, the best chance they had to get away from that was probably the communist government that the Americans and their Middle Eastern allies created the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and various other nasties to fight.
I have done jobs where I was paid to read news (at least news related to certain industries). That news sometimes appeared first on general news sites.
It was also part of my job to read alcohol and tobacco related websites (e.g. Diageo's and BAT's corporate sites), which were blocked as a category until I complained.
The email system blocked any email with images. The only time I ever got emails with attached images they were work related - on the other hand non-work related images (usually funny ones) got through fine because people usually embedded them in an MS Word doc.
You are pretty safe blocking porn sites, but even there where do you draw the line? Some filtering services will block sites that carry images that newspapers are happy to carry and no one sane could object to (e.g. works of art depicting nudity).
They have a right to block stuff on their own network, but blocking is very difficult to do if you want to be sure that you do not impede people's work.
And drunken cheerleaders get date raped more than shut-in nerd chicks. Personally, I prefer nerd chicks, and you likely do too, but most people don't. Really, they don't, and there's no use telling them that their opinion is wrong.
Do people prefer Windows? After actually trying Linux? Not in my experience.
If you don't value your time.
Most stuff works out of the box. Some stuff does not work out of the box on Windows or Mac either.
Until of course you try and run a script written for fooshell on barshell, i.e. when a distro changes its shell.
Dash is supposed to compatible with Bash if you stuck to Debian policy of affected scripts (those than use #!/bin/sh - if you useed bash specific features you should have used #!/bin/bash . Any examples of stuff that breaks? BTW Bash is still the login shell.
Can be made to run on it, given enough time.
Most stuff non-geeks use is in the major distros repos and is easier to install than Windows apps.
But I would not recommend them to a Joe Windows user, ever, since I don't want to be their Support Guy from now until there's a distro that actually Just Works.
My father, my wife, by seven year old daughter, her former pre-school principal, an accountant who used to work for me are all presumably geeks? They all prefer Linux.
Really? Neither a search of Gnome bugzilla for the word "fuck" found only three reports for GIMP that contained the word. IN two cases it was used by the reporter not the GIMP devs, and even in no case was anyone told to "fuck off".
Perhaps you mean that the GIMP developers were unwilling to do the work your father wanted them to do for free. Can you provide any evidence that Adobe act on ALL well documented enhancement requests?
The problem is that the FOSS alternatives are often better - I would say usually better for commonly used apps.
The problem is that they are not better for every single app from the point of view of every single user. I do not view that as a problem.
For my usage open source is usually superior, with the exception of Excel for really big spreadsheets (even that is not really something I do any more either) and spreadsheet graphs. That is well worth putting up for, for the advantages of FOSS:
1) Linux had had repositories for years, MS might add an app store to Win 8. 2) Firefox is hugely better than IE, especially given the extensions available. 3) Lyx is the best way I know to write nice looking documents quickly, and Latex is good for more complex stuff (I have in mind things that would NOT be easy in word, and would probably involve writing stuff in VBA). 4) Okular is faster and has a better UI than Acrobat Reader 5) Kate is an amazingly good text editor. 6) Qood Libet music manager has a people column (so you can browse composers and performers at once in an unclutters UI), edits info on the files themselves (so if you add a missing composer label and copy the file to another device its still corrected), and generally does things write 7) Linux has multiple desktops to organise my work. Windows does not. 6) KDE is hugely customisable: being able to set things up to suit myself helps productivity, and makes the best use of screen space on my laptop. The desktop UI I have is far superior to Windows cramming everything onto one bar or the MacOS equivalent which always seems to end up incredibly cluttered. 7) The remaing apps I use regularly (Sylpheed, Akregator) do what I want reliably and simply. 8) Pulse audio lets me play two streams at once, and move them between sound cards. Kids can listen to a story while I listen to music, for example.
Like it or not, the open-source community has proven to be relatively horrible at listening to its user base; half the time, you're told "if you don't like it, fix it yourself."
I was taking you quite seriously until I got to that.
Do proprietary software vendors always add every feature you request? Open source developers, like proprietary developers, MAY act on feature requests if they think its worth doing. Open source gives you the additional option of fixing it yourself, or paying someone to do it.
A good many open source developers will also be willing to to add features they think are unnecessary if you are willing to pay for it - do Adobe give you that option?
The restaurant analogy is completely broken: open source gives you the choice of no-payment but you take what you are given (e.g. like being invited to dinner) or you can pay the developers (then your restaurant analogy almost works).
Open source is not going to work as a cheapskate version of a proprietary product. You should use it because your prefer it, or because you want to avoid vendor lock-in, etc.
Bad example, it is very clear cut: the business operates in the US, and the work was done in the US, so the profit was made in the US.
There was a recent Slashdot discussion (not the first) on how people can be intelligent about other things but clueless about IT. The fact that the parent was modded +5 insightful shows how clueless Slashdot people are about tax.
Slashdot Mirror
The Irish war of independence was fought with great restrain: check the number of casualties - just a few hundred. Low level insurgency followed by negotiated peace is a better description of it than a war.
Your point stands: you just chose a bad example.
News flash: Windows' "folders" aren't real folders
You are only saying that because Linux does not have real folders. You have to use something called directories instead. My friend who is a hard drive expert told me that someone told him in the pub that if you open a hard drive you can see all the little folders windows made, and with a microscope you can see the tiny files.
Twitter's "tweets" do not come from little birds
They do. Why do you think there is a picture of a bird on the site.
you are not in physical contact with your Linkedin "connections."
I am. Frequently.
One screen saver, available for download on one site, and was never in the repos, is of course, as great a danger as the tens of thousands of security threats Windows users face.
What do you mean "just" whacky purple cases. Those are a major feature.
Completely different: the evidence is that MMR does not cause autism. On the other hand the evidence is pretty clear that GM foods are GM.
Also vaccines go through testing and there are studies of safety. They also have undeniable benefits. None of this is true for GM foods. The only clear substantial benefits are cost savings.
Supposedly healthier versions of foods are a stupid idea because it makes it impossible to track what you are eating. Take adding vitamin A to rice: if it is enough to make up the deficiency in the average poor person's diet, then it may well lead to over doses in people who already have lots from other sources (the tolerable upper limit is only about three times the RDA, and some people eat a lot of rice).
Actually the proper name for what I use is:
Mandriva GNU/Linux/xorg/KDE/Qt/Gtk
So why does .us exist?
IN any case .com etc. are supposed to be global generic tlds and used as such. British postage stamps are clearly meant to be British.
When was that? It was running on Windows recently, although it is switching to Linux with the purchase of Millennium IT.
I stated that OSS projects build shitty UIs.
You offered one example of each: hardly a statistically significant sample.
development is being done by a focused group of paid developers
Please point me to the rule that says OSS developers should not be paid or focused. Its definitely not in the OSI definition.
*very very different* from a traditional OSS project like, say, Gnome or KDE.
Both of which have a much better UI than Windows.
How is suspend to RAM any less secure than having the machine on, which I assume you allow?
It can only be classified as world if the US has a good chance of winning - the World Series is a good example.
How is the EU not a country? It has a parliament, a flag, a national anthem. It has common enforcement of criminal law (e.g. no need for extradition, just issue a warrant).
It is a sovereign body and its laws supersede those of its constituent parts. It controls things that would be under state control in the US (e.g. seatbelt laws) as well as everything to do with commerce between constituent states.
The UK has multiple national teams, of which at least two have qualified to play in some World Cups.
Not really, if people are deliberately careless its primarily their fault. Its more as though you gave the STD to someone who says "yes, I know you might be carrying it, but I cannot be bothered with precautions".
Use a credit card and pay it off fully at the end of every month.
The card companies hate that.
The banks and credit ratings agencies said exactly the same thing. All financial models that get used are thoroughly back tested
When you are predicting a change that is very different from what happened in your historical data your back testing has no real value.
I am sure you can make good prediction if things stay broadly similar to your historical data, but if you are predicting changes well outside that range.
Telling me how limited your test dataset is has done more to make me sceptical about climate change than anything I have every read before. I am going to try to find something to confirm what you have said (it is just a slashdot comment, after all), and if it is true it is enough to make me a "denialist".
Yes, we need better government at the federal level (to put in in American terms), and the only way we will get that is by getting better constitutional arrangements, which will only happen if the EU actually gets a proper constitution - but that will reduce the power of state governments even further.
As the Afghan way of life seems to be based on intolerance, blood feuds, petty local dictatorships, the oppression of women and other such charming traditions, I am not overly impressed by their right to keep it.
On the other hand, the best chance they had to get away from that was probably the communist government that the Americans and their Middle Eastern allies created the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and various other nasties to fight.
Or buy a mobile device.
I have done jobs where I was paid to read news (at least news related to certain industries). That news sometimes appeared first on general news sites.
It was also part of my job to read alcohol and tobacco related websites (e.g. Diageo's and BAT's corporate sites), which were blocked as a category until I complained.
The email system blocked any email with images. The only time I ever got emails with attached images they were work related - on the other hand non-work related images (usually funny ones) got through fine because people usually embedded them in an MS Word doc.
You are pretty safe blocking porn sites, but even there where do you draw the line? Some filtering services will block sites that carry images that newspapers are happy to carry and no one sane could object to (e.g. works of art depicting nudity).
They have a right to block stuff on their own network, but blocking is very difficult to do if you want to be sure that you do not impede people's work.
And drunken cheerleaders get date raped more than shut-in nerd chicks. Personally, I prefer nerd chicks, and you likely do too, but most people don't. Really, they don't, and there's no use telling them that their opinion is wrong.
Do people prefer Windows? After actually trying Linux? Not in my experience.
If you don't value your time.
Most stuff works out of the box. Some stuff does not work out of the box on Windows or Mac either.
Until of course you try and run a script written for fooshell on barshell, i.e. when a distro changes its shell.
Dash is supposed to compatible with Bash if you stuck to Debian policy of affected scripts (those than use #!/bin/sh - if you useed bash specific features you should have used #!/bin/bash . Any examples of stuff that breaks? BTW Bash is still the login shell.
Can be made to run on it, given enough time.
Most stuff non-geeks use is in the major distros repos and is easier to install than Windows apps.
But I would not recommend them to a Joe Windows user, ever, since I don't want to be their Support Guy from now until there's a distro that actually Just Works.
My father, my wife, by seven year old daughter, her former pre-school principal, an accountant who used to work for me are all presumably geeks? They all prefer Linux.
Really? Neither a search of Gnome bugzilla for the word "fuck" found only three reports for GIMP that contained the word. IN two cases it was used by the reporter not the GIMP devs, and even in no case was anyone told to "fuck off".
Perhaps you mean that the GIMP developers were unwilling to do the work your father wanted them to do for free. Can you provide any evidence that Adobe act on ALL well documented enhancement requests?
The problem is that the FOSS alternatives are often better - I would say usually better for commonly used apps.
The problem is that they are not better for every single app from the point of view of every single user. I do not view that as a problem.
For my usage open source is usually superior, with the exception of Excel for really big spreadsheets (even that is not really something I do any more either) and spreadsheet graphs. That is well worth putting up for, for the advantages of FOSS:
1) Linux had had repositories for years, MS might add an app store to Win 8.
2) Firefox is hugely better than IE, especially given the extensions available.
3) Lyx is the best way I know to write nice looking documents quickly, and Latex is good for more complex stuff (I have in mind things that would NOT be easy in word, and would probably involve writing stuff in VBA).
4) Okular is faster and has a better UI than Acrobat Reader
5) Kate is an amazingly good text editor.
6) Qood Libet music manager has a people column (so you can browse composers and performers at once in an unclutters UI), edits info on the files themselves (so if you add a missing composer label and copy the file to another device its still corrected), and generally does things write
7) Linux has multiple desktops to organise my work. Windows does not.
6) KDE is hugely customisable: being able to set things up to suit myself helps productivity, and makes the best use of screen space on my laptop. The desktop UI I have is far superior to Windows cramming everything onto one bar or the MacOS equivalent which always seems to end up incredibly cluttered.
7) The remaing apps I use regularly (Sylpheed, Akregator) do what I want reliably and simply.
8) Pulse audio lets me play two streams at once, and move them between sound cards. Kids can listen to a story while I listen to music, for example.
Like it or not, the open-source community has proven to be relatively horrible at listening to its user base; half the time, you're told "if you don't like it, fix it yourself."
I was taking you quite seriously until I got to that.
Do proprietary software vendors always add every feature you request? Open source developers, like proprietary developers, MAY act on feature requests if they think its worth doing. Open source gives you the additional option of fixing it yourself, or paying someone to do it.
A good many open source developers will also be willing to to add features they think are unnecessary if you are willing to pay for it - do Adobe give you that option?
The restaurant analogy is completely broken: open source gives you the choice of no-payment but you take what you are given (e.g. like being invited to dinner) or you can pay the developers (then your restaurant analogy almost works).
Open source is not going to work as a cheapskate version of a proprietary product. You should use it because your prefer it, or because you want to avoid vendor lock-in, etc.
Is that any worse than the average politician?
Bad example, it is very clear cut: the business operates in the US, and the work was done in the US, so the profit was made in the US.
There was a recent Slashdot discussion (not the first) on how people can be intelligent about other things but clueless about IT. The fact that the parent was modded +5 insightful shows how clueless Slashdot people are about tax.