What you need to know about Microsoft in business is that it's good enough, and approximately everyone is confident of that. Therefore, Microsoft-based IT is adequate. It will do what businesses need at a more-or-less known and acceptable cost, and that's what businesses in general are looking for. Therefore, people writing business software expect to sell it on Windows, and it's easier to support Windows versions than Linux versions, where, for example, there's two big installer formats.
F/OSS is great for many things, but businesses often run on big sucky software that's no fun to write or use, so nobody does it without being paid well. It's all very well to say "find another solution", but it's often completely impractical. Moving off something like SAP can be incredibly expensive (even more expensive than running the stuff in the first place) and there is NO F/OS counterpart.
Like it or not, most people assume Microsoft Office as the norm. If you use MS Office also, and there's a compatibility problem, well, that's odd, and people will be interested in helping get around it. If you use LibreOffice and there's a compatibility problem, it's your fault for having a substandard product, and people will tell you to buy real software. The details and fairness don't matter to people's perceptions.
Out in the real world, expectations have been formed by Microsoft. Software that's at Microsoft's level of annoyances or problems is normal, and people won't actually believe deep down that better software exists. Microsoft's faults are normal, and competitor's faults are glaring.
Not that this stops me from using LibreOffice or recommending it, or liking it better than Microsoft's, but to society at large MS Office is filled with god-given correctness.
Most of what you list is consumables, and it's reasonable to compare iPhones to durable goods (although that's not what TFS said). Swords come in different categories, and I'm by no means sure that a billion of them have been made. I don't know how many wheels have been sold as wheels, although obviously a great many have been sold as part of vehicles. Don't count on great numbers in things that historically generally went with the middle to upper classes. The Bible seems to me to be about as specific as the iPhone, and unless you divide Bibles up by publishers there's been several times more of them sold than the iPhone.
The iPhone is indeed a great product that changed its industry, and it's sold in very large numbers, but let's not get carried away here.
Perhaps you'd care to tell me why my sister-in-law is incapable of using a hand-me-down iPhone 4 bought nearly six years ago then. It seems to work fine when I see her use it. I've never used a single Bic for three years, personally, and that's how often I tend to replace my iPhone. Are you just buying cheap phones that will fall apart soon?
I think the idea is that people who keep an iPhone for four years are less likely to spend money, and vendors aren't going to worry about selling to such people. That's been the case in the personal software industry about as long as it's been around. I assume that all the Apple functionality is working just fine (my sister-in-law has my wife's old iPhone 4, almost six years old now, and it works well), and your gripe is with the app vendors.
Look at what people actually buy. Very few people buy an ARM processor; instead, they buy a device containing one. Very few people buy individual grains of rice; instead, they buy a box or a bag that contains a lot of grains. If there's a detailed receipt, look at the line item and see what the consumer bought. Ask the vendor about SKUs and how they're grouped.
I suspect you'll find that there are more boxes of Uncle Ben's Converted Rice sold than iPhones, and that's the proper comparison.
You make statements that I see no evidence to support, and say that it's a disaster to Apple.
Smartphones are not quite a commodity, and I see no evidence to think they'll be fads. I don't expect dumb phones to go away, but people use the functionality on their smartphones, and are unlikely to be willing to discard it.
I carry a device in my shirt pocket that has access to a tremendous amount of the world's knowledge, can give me directions when driving (by voice output - I'm not going to look at the silly thing while driving), keeps track of my appointments, handles my email, and displays virtual Pokemon I can catch. Those are all useful or entertaining, and people do use these. Many people use other features a lot more than making phone calls. Why would this be a fad? The Web wasn't.
Voter ID is not inherently a bad idea, but the implementations I've seen have been at best suspect. The version proposed in Minnesota a while ago would have made it essentially impossible to cast an absentee ballot. In one more recent case, the requirement was to get an ID, while almost every state office that could supply such an ID and was convenient to poor neighborhoods was to be closed. Pigment per se is irrelevant, although I suspect it's relevant to why people push these schemes, but blacks tend to be significantly poorer than whites.
I have no knowledge of any controversy about slate voting. I'd like to know exactly what's behind your claims, because I don't think it supports what you think.
Wrong. The FBI said nothing about her being too big to indict. The FBI said that, while she broke the law, and certainly shouldn't have done those things, there was no precedent involving prosecution for someone who was negligent in the case of a reasonably small number of classified documents with no good evidence that they got to anyone they shouldn't have. If you had done what she did, you would likely have lost your clearance, and maybe been fired. You would not have been charged.
There was a recent court decision, discussed here, which emphasized that access without following the TOS is not unauthorized access as far as the CFAA goes.
You're missing my point. I'm claiming that there are good reasons to allow law enforcement to do certain things, since law enforcement on that level generally is good for the majority of the people. You claimed there are no good reasons. I believe there are excellent reasons to stop law enforcement from doing some things they are doing now, but that wasn't your claim.
The public never properly oversees the State. That's wishful thinking on the order of a Communist or Libertarian utopia. When the public gets sufficiently upset about certain things the State does, it forces things to be done about them. They aren't necessarily very good things, but they will happen.
Few abuses of the public can be considered "already won". We're seeing changes that will result in reduced police violence and increased penalties for police officers who are too egregious in their use of violence. I don't know how far these are going to go. Also, "the public" is not a unified hive mind. There are people (including some I generally respect) who support the police and dislike Black Lives Matter, and there are people who think the police need immediate reform and that certain officers should be convicted and sent to prison for a long time.
"Favored by the banks" and "against the common welfare" are two different things. We need the banking system, or something very like it. It needs to be policed a whole lot better, but that might actually please some banks. If everyone else is doing something profitable and sleazy, it's sometimes necessary to get sleazy just to compete.
Clinton favors free trade, which includes shipping jobs overseas, and so I'd think AC disagrees with her on that point. It's reasonable to think Trump might be worse, and so someone might well vote for Clinton while thinking she'd ship fewer jobs, or at least that there would be more good jobs in the US with her as President than with Trump. I've never voted for someone while agreeing with them completely (although a particular state senator came close).
The context is that someone claimed AC was obviously a Trump voter. I'm claiming that someone with AC's views might well vote for Clinton, although I'd think AC would have liked Sanders better.
I do know the legally defined charge of treason in the US, and Trump has, to my knowledge, done nothing that meets the definition. The statement we're discussing is, to my mind, unpatriotic and disloyal, but those are not crimes. Regrettably, I don't find his statement to be surprising or unexpected.
The accusation was on Facebook, and I don't feel like wading through all that stuff again to find it. It wasn't from what I consider a trustworthy source.
However, we do need to consider the possibility. I hate to disillusion you about human nature, but people who commit felonies are not always completely honest and truthful, and upstanding felons who release material for political purposes might be suspected of changing some of it to enhance the impact.
And what do you mean by "the truth"? There are lots and lots of truths out there, and it's possible to be pretty darn deceitful while sticking to the truth. Revealing a certain truth, but not others, can be done as a lie*. We know that the DNC misbehaved. What we do not know is whether this is normal or exceptional behavior. Politics is an ugly business sometimes.
*Feynman was in a fraternity once, and it was suspected that a member of the fraternity had stolen a door. (I don't think it was explained, in my source, why Feynman stole the door.) The fraternity officers went down the line, asking members if they'd stolen the door. When it came to Feynman, he said, "Yeah, yeah, I stole the door." The response was "Shut up, Feynman, this is serious" and the questioning continued.
My apologies. I was going along with the general tone of the thread, which implicated the Russians. I have no independent information on who got the information.
The DNC is not totally corrupt, and their degree of corruptness isn't all that relevant to the actual Democratic candidates. I think Clinton will make an excellent President, and that's why I'm going to vote for her.
She could be a liar. There are liars out there. She could also be misremembering what was said to her in an extremely high-stress situation. That happens. Ask a police investigator about the testimony they'll get from several honest witnesses about something they saw. It's quite possible that everyone talking about this believes they're telling the truth. What we've got is several after-the-fact statements about extremely emotional conversations with no independent record, and so we can't know what actually happened.
Clinton handled a small amount of classified material in a negligent manner, and there was no evidence that it had reached people not cleared for it. People who have done the exact same thing have lost security clearances and been fired and been subject to other administrative actions. They have not been criminally prosecuted. That was made clear by the FBI, and the Attorney General had said she'd follow the FBI recommendations. Someone posted a clip of a very hostile Republican talking about it, and he was clear that he wanted to have Clinton prosecuted even though admitting there was no precedent.
For decades now, the Clintons have been subject to all sorts of attacks and accusations, but these accusations don't include sufficient evidence to justify any prosecution. They're often not against the law: the Paula Jones case was eventually dismissed because the judge found that Jones' allegations, even if completely true, didn't constitute any violation of the law.
What he said could be interpreted as an exhortation for people to violate the CFAA (I believe the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act), and exhorting someone to commit a felony can be illegal. I think he probably stayed on the legal side of that, but I'm not a lawyer. If someone does violate the CFAA and claims it was inspired by Trump, he could be in hot water, but I don't think it would be worth prosecuting anyway.
It's perfectly legal, in the US, to publish classified information that was illegally obtained. The Times was breaking no US laws. It is, of course, illegal to obtain the material illegally, but since someone else had provided them with the information they were free to run with it. This is why there's no US effort to get hold of Assange (except in his own shared delusions): he didn't violate US law. Manning did, and was tried and convicted.
We can ask why certain information is being published. The Times had reasons to further disseminate certain classified material, such as showing the US public what their government was actually doing, which affected them without them knowing about it or being able to do anything about it. Releasing material that shows the DNC was not neutral in the Clinton-Sanders race shows nothing that affected people who could do nothing about it. The decision was made by the voters and those who attended caucuses, depending on the state. Your past postings indicate that you make a distinction between activities of government actions (which you usually consider bad), and activities of private parties, and I'd think you'd be much more interested in finding out how the government works than finding out what private entities work.
Are you really saying that government and private parties should have the same level of privacy? Do you mind if I throw that in your face for your future posts about how government is bad and must be watched?
For the record, Clinton was in favor of the TPP when she was involved in the negotiations. When she saw the finished product, after years of negotiations she was not a party to, it had provisions she hadn't seen before, and she was against it. These are not contradictory positions.
She set up an email server of unknown security that inadvertantly hosted a small number of classified documents, and someone could have hacked into it. I'm sure the Russians are still trying to hack into US State Department servers, and I don't know whether they'd have more or less success.
Presenting a soft target is not an invitation. You're making up false parallels.
Of course politicians are allowed to joke. Senator Franken was elected in 2008 by having a few hundred more votes than Coleman out of millions cast. In his re-election campaign in 2014, he commented that, with the help of his supporters, he could double, maybe even triple his margin of victory. That's a joke, son, and I don't see how it can be interpreted as exhortation to have a foreign power commit politically motivated crimes in the US. Or perhaps you remember Reagan's joke about starting the bombing of the Soviet Union on a microphone he didn't think was live. That had some unpleasant consequences, also.
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What you need to know about Microsoft in business is that it's good enough, and approximately everyone is confident of that. Therefore, Microsoft-based IT is adequate. It will do what businesses need at a more-or-less known and acceptable cost, and that's what businesses in general are looking for. Therefore, people writing business software expect to sell it on Windows, and it's easier to support Windows versions than Linux versions, where, for example, there's two big installer formats.
F/OSS is great for many things, but businesses often run on big sucky software that's no fun to write or use, so nobody does it without being paid well. It's all very well to say "find another solution", but it's often completely impractical. Moving off something like SAP can be incredibly expensive (even more expensive than running the stuff in the first place) and there is NO F/OS counterpart.
Like it or not, most people assume Microsoft Office as the norm. If you use MS Office also, and there's a compatibility problem, well, that's odd, and people will be interested in helping get around it. If you use LibreOffice and there's a compatibility problem, it's your fault for having a substandard product, and people will tell you to buy real software. The details and fairness don't matter to people's perceptions.
Out in the real world, expectations have been formed by Microsoft. Software that's at Microsoft's level of annoyances or problems is normal, and people won't actually believe deep down that better software exists. Microsoft's faults are normal, and competitor's faults are glaring.
Not that this stops me from using LibreOffice or recommending it, or liking it better than Microsoft's, but to society at large MS Office is filled with god-given correctness.
I didn't think Microsoft would ever sell me an OS that made me think "You know, Vista really wasn't all that bad".
I see that not having a smartphone is generating at least as much smugness as having a latest-model iPhone.
Most of what you list is consumables, and it's reasonable to compare iPhones to durable goods (although that's not what TFS said). Swords come in different categories, and I'm by no means sure that a billion of them have been made. I don't know how many wheels have been sold as wheels, although obviously a great many have been sold as part of vehicles. Don't count on great numbers in things that historically generally went with the middle to upper classes. The Bible seems to me to be about as specific as the iPhone, and unless you divide Bibles up by publishers there's been several times more of them sold than the iPhone.
The iPhone is indeed a great product that changed its industry, and it's sold in very large numbers, but let's not get carried away here.
Perhaps you'd care to tell me why my sister-in-law is incapable of using a hand-me-down iPhone 4 bought nearly six years ago then. It seems to work fine when I see her use it. I've never used a single Bic for three years, personally, and that's how often I tend to replace my iPhone. Are you just buying cheap phones that will fall apart soon?
I think the idea is that people who keep an iPhone for four years are less likely to spend money, and vendors aren't going to worry about selling to such people. That's been the case in the personal software industry about as long as it's been around. I assume that all the Apple functionality is working just fine (my sister-in-law has my wife's old iPhone 4, almost six years old now, and it works well), and your gripe is with the app vendors.
Look at what people actually buy. Very few people buy an ARM processor; instead, they buy a device containing one. Very few people buy individual grains of rice; instead, they buy a box or a bag that contains a lot of grains. If there's a detailed receipt, look at the line item and see what the consumer bought. Ask the vendor about SKUs and how they're grouped.
I suspect you'll find that there are more boxes of Uncle Ben's Converted Rice sold than iPhones, and that's the proper comparison.
You make statements that I see no evidence to support, and say that it's a disaster to Apple.
Smartphones are not quite a commodity, and I see no evidence to think they'll be fads. I don't expect dumb phones to go away, but people use the functionality on their smartphones, and are unlikely to be willing to discard it.
I carry a device in my shirt pocket that has access to a tremendous amount of the world's knowledge, can give me directions when driving (by voice output - I'm not going to look at the silly thing while driving), keeps track of my appointments, handles my email, and displays virtual Pokemon I can catch. Those are all useful or entertaining, and people do use these. Many people use other features a lot more than making phone calls. Why would this be a fad? The Web wasn't.
Voter ID is not inherently a bad idea, but the implementations I've seen have been at best suspect. The version proposed in Minnesota a while ago would have made it essentially impossible to cast an absentee ballot. In one more recent case, the requirement was to get an ID, while almost every state office that could supply such an ID and was convenient to poor neighborhoods was to be closed. Pigment per se is irrelevant, although I suspect it's relevant to why people push these schemes, but blacks tend to be significantly poorer than whites.
I have no knowledge of any controversy about slate voting. I'd like to know exactly what's behind your claims, because I don't think it supports what you think.
Wrong. The FBI said nothing about her being too big to indict. The FBI said that, while she broke the law, and certainly shouldn't have done those things, there was no precedent involving prosecution for someone who was negligent in the case of a reasonably small number of classified documents with no good evidence that they got to anyone they shouldn't have. If you had done what she did, you would likely have lost your clearance, and maybe been fired. You would not have been charged.
There was a recent court decision, discussed here, which emphasized that access without following the TOS is not unauthorized access as far as the CFAA goes.
You're missing my point. I'm claiming that there are good reasons to allow law enforcement to do certain things, since law enforcement on that level generally is good for the majority of the people. You claimed there are no good reasons. I believe there are excellent reasons to stop law enforcement from doing some things they are doing now, but that wasn't your claim.
The public never properly oversees the State. That's wishful thinking on the order of a Communist or Libertarian utopia. When the public gets sufficiently upset about certain things the State does, it forces things to be done about them. They aren't necessarily very good things, but they will happen.
Few abuses of the public can be considered "already won". We're seeing changes that will result in reduced police violence and increased penalties for police officers who are too egregious in their use of violence. I don't know how far these are going to go. Also, "the public" is not a unified hive mind. There are people (including some I generally respect) who support the police and dislike Black Lives Matter, and there are people who think the police need immediate reform and that certain officers should be convicted and sent to prison for a long time.
"Favored by the banks" and "against the common welfare" are two different things. We need the banking system, or something very like it. It needs to be policed a whole lot better, but that might actually please some banks. If everyone else is doing something profitable and sleazy, it's sometimes necessary to get sleazy just to compete.
Clinton favors free trade, which includes shipping jobs overseas, and so I'd think AC disagrees with her on that point. It's reasonable to think Trump might be worse, and so someone might well vote for Clinton while thinking she'd ship fewer jobs, or at least that there would be more good jobs in the US with her as President than with Trump. I've never voted for someone while agreeing with them completely (although a particular state senator came close).
The context is that someone claimed AC was obviously a Trump voter. I'm claiming that someone with AC's views might well vote for Clinton, although I'd think AC would have liked Sanders better.
I do know the legally defined charge of treason in the US, and Trump has, to my knowledge, done nothing that meets the definition. The statement we're discussing is, to my mind, unpatriotic and disloyal, but those are not crimes. Regrettably, I don't find his statement to be surprising or unexpected.
The accusation was on Facebook, and I don't feel like wading through all that stuff again to find it. It wasn't from what I consider a trustworthy source.
However, we do need to consider the possibility. I hate to disillusion you about human nature, but people who commit felonies are not always completely honest and truthful, and upstanding felons who release material for political purposes might be suspected of changing some of it to enhance the impact.
And what do you mean by "the truth"? There are lots and lots of truths out there, and it's possible to be pretty darn deceitful while sticking to the truth. Revealing a certain truth, but not others, can be done as a lie*. We know that the DNC misbehaved. What we do not know is whether this is normal or exceptional behavior. Politics is an ugly business sometimes.
*Feynman was in a fraternity once, and it was suspected that a member of the fraternity had stolen a door. (I don't think it was explained, in my source, why Feynman stole the door.) The fraternity officers went down the line, asking members if they'd stolen the door. When it came to Feynman, he said, "Yeah, yeah, I stole the door." The response was "Shut up, Feynman, this is serious" and the questioning continued.
My apologies. I was going along with the general tone of the thread, which implicated the Russians. I have no independent information on who got the information.
The DNC is not totally corrupt, and their degree of corruptness isn't all that relevant to the actual Democratic candidates. I think Clinton will make an excellent President, and that's why I'm going to vote for her.
She could be a liar. There are liars out there. She could also be misremembering what was said to her in an extremely high-stress situation. That happens. Ask a police investigator about the testimony they'll get from several honest witnesses about something they saw. It's quite possible that everyone talking about this believes they're telling the truth. What we've got is several after-the-fact statements about extremely emotional conversations with no independent record, and so we can't know what actually happened.
Clinton handled a small amount of classified material in a negligent manner, and there was no evidence that it had reached people not cleared for it. People who have done the exact same thing have lost security clearances and been fired and been subject to other administrative actions. They have not been criminally prosecuted. That was made clear by the FBI, and the Attorney General had said she'd follow the FBI recommendations. Someone posted a clip of a very hostile Republican talking about it, and he was clear that he wanted to have Clinton prosecuted even though admitting there was no precedent.
For decades now, the Clintons have been subject to all sorts of attacks and accusations, but these accusations don't include sufficient evidence to justify any prosecution. They're often not against the law: the Paula Jones case was eventually dismissed because the judge found that Jones' allegations, even if completely true, didn't constitute any violation of the law.
What he said could be interpreted as an exhortation for people to violate the CFAA (I believe the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act), and exhorting someone to commit a felony can be illegal. I think he probably stayed on the legal side of that, but I'm not a lawyer. If someone does violate the CFAA and claims it was inspired by Trump, he could be in hot water, but I don't think it would be worth prosecuting anyway.
It's perfectly legal, in the US, to publish classified information that was illegally obtained. The Times was breaking no US laws. It is, of course, illegal to obtain the material illegally, but since someone else had provided them with the information they were free to run with it. This is why there's no US effort to get hold of Assange (except in his own shared delusions): he didn't violate US law. Manning did, and was tried and convicted.
We can ask why certain information is being published. The Times had reasons to further disseminate certain classified material, such as showing the US public what their government was actually doing, which affected them without them knowing about it or being able to do anything about it. Releasing material that shows the DNC was not neutral in the Clinton-Sanders race shows nothing that affected people who could do nothing about it. The decision was made by the voters and those who attended caucuses, depending on the state. Your past postings indicate that you make a distinction between activities of government actions (which you usually consider bad), and activities of private parties, and I'd think you'd be much more interested in finding out how the government works than finding out what private entities work.
Are you really saying that government and private parties should have the same level of privacy? Do you mind if I throw that in your face for your future posts about how government is bad and must be watched?
For the record, Clinton was in favor of the TPP when she was involved in the negotiations. When she saw the finished product, after years of negotiations she was not a party to, it had provisions she hadn't seen before, and she was against it. These are not contradictory positions.
She set up an email server of unknown security that inadvertantly hosted a small number of classified documents, and someone could have hacked into it. I'm sure the Russians are still trying to hack into US State Department servers, and I don't know whether they'd have more or less success.
Presenting a soft target is not an invitation. You're making up false parallels.
Of course politicians are allowed to joke. Senator Franken was elected in 2008 by having a few hundred more votes than Coleman out of millions cast. In his re-election campaign in 2014, he commented that, with the help of his supporters, he could double, maybe even triple his margin of victory. That's a joke, son, and I don't see how it can be interpreted as exhortation to have a foreign power commit politically motivated crimes in the US. Or perhaps you remember Reagan's joke about starting the bombing of the Soviet Union on a microphone he didn't think was live. That had some unpleasant consequences, also.