You're right. Ctrl Alt Del is NT's Secure Attention Sequence and it will get the message. The problem is sometimes it may not be able to display Task Manager anyway -- but the GP was wrong, this isn't because of "IE" DLLs, it's most usually because of GDI resource issues / video driver issues.
Easy example: if you play Half Life 2 on Steam, HL2 has a sound stutter problem that can bring your PC to a halt. Ctrl Alt Del often doesn't work then, because (I'm not a DirectX programmer so I'm a bit vague on this) whatever paints the screen is stuck and can't display task manager (remember HL2 runs full screen, often at a different resolution than standard Windows). Most people reset or switch off their systems at this point.
But NT/Windows isn't really dead at this point -- you could actually use Task Manager "blind", or you could actually reset the display by using Alt-Tab (which HL2 IIRC doesn't trap) and opening a fullscreen console, which zaps the GUI and brings you to "text mode". You can then use pskill to kill HL2.
> It's a *fundamentally* bad thing to do. It lead to an awful lot of remote code execution exploits.
Providing a web browser EXE and standard URL parsing (urlmon), Network handling (wininet and now winhttp) and rendering (shdocvw) components + APIs as part of the base OS package is in no imaginable way a bad idea. Don't confuse MS's implementation for the RIGHT way to design things.
The BIG problem with IE4-6 was Microsoft using their brand-new HTML renderer to render *everything* -- as part of the "let's make it so that people can't help but use IE and forget about Netscape" strategy.
So everything from help to the filesystem to to the desktop to, god help us, system dialogs starting becoming render surfaces for HTML (the post-Win2K Add/Remove dialog uses shdocvw, and yes, you can use it too 'uninstall' IE. I think that's pretty funny.) Looks like no one thought for a minute about tainted input.
The comparatively smaller (because they didn't have the previous problem this would be less of a deal) problem is Microsoft's brain dead IE Zones model (which they moved away from in.NET, thankfully -- but IE+ActiveX is still stuck with it). At least with IE7 they've figured out how to separate the browser from the file manager. Removing that one "feature" alone decreased the attack surface 4X.
> In fact, it's a fundamentally poor practice in secure systems design.
No. Ignoring taint analysis is fundamentally poor systems design. Including a browser and standard browser-ish components and APIs makes just as much sense as including a TCP/IP stack with the OS.
But hey, as everyone knows, Windows just sorta evolved. It wasn't intelligently designed or anything:-)
That was never IE's fault. It was Win9x's problem. If an app hung under Win9x, there was a good chance of the OS going down (because of the weird remnants of cooperative multitasking lurking about in Win9x). By contrast NT4 (with the Active Desktop+IE4 Shell Update) and Windows 2000 never had a problem if IE crashed (and IIRC it crashed far less than NN4 did).
By the way, the problem in bundling IE wasn't technical: all they did was add a browser to Windows, and make the components + standard APIs available to all Windows apps. If you think that's technically awful you should go back to using VMS. No, the problem with bundling IE was the business practices that accompanied it.
The problem with Internet Explorer was bundling with the Operating System (not that it was a technically bad thing to do).
In this case, it's a web download. Big deal. And it probably saves time for those who use all of MSN's services and needs to install/update them. Doesn't Google do this already with Google Pack (including the auto-update) ?
What is this, Hug a Grizzly Bear Week? Be Nice to the Sharks Month? This man Zemlin is obviously either a shill or a sad deluded man who needs to be shipped off to the re-education camps as soon as possible!
> just pay for $7 or wait for the DVD like everyone else
I wonder if this guy was just doing it for his friends, or if someone paid him to do it. Crappy camcorder prints are pretty popular in Eastern Europe (or used to be 10 years back) and South Asia, where these movies won't be released for months, if at all. If the MPAA was less lawsuit happy they'd look at releasing their movies at the same time around the world, and allowing internet screenings for countries where they won't release.
The UK General Medical Council hasn't been calling for a private system (it'd be plain silly, I think) but they have been calling for less government interference in how hospitals are run. Also they've been complaining that the targets-based system that Blair introduced to increase NHS accountability has diminished the care given to patients (here's a discussion of this). Oh, and more favorable contracts too (of course!).
I believe the new PM, Brown, has promised a fresh look at how the NHS is governed and making it independent (like the BBC) if need be.
Well, the way the UK national archives are structured, anyone (in the UK, I guess) can forward them their letters to the archive and they'll take care of the backups (if you trust them to do it right). Even otherwise, it won't be hard to buy/download a WP 5.1 filter and convert your letters to plain text and then store that.
> VMWare is long dead, you backed it up... Sure, but his platform can't run it.
Recreating old platforms is trivial -- a modern 32 bit processor can recreate 16-bit environments without breaking a sweat. Think of emulators for old games, like MAME.
Also, maybe they won't have to rely on emulation. Just like present-day archaeologists get specialized equipment for their digs, I'm sure a historian from 3007 who really wants to read your letters in the original Wordperfect software will be able to recreate a (for him, primitive) PC. Since the PC platform is pretty well documented in manuals and source for FreeDOS is available (if Microsoft doesn't release the source for MSDOS by then), the only bottleneck is making sure your letters are stored in a future-proof format. Maybe someone can start an internet business offering laser etching on stone tablets:-)
No, I actually think the Swiss-style is a lot better. And Massachusetts seems to be closer to the Swiss model than the UK's, so more power to them.
Anyway, Canada or the UK are not models of what socialized medicare should look like, because for 20 or 30 years, both systems have been under persistent attack by powerful wealthy interests who would like nothing better than a US-style system.
I don't know much about Canada, but the Conservatives adopted a policy of neglect w.r.t the NHS. Blair reversed that and the NHS has not been under existential attack by any stretch of the imagination under his reign (it wasn't under the Conservatives either, but it was under an effective budget attack). Present-day Conservatives support the NHS, too. Which is why your statement sounds pretty conspiracy-theoryish to me, because the NHS has not been under a budget attack, it's budget has been increasing (IIRC). What it is under attack for is shoddy service and sub-par hospitals -- search for [UK MRSA scare] sometime.
There are also serious issues about how much choice patients have (or should have) when choosing care providers or hospitals (a non-trivial issue when you consider that some hospitals are really good and some are crap -- so who gets to go to the crap ones?) and how best to use valuable specialist time. Also compensation for medical staff is a sore point, with many NHS doctors complaining about increasingly onerous work contracts that make them work more for effectively less pay. All in all, a good deal more complicated than the happy picture of the UK Michael Moore presented in Sicko.
Of course, the heart of the matter is that the British government sells NHS to Brits as "world class care", whereas it really is uneven standards of care that on average is a ways away from world-class. But the government can't admit that, given how much the NHS costs the taxpayer.
So yeah, Britain's NHS is better than nothing, but any country planning to introduce universal healthcare from scratch can do much, much better. Note that both France and Switzerland have universal health care without the insanity of the government running hospitals. And last I checked, the French and the Swiss seemed pretty happy about their medical systems.
Whatever is worth keeping for a long time should be on paper and translated in more than one language.
Er, even if you translate it into other languages, they'll evolve too. Try reading Old French much? And translation also leaves you with the headache of reconciling various translations and figuring out which is "more correct" (IIRC the Bible has this problem). It would be a much better idea to make redundant copies, to guard against bitrot and store them as physically apart as possible.
I doubt that the now common CD/DVD/BlueRay/HD-DVD will be available in a few centuries.
And it won't matter. The important stuff would be migrated to archival formats. For example, I keep a copy of DOS and Win3.1 ISOs (about 20MB total) and Norton Commander (3 floppy images!) on a DVDR, along with a copy of Virtual PC. This lets me recreate a Windows 3.1 virtual PC anytime I want. I wouldn't be surprised if I were copying DVDR ISOs to a holographic memory drive in the next ten years.
As for the next century, most of this material will lose value, but the important stuff will get backed up professionally and successively remastered on new media (esp with things like the UK National Archive). And amateur historians, genealogy buffs and private collectors will have their hands full in the future with stuff that you can't find in the official archives but in people's attics, just like people are fascinated with Stone Age, Roman or Victorian artifacts today.
> Socialised health care delivers better value for money because of the enormous purchasing power of the government. The NHS can purchase millions of shots in one go.
That's the good side of the NHS. The dark side of the NHS is quotas -- because of budget limitations they have very long waiting lists, and Brits have recently taken to travelling to South Africa or India for care that they need urgently. Doctors are less willing to recommend surgery and more willing to tell the patient to wait the problem out.
Another dark side is cost control. Cost control sounds great in theory but in practice means keeping salaries for health workers down, and getting by with inadequate staff. This has led to poorly maintained hospitals in many areas, and the current MRSA scare in the UK.
Finally, because of the pay issue, the best and brightest doctors have emigrated, often to America. The NHS (as I'm sure anyone who's been following the UK carbombers story will know) is quite dependent on foreign doctors because they find they pay scales attractive. (This isn't to say recruiting foreign doctors is bad, just that the pay is better elsewhere.) IMHO this is one reason why a lot of brilliant Brits my age have chosen careers like law or business.
Anyway, some form of universal health care is good to have, but if anyone thinks the NHS is a paragon, please think again (or ask some Brits who're -- unlike the chap in Sicko -- not Labour Party ideologues). And also, consider the Swiss model, which is pretty similar to the Mass. model: it gives a high degree of choice while charging transparently and competitively for health insurance, thus creating market pressure to keep costs down.
Wow, rhinokitty can sure lay on the purple prose. What's next, Linux will help me leverage my key skills and maximize my full potential, making my chakras spin in unison to bring me closer to a fully actualized human being?
Only to RMS's ass-kissers, and I'm happy they consider it so.
Then you seem to think that Free Software should care about Open Source.
Yes, they should, because without the pragmatism of the Open-Source community, RMS would be stuck with v0.2.0 of Hurd. He is an ideologue who has no idea of how to ship a platform people actually want to use, and further is okay with the idea of accepting inferior software because it is "ideologically correct". As an engineer, I find that offensive.
Further, for all of the FSF's honking about "user rights", they forget that many of their users are developers, and they have special needs. Instead the FSF has basically said "fuck you, we're coming after you" to organizations they decided they didn't like, such as Tivo. The excuse is that Tivo can always fork. Yep, fracturing the community because of your ideological needs is a smart move all right.
Were alternate approaches possible? Sure they were. Any half-competent IP lawyer will tell you that grace periods could be defined in the license. Existing practices could be grandfathered in, or deprecated. Instead we have this amazing mess where mixing GPL2 and 3 is impossible, thus ensuring that companies using diverse upstream providers cannot adopt the GPL3 incrementally, and will end up making some IP attorneys pretty rich as they figure out the right thing to do (i.e., stay with v2 or go with v3).
For anyone who knows RMS this behavior of the FSF is instantly recognizable: this is the GNU Emacs vs XEmacs dick-waving contest all over again, in a bigger arena.
Thats in the same direction, although not of the same magnitude, as saying, "there are a lot of people, including people who've made valuable contributions to Microsoft, who don't." Sorry, but duh!
I'm sorry, but did you have a point there, or was that merely verbal diarrhoea? Cheers.
If we're talking about users' freedom, and since so much of the GPL applies to developer toolchain software, what about the users' (i.e., developers) to use those tools and still have a viable business model? The FSF is clearly in the business of pushing an agenda with their license, one that'll force vendors to change business models to survive. The unforgivable part is there was no attempt to grandfather in existing users who might be harmed. In fact, there was a "we don't like 'em, go get 'em" mentality that makes me very uncomfortable.
> Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.
Except that it is debatable whether Tivo and iPhone are distributing software. For anyone not completely steeped in the FSF viewpoint, it's a fair statement that the Tivo and iPhone are in fact, hardware (more importantly, customs and tax laws would back this view).
Also, what bugs me is that the GPL3 does not even pretend to be fair. Any "corporate" device can get away with Tivo-ization. In my more cynical moments, I wonder if this is because of IBM's sucking up to (and donating $$$ to) RMS.
Laws and technology influence one another. The way the FSF is going, the only software worth selling in a few years will be overcomplicated "enterprise" software packages that no one can do anything with unless some high-priced consultants come and do it for you (and do such dreary business tasks that hackers won't even want to touch it), or apps over the web -- until the GPLvNext incorporates the AGPL and busts that particular loophole.
My prediction? None of that will happen -- business will start to increasingly stay away from later versions of the GPL because RMS forgot about one basic right in his little manifesto -- the right to make a living.
> I am amused every time I see someone showing utter ignorance of the basic GPL premise after lurking around slashdot for, according to slashdot ID, at least five years.
Heh. If I'd actually bothered to create an account when I started reading/., I'd have a 3 digit account. All I can say is that I'm glad Slashdot groupthink isn't contagious.
Because the GPL3 is not about "free as in liberty", it's about "free as in do what RMS says". This is fine if you agree with RMS, but you should be aware that there are a lot of people, including people who've made valuable contributions to open-source, who don't.
Since there was a slideshow of pictures taken with the iPhone camera in the parent post, to compare here's a GSMArena review with some pictures taken with the Nokia N95's camera.
Well, "noisy" depends on the place. My commute's not very noisy, and I usually drive with my windows rolled up. The car itself has some noise, primarily the AC (a used 5-series beamer) but that affects both MP3s burnt to CDs and real CDs. And with MP3 CDs, when you yank up the volume above a certain level, the sound turns to mud for certain kinds of music.
And oh, I'm not an audiophile by any measure. It's just that I prefer CDs for some music -- notably my largish classical collection, Floyd, and so on.
Apart from home audio systems, a LOT of people listen to music on car stereos. And on good ones, CD quality really helps for some music -- for example, Shine On You Crazy Diamond sounds a lot better on CD than an MP3 burn.
That said, yeah, a lot of new music has been so overprocessed and made loud that the they don't really benefit much from a CD. Still, people who listen to classical etc will be able to tell the difference.
IIRC it's a matter for individual states in the US. California already teaches evolution pretty well. So do states like Washington and NY and (for all those who think the South==hicks) the Carolinas. Only a handful of states remain recalcitrant.
Well put. Dune, for example, had loads of dreams, visions etc but it was science fiction, not fantasy, because it was quite obvious that the human mind had evolved (perhaps thanks to Spice) in the tens of thousands of years since present-day. And frankly, our knowledge of cosmology and what the human brain can do is pretty primitive. For example, is consciousness preserved at the quantum level, thus leading to the possibility that reincarnation is possible? I think not, but I can't prove it -- which makes it excellent 'story material'.
People who think that 21st century science is the be-all and end-all of all knowledge display staggering amounts of hubris, especially since they are familiar with overzealous predictions like "everything that can be patented has been patented" and "there's a world market for maybe 5 computers".
Whether it's overused or not is another question -- that depends on the writer, and I think the B5 seasons treated techno-mages and psychics quite well. Especially compared to a certain Betazoid on TNG, whose sole purpose seemed to be, er, wear dresses and state the obvious.
I once spent a summer (ok, a month) in Yorkshire with the SO, a pile of books and a German Shepherd for company. We did a lots of long walks, and I never felt the need for any gadgets whatsoever (we did have a portable CD player, though, and I checked my email twice that month when I was in town).
You really don't need digg, Slashdot, or the usually IT industry inanity fed intravenously to you 24x7. Like Taleb said his book, Fooled by Randomness, most up-to-the-minute information is just noise.
> The big difference is that the Reich was not fighting any injustice.
Funny, a lot of the Nazis thought they were fighting the injustice that was the treat of Versailles that left Germany in penury. For a guy with academic pretensions it's pretty amazing you chose to gloss over this.
> if the RSS was so "obsessed with Muslim/Christian/Communist Bashing", why did they rescue poor Muslims during the Surat floods
The RSS does social work. So does Hamas. We're supposed to be impressed because they're equitable in their aid work, something that every human should be anyway? Doesn't mean Hamas isn't a terrorist organization, or that the RSS isn't a stick-in-the-mud, intellectually bankrupt organization.
I should probably clarify the fascist line here: The RSS doesn't need to be fascist. It has other organizations for that -- the Sena, the VHP, the BVP. This leaves the RSS as a organization for which anything that is "foreign" is evil. According to them, globalisation is imperialistic, India is an agrarian country and is destined to remain so, small shopkeepers (and we're talking push-cart vendors, really) should be protected even at the cost of maintaining inefficiencies in the economy (all these taken from a resolution document on their website). They tend to seize on inequities in current IP law to denounce the entire international system of trade, a case of throwing the baby out of the bathwater if there ever was one.
This flies in the face of international experience (and even India's own experience): every country that freed their economy saw its standard of living rise. Ultimately, the stasist tendencies of the RSS are what doom them, and which is why I use the term intellectually bankrupt for them. No one pretends this growth is uniform or equitable -- human skills are not equally distributed, and some WILL get more than others in a meritocracy. The solution to that (in better implemented models of welfare-state socialism) is a social security net and work training.
The RSS' policy proposals are nothing but a recycled mix of badly-thought-out socialism and Hindu supremacism, each pathetic in itself but especially pathetic together. Nowhere is there anything about petitioning India's obscenely rich temples to coordinate a social security net. Nowhere is there any plans for skills upgradation or work training. Nowhere is there any imaginative thinking on how to eliminate caste, probably _the_ biggest threat to India today.
> So also, fascism and Nazism do have distinct meanings in the socio-political contexts that prevailed in Italy and Germany which have no bearing in the Indian context.
Throughout this thread, you have used high-falutin' language and abtruse academic distinctions to defend your point. Here's the thing: no one's impressed. The words Nazi and Fascist have fairly well-developed meanings even outside of Germany and Italy. Specifically, the "if we don't like what you do, we'll beat you up" tactic the Shiv Sena uses is right up there in fascists' handbook.
> Indian society is in a vicious circle with the majority Hindu community suffering from persecution from the Communists and their new allies in the Islamist cabal in spite of their numerical superiority.
One word: bullshit. As proven time and again with election results, where calls to Hindu pride repeatedly fail to net any votes (the Babri Masjid issue was a better vote-getter when it was actually, um, not demolished, wasn't it?) and caste-based parties win all the polls. Shows you what Hindus really care about.
> One admirable aspect of the RSS, is its flexibility to move with the times
Oh really? That would be good to see. So where are the RSS pracharaks who actually have basic economic knowledge, or who travel to Sweden, Finland, Canada or the US to see how other countries ensure a decent life for their people? It's pretty clear the RSS would rather sit in and wax eloquent about Akhand Bharat's former glories and come up with policies that are destined
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You're right. Ctrl Alt Del is NT's Secure Attention Sequence and it will get the message. The problem is sometimes it may not be able to display Task Manager anyway -- but the GP was wrong, this isn't because of "IE" DLLs, it's most usually because of GDI resource issues / video driver issues.
Easy example: if you play Half Life 2 on Steam, HL2 has a sound stutter problem that can bring your PC to a halt. Ctrl Alt Del often doesn't work then, because (I'm not a DirectX programmer so I'm a bit vague on this) whatever paints the screen is stuck and can't display task manager (remember HL2 runs full screen, often at a different resolution than standard Windows). Most people reset or switch off their systems at this point.
But NT/Windows isn't really dead at this point -- you could actually use Task Manager "blind", or you could actually reset the display by using Alt-Tab (which HL2 IIRC doesn't trap) and opening a fullscreen console, which zaps the GUI and brings you to "text mode". You can then use pskill to kill HL2.
> It's a *fundamentally* bad thing to do. It lead to an awful lot of remote code execution exploits.
.NET, thankfully -- but IE+ActiveX is still stuck with it). At least with IE7 they've figured out how to separate the browser from the file manager. Removing that one "feature" alone decreased the attack surface 4X.
:-)
Providing a web browser EXE and standard URL parsing (urlmon), Network handling (wininet and now winhttp) and rendering (shdocvw) components + APIs as part of the base OS package is in no imaginable way a bad idea. Don't confuse MS's implementation for the RIGHT way to design things.
The BIG problem with IE4-6 was Microsoft using their brand-new HTML renderer to render *everything* -- as part of the "let's make it so that people can't help but use IE and forget about Netscape" strategy.
So everything from help to the filesystem to to the desktop to, god help us, system dialogs starting becoming render surfaces for HTML (the post-Win2K Add/Remove dialog uses shdocvw, and yes, you can use it too 'uninstall' IE. I think that's pretty funny.) Looks like no one thought for a minute about tainted input.
The comparatively smaller (because they didn't have the previous problem this would be less of a deal) problem is Microsoft's brain dead IE Zones model (which they moved away from in
> In fact, it's a fundamentally poor practice in secure systems design.
No. Ignoring taint analysis is fundamentally poor systems design. Including a browser and standard browser-ish components and APIs makes just as much sense as including a TCP/IP stack with the OS.
But hey, as everyone knows, Windows just sorta evolved. It wasn't intelligently designed or anything
That was never IE's fault. It was Win9x's problem. If an app hung under Win9x, there was a good chance of the OS going down (because of the weird remnants of cooperative multitasking lurking about in Win9x). By contrast NT4 (with the Active Desktop+IE4 Shell Update) and Windows 2000 never had a problem if IE crashed (and IIRC it crashed far less than NN4 did).
By the way, the problem in bundling IE wasn't technical: all they did was add a browser to Windows, and make the components + standard APIs available to all Windows apps. If you think that's technically awful you should go back to using VMS. No, the problem with bundling IE was the business practices that accompanied it.
The problem with Internet Explorer was bundling with the Operating System (not that it was a technically bad thing to do).
In this case, it's a web download. Big deal. And it probably saves time for those who use all of MSN's services and needs to install/update them. Doesn't Google do this already with Google Pack (including the auto-update) ?
Ahem. That was meant to be funny (I thought the "re-education camps" bit gave it away). But the mods seem to have lost their sense of humor today.
What is this, Hug a Grizzly Bear Week? Be Nice to the Sharks Month? This man Zemlin is obviously either a shill or a sad deluded man who needs to be shipped off to the re-education camps as soon as possible!
When I read that in TFA, I swear the first thought in my mind was -- he's going to reinvent Emacs?
> just pay for $7 or wait for the DVD like everyone else
I wonder if this guy was just doing it for his friends, or if someone paid him to do it. Crappy camcorder prints are pretty popular in Eastern Europe (or used to be 10 years back) and South Asia, where these movies won't be released for months, if at all. If the MPAA was less lawsuit happy they'd look at releasing their movies at the same time around the world, and allowing internet screenings for countries where they won't release.
The UK General Medical Council hasn't been calling for a private system (it'd be plain silly, I think) but they have been calling for less government interference in how hospitals are run. Also they've been complaining that the targets-based system that Blair introduced to increase NHS accountability has diminished the care given to patients (here's a discussion of this). Oh, and more favorable contracts too (of course!).
I believe the new PM, Brown, has promised a fresh look at how the NHS is governed and making it independent (like the BBC) if need be.
Well, the way the UK national archives are structured, anyone (in the UK, I guess) can forward them their letters to the archive and they'll take care of the backups (if you trust them to do it right). Even otherwise, it won't be hard to buy/download a WP 5.1 filter and convert your letters to plain text and then store that.
:-)
> VMWare is long dead, you backed it up... Sure, but his platform can't run it.
Recreating old platforms is trivial -- a modern 32 bit processor can recreate 16-bit environments without breaking a sweat. Think of emulators for old games, like MAME.
Also, maybe they won't have to rely on emulation. Just like present-day archaeologists get specialized equipment for their digs, I'm sure a historian from 3007 who really wants to read your letters in the original Wordperfect software will be able to recreate a (for him, primitive) PC. Since the PC platform is pretty well documented in manuals and source for FreeDOS is available (if Microsoft doesn't release the source for MSDOS by then), the only bottleneck is making sure your letters are stored in a future-proof format. Maybe someone can start an internet business offering laser etching on stone tablets
There are also serious issues about how much choice patients have (or should have) when choosing care providers or hospitals (a non-trivial issue when you consider that some hospitals are really good and some are crap -- so who gets to go to the crap ones?) and how best to use valuable specialist time. Also compensation for medical staff is a sore point, with many NHS doctors complaining about increasingly onerous work contracts that make them work more for effectively less pay. All in all, a good deal more complicated than the happy picture of the UK Michael Moore presented in Sicko.
Of course, the heart of the matter is that the British government sells NHS to Brits as "world class care", whereas it really is uneven standards of care that on average is a ways away from world-class. But the government can't admit that, given how much the NHS costs the taxpayer.
So yeah, Britain's NHS is better than nothing, but any country planning to introduce universal healthcare from scratch can do much, much better. Note that both France and Switzerland have universal health care without the insanity of the government running hospitals. And last I checked, the French and the Swiss seemed pretty happy about their medical systems.
As for the next century, most of this material will lose value, but the important stuff will get backed up professionally and successively remastered on new media (esp with things like the UK National Archive). And amateur historians, genealogy buffs and private collectors will have their hands full in the future with stuff that you can't find in the official archives but in people's attics, just like people are fascinated with Stone Age, Roman or Victorian artifacts today.
> Socialised health care delivers better value for money because of the enormous purchasing power of the government. The NHS can purchase millions of shots in one go.
That's the good side of the NHS. The dark side of the NHS is quotas -- because of budget limitations they have very long waiting lists, and Brits have recently taken to travelling to South Africa or India for care that they need urgently. Doctors are less willing to recommend surgery and more willing to tell the patient to wait the problem out.
Another dark side is cost control. Cost control sounds great in theory but in practice means keeping salaries for health workers down, and getting by with inadequate staff. This has led to poorly maintained hospitals in many areas, and the current MRSA scare in the UK.
Finally, because of the pay issue, the best and brightest doctors have emigrated, often to America. The NHS (as I'm sure anyone who's been following the UK carbombers story will know) is quite dependent on foreign doctors because they find they pay scales attractive. (This isn't to say recruiting foreign doctors is bad, just that the pay is better elsewhere.) IMHO this is one reason why a lot of brilliant Brits my age have chosen careers like law or business.
Anyway, some form of universal health care is good to have, but if anyone thinks the NHS is a paragon, please think again (or ask some Brits who're -- unlike the chap in Sicko -- not Labour Party ideologues). And also, consider the Swiss model, which is pretty similar to the Mass. model: it gives a high degree of choice while charging transparently and competitively for health insurance, thus creating market pressure to keep costs down.
Wow, rhinokitty can sure lay on the purple prose. What's next, Linux will help me leverage my key skills and maximize my full potential, making my chakras spin in unison to bring me closer to a fully actualized human being?
Further, for all of the FSF's honking about "user rights", they forget that many of their users are developers, and they have special needs. Instead the FSF has basically said "fuck you, we're coming after you" to organizations they decided they didn't like, such as Tivo. The excuse is that Tivo can always fork. Yep, fracturing the community because of your ideological needs is a smart move all right.
Were alternate approaches possible? Sure they were. Any half-competent IP lawyer will tell you that grace periods could be defined in the license. Existing practices could be grandfathered in, or deprecated. Instead we have this amazing mess where mixing GPL2 and 3 is impossible, thus ensuring that companies using diverse upstream providers cannot adopt the GPL3 incrementally, and will end up making some IP attorneys pretty rich as they figure out the right thing to do (i.e., stay with v2 or go with v3).
For anyone who knows RMS this behavior of the FSF is instantly recognizable: this is the GNU Emacs vs XEmacs dick-waving contest all over again, in a bigger arena.I'm sorry, but did you have a point there, or was that merely verbal diarrhoea? Cheers.
If we're talking about users' freedom, and since so much of the GPL applies to developer toolchain software, what about the users' (i.e., developers) to use those tools and still have a viable business model? The FSF is clearly in the business of pushing an agenda with their license, one that'll force vendors to change business models to survive. The unforgivable part is there was no attempt to grandfather in existing users who might be harmed. In fact, there was a "we don't like 'em, go get 'em" mentality that makes me very uncomfortable.
/., I'd have a 3 digit account. All I can say is that I'm glad Slashdot groupthink isn't contagious.
> Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.
Except that it is debatable whether Tivo and iPhone are distributing software. For anyone not completely steeped in the FSF viewpoint, it's a fair statement that the Tivo and iPhone are in fact, hardware (more importantly, customs and tax laws would back this view).
Also, what bugs me is that the GPL3 does not even pretend to be fair. Any "corporate" device can get away with Tivo-ization. In my more cynical moments, I wonder if this is because of IBM's sucking up to (and donating $$$ to) RMS.
Laws and technology influence one another. The way the FSF is going, the only software worth selling in a few years will be overcomplicated "enterprise" software packages that no one can do anything with unless some high-priced consultants come and do it for you (and do such dreary business tasks that hackers won't even want to touch it), or apps over the web -- until the GPLvNext incorporates the AGPL and busts that particular loophole.
My prediction? None of that will happen -- business will start to increasingly stay away from later versions of the GPL because RMS forgot about one basic right in his little manifesto -- the right to make a living.
> I am amused every time I see someone showing utter ignorance of the basic GPL premise after lurking around slashdot for, according to slashdot ID, at least five years.
Heh. If I'd actually bothered to create an account when I started reading
Because the GPL3 is not about "free as in liberty", it's about "free as in do what RMS says". This is fine if you agree with RMS, but you should be aware that there are a lot of people, including people who've made valuable contributions to open-source, who don't.
Since there was a slideshow of pictures taken with the iPhone camera in the parent post, to compare here's a GSMArena review with some pictures taken with the Nokia N95's camera.
Well, "noisy" depends on the place. My commute's not very noisy, and I usually drive with my windows rolled up. The car itself has some noise, primarily the AC (a used 5-series beamer) but that affects both MP3s burnt to CDs and real CDs. And with MP3 CDs, when you yank up the volume above a certain level, the sound turns to mud for certain kinds of music.
And oh, I'm not an audiophile by any measure. It's just that I prefer CDs for some music -- notably my largish classical collection, Floyd, and so on.
Apart from home audio systems, a LOT of people listen to music on car stereos. And on good ones, CD quality really helps for some music -- for example, Shine On You Crazy Diamond sounds a lot better on CD than an MP3 burn.
That said, yeah, a lot of new music has been so overprocessed and made loud that the they don't really benefit much from a CD. Still, people who listen to classical etc will be able to tell the difference.
IIRC it's a matter for individual states in the US. California already teaches evolution pretty well. So do states like Washington and NY and (for all those who think the South==hicks) the Carolinas. Only a handful of states remain recalcitrant.
Well put. Dune, for example, had loads of dreams, visions etc but it was science fiction, not fantasy, because it was quite obvious that the human mind had evolved (perhaps thanks to Spice) in the tens of thousands of years since present-day. And frankly, our knowledge of cosmology and what the human brain can do is pretty primitive. For example, is consciousness preserved at the quantum level, thus leading to the possibility that reincarnation is possible? I think not, but I can't prove it -- which makes it excellent 'story material'.
People who think that 21st century science is the be-all and end-all of all knowledge display staggering amounts of hubris, especially since they are familiar with overzealous predictions like "everything that can be patented has been patented" and "there's a world market for maybe 5 computers".
Whether it's overused or not is another question -- that depends on the writer, and I think the B5 seasons treated techno-mages and psychics quite well. Especially compared to a certain Betazoid on TNG, whose sole purpose seemed to be, er, wear dresses and state the obvious.
It indicates that he's quoting from mid-sentence. In this case, the original quote was "And when we do consider technology...".
I once spent a summer (ok, a month) in Yorkshire with the SO, a pile of books and a German Shepherd for company. We did a lots of long walks, and I never felt the need for any gadgets whatsoever (we did have a portable CD player, though, and I checked my email twice that month when I was in town).
You really don't need digg, Slashdot, or the usually IT industry inanity fed intravenously to you 24x7. Like Taleb said his book, Fooled by Randomness, most up-to-the-minute information is just noise.
> The big difference is that the Reich was not fighting any injustice.
Funny, a lot of the Nazis thought they were fighting the injustice that was the treat of Versailles that left Germany in penury. For a guy with academic pretensions it's pretty amazing you chose to gloss over this.
> if the RSS was so "obsessed with Muslim/Christian/Communist Bashing", why did they rescue poor Muslims during the Surat floods
The RSS does social work. So does Hamas. We're supposed to be impressed because they're equitable in their aid work, something that every human should be anyway? Doesn't mean Hamas isn't a terrorist organization, or that the RSS isn't a stick-in-the-mud, intellectually bankrupt organization.
I should probably clarify the fascist line here: The RSS doesn't need to be fascist. It has other organizations for that -- the Sena, the VHP, the BVP. This leaves the RSS as a organization for which anything that is "foreign" is evil. According to them, globalisation is imperialistic, India is an agrarian country and is destined to remain so, small shopkeepers (and we're talking push-cart vendors, really) should be protected even at the cost of maintaining inefficiencies in the economy (all these taken from a resolution document on their website). They tend to seize on inequities in current IP law to denounce the entire international system of trade, a case of throwing the baby out of the bathwater if there ever was one.
This flies in the face of international experience (and even India's own experience): every country that freed their economy saw its standard of living rise. Ultimately, the stasist tendencies of the RSS are what doom them, and which is why I use the term intellectually bankrupt for them. No one pretends this growth is uniform or equitable -- human skills are not equally distributed, and some WILL get more than others in a meritocracy. The solution to that (in better implemented models of welfare-state socialism) is a social security net and work training.
The RSS' policy proposals are nothing but a recycled mix of badly-thought-out socialism and Hindu supremacism, each pathetic in itself but especially pathetic together. Nowhere is there anything about petitioning India's obscenely rich temples to coordinate a social security net. Nowhere is there any plans for skills upgradation or work training. Nowhere is there any imaginative thinking on how to eliminate caste, probably _the_ biggest threat to India today.
> So also, fascism and Nazism do have distinct meanings in the socio-political contexts that prevailed in Italy and Germany which have no bearing in the Indian context.
Throughout this thread, you have used high-falutin' language and abtruse academic distinctions to defend your point. Here's the thing: no one's impressed. The words Nazi and Fascist have fairly well-developed meanings even outside of Germany and Italy. Specifically, the "if we don't like what you do, we'll beat you up" tactic the Shiv Sena uses is right up there in fascists' handbook.
> Indian society is in a vicious circle with the majority Hindu community suffering from persecution from the Communists and their new allies in the Islamist cabal in spite of their numerical superiority.
One word: bullshit. As proven time and again with election results, where calls to Hindu pride repeatedly fail to net any votes (the Babri Masjid issue was a better vote-getter when it was actually, um, not demolished, wasn't it?) and caste-based parties win all the polls. Shows you what Hindus really care about.
> One admirable aspect of the RSS, is its flexibility to move with the times
Oh really? That would be good to see. So where are the RSS pracharaks who actually have basic economic knowledge, or who travel to Sweden, Finland, Canada or the US to see how other countries ensure a decent life for their people? It's pretty clear the RSS would rather sit in and wax eloquent about Akhand Bharat's former glories and come up with policies that are destined