Well, we have already lost all of our other rights. The right to own firearms is all we have left. Losing that is losing all that is left.
If it's truly come to the point where all other rights are gone, then passionate supporters of the Second Amendment have already utterly failed to defend the very reason that right exists in the first place: "being necessary to the security of a free State".
Just because something's good doesn't mean they stay. Just because something's bad doesn't mean they die away (or die quickly enough).
Unlike consumer electronics, or the battlefield of early personal computing which was decided largely on cost and brand association (IBM), take something that has effectively zero cost to the consumer, television:
Firefly: half a season. Jersey Shore: 6 seasons.
Granted sci-fi itself is already a niche market, but whether one thinks Firefly was good or not, Jersey Shore was in no way better than it and certainly not "good", other than its appeal to the people obsessed with tabloid drama who make up a much higher percentage of the population.
It used to be even better than that before the Conservatives screwed things up.
To somewhat offset the contribution limits, we had a program in place that rewarded federal political parties a subsidy of around $2 for every vote cast for one of their candidates during an election. Smaller parties in particular benefited from this (though there was some minimum-vote threshold, IIRC), and it meant your vote wasn't merely symbolic, but directly aided your preferred party even if they didn't win a seat.
The Conservatives decided to kill this program, arguing that parties should only get money from fundraising efforts. This played well with the so-called fiscally responsible right-wing who complained that "their" tax dollars were being wasted. No subsidy meant a few million saved each election, right?
Except campaign contributions are tax-deductable. If you donated the maximum $1000, you got around half of it back in tax deductions, so instead of $2 every 4-5 years of tax dollars I paid into subsidizing exactly who I want, $500 every year goes to subsidizing some rich bastard's tax deduction for contributing $1000 to a party I don't support.
Political donations should not be tax-deductable at all. It should be a purely ideological choice, with zero financial incentives. And if you have enough money to waste on a political party, you obviously don't need the tax deduction.
I'm not sure I would call $750 "cheaply available" when that one item is more than what many are willing (or able) to pay for a PC or laptop. Granted that crowd likely wouldn't be looking at 27" screens either, but if some of them were, there are 1920x1080 27" monitors for less than $300.
The problem with US $1 coin's characteristics seems to be a management failure, then, because those seem like extremely trivial issues that never should have arisen in the first place.
Canada, Australia and New Zealand (and others, but I'm familiar with these countries) all introduced dollar and even 2-dollar coins without prolonged fuss or confusion. In Canada's case, the coins were very distinct (different colour, size, and shape) without being too much heavier, enough that visually impaired have no problem telling them apart. $1 and $2 bills completely disappeared within a year or two of their coin replacement's introduction.
I disagree that things like this should be phased in over long periods of time. Many examples show that if you allow the old system to continue existing in parallel with the old, people will never start adapting to the new--they'll just block it out mentally as noise. They'll use any justification for using the old, including pointing to relatively minor issues with the new. People only *start* changing their ways when it's a sudden, drastic change. The gas price spike in 2008 saw an irrational run on fuel-efficient cars. After gas prices dropped and the economy recovered somewhat, once again SUVs are being bought in droves, the lesson all but forgotten.
The official metric conversion in Canada happened before my time, but the social effects happened inside of a decade--far shorter than a single human generation. The government simply gave people no choice--road signs, gas stations, etc were all changed to metric-only, no imperial equivalent provided. Of course there's still lingering imperial usage informally, even among young people, not helped by all the American content we're exposed to.
Now, the American people are not as government-friendly as people in other democracies are, so one can argue that forcing sudden change is not in the US government's nature. But historically, that's exactly what the US federal government has done to force social changes, stepping on state's rights in the process sometimes. Now, metric and dollar coins obviously don't compare to the social significance (good and bad) of civil rights, women's suffrage, health care reform, prohibition, the drug war, etc... but they are comparable in impact to the Highway Act, or mandating the end of analog TV broadcasts.
Hell, it would've been more economical to stop printing $1 bills years ago, seeing as $1 US coins have been available for ages. But no, new $1 bills are still made, and so people continue using them.
Dig that grave deeper. It'd have been more economical to just drop the dollar coin altogether. Somehow your little opinion on such things is more important than the blatantly obvious consensus of hundreds of millions of people.
The blatantly obvious consensus of hundreds of millions of people is that Internet Explorer is a great browser, and Windows XP remains a great operating system for 2013. That is obviously as false as your statement, because it's inertia, familiarity, and habit that keeps them going, not because they remain the best option years after their introduction.
Yes, that's the same excuse detractors of the space program use. Why waste $20 billion / year on NASA when that could be used to feed and house the poor?
Never mind that such social programs already add up to around $1.5 trillion a year, and things never seem to improve.
There will always be other issues to "address first", but those likely already have metric shitloads of money devoted to it already, plus you can do things in parallel instead of just sequence everything one right after the other. Your analogy is flawed because it assumes only one issue can be addressed at a time, or that every single resource of the US can be channeled into addressing a single issue (and that the issue will utterly wipe the US from the map, no less).
As a Canadian who has ordered beer in most of the provinces, I can confirm that we order it in pints.
And that's OK. because it's a set size and it's not something that further conversion is going to be done on. You are never going to have to know how many mL of beer you just received.
Actually, as a Canadian you have probably been scammed on pints. The US pint (473 mL) is less than a imperial pint (568 mL), and there's a "metric" pint that's exactly 500 mL. In Canada there hasn't been consistency or regulations as to which "pint" bars need to serve, so you might expect a British pint when ordering but actually get beer in an American-sized pint glass. 100 mL difference isn't a lot in absolute terms, but we're talking up to 20% difference in expectation vs. reality.
So no, a pint of beer in Canada is NOT a set size.
Economics and timing is a poor but convenient excuse, it's only been used for the last three decades to justify not doing anything.
It would have been more economical to start phasing out imperial 30 years ago, but instead millions of additional dollars have been wasted making, for example, signposts in miles and speed limit signs in mph.
It will *never* be a "good time" to change to metric, but the longer you *don't* change, the more money you've wasted and the more it will cost when you finally do change over.
Hell, it would've been more economical to stop printing $1 bills years ago, seeing as $1 US coins have been available for ages. But no, new $1 bills are still made, and so people continue using them.
Instead of saying it's not economical or bad timing, just say some of the real reasons: Americans on the whole are resistant to change, don't want to learn a new and generally better way of doing things, or just want to be different somehow from the rest of the world (except such nice company as Liberia and Burma).
Not sure rolfwind is saying Google is a monopoly. Just like Apple, Google is showing anti-competitive behaviour, that demonstrates they would do far worse if they actually did have a monopoly or significant majority.
Not that I'm in any way supporting Microsoft's browser. Those bastards held back web development for a good decade, so a little Schadenfreude is in order.
There's a difference between, for example, correcting a stranger on the street about the species of bird they're actually seeing based on its plumage, versus a simple correction to a widely held misconception about the world-famous Autobahn.
This is Slashdot, not a frat party, correcting common misconceptions on indisputable facts are welcome and encouraged. It's bad enough that CNN did its part to continue America's descent into idiocracy by showcasing Honey Boo Boo during their New Years Eve coverage.
FFS that was my gut reaction, then backed up by someone from the article itself. You want a *study* to back up an ill-conceived move?
But fine, I'll expand on that and do the math for you.
The most popular hybrid, the Toyota Prius, has only sold a cumulative total of 3.3 million *worldwide* as of October 2012.
In the US alone, hybrids and non-traditional fuel vehicles make up only 3% of car sales, or about 2 million since 2007. Oregon has a population of about 3.9 million, or 1.25% of the US population. Despite this, Oregon makes up about 2% of hybrid and electric-only sales.
So, let's say all hybrid and electric vehicles since 2007 are still on the road, 2% of 2 million sold is a mere 40,000. Rates were deliberately left out in the proposed Oregon legislation, but let's use Washington's flat rate option of $100 a year. If all hybrid/electric car owners go with that, or we assume this is the average even if they track them using GPS or whatever, the state pulls in a mere $4 million each year.
In the Oregon DOT's 2011-13 budget, they have a total annual revenue of almost $2.5 billion ($5 billion revenue over the budget's 2-year span).
$4 million is peanuts for a government operation. It wouldn't even cover the cost of government-contracted development of the necessary devices for tracking in-state usage (you know they won't just re-use anything that's already out there).
In fact, the revenue from this is far worse than $4 million--I just realized that the Oregon tax only kicks in for vehicles rated at 55 mpg or better, but the Prius' official EPA rating is 50 mpg. The EPA actually rates none of the 2012 hybrids as 55mpg or better. So, remove the most popular non-traditional fuel cars from all the stats above and recalculate--downward. Going back to this chart, only around 70,000 plug-in hybrids and extended range vehicles have been sold since 2007. 2% of *that* is 1400, so you're pulling in a mere $140,000 a year.
Sure, this'll increase as years go by, and they even claim this is planning for the future, but that doesn't change the accuracy of the statement that fuel-efficient vehicles are still (i.e. right now) nowhere near the numbers they need to be for this to even make sense from a bureaucratic/administrative perspective.
So there's your study. The state of Oregon has been invoiced $10,000 in consulting fees, which I'm pretty sure is a bargain over whatever their regular consultants are charging for a "study" like this.
Unfortunately, currency reform would not only face stiff opposition from the zinc lobby (because penny is largely zinc now), but from the politically well-connected Crane Company in Massachusetts, which manufactures all of the paper used in printing US currency. The absurdity of vending machines and tollbooths needing to accept paper money (much more expensive than coins) counts for nothing as against a corporation with skilled lobbyists.
+1. I saw the stupidest thing on the double-decker public buses in Vegas where they had to accept paper bills too, and the damn things took 2 seconds per $1 bill to suck it in, pause, slip it partway back out, and suck it all the way in the second time (assuming it didn't jam or something and the rider had to remove and re-insert the whole damn bill). This idiocy took minutes at several busy stops. On top of the heavy traffic along the strip, on the way back we decided to just walk. We actually did beat the bus back to our hotel.
Not to mention the irrational resistance to dollar coins in the US. Canada not only introduced $1 and later $2 coins, they did the sane thing and stopped making $1 and $2 bills.
Between this and the refusal to use metric, I swear, if it weren't for the fact lots of modern technology comes out of the USA I'd mistake it for a regressive country resistant to any and all positive change.
As what? An administrative clerk? With zero context for what exactly it is you do, the engineer friend of a registered/. user has far more credibility than an anonymous nobody.
Tax everyone, based on miles driven + weight of the car. Because heavier cars damage the road more. Then it will probably make sense.
Which is essentially what a gasoline tax does - heavier cars tend to use more, cars that are driven more use more, heavy cars that are driven more use even more.
This is just looking ahead to a future when the current way of doing business no longer works....
Except this is not yet the future, and it especially was not in 2001 when they started studying how to make up gas tax shortage. Fuel-efficient vehicles are still nowhere near the numbers they need to be for this to even make sense from an bureaucratic/administrative perspective ("The administrative costs of starting the new system would also outweigh any additional revenue for years").
And, while governments are great at reacting to things, they're notoriously bad at prescriptive action without some lobby group pushing an agenda.
Please excuse my civilian ignorance, but why is this the case? If there's one group of people qualified to handle guns, understand its use, safety procedures, and consequences of screwing up when using them, you'd think it would be the disciplined professionals. I'm assuming soldiers went through a psych evaluation when enlisting, too, though of course that can change during the course of a career. And while there might be kids in family housing, there wouldn't be any on base to stumble across a gun and accidentally shoot themselves.
So what's the reason they can't carry even a small personal firearm just anywhere while on military base grounds or housing? Is this an arbitrary government/military rule (implication: they don't trust their own military to have sufficient self-discipline)? Or is there a good historical reason?
Not quite. In DOS you had to either typed out the whole name, or typed part of it and tabbed to auto-complete (think of it as hitting the Windows key *after* typing the name of the program). And that's only if you knew the exact letters it started with, too.
Type "Word" into the search-launchers of Vista/7 and it'll correctly offer up "Microsoft Office Word 20xx" as the first choice instead of "Wordpad"
And sure, 8.3-format names aren't a big deal for the 5 programs you use normally, but a small problem for the dozens or hundreds of others you don't use often.
Although Apple's reason for this isn't security but instead to up-sell to a more expensive model, a lack of an SD slot does indeed increase security by physically eliminating one vector for malware to take advantage of.
We see the same principle when some companies disable or seal up USB ports on their employee desktops computers, and of course there's the so-called air gap between the internet and secure internal-only servers.
Each of these decreases usability and convenience, and can be defeated by anyone motivated and savvy enough, but they undeniably increase overall security.
Given even non-projectile weapons, a pitbull is weaker than you are, but you'd be a fool to call it weak. Take on a poodle or chihuahua, or an infant pitbull, and there's no contest.
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Well, we have already lost all of our other rights. The right to own firearms is all we have left. Losing that is losing all that is left.
If it's truly come to the point where all other rights are gone, then passionate supporters of the Second Amendment have already utterly failed to defend the very reason that right exists in the first place: "being necessary to the security of a free State".
Just because something's good doesn't mean they stay. Just because something's bad doesn't mean they die away (or die quickly enough).
Unlike consumer electronics, or the battlefield of early personal computing which was decided largely on cost and brand association (IBM), take something that has effectively zero cost to the consumer, television:
Firefly: half a season.
Jersey Shore: 6 seasons.
Granted sci-fi itself is already a niche market, but whether one thinks Firefly was good or not, Jersey Shore was in no way better than it and certainly not "good", other than its appeal to the people obsessed with tabloid drama who make up a much higher percentage of the population.
It used to be even better than that before the Conservatives screwed things up.
To somewhat offset the contribution limits, we had a program in place that rewarded federal political parties a subsidy of around $2 for every vote cast for one of their candidates during an election. Smaller parties in particular benefited from this (though there was some minimum-vote threshold, IIRC), and it meant your vote wasn't merely symbolic, but directly aided your preferred party even if they didn't win a seat.
The Conservatives decided to kill this program, arguing that parties should only get money from fundraising efforts. This played well with the so-called fiscally responsible right-wing who complained that "their" tax dollars were being wasted. No subsidy meant a few million saved each election, right?
Except campaign contributions are tax-deductable. If you donated the maximum $1000, you got around half of it back in tax deductions, so instead of $2 every 4-5 years of tax dollars I paid into subsidizing exactly who I want, $500 every year goes to subsidizing some rich bastard's tax deduction for contributing $1000 to a party I don't support.
Political donations should not be tax-deductable at all. It should be a purely ideological choice, with zero financial incentives. And if you have enough money to waste on a political party, you obviously don't need the tax deduction.
I'm not sure I would call $750 "cheaply available" when that one item is more than what many are willing (or able) to pay for a PC or laptop. Granted that crowd likely wouldn't be looking at 27" screens either, but if some of them were, there are 1920x1080 27" monitors for less than $300.
The problem with US $1 coin's characteristics seems to be a management failure, then, because those seem like extremely trivial issues that never should have arisen in the first place.
Canada, Australia and New Zealand (and others, but I'm familiar with these countries) all introduced dollar and even 2-dollar coins without prolonged fuss or confusion. In Canada's case, the coins were very distinct (different colour, size, and shape) without being too much heavier, enough that visually impaired have no problem telling them apart. $1 and $2 bills completely disappeared within a year or two of their coin replacement's introduction.
I disagree that things like this should be phased in over long periods of time. Many examples show that if you allow the old system to continue existing in parallel with the old, people will never start adapting to the new--they'll just block it out mentally as noise. They'll use any justification for using the old, including pointing to relatively minor issues with the new. People only *start* changing their ways when it's a sudden, drastic change. The gas price spike in 2008 saw an irrational run on fuel-efficient cars. After gas prices dropped and the economy recovered somewhat, once again SUVs are being bought in droves, the lesson all but forgotten.
The official metric conversion in Canada happened before my time, but the social effects happened inside of a decade--far shorter than a single human generation. The government simply gave people no choice--road signs, gas stations, etc were all changed to metric-only, no imperial equivalent provided. Of course there's still lingering imperial usage informally, even among young people, not helped by all the American content we're exposed to.
Now, the American people are not as government-friendly as people in other democracies are, so one can argue that forcing sudden change is not in the US government's nature. But historically, that's exactly what the US federal government has done to force social changes, stepping on state's rights in the process sometimes. Now, metric and dollar coins obviously don't compare to the social significance (good and bad) of civil rights, women's suffrage, health care reform, prohibition, the drug war, etc... but they are comparable in impact to the Highway Act, or mandating the end of analog TV broadcasts.
Economics and timing is a poor but convenient excuse, it's only been used for the last three decades to justify not doing anything.
So you think a choice of measurement units is more important than an economy?
I addressed such false dichotomy already.
Hell, it would've been more economical to stop printing $1 bills years ago, seeing as $1 US coins have been available for ages. But no, new $1 bills are still made, and so people continue using them.
Dig that grave deeper. It'd have been more economical to just drop the dollar coin altogether. Somehow your little opinion on such things is more important than the blatantly obvious consensus of hundreds of millions of people.
The blatantly obvious consensus of hundreds of millions of people is that Internet Explorer is a great browser, and Windows XP remains a great operating system for 2013. That is obviously as false as your statement, because it's inertia, familiarity, and habit that keeps them going, not because they remain the best option years after their introduction.
Yes, that's the same excuse detractors of the space program use. Why waste $20 billion / year on NASA when that could be used to feed and house the poor?
Never mind that such social programs already add up to around $1.5 trillion a year, and things never seem to improve.
There will always be other issues to "address first", but those likely already have metric shitloads of money devoted to it already, plus you can do things in parallel instead of just sequence everything one right after the other. Your analogy is flawed because it assumes only one issue can be addressed at a time, or that every single resource of the US can be channeled into addressing a single issue (and that the issue will utterly wipe the US from the map, no less).
As a Canadian who has ordered beer in most of the provinces, I can confirm that we order it in pints.
And that's OK. because it's a set size and it's not something that further conversion is going to be done on. You are never going to have to know how many mL of beer you just received.
Actually, as a Canadian you have probably been scammed on pints. The US pint (473 mL) is less than a imperial pint (568 mL), and there's a "metric" pint that's exactly 500 mL. In Canada there hasn't been consistency or regulations as to which "pint" bars need to serve, so you might expect a British pint when ordering but actually get beer in an American-sized pint glass. 100 mL difference isn't a lot in absolute terms, but we're talking up to 20% difference in expectation vs. reality.
So no, a pint of beer in Canada is NOT a set size.
Economics and timing is a poor but convenient excuse, it's only been used for the last three decades to justify not doing anything.
It would have been more economical to start phasing out imperial 30 years ago, but instead millions of additional dollars have been wasted making, for example, signposts in miles and speed limit signs in mph.
It will *never* be a "good time" to change to metric, but the longer you *don't* change, the more money you've wasted and the more it will cost when you finally do change over.
Hell, it would've been more economical to stop printing $1 bills years ago, seeing as $1 US coins have been available for ages. But no, new $1 bills are still made, and so people continue using them.
Instead of saying it's not economical or bad timing, just say some of the real reasons: Americans on the whole are resistant to change, don't want to learn a new and generally better way of doing things, or just want to be different somehow from the rest of the world (except such nice company as Liberia and Burma).
Not sure rolfwind is saying Google is a monopoly. Just like Apple, Google is showing anti-competitive behaviour, that demonstrates they would do far worse if they actually did have a monopoly or significant majority.
Not that I'm in any way supporting Microsoft's browser. Those bastards held back web development for a good decade, so a little Schadenfreude is in order.
Since when did correcting a wrong assertion become pedantry?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedant
There's a difference between, for example, correcting a stranger on the street about the species of bird they're actually seeing based on its plumage, versus a simple correction to a widely held misconception about the world-famous Autobahn.
This is Slashdot, not a frat party, correcting common misconceptions on indisputable facts are welcome and encouraged. It's bad enough that CNN did its part to continue America's descent into idiocracy by showcasing Honey Boo Boo during their New Years Eve coverage.
FFS that was my gut reaction, then backed up by someone from the article itself. You want a *study* to back up an ill-conceived move?
But fine, I'll expand on that and do the math for you.
The most popular hybrid, the Toyota Prius, has only sold a cumulative total of 3.3 million *worldwide* as of October 2012.
In the US alone, hybrids and non-traditional fuel vehicles make up only 3% of car sales, or about 2 million since 2007. Oregon has a population of about 3.9 million, or 1.25% of the US population. Despite this, Oregon makes up about 2% of hybrid and electric-only sales.
So, let's say all hybrid and electric vehicles since 2007 are still on the road, 2% of 2 million sold is a mere 40,000. Rates were deliberately left out in the proposed Oregon legislation, but let's use Washington's flat rate option of $100 a year. If all hybrid/electric car owners go with that, or we assume this is the average even if they track them using GPS or whatever, the state pulls in a mere $4 million each year.
In the Oregon DOT's 2011-13 budget, they have a total annual revenue of almost $2.5 billion ($5 billion revenue over the budget's 2-year span).
$4 million is peanuts for a government operation. It wouldn't even cover the cost of government-contracted development of the necessary devices for tracking in-state usage (you know they won't just re-use anything that's already out there).
In fact, the revenue from this is far worse than $4 million--I just realized that the Oregon tax only kicks in for vehicles rated at 55 mpg or better, but the Prius' official EPA rating is 50 mpg. The EPA actually rates none of the 2012 hybrids as 55mpg or better. So, remove the most popular non-traditional fuel cars from all the stats above and recalculate--downward. Going back to this chart, only around 70,000 plug-in hybrids and extended range vehicles have been sold since 2007. 2% of *that* is 1400, so you're pulling in a mere $140,000 a year.
Sure, this'll increase as years go by, and they even claim this is planning for the future, but that doesn't change the accuracy of the statement that fuel-efficient vehicles are still (i.e. right now) nowhere near the numbers they need to be for this to even make sense from a bureaucratic/administrative perspective.
So there's your study. The state of Oregon has been invoiced $10,000 in consulting fees, which I'm pretty sure is a bargain over whatever their regular consultants are charging for a "study" like this.
Throw in the fact taxes are added on top of the listed prices, and it really is a crapshoot that averages out over time.
Unfortunately, currency reform would not only face stiff opposition from the zinc lobby (because penny is largely zinc now), but from the politically well-connected Crane Company in Massachusetts, which manufactures all of the paper used in printing US currency. The absurdity of vending machines and tollbooths needing to accept paper money (much more expensive than coins) counts for nothing as against a corporation with skilled lobbyists.
+1. I saw the stupidest thing on the double-decker public buses in Vegas where they had to accept paper bills too, and the damn things took 2 seconds per $1 bill to suck it in, pause, slip it partway back out, and suck it all the way in the second time (assuming it didn't jam or something and the rider had to remove and re-insert the whole damn bill). This idiocy took minutes at several busy stops. On top of the heavy traffic along the strip, on the way back we decided to just walk. We actually did beat the bus back to our hotel.
Not to mention the irrational resistance to dollar coins in the US. Canada not only introduced $1 and later $2 coins, they did the sane thing and stopped making $1 and $2 bills.
Between this and the refusal to use metric, I swear, if it weren't for the fact lots of modern technology comes out of the USA I'd mistake it for a regressive country resistant to any and all positive change.
As what? An administrative clerk? With zero context for what exactly it is you do, the engineer friend of a registered /. user has far more credibility than an anonymous nobody.
Which is essentially what a gasoline tax does - heavier cars tend to use more, cars that are driven more use more, heavy cars that are driven more use even more.
This is just looking ahead to a future when the current way of doing business no longer works....
Except this is not yet the future, and it especially was not in 2001 when they started studying how to make up gas tax shortage. Fuel-efficient vehicles are still nowhere near the numbers they need to be for this to even make sense from an bureaucratic/administrative perspective ("The administrative costs of starting the new system would also outweigh any additional revenue for years").
And, while governments are great at reacting to things, they're notoriously bad at prescriptive action without some lobby group pushing an agenda.
Please excuse my civilian ignorance, but why is this the case? If there's one group of people qualified to handle guns, understand its use, safety procedures, and consequences of screwing up when using them, you'd think it would be the disciplined professionals. I'm assuming soldiers went through a psych evaluation when enlisting, too, though of course that can change during the course of a career. And while there might be kids in family housing, there wouldn't be any on base to stumble across a gun and accidentally shoot themselves.
So what's the reason they can't carry even a small personal firearm just anywhere while on military base grounds or housing? Is this an arbitrary government/military rule (implication: they don't trust their own military to have sufficient self-discipline)? Or is there a good historical reason?
3 years ago Facebook was perfectly willing to "add significant safeguards" to comply with Canadian privacy laws.
I guess becoming a publicly traded company means they think they're big enough to push countries around, instead of the other way around.
Not quite. In DOS you had to either typed out the whole name, or typed part of it and tabbed to auto-complete (think of it as hitting the Windows key *after* typing the name of the program). And that's only if you knew the exact letters it started with, too.
Type "Word" into the search-launchers of Vista/7 and it'll correctly offer up "Microsoft Office Word 20xx" as the first choice instead of "Wordpad"
And sure, 8.3-format names aren't a big deal for the 5 programs you use normally, but a small problem for the dozens or hundreds of others you don't use often.
More like Vista in 2007.
Or Mac OSX's Spotlight from 2005 or '06.
(Excluding 3rd party utilities/launchers since they're not part of the out-of-the-box UI).
Although Apple's reason for this isn't security but instead to up-sell to a more expensive model, a lack of an SD slot does indeed increase security by physically eliminating one vector for malware to take advantage of.
We see the same principle when some companies disable or seal up USB ports on their employee desktops computers, and of course there's the so-called air gap between the internet and secure internal-only servers.
Each of these decreases usability and convenience, and can be defeated by anyone motivated and savvy enough, but they undeniably increase overall security.
I hate to tell you this, but all over Europe it is well known that Americans don't understand irony.
No, it isn't anything like silvery or coppery....
I hate to tell you this, but all over the U.S.A. it is well known that Europeans are prone to over-generalizing when it comes to Americans.
Sounds fair, since all over the world it is well known that Americans are prone to over-generalizing when it comes to non-Americans...
(Wait, were we going for sarcasm, irony, or serious?)
If the end of the world involves the Weeping Angels, I want her with me.
Political statement aside, weaker != weak.
Given even non-projectile weapons, a pitbull is weaker than you are, but you'd be a fool to call it weak. Take on a poodle or chihuahua, or an infant pitbull, and there's no contest.