You can flash chips without removing them from the board if the board designer was thinking intelligently. In my company's HW dev labs they re-flash bricked system boards all the time
Those boards weren't designed to prevent modding. No, I bet Nintendo has to replace the whole circuit board containing the flash chip due to their own paranoia.
You haven't given a single fact in your diatribe, all you do is state your religiously held beliefs as truth.
Yep. Ignore this guy. He thinks exactly like a neocon. He's got a set of blind, unchangeable allegiances, and he'll make up convenient lies to justify his ridiculous opinions. Then he firmly believes what he made up argues his delusions to the end of the earth. I always wonder about these people. Don't they remember making the stuff up in the first place?
He even had a list of loyalties and enemies on his blog (which appears shut down now). It wasn't 'I like these things' and 'I don't like these things'. It was 'I am for these things' and 'I am against these things.' It's a personality disorder and he'll probably never change.
Mostly because I still have some old GB/GBC games that do not play in the DS at all.(I'm a little surprised NoA didn't put out a DS card that would let me play those titles.)
They can't. If you try to put a GB or GBC cartridge in your DS, you'll find it won't go all the way in. They operate at a different voltage, and the GBA was designed with a switch inside the slot that only GB/GBC cartridges would push. That switch changed the operating voltage and basically connected the cartridge, screen, and buttons to an alternate set of hardware. In the DS, there's a solid obstruction in place of the switch, so you can't fit GB/GBC carts in it.
Because in the US that is what hate speech laws are being used for. Get off from a high profile case that "bothers" some politicians and you can be sure a hate speech charge will crop up. Been done in a few visible crimes around Atlanta, suddenly the Feds are brought in because there was enough to convict on the real accused crime.
You must be confused. There are no hate speech laws in the United States and there aren't going to be. No significant group is proposing we create them.
The other point is that prosecuting under the guise of a hate crime can devalue the real crime. I don't care why they selected someone's house to rob/burn/etc, all reasons should be treated the same : equally bad. Yet we try to differentiate the crimes by assigning severity based on what they were thinking or what we think they were thinking?
So you're against the attempted murder charge? Because that's a charge based on intent. We also prosecute people for failed terrorist attacks. Are you against that? Heck, even successful terrorist bombers get charged with more than just murder. It's because beyond just the killing they also accomplish another goal, which is often their primary goal: the intimidation and coercion of a certain group of people, whether it's government employees, Americans, people of a particular religion, blacks, gays, or whoever. Hate crimes are the same.
I think you're drowning in rhetoric and haven't thought through the logical consequences of the ridiculous notion that intent should be ignored by the criminal justice system.
Homer Simpson: Awww... 20 dollars!? I wanted a peanut.
Homer's brain: 20 dollars can buy many peanuts!
Homer Simpson: Explain how.
Homer's brain: Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
Homer Simpson: Woo hoo!
I think you missed the point. He clearly was referring not to politicians, but to all the ordinary "government is the problem" Republican-voting citizens. This is an example where regulation is a good thing. Something those people should take note of. Nothing a Democrat did will disprove that point.
No this has nothing to do with government regulations it has to do with the business practices the business is doing. Which is why the FCC stepped in.
You're right! We don't need no stinkin' government regulations. We just need to make sure the government regulates business practices. While we're at it, let's keep government out of our Medicare!
The overlay fullscreen setting has always been a horrible hack. Last time I used it, I couldn't minimize the video player window while it was playing or the video would stop or go away, and I also had to keep at least one pixel on-screen as well. Which meant leaving an annoying obstruction on my screen.
The better solution is to just set up a normal dual-head configuration and get a video player capable of handling that correctly, such as Zoom Player for Windows.
I've been on Linux for a while, and I've got a multi-screen setup with video out to my SDTV, and my sound card is split to give separate audio to both my TV and my PC speakers, and I have MythTV set up to be usable with a remote without bothering the person using the computer. All from a single computer with one (nvidia) video card and the motherboard-integrated sound card.
Unless Splashtop uses a static path and assumes all systems are placing it in the exact same place on the exact same hard drive configuration (IDE, SATA, etc), I would assume that anything having to do with a BIOS loading linux distribution would have to at least touch the BIOS to install.
You mean the same way standard operating systems don't install to a static path on a fixed device and therefore need to touch the BIOS to install? Oh, except they don't! The BIOS already scans for a bootable OS and it can scan for SplashTop as well.
How hard do you think it is to scan for partitions with a certain ID and load a file off them? It's certainly a whole lot easier than solving the problem by implementing a BIOS routine to hardcode the loading location in a way that will break as soon as someone moves the partition, then programming a Windows-based setup program to get the starting sector of the file and invoke the BIOS routine. Oh, and there's a good chance this installs its files directly to the Windows partition so it doesn't have to go through all the trouble of shrinking the active partition and making a new one. Which would mean a simple defrag would break SplashTop if it works the ridiculous way you think it does!
Whether or not it's loading into a ROM chip, it's talking to the BIOS, something linux is more than a little bit retarded at.
That's a generalization, not a fact. It implies a whole set of instances of Linux being bad at "talking to the BIOS." I challenge you to cite one instance, never mind a whole set, of "talking to the BIOS" that Windows performs without problems and that Linux has trouble doing. I can cite the reverse: getting or setting the wakeup alarm that every modern PC and even laptops have, that you can set from the BIOS screen. Windows just can't do it. The capability certainly isn't built into Windows already, but even beyond that I couldn't even find a third-party program to do it in Windows. In Linux it's trivial. Just read or write/sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm. So looks like Windows is pretty retarded at talking to the BIOS.
On my desktop machine with MythTV, my system regularly powers on to record a program, then afterwards if no one is logged on it sets the alarm for the next recording and shuts down. It's been doing this for years and hasn't blown up yet! I can even cite the code in case you want to nitpick it or claim it's not BIOS access. cmos_read_alarm and cmos_set_alarm.
You're just way too willing to believe that the other guy is an idiot and wrong to even consider the possibility that you might be wrong and should check the facts. Jeez, man, it's right in the summary:
I assumed that the OS was on a ROM chip on the motherboard. To my great annoyance, when I tried to boot to this OS, a message said that it was not installed. It turns out that motherboard comes with an install disk for this GNU/Linux OS - that you can only run from Windows, to install Splashtop on the hard drive.
Duh, don't you get it? The loader is built into the BIOS already. That's why there was already an option to boot Splashtop, which responded with a message saying it was not installed. That loader is there to load and boot a Linux kernel more quickly and efficiently, but Splashtop is stored on another device. Early motherboards had it preinstalled on an integrated SSD. But this guy's motherboard didn't have an SSD built-in, so Splashtop has to be installed on the hard drive.
If his board had flash memory dedicated to it, Splashtop would have been pre-installed. And if for some reason it wasn't, installing Splashtop from Linux would have been as safe as writing to a USB flash drive. It would not involve flashing the BIOS. But even that's not the situation here because there was no integrated SSD in this board and the installer just puts Splashtop on the hard drive.
In short, the fundamental basis of your post is flat out wrong. I repeat, the fundamental basis of your post is flat out wrong. I repeat because you seem to think repetition is convincing. You're totally wrong, and this install process wasn't something that had to be done from Windows.
This is ridiculous. I can't believe you argued the tragedy of the commons in regard to a basic technical problem.
No, I did no such thing. My reply is only in response to the text I quoted. Hence my quoting that text. I could have corrected you that the fundamental assumption behind your rant that followed was flat out wrong, but I found your prejudicial attitude so much more disturbing.
Here I am talking about how you use Windows to flash ROMs
Why are you talking about that? This story has nothing to do with flashing the BIOS. This is about installing an OS to the hard drive.
because it adheres to the PC specification
This is a totally meaningless statement.
and has a binary distribution model (so you can ship a simple unique flashing app with the board)
Guess what? You can ship one binary that runs on every modern x86 Linux. It's not hard. Especially when your app only needs glibc and a command line interface.
and it is easier to speak to the BIOS through it
No, it's easier to speak to the BIOS through DOS. On both Linux and Windows you have to load your own specialized driver. Or you scrap that plan and provide a FreeDOS boot disk like 99% of motherboard manufacturers do.
and you brought out the tragedy of the commons.
Let me attempt to look at this for what it is, a software environment for my home computing hardware. With that in mind...
I never said anything about single system dominance. In fact, that sort of standardization has some advantages. What I brought up was single-party dominance which is a totally different thing (though it often implies single system dominance). Single party dominance inflates the price of the product and reduces its quality.
And this topic was on Home Desktops... there are no home desktop linux distributions competitive with commercial offerings.
Yeah there are. I could name some counterexamples, but I'm sure you'll just reactively disagree with me. But there are plenty of people having a better experience with Linux distros than they ever had with Windows. Both technical and inexperienced users. And you know what the number one complaint is? That a lot of software (games especially) and drivers aren't available for Linux... A problem not intrinsic to Linux but due to it not having over 90% market share.
You've thrown out the entire technical precedent involved in a completely simple issue of operating system choice for consumer hardware (actually the use thereof for bios operations) and made it an issue of philosophy... you're pushing this amateur hacked-to-shit 1970's operating system on me for what seems like religious reasons.
This statement is so full of fallacies it's hard to pick which ones to respond to. I didn't push an OS at all. I merely explained
"The article describes a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently in their own self-interest can ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long term interest for this to happen."
"The commons dilemma is a specific class of social dilemma in which people's short-term selfish interests are at odds with long-term group interests and the common good. In academia, a range of related terminology has also been used as shorthand for the theory or aspects of it, including resource dilemma, take-some dilemma, and common pool resource."
Some people try to take this problem into account when making decisions. To a naive person, it seems dogmatic, but it's actually quite pragmatic to behave in a way that would be in your interest if other people did the same. It lays the groundwork for your own interests to be served in the future.
For example, remember the dark age of the web? You had to use Internet Explorer or some sites wouldn't display right, look right, or even let you in. Despite that, some people were willing use the competition and demand that sites work with their alternative browsers. You might have told them to just use IE and stop complaining or made fun of them for "thinking IE will dissolve their hands," but it's thanks to them that we have IE8, Firefox 3.5, Chrome, Safari, and Opera 9. Without them we'd all still be on IE6 and there'd be ActiveX all over the place.
We're still in the dark age of operating systems, but the end is in sight. Consumers now have a Linux option with some vendors. And there's those netbooks. Eventually, not supporting Linux will be as common as requiring Internet Explorer on a website is today. And then there will be a large number of people switching.
When people want to avoid Windows, it's not about being cheap or crazy. It's about having control over where your money goes and not contributing to the single-party dominance that hurts the quality of software we all use.
I swear some of you people are like the North Korean refugees who are afraid if they touch the ground in South Korea, their hands will rot and fall off.
Your glorious supreme leader and chief asshat-for-life, Richard M Stallman, is lying to you. If you use Windows, your hands will not rot and fall off.
Sometimes when an idea seems stupid to you, that's because it's actually wooshing over your head. Your comment reads like "Ha ha, if the Earth was round we'd fall off it you idiot!" If you stop assuming other people are morons, you just might learn something.
But common usage in the tech field implies any functional impairment that's not intrinsic. Like software or hardware with features turned off. If Google Earth doesn't give me all implemented features without making me pay for them, then it's crippled. It doesn't matter that I don't care much about the features I'm missing. Similarly, if an update reduces battery life by 10%, then the update cripples battery life.
If you allowed private enterprises to compete unchecked, they would cherrypick the most profitable routes (hubs, basically) and quickly bankrupt the Post Office. They'd also charge less than the Post Office on short routes that the Post Office would need to subsidize the longer routes. But if you had to regulate competitors to make sure they had the same disadvantages as the Post Office, what's the point?
How can you even speculate about that? You have no idea what would happen because it's illegal for anybody to even try it.
That's such basic economics that I'd expect any free market advocate to understand it. It's bad debate ethics to fail to acknowledge a point you know is valid just because you think it will hurt your case. It just indicates doubt over the position you're arguing for and hints that you care more about winning the argument than finding the truth.
Besides, if you think competing companies undercutting USPS hurts your case, then the opposite is even more devastating. If the other companies fail to undercut USPS, then there was no practical benefit to allowing competition. It just wastes gas, and the scenario is an example of capitalism failing. So either the point you wouldn't acknowledge is true, or you lose pretty spectacularly right now.
But, basically you're saying 99% of the population should be screwed because 1% of the population doesn't want to pay the true cost of their mail delivery.
If 99% of the population is subsidizing 1%, then the extra expense of mail delivery for each person in the 1% is split 99 ways. That shouldn't burdern the 99 people too much.
" as well as crippling battery life." is not the same as "a slightly excessive battery drain."
A little to quick to post something?
Main Entry: cripple
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: hinder action, progress
Synonyms: bring to standstill, cramp, damage, destroy, halt, hamstring, impair, put out of action, ruin, spoil, stifle, vitiate
So, you're saying that extra battery drain doesn't impair battery life?
Your attitude is a perfect demonstration of how to lose elections. It's apparently not enough that he agrees with you on the issues, he also has to prioritize them the same way you would. Well that doesn't work. We can't all get top priority attention to our favorite issue.
If you're going to attack Obama for not addressing your favorite issue, then someone else is going to attack him for not addressing theirs and so on... And then we all attack him, fighting over our place in line instead of waiting our turn, and none of us get our issues addressed. Worse yet, the charge is hypocracy, something that can't be levied against the anti-progressives who may want to, for example, begin a massive crackdown on pot. They now sound better because you're spinning the issue in a way that can only make people favoring decriminalization look bad.
It just gives political advantage to the conformists who don't think for themselves and therefore don't suffer from this problem. We need to save our criticism for the people that would actually take us backwards. Attack enemies, not allies!
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Sony will too when this lawsuit is resolved...
You can flash chips without removing them from the board if the board designer was thinking intelligently. In my company's HW dev labs they re-flash bricked system boards all the time
Those boards weren't designed to prevent modding. No, I bet Nintendo has to replace the whole circuit board containing the flash chip due to their own paranoia.
You haven't given a single fact in your diatribe, all you do is state your religiously held beliefs as truth.
Yep. Ignore this guy. He thinks exactly like a neocon. He's got a set of blind, unchangeable allegiances, and he'll make up convenient lies to justify his ridiculous opinions. Then he firmly believes what he made up argues his delusions to the end of the earth. I always wonder about these people. Don't they remember making the stuff up in the first place?
He even had a list of loyalties and enemies on his blog (which appears shut down now). It wasn't 'I like these things' and 'I don't like these things'. It was 'I am for these things' and 'I am against these things.' It's a personality disorder and he'll probably never change.
Mostly because I still have some old GB/GBC games that do not play in the DS at all.(I'm a little surprised NoA didn't put out a DS card that would let me play those titles.)
They can't. If you try to put a GB or GBC cartridge in your DS, you'll find it won't go all the way in. They operate at a different voltage, and the GBA was designed with a switch inside the slot that only GB/GBC cartridges would push. That switch changed the operating voltage and basically connected the cartridge, screen, and buttons to an alternate set of hardware. In the DS, there's a solid obstruction in place of the switch, so you can't fit GB/GBC carts in it.
Yes, saving lives is retarded. I'm sure the families of victims killed by quiet cars will be relieved to know that it's somebody else's fault.
Any cause it harmed by people spouting negative or derogatory opinions toward it.
Because in the US that is what hate speech laws are being used for. Get off from a high profile case that "bothers" some politicians and you can be sure a hate speech charge will crop up. Been done in a few visible crimes around Atlanta, suddenly the Feds are brought in because there was enough to convict on the real accused crime.
You must be confused. There are no hate speech laws in the United States and there aren't going to be. No significant group is proposing we create them.
The other point is that prosecuting under the guise of a hate crime can devalue the real crime. I don't care why they selected someone's house to rob/burn/etc, all reasons should be treated the same : equally bad. Yet we try to differentiate the crimes by assigning severity based on what they were thinking or what we think they were thinking?
So you're against the attempted murder charge? Because that's a charge based on intent. We also prosecute people for failed terrorist attacks. Are you against that? Heck, even successful terrorist bombers get charged with more than just murder. It's because beyond just the killing they also accomplish another goal, which is often their primary goal: the intimidation and coercion of a certain group of people, whether it's government employees, Americans, people of a particular religion, blacks, gays, or whoever. Hate crimes are the same.
I think you're drowning in rhetoric and haven't thought through the logical consequences of the ridiculous notion that intent should be ignored by the criminal justice system.
money = sex, cars, nachos, AND/OR beer!
Homer Simpson: Awww ... 20 dollars!? I wanted a peanut.
Homer's brain: 20 dollars can buy many peanuts!
Homer Simpson: Explain how.
Homer's brain: Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
Homer Simpson: Woo hoo!
I think you missed the point. He clearly was referring not to politicians, but to all the ordinary "government is the problem" Republican-voting citizens. This is an example where regulation is a good thing. Something those people should take note of. Nothing a Democrat did will disprove that point.
No this has nothing to do with government regulations it has to do with the business practices the business is doing. Which is why the FCC stepped in.
You're right! We don't need no stinkin' government regulations. We just need to make sure the government regulates business practices. While we're at it, let's keep government out of our Medicare!
The overlay fullscreen setting has always been a horrible hack. Last time I used it, I couldn't minimize the video player window while it was playing or the video would stop or go away, and I also had to keep at least one pixel on-screen as well. Which meant leaving an annoying obstruction on my screen.
The better solution is to just set up a normal dual-head configuration and get a video player capable of handling that correctly, such as Zoom Player for Windows.
I've been on Linux for a while, and I've got a multi-screen setup with video out to my SDTV, and my sound card is split to give separate audio to both my TV and my PC speakers, and I have MythTV set up to be usable with a remote without bothering the person using the computer. All from a single computer with one (nvidia) video card and the motherboard-integrated sound card.
Are the checkboxes on your Windows system disabled?
Yes, and I can't turn them back on. Help!!
Unless Splashtop uses a static path and assumes all systems are placing it in the exact same place on the exact same hard drive configuration (IDE, SATA, etc), I would assume that anything having to do with a BIOS loading linux distribution would have to at least touch the BIOS to install.
You mean the same way standard operating systems don't install to a static path on a fixed device and therefore need to touch the BIOS to install? Oh, except they don't! The BIOS already scans for a bootable OS and it can scan for SplashTop as well.
How hard do you think it is to scan for partitions with a certain ID and load a file off them? It's certainly a whole lot easier than solving the problem by implementing a BIOS routine to hardcode the loading location in a way that will break as soon as someone moves the partition, then programming a Windows-based setup program to get the starting sector of the file and invoke the BIOS routine. Oh, and there's a good chance this installs its files directly to the Windows partition so it doesn't have to go through all the trouble of shrinking the active partition and making a new one. Which would mean a simple defrag would break SplashTop if it works the ridiculous way you think it does!
Whether or not it's loading into a ROM chip, it's talking to the BIOS, something linux is more than a little bit retarded at.
That's a generalization, not a fact. It implies a whole set of instances of Linux being bad at "talking to the BIOS." I challenge you to cite one instance, never mind a whole set, of "talking to the BIOS" that Windows performs without problems and that Linux has trouble doing. I can cite the reverse: getting or setting the wakeup alarm that every modern PC and even laptops have, that you can set from the BIOS screen. Windows just can't do it. The capability certainly isn't built into Windows already, but even beyond that I couldn't even find a third-party program to do it in Windows. In Linux it's trivial. Just read or write /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm. So looks like Windows is pretty retarded at talking to the BIOS.
On my desktop machine with MythTV, my system regularly powers on to record a program, then afterwards if no one is logged on it sets the alarm for the next recording and shuts down. It's been doing this for years and hasn't blown up yet! I can even cite the code in case you want to nitpick it or claim it's not BIOS access. cmos_read_alarm and cmos_set_alarm.
You're just way too willing to believe that the other guy is an idiot and wrong to even consider the possibility that you might be wrong and should check the facts. Jeez, man, it's right in the summary:
I assumed that the OS was on a ROM chip on the motherboard. To my great annoyance, when I tried to boot to this OS, a message said that it was not installed. It turns out that motherboard comes with an install disk for this GNU/Linux OS - that you can only run from Windows, to install Splashtop on the hard drive.
Duh, don't you get it? The loader is built into the BIOS already. That's why there was already an option to boot Splashtop, which responded with a message saying it was not installed. That loader is there to load and boot a Linux kernel more quickly and efficiently, but Splashtop is stored on another device. Early motherboards had it preinstalled on an integrated SSD. But this guy's motherboard didn't have an SSD built-in, so Splashtop has to be installed on the hard drive.
If his board had flash memory dedicated to it, Splashtop would have been pre-installed. And if for some reason it wasn't, installing Splashtop from Linux would have been as safe as writing to a USB flash drive. It would not involve flashing the BIOS. But even that's not the situation here because there was no integrated SSD in this board and the installer just puts Splashtop on the hard drive.
In short, the fundamental basis of your post is flat out wrong. I repeat, the fundamental basis of your post is flat out wrong. I repeat because you seem to think repetition is convincing. You're totally wrong, and this install process wasn't something that had to be done from Windows.
This is ridiculous. I can't believe you argued the tragedy of the commons in regard to a basic technical problem.
No, I did no such thing. My reply is only in response to the text I quoted. Hence my quoting that text. I could have corrected you that the fundamental assumption behind your rant that followed was flat out wrong, but I found your prejudicial attitude so much more disturbing.
Here I am talking about how you use Windows to flash ROMs
Why are you talking about that? This story has nothing to do with flashing the BIOS. This is about installing an OS to the hard drive.
because it adheres to the PC specification
This is a totally meaningless statement.
and has a binary distribution model (so you can ship a simple unique flashing app with the board)
Guess what? You can ship one binary that runs on every modern x86 Linux. It's not hard. Especially when your app only needs glibc and a command line interface.
and it is easier to speak to the BIOS through it
No, it's easier to speak to the BIOS through DOS. On both Linux and Windows you have to load your own specialized driver. Or you scrap that plan and provide a FreeDOS boot disk like 99% of motherboard manufacturers do.
and you brought out the tragedy of the commons.
Let me attempt to look at this for what it is, a software environment for my home computing hardware. With that in mind...
Some might argue that you are pushing a far inferior form of single system dominance by pushing UNIX..
I never said anything about single system dominance. In fact, that sort of standardization has some advantages. What I brought up was single-party dominance which is a totally different thing (though it often implies single system dominance). Single party dominance inflates the price of the product and reduces its quality.
You're pushing something here that's archaic to the point of being dangerous to national security infrastructure, the linux operating system. This is just plain scary. It's scary because Linux is such a castle in the sky. It's a massive basket of failed promises and assurances to the point where it is basically a trojan horse for enterprise-like infrastructure. It's so low quality and insecure that its use in government applications literally frightens me. Do you have any idea how bad the virus situation would be if Linux was the dominant system instead of Windows? The UNIX security model doesn't apply to complex systems like Linux, you poor fools! Why does the "future" need to be a poorly implemented flavor of a system from the past?
And this topic was on Home Desktops... there are no home desktop linux distributions competitive with commercial offerings.
Yeah there are. I could name some counterexamples, but I'm sure you'll just reactively disagree with me. But there are plenty of people having a better experience with Linux distros than they ever had with Windows. Both technical and inexperienced users. And you know what the number one complaint is? That a lot of software (games especially) and drivers aren't available for Linux... A problem not intrinsic to Linux but due to it not having over 90% market share.
You've thrown out the entire technical precedent involved in a completely simple issue of operating system choice for consumer hardware (actually the use thereof for bios operations) and made it an issue of philosophy... you're pushing this amateur hacked-to-shit 1970's operating system on me for what seems like religious reasons.
This statement is so full of fallacies it's hard to pick which ones to respond to. I didn't push an OS at all. I merely explained
There's a lot I could say, but I'll just focus on one point.
First, read up on the tragedy of the commons and the commons dilemma:
"The article describes a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently in their own self-interest can ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long term interest for this to happen."
"The commons dilemma is a specific class of social dilemma in which people's short-term selfish interests are at odds with long-term group interests and the common good. In academia, a range of related terminology has also been used as shorthand for the theory or aspects of it, including resource dilemma, take-some dilemma, and common pool resource."
Some people try to take this problem into account when making decisions. To a naive person, it seems dogmatic, but it's actually quite pragmatic to behave in a way that would be in your interest if other people did the same. It lays the groundwork for your own interests to be served in the future.
For example, remember the dark age of the web? You had to use Internet Explorer or some sites wouldn't display right, look right, or even let you in. Despite that, some people were willing use the competition and demand that sites work with their alternative browsers. You might have told them to just use IE and stop complaining or made fun of them for "thinking IE will dissolve their hands," but it's thanks to them that we have IE8, Firefox 3.5, Chrome, Safari, and Opera 9. Without them we'd all still be on IE6 and there'd be ActiveX all over the place.
We're still in the dark age of operating systems, but the end is in sight. Consumers now have a Linux option with some vendors. And there's those netbooks. Eventually, not supporting Linux will be as common as requiring Internet Explorer on a website is today. And then there will be a large number of people switching.
When people want to avoid Windows, it's not about being cheap or crazy. It's about having control over where your money goes and not contributing to the single-party dominance that hurts the quality of software we all use.
I swear some of you people are like the North Korean refugees who are afraid if they touch the ground in South Korea, their hands will rot and fall off.
Your glorious supreme leader and chief asshat-for-life, Richard M Stallman, is lying to you. If you use Windows, your hands will not rot and fall off.
Sometimes when an idea seems stupid to you, that's because it's actually wooshing over your head. Your comment reads like "Ha ha, if the Earth was round we'd fall off it you idiot!" If you stop assuming other people are morons, you just might learn something.
But common usage in the tech field implies any functional impairment that's not intrinsic. Like software or hardware with features turned off. If Google Earth doesn't give me all implemented features without making me pay for them, then it's crippled. It doesn't matter that I don't care much about the features I'm missing. Similarly, if an update reduces battery life by 10%, then the update cripples battery life.
If you allowed private enterprises to compete unchecked, they would cherrypick the most profitable routes (hubs, basically) and quickly bankrupt the Post Office. They'd also charge less than the Post Office on short routes that the Post Office would need to subsidize the longer routes. But if you had to regulate competitors to make sure they had the same disadvantages as the Post Office, what's the point?
How can you even speculate about that? You have no idea what would happen because it's illegal for anybody to even try it.
That's such basic economics that I'd expect any free market advocate to understand it. It's bad debate ethics to fail to acknowledge a point you know is valid just because you think it will hurt your case. It just indicates doubt over the position you're arguing for and hints that you care more about winning the argument than finding the truth.
Besides, if you think competing companies undercutting USPS hurts your case, then the opposite is even more devastating. If the other companies fail to undercut USPS, then there was no practical benefit to allowing competition. It just wastes gas, and the scenario is an example of capitalism failing. So either the point you wouldn't acknowledge is true, or you lose pretty spectacularly right now.
But, basically you're saying 99% of the population should be screwed because 1% of the population doesn't want to pay the true cost of their mail delivery.
If 99% of the population is subsidizing 1%, then the extra expense of mail delivery for each person in the 1% is split 99 ways. That shouldn't burdern the 99 people too much.
" as well as crippling battery life." is not the same as "a slightly excessive battery drain."
A little to quick to post something?
Main Entry: cripple
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: hinder action, progress
Synonyms: bring to standstill, cramp, damage, destroy, halt, hamstring, impair, put out of action, ruin, spoil, stifle, vitiate
So, you're saying that extra battery drain doesn't impair battery life?
How about this statement?
"People of your religion deserve to be hunted down and killed."
No intention was expressed, so no problem, right?
The technology is definitely out there, my handhald with 9" has 800x480
That's nothing, check out the Pandora: 800x480 on a 4.3" screen
That's not a workaround, that's a solution!
Your attitude is a perfect demonstration of how to lose elections. It's apparently not enough that he agrees with you on the issues, he also has to prioritize them the same way you would. Well that doesn't work. We can't all get top priority attention to our favorite issue.
If you're going to attack Obama for not addressing your favorite issue, then someone else is going to attack him for not addressing theirs and so on... And then we all attack him, fighting over our place in line instead of waiting our turn, and none of us get our issues addressed. Worse yet, the charge is hypocracy, something that can't be levied against the anti-progressives who may want to, for example, begin a massive crackdown on pot. They now sound better because you're spinning the issue in a way that can only make people favoring decriminalization look bad.
It just gives political advantage to the conformists who don't think for themselves and therefore don't suffer from this problem. We need to save our criticism for the people that would actually take us backwards. Attack enemies, not allies!
Oops. I gave the correct spelling to Google, but it sent me to a misspelled domain...