not enough better [than OOo] (in my opinion) to warrant the switch
For personal used, I used OpenOffice.org almost exclusively up until about eight months ago (for business I use Word running under Crossover, because exact formating is crucial for me). At about that time, with no change to my desktop OS (Mandriva 2006 at the time, and had not applied any updates recently), my version of OOo, nor my file server (Debian), OOo simply stopped working with my NFS shares. I don't recall the specifics (& I'm not going to waste the time searching now so I can link it, but it had something to do with file locking), but whenever I tried to load or save a file to the NFS share I got an error to the effect that it was read-only (Word, Kword, Abiword, etc., had no problem). I Googled it, and wasn't the only one that had the problem; I tried some of the kludgy work-arounds that were suggested, but the only one that worked at all only works about 1/2 the time and the rest of the time crashes the program.
Since then, I've been searching for a replacement word processor (even though I use Word, I don't like it even aside from the cost/MS issues). Recently I have settled for Kword as the least of all evils, but I will be willing to shell out money to Softmaker if the product is as polished as it seems. Based on the trial download, it doesn't seem to write to.odt format, but it does open it flawlessly. Unfortunately, the trial version is crippled so that you can't save to.doc format . . . for a product that is meant to be a Word replacement, it is unspeakably retarded not to let people kick the tires on its Word compatibility.
Perhaps you did not read the article - the point of it is that the pyramids were not built from quarried stone, but from concrete. Wooden forms are quite easy to make straight.
Your employer doesn't have a choice. The law requires them to give you the time off. Whether or not you get paid is another matter, but for anyone on salary my guess is that most employers just write off the couple days you're gone. And unless you're sitting on the jury in the O.J. trial, a couple days is probably more than most jurors serve.
The point is that the treaties were not written by 'experts' in the sense you mean. They were written to stop nuclear proliferation -- a 'good thing' of course -- but had the unintentional result of stopping research on nuclear propulsion systems. Despite the hysterical comments from the ignorant, the original poster's point was that the treaties were not written with nuclear propulsion in mind, and should not be applied to stop such research. This is not about weapons -- Bush isn't (at least here) abrogating these treaties, just stating that they will not be applied in a way that their overly-broad language could be considered to apply (i.e., blocking nuclear propulsion systems instead of just nuclear weapons).
WoW seems cool, but seriously, try talking to your WoW friends about something other than WoW and see if you would still be their friend without it.
Replace 'WoW' with 'work/bowling/school/stamp collecting/any other shared interest' and your sentence makes just as much sense. IF you meet people through a common interest, when those people gather that common interest is generally going to dominate the conversation. For example, I know several architects, and whenever they are in a group the dominate subject is architecture, and I'm the odd-man-out. Does it meant they're not 'real friends,' either with me or with each other? No, that's nonsense . . . it's just that people tend to settle on subjects that are interesting to them and they know are shared by those around them.
everytime [a BSOD] has occured it was due to hardware such as bad RAM
I concur with this: for the two occasions I started seeing a lot of BSODs, the first was due to a bad stick of RAM and the other was my video card dying. By way of comparison, though, I dual-boot Linux (and actually use it far more than XP) and my Linux installation would still work with only an occasional crash with the faulty hardware still installed, while XP got to the point where it wouldn't boot at all.
No OS is perfect, and XP is a reasonably solid one that I've been fairly happy with. I still prefer Linux, though, for many reasons, but straight uptime is not one of them anymore.
You're right - shouldn't have assumed it was treaty based. In fact, it appears to be strictly common law, based on the principle of comity. See, e.g., Hilton v. Guyot, 159 US 113, 40 L ed 95, 16 S Ct 139 (1895) (enforcing on the basis of comity, but only where there is reciprocity).
Jurisdiction isn't based on the quality of the legal system.
Unfortunately, though, you are right about the legal system in under-developed countries having a negative impact on investment: a company would rather operate somewhere there is danger of physical violence but can count on the legal system to be fair and consistent (enforce contracts, protect property rights, etc. - think Iraq at the moment) than to operate in a country that might be peaceful but where the legal system is arbitrary and can change at the whim of the ruler (such as most African nations).
I'm afraid Google is not as invincible (and therefore somehow to blame for this) as everyone here seems to want to believe. The fact is, a judgment in a court in Brazil can be registered with a court in the US and enforced just like it was handed down by a US court (based on various international treaties and subject to all kinds of exceptions, of course). Even if that weren't the case, they could simply sue Google in a US court directly.
So, no, Google cannot just ignore the laws of countries in which it does business if it doesn't like what they say.
By "compelled to produce," the article is talking about Google obeying a court order. If a court has jurisdiction over a company, it doesn't matter where the information is -- the company has to obey that order or face the consequences (or try to convince the court the order is invalid somehow).
The article summary is horribly misleading (even more so than normal): this is nothing like Google refusing to give the US government access to search info. There was no court order to do so (think subpoena), and so Google told them to take a hike. IIRC, even at that time Google specifically stated that if there had been a lawful court order, it would have complied.
Try an Ubuntu live CD and see what happens. Like I mentioned previously, there are no Linux drivers for my wireless card. Yet somehow it works without any configuration under Ubuntu. I don't know if they use ndiswrapper with Windows drivers, or how they do it -- quite frankly, since it just worked, I didn't bother looking into it.
Both desktop integration and setup utilities make a huge amount of difference in ease of use, and Debian has none of the former and a primitive one of the latter. Just having all the latest drivers doesn't matter much if you don't have them set up properly and/or tweaked just so. With Debian there is enormous room for error; I love it for a server, not just because it's stable but also because you get down to the very lowest level and tweak things to be exactly the way you want them. For a desktop, specifically the graphics and audio systems, not to mention everthing else a desktop user wants and expects, that's unnecessarily painful. In the trade-off between miniscule control and usability, Ubuntu and similar distros may be less flexible in certain ways but they make up for it by 'just working' right out of the box.
I'm not trying to put Debian down, and I don't mean to put you down for using it, I just don't think it has much of a place on the desktop (or on laptops). It's the difference between going down to the Honda dealership and driving a car off the lot versus having it shipped to you in its component parts: all the same pieces are there, but the more you have to do yourself the more room for error (well, okay, maybe that's Gentoo more than Debian, but the point is the same).
I specified a modern distro. Debian, even testing (or, for that matter, experimental), is focused on stability and is at least a couple years behind most other flavors as far as features and drivers. On top of that, Debian is one of the least user-friendly distros out there: if you're installing Debian on anything, you are probably going to have to do some tweaking. On a laptop? You're just a masochist.
Debian is great for servers, but it's only a notch above Slack for the desktop. Don't generalize your difficulties with Debian to Linux as a whole. There are some great, much more desktop/user-oriented distros out there. Try one of those (or better yet, a couple to see which is the best fit); if you still have trouble then you might have a legitimate gripe. As it is, I have to assume you're just trolling.
I call bullshit. I'll let someone else address your first point, but for the seocond, if you're running an up-to-date distro, hardware support is vastly superior to windows. I've been running Mandrake (now Mandriva) on my primary desktop for years, and other than having to manually install Nvidia drivers when I'm cheap and try the free version (it's included and automatically installed with any of the pay versions). I have a Windows XP partition on the same box, and if I upgrade my hardware and have to reinstall Windows, it is incredibly painful in comparison to any Linux install (& I've at least tried almost every major flavor).
On my laptop, a cheap Dell without built in wireless (I use a D-Link PCMCIA card that does not have a native Linux driver), the version of Mandriva I'm running that is a bit more than a year old installed and worked perfectly with the exception of having to install the wireless driver through ndiswrapper. I recently tried several newer distros on my laptop, and SLED 10 and Ubuntu stand out for perfectly setting up the wireless without any additional steps. SLED was a bit quirky (to be fair, it was the release candidate) in that you had to manually connect each time you started the computer, but in Ubuntu -- both running from the live CD and from the hard drive install -- all I had to do was enter my WEP key once and now my laptop connects automatically at each boot. Searching for available networks and connecting is simple from either distro (although I prefer Ubuntu's method). In comparison, under Windows XP on the same laptop, first I had to install the D-Link drivers as a separate step after installation, and then I had to disable the D-Link utility because of some strange conflict between them and the MS wireless utility that would BSOD my laptop if there weren't any wireless signals in detection range.
I've also installed Linux on several older computers I have, some PII- and PIII-based desktops and older AMD-based laptops, and had nothing but good luck. I can shoe-horn Windows 98 on the laptops, but not with functionally networking (wired or wireless), and I gave up trying to get any Windows back on the older desktops when I couldn't even get a proper display without hours of hunting up drivers.
I don't know about inkjets and the like, but all of my computers print to a Brother laser printer over the network, and setup on my Linux boxes takes about 2 minutes, whereas setting printing up on my wife's XP desktop (which randomly forgets how to connect to the printer) is at least a 10-15 minute job.
No OS is going to work perfectly out of the box on every single computer configuration out there: it simply isn't possible given the vast number of hardware combinations. That said, a modern Linux distro is going to be far closer to 100% than anything else out there, on both old and new computers. You don't even have to buy one of the commericial distros anymore to get good drivers; just download the latest Ubuntu/Kubuntu
If you're referring to the Asimov character (who was not in I, Robot in any case) the correct name is Robot Daneel Olivaw, not Daniel Oliver. Just FYI.
Because we all know Capt. Cook discovered the Hawaiian Islands while flying his Cessna. And the natives flew out to greet him in their outrigger ultralites.
Did you actually read my post? The entire point was that they had a different value system and I don't think we should intentionally kill their innnocent civilians. How did that trigger an attack on me for being from Arkansas? Did you once get a ticket going through the state or something?
And no, the terrorists are not rational. I think being a 'fanatic' eliminates that possibility, by definition.
No, not for practical purposes. To use your example, if there are enough explosives hidden in a laptop to actually damage the plane it will show up on the x-ray (or at least the lack of internal parts will). Liquid, on the other hand, can be carried in several containers to get sufficient quantity (hairspray, soda can, and yes, toothpaste tube) and can't be detected without at least opening every single container.
Are you 'living in fear' because you can't take toothpaste on a plane? You said you didn't even fly: name one way in which the 'war on terror' has affected you, personally. What freedom, or even convenience, have you given up? While I'm sure al-qaeda are dancing in their caves because it now takes twice as long to board a plane, I don't think the terrorists have won quite yet. There's a wide spectrum between measures that infringe civil liberties and doing absolutely nothing to prevent a terrorist attack. Restricting what you can put in your carry-on is pretty comfortably in the middle ground.
I'm not quite sure how banning items that may be disguised explosives is irrational, but whatever.
Your remark about the list of restrictions is exactly my point: whining about the inconsequential annoyances distracts from the bigger problems. Life is full of government restrictions, from not being able to smoke in public buildings in some places to having to pay sometimes arbitrary taxes. If people get more worked up about the petty irritations than the important issues -- and they do -- the important issues get pushed aside.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that whining about everything the government does makes a low background noise that is easy to ignore, when instead we should make a sharp, focused sound when it's important.
The U.S. just killed my entire family. I know a guy down the street is in a terrorist organization that just killed some Americans. Do I (a) go kill him, or (b) give him a medal and probably join him?
From what I know of the Middle East, the vast majority of the people there either already frown on terrorism or else they identify with the terrorists' aims (whether or not they agree with their methods). What you're talking about would push more people into that second category.
Totally aside from the practical issues, you're just talking about indiscrimate murder on a larger scale than the terrorist themselves could hope to acheive. I'm all for an-eye-for-an-eye if you're going after the guilty, but carpet bombing civilians isn't exactly the best method to do that.
If they kill 100 or 1,000 our innocent civilians, you think we should respond by killing thousands or tens of thousands of innocent their civilians? That's about the only thing I can think of that will swell the terrorist ranks more quickly than our current meddling in the region. You're not exactly dealing with rational, cost-benefit type people here: they place zero value on human life, including (maybe especially) their own. The nuclear standoff of the Cold War worked because the USSR didn't want war anymore than we did. To a radical Islamist, mutually-assured destructions just looks like the express line to heaven.
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For personal used, I used OpenOffice.org almost exclusively up until about eight months ago (for business I use Word running under Crossover, because exact formating is crucial for me). At about that time, with no change to my desktop OS (Mandriva 2006 at the time, and had not applied any updates recently), my version of OOo, nor my file server (Debian), OOo simply stopped working with my NFS shares. I don't recall the specifics (& I'm not going to waste the time searching now so I can link it, but it had something to do with file locking), but whenever I tried to load or save a file to the NFS share I got an error to the effect that it was read-only (Word, Kword, Abiword, etc., had no problem). I Googled it, and wasn't the only one that had the problem; I tried some of the kludgy work-arounds that were suggested, but the only one that worked at all only works about 1/2 the time and the rest of the time crashes the program.
Since then, I've been searching for a replacement word processor (even though I use Word, I don't like it even aside from the cost/MS issues). Recently I have settled for Kword as the least of all evils, but I will be willing to shell out money to Softmaker if the product is as polished as it seems. Based on the trial download, it doesn't seem to write to .odt format, but it does open it flawlessly. Unfortunately, the trial version is crippled so that you can't save to .doc format . . . for a product that is meant to be a Word replacement, it is unspeakably retarded not to let people kick the tires on its Word compatibility.
Perhaps you did not read the article - the point of it is that the pyramids were not built from quarried stone, but from concrete. Wooden forms are quite easy to make straight.
Bush is like Hitler!
Your employer doesn't have a choice. The law requires them to give you the time off. Whether or not you get paid is another matter, but for anyone on salary my guess is that most employers just write off the couple days you're gone. And unless you're sitting on the jury in the O.J. trial, a couple days is probably more than most jurors serve.
So . . . you're majoring in Mexican cuisine?
The point is that the treaties were not written by 'experts' in the sense you mean. They were written to stop nuclear proliferation -- a 'good thing' of course -- but had the unintentional result of stopping research on nuclear propulsion systems. Despite the hysterical comments from the ignorant, the original poster's point was that the treaties were not written with nuclear propulsion in mind, and should not be applied to stop such research. This is not about weapons -- Bush isn't (at least here) abrogating these treaties, just stating that they will not be applied in a way that their overly-broad language could be considered to apply (i.e., blocking nuclear propulsion systems instead of just nuclear weapons).
Replace 'WoW' with 'work/bowling/school/stamp collecting/any other shared interest' and your sentence makes just as much sense. IF you meet people through a common interest, when those people gather that common interest is generally going to dominate the conversation. For example, I know several architects, and whenever they are in a group the dominate subject is architecture, and I'm the odd-man-out. Does it meant they're not 'real friends,' either with me or with each other? No, that's nonsense . . . it's just that people tend to settle on subjects that are interesting to them and they know are shared by those around them.
You killed my father! Prepare to die!
I concur with this: for the two occasions I started seeing a lot of BSODs, the first was due to a bad stick of RAM and the other was my video card dying. By way of comparison, though, I dual-boot Linux (and actually use it far more than XP) and my Linux installation would still work with only an occasional crash with the faulty hardware still installed, while XP got to the point where it wouldn't boot at all.
No OS is perfect, and XP is a reasonably solid one that I've been fairly happy with. I still prefer Linux, though, for many reasons, but straight uptime is not one of them anymore.
You're right - shouldn't have assumed it was treaty based. In fact, it appears to be strictly common law, based on the principle of comity. See, e.g., Hilton v. Guyot, 159 US 113, 40 L ed 95, 16 S Ct 139 (1895) (enforcing on the basis of comity, but only where there is reciprocity).
You hate coins?
Jurisdiction isn't based on the quality of the legal system.
Unfortunately, though, you are right about the legal system in under-developed countries having a negative impact on investment: a company would rather operate somewhere there is danger of physical violence but can count on the legal system to be fair and consistent (enforce contracts, protect property rights, etc. - think Iraq at the moment) than to operate in a country that might be peaceful but where the legal system is arbitrary and can change at the whim of the ruler (such as most African nations).
So, no, Google cannot just ignore the laws of countries in which it does business if it doesn't like what they say.
By "compelled to produce," the article is talking about Google obeying a court order. If a court has jurisdiction over a company, it doesn't matter where the information is -- the company has to obey that order or face the consequences (or try to convince the court the order is invalid somehow).
The article summary is horribly misleading (even more so than normal): this is nothing like Google refusing to give the US government access to search info. There was no court order to do so (think subpoena), and so Google told them to take a hike. IIRC, even at that time Google specifically stated that if there had been a lawful court order, it would have complied.
Try an Ubuntu live CD and see what happens. Like I mentioned previously, there are no Linux drivers for my wireless card. Yet somehow it works without any configuration under Ubuntu. I don't know if they use ndiswrapper with Windows drivers, or how they do it -- quite frankly, since it just worked, I didn't bother looking into it.
Both desktop integration and setup utilities make a huge amount of difference in ease of use, and Debian has none of the former and a primitive one of the latter. Just having all the latest drivers doesn't matter much if you don't have them set up properly and/or tweaked just so. With Debian there is enormous room for error; I love it for a server, not just because it's stable but also because you get down to the very lowest level and tweak things to be exactly the way you want them. For a desktop, specifically the graphics and audio systems, not to mention everthing else a desktop user wants and expects, that's unnecessarily painful. In the trade-off between miniscule control and usability, Ubuntu and similar distros may be less flexible in certain ways but they make up for it by 'just working' right out of the box.
I'm not trying to put Debian down, and I don't mean to put you down for using it, I just don't think it has much of a place on the desktop (or on laptops). It's the difference between going down to the Honda dealership and driving a car off the lot versus having it shipped to you in its component parts: all the same pieces are there, but the more you have to do yourself the more room for error (well, okay, maybe that's Gentoo more than Debian, but the point is the same).
I specified a modern distro. Debian, even testing (or, for that matter, experimental), is focused on stability and is at least a couple years behind most other flavors as far as features and drivers. On top of that, Debian is one of the least user-friendly distros out there: if you're installing Debian on anything, you are probably going to have to do some tweaking. On a laptop? You're just a masochist.
Debian is great for servers, but it's only a notch above Slack for the desktop. Don't generalize your difficulties with Debian to Linux as a whole. There are some great, much more desktop/user-oriented distros out there. Try one of those (or better yet, a couple to see which is the best fit); if you still have trouble then you might have a legitimate gripe. As it is, I have to assume you're just trolling.
I call bullshit. I'll let someone else address your first point, but for the seocond, if you're running an up-to-date distro, hardware support is vastly superior to windows. I've been running Mandrake (now Mandriva) on my primary desktop for years, and other than having to manually install Nvidia drivers when I'm cheap and try the free version (it's included and automatically installed with any of the pay versions). I have a Windows XP partition on the same box, and if I upgrade my hardware and have to reinstall Windows, it is incredibly painful in comparison to any Linux install (& I've at least tried almost every major flavor).
On my laptop, a cheap Dell without built in wireless (I use a D-Link PCMCIA card that does not have a native Linux driver), the version of Mandriva I'm running that is a bit more than a year old installed and worked perfectly with the exception of having to install the wireless driver through ndiswrapper. I recently tried several newer distros on my laptop, and SLED 10 and Ubuntu stand out for perfectly setting up the wireless without any additional steps. SLED was a bit quirky (to be fair, it was the release candidate) in that you had to manually connect each time you started the computer, but in Ubuntu -- both running from the live CD and from the hard drive install -- all I had to do was enter my WEP key once and now my laptop connects automatically at each boot. Searching for available networks and connecting is simple from either distro (although I prefer Ubuntu's method). In comparison, under Windows XP on the same laptop, first I had to install the D-Link drivers as a separate step after installation, and then I had to disable the D-Link utility because of some strange conflict between them and the MS wireless utility that would BSOD my laptop if there weren't any wireless signals in detection range.
I've also installed Linux on several older computers I have, some PII- and PIII-based desktops and older AMD-based laptops, and had nothing but good luck. I can shoe-horn Windows 98 on the laptops, but not with functionally networking (wired or wireless), and I gave up trying to get any Windows back on the older desktops when I couldn't even get a proper display without hours of hunting up drivers.
I don't know about inkjets and the like, but all of my computers print to a Brother laser printer over the network, and setup on my Linux boxes takes about 2 minutes, whereas setting printing up on my wife's XP desktop (which randomly forgets how to connect to the printer) is at least a 10-15 minute job.
No OS is going to work perfectly out of the box on every single computer configuration out there: it simply isn't possible given the vast number of hardware combinations. That said, a modern Linux distro is going to be far closer to 100% than anything else out there, on both old and new computers. You don't even have to buy one of the commericial distros anymore to get good drivers; just download the latest Ubuntu/Kubuntu
If you're referring to the Asimov character (who was not in I, Robot in any case) the correct name is Robot Daneel Olivaw, not Daniel Oliver. Just FYI.
Because we all know Capt. Cook discovered the Hawaiian Islands while flying his Cessna. And the natives flew out to greet him in their outrigger ultralites.
You are actually advocating genocide? You're going to 'kill all the Arabs' the way Hitler 'killed all the Jews'? Good plan.
I'm officially invoking Godwin's Law.
Did you actually read my post? The entire point was that they had a different value system and I don't think we should intentionally kill their innnocent civilians. How did that trigger an attack on me for being from Arkansas? Did you once get a ticket going through the state or something?
And no, the terrorists are not rational. I think being a 'fanatic' eliminates that possibility, by definition.
No, not for practical purposes. To use your example, if there are enough explosives hidden in a laptop to actually damage the plane it will show up on the x-ray (or at least the lack of internal parts will). Liquid, on the other hand, can be carried in several containers to get sufficient quantity (hairspray, soda can, and yes, toothpaste tube) and can't be detected without at least opening every single container.
Are you 'living in fear' because you can't take toothpaste on a plane? You said you didn't even fly: name one way in which the 'war on terror' has affected you, personally. What freedom, or even convenience, have you given up? While I'm sure al-qaeda are dancing in their caves because it now takes twice as long to board a plane, I don't think the terrorists have won quite yet. There's a wide spectrum between measures that infringe civil liberties and doing absolutely nothing to prevent a terrorist attack. Restricting what you can put in your carry-on is pretty comfortably in the middle ground.
I'm not quite sure how banning items that may be disguised explosives is irrational, but whatever.
Your remark about the list of restrictions is exactly my point: whining about the inconsequential annoyances distracts from the bigger problems. Life is full of government restrictions, from not being able to smoke in public buildings in some places to having to pay sometimes arbitrary taxes. If people get more worked up about the petty irritations than the important issues -- and they do -- the important issues get pushed aside.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that whining about everything the government does makes a low background noise that is easy to ignore, when instead we should make a sharp, focused sound when it's important.
The U.S. just killed my entire family. I know a guy down the street is in a terrorist organization that just killed some Americans. Do I (a) go kill him, or (b) give him a medal and probably join him?
From what I know of the Middle East, the vast majority of the people there either already frown on terrorism or else they identify with the terrorists' aims (whether or not they agree with their methods). What you're talking about would push more people into that second category.
Totally aside from the practical issues, you're just talking about indiscrimate murder on a larger scale than the terrorist themselves could hope to acheive. I'm all for an-eye-for-an-eye if you're going after the guilty, but carpet bombing civilians isn't exactly the best method to do that.
If they kill 100 or 1,000 our innocent civilians, you think we should respond by killing thousands or tens of thousands of innocent their civilians? That's about the only thing I can think of that will swell the terrorist ranks more quickly than our current meddling in the region. You're not exactly dealing with rational, cost-benefit type people here: they place zero value on human life, including (maybe especially) their own. The nuclear standoff of the Cold War worked because the USSR didn't want war anymore than we did. To a radical Islamist, mutually-assured destructions just looks like the express line to heaven.