As I recall, Gerrold presented some mumbo-jumbo that said the storage capacity of such an arrangement - a billions-of-miles-long laser beam - was truly enormous. Sounded like a pretty good idea. Anybody think it would really work - and better yet, be practical?
It does sound like an intriguing idea. Some of my thoughts on the subject:
In order to maintain a constant signal strength, each receiver/transmitter would need to "boost" the light signal, presumably by adding a beam of light of its own. The spillover light you mention is a result of the focus angle, and if some of it is not reflected, then the light signal degrades with each station. Also, reflection itself is lossy; some light is always absorbed by the mirror. The whole system would dim over time unless you boosted it back up periodically.
In order to boost the signal, you would probably need to have the signal not be reflected, but rather collected, processed, and retransmitted. Since nothing travels faster than light (according to Einstein, and I hear he was pretty good at math), it would be impossible to collect a signal, interpret it, and send an identical signal in the time it takes to reflect. So the boost signals would be slightly behind the source signals, resulting in some phasing of the signal over time. The whole thing would "blur." That means we're left not with reflection, but with collection and retransmission. There would be a slight delay, but it would work like the 7-second delay built into radio stations: if it's constant, no one notices. The other alternative would be to place enough mirrors between the reception mirror/signal collector and the transmission mirror/signal booster to keep the timing of the signals lined up. But the signal would still need to be collected and retransmitted, perhaps through a partially-silvered mirror at the outgoing end. All this would require that each station be powered. Even if you used the incoming light to power the system (and did no reflection at all, simply collect light -> generate power -> read signal during generation using generated power -> retransmit using generated power), the act of collection/retransmission, and the spillover, will result in a negative net power generation, and power would need to be supplied. This could probably be taken care of with solar cells or something, but that brings us to the question of...
Maintenance. The system you're talking about, with one giant ring of retransmission stations, allows for a single point of failure, which would result in loss of data. This is unacceptable. Instead, I would propose building each station so that redundancy is built in; there would actually be several rings transmitting identical data in parallel. With proper "junction" stations, one could even build a striping system that would ensure that even if several receivers/transmitters went down, no data would be lost.
However, if this were being accomplished in a solar system, it would have to be bounced off satellites in a polar orbit around the sun, to avoid the situations where the signal would need to travel close to the sun and receive interference. A better system than bouncing just between planets would be to have the planets be just stops on the loop, with the majority of stations as satellites in very eccentric orbits around the sun (all the solar systems we know of so far have all the planets basically in a single plane of orbits). The planet stations themselves, of course, would be satellites in orbit around those planets to avoid all the nastiness with transmitting through atmosphere.
Additionally, the stations themselves would need to be self-correcting for perturbations in orbits and pointing angles. This can't be accomplished by a central server or even by communication between the satellites, since that communication would take place at the speed of light, and misalignment would result in loss of data. Each station would have to be semi-intelligent about orbit perturbations and alignments.
Because some jackass open source programmer will write a driver which will make the card broadcast on an illegal radio spectrum. And when the investigators come to take a look at it, they'll just look at the brand name of the card.
That's the biggest load of crap ever.
As long as Marvell doesn't release drivers that broadcast on an illegal radio frequency, then it's the fault of the person who modified the card, not Marvell. Cars drive all over people's lawns, too, but no one blames Toyota when that happens.
His analogy was that you don't carry all your money around in a briefcase, you put it in a bank and then access it when you need some of it. But we're perfectly happy carrying all our information around in a box, typically with little or no safety net. It looks like it may not be Sun who points us towards the information appliance with their name on it, but maybe Web 2.0 services that make it so that I can have my info (where-ever) and get it where I need to.
That's a great analogy, and I'd like to extend it to explain why Web 2.0 will be the "computer as network" breakthrough, and Sun wasn't.
Sun was pushing the right concept, but they forced application developers to conform to one company's standard in order to participate, and that killed it. These kinds of grand, society-changing ideas almost never take hold when a single company is in charge of all the standards (MS excepted). Instead, they spring up from many different companies, and then coalesce into a coherent standard. To extend the analogy, imagine if all the private banks had their own currencies, and you could not transfer your money from one back to another. This is what Sun was proposing; proprietary solutions to interconnection problems. They don't work.
Instead, we had several different companies creating their own different standards which eventually coalesced into the defacto Web standards we have today (Java/ECMAScript, (X)HTML, TCP/IP, etc.), forming the basis for the "network is the computer" framework of Web 2.0. The same thing happened with the U.S. railroads in the 19th century... all the railroad companies built their own tracks, and they all used a different track guage to keep the other companies from using their infrastructure. They eventually realized that it was worth it to standardize, and the railroad tracks were standardized to the 4'9" gauge used throughout the country now, leading to much more efficient rail systems.
like Gimp, where you can't even draw a rounded rectangle without installing specially crafted Script-Fu commands
That's funny, I just select a rectangle, go to Select -> Rounded Rectangle..., choose my radius and click OK, go to Edit -> Stroke Selection, choose my stroke options, and click OK.
Rounded Rectangle is a Script-Fu, it's true, but it came in my standard install and is integrated directly into the UI. Where are you getting this strange copy of Gimp without standard Script-Fu scripts?
The Gimp is every bit as powerful as Photoshop, it's just DIFFERENT. And not just in the "commands have moved to different menus" sense of different; the entire paradigm of how to do things is different in The Gimp, with the exception of layers. And IMHO, it's worth the learning curve, because it's both free and Free. Photoshop apologists can get off their soapbox and actually spend some quality time with The Gimp before making their judgements (and that two weeks in 2002 you spent "messing about" with The Gimp don't count; the program has matured by leaps and bounds in the last few years).
it's ms' right to include whatever they want in their os, in my opinion.
That's not the opinion of the court, who convicted Microsoft of being a monopoly. Once you are convicted like that, the *rules change*. This is no different than if you had been convicted of killing someone... once that conviction is handed down, the rules change, and you no longer have the same rights you did before you were convicted (specifically, the right to not be held against your will).
Just because the U.S. doesn't seem interested in enforcing that conviction, and is instead relying on the European Union to hold Microsoft's feet to the fire, doesn't mean that Microsoft still has the same rights as other companies.
Microsoft is a *convicted monopoly*, and therefore does NOT have the right to include whatever they want in their OS. It's not rocket science.
I'm about as conservative as you can get on most issues, but I still enjoy watching The Daily Show.
Same here. I am a true conservative (pity we don't have a party anymore), but the Daily Show is a highlight of my evening. So is the Colbert Report, for different reasons.
I think the difference is that the news shows try very hard to appear non-biased, and as a result, never confront their own bias. They subscribe to the ridiculous notion that being completely unbiased is a physical impossibility, and it paralyses them.
The Daily Show, on the other hand, is much like a good editorial staff at a newspaper. They are not afraid to show their personal opinion, but they do not allow that opinion to color how they present the events. Witness that Jon Stewart himself is very liberal, and (I'm sure) voted for Kerry. He makes that clear in his interviews and his reactions to some of the jokes. However, he does not allow this personal opinion (which is not the same as bias) to affect who, how, or what he lampoons on the show. He is constantly giving the Democrats crap for their poor strategy and platform, making fun of the "Bleeding Heart Liberals" who are on the extreme end of the spectrum, and basically holding politicians' feet to the fire, regardless of party (in addition to all the crap he gives the other side, which frankly, is not difficult). Allowing himself to show his own personal opinion on the show is actually refreshing, because it allows him to be more honest with himself and his guests about the events. Instead of hiding behind a facade of "unbiased reporting" and becoming ultra sensitive to bipolar reporting, he actually uses critical thinking and common sense to point out the absurdities in the system, at a higher level than Democrat vs. Republican, liberal vs. conservative.
Jon Stewart is a man who "gets it", and he's not afraid to go on television to tell it like it is, from the moderate majority point of view. As a bonus, he's also very funny, highly intelligent, and very insightful as a result. I applaud his accomplishments.
The fact that the mainstream news outlets can't seem to live up to this is rather sad.
The question isn't about density, as it is about resources and the ecological footprint that Americans have. We're terribly, awfully wasteful. If we all became more conscious about resource use, in twenty years, even with 360 million people, we could use less resources then than we use today.
I like your comparison of population densities, because it actually IS all about the population density.
Yes, Americans use more resources, per capita, than other nations. But let's explore WHY that is.
Most Americans live in a suburban setting, where housing, commecial, and industrial areas are all zoned off and kept separate and distinct from one another. We have the land available, so we use it. Someone living in the residential area can't just walk to the market, and public transportation is usually woefully inadequate in such a spread-out area, so they drive to the grocery store and their place of work (more gasoline, higher demand for automobiles, etc.). Then, because the grocery store is out of the way, and not easy to get to since it involves a drive in traffic, Americans visit the store less often (more packaged/prepared foods make more packaging, preservatives in food generate industrial waste in their creation, etc.). A higher demand for automobiles and prepared foods gives rise to entire industries which generate a lot of waste. These are just two examples.
So, yes, the average American generates more waste, but I think it's mostly *because* the population density is lower here, and we are more spread out. In a tight urban setting where you're living on top of your neighbors and can walk to the market on the way home from work, you will consume fewer resources than someone living in a spread-out suburban setting who needs to drive everywhere.
Let's work some numbers: Data from this IEA page indicates that each person in the U.S. uses 7,920.9 kg of oil (energy equivalent) per year, and each person in Germany uses 4,263.5 kg of oil. And this Wikipedia page states areas of 9,629,091 sq. km in the United States and 357,022 sq. km in Germany. If we were to adjust the area of the United States to match the population density with that of Germany, the U.S. would have 1,285,400 sq. km. (basically cramming the U.S. population into the area west of Nevada's eastern border). Using these numbers, the U.S. uses 0.006 kg of oil per person per sq. km per year, and Germany uses 0.012 kg of oil per person per sq. km per year. Germany uses about twice as many resources per person per year as the United States, when you correct for population density. (Someone else with a firmer grounding in statistics could probably do this more robustly.)
So could Americans use fewer resources? Of course we could. But the way to do that would be to artificially constrain ourselves to only live in highly urban settings with high population densities and mixed residential/commercial/industrial zoning, and leave the open spaces completely devoid of human activity. I, for one, enjoy living more than 3 feet away from my neighbors. Those people are obnoxious, anyway.
Would some one please explain what exactly it wrong with DRM? If you have a problem with concept of copyrights in general, then I can understand. But is there anyone out there that is cool with copyrights, but thinks DRM is bad?
I am all for copyrights in general (even though the current system of life+70 years is ridiculous and wrong), and I see your point about the difference between DRM and the abuse of DRM. However, I don't believe it's possible to use DRM without abusing it, and here's why:
1). There is no way for software to tell the difference between infringing use and non-infringing use. Those 10,000 copies of the album you're burning: is that to wallpaper your room with (legal) or to sell to people on the street (illegal)? There's no way for the software to know, so it is forced to restrict you in situations where you are not infringing. Software cannot know your intentions.
2). DRM is inherently insecure. There is no such thing as a secure DRM system: either content and key are stored with the content, in which case it's easy to bypass, or content is stored in a central server controlled by a content distribution company, and the content will no longer be decryptable if the company folds. This in itself is not a problem; houses are inherently insecure as well, since I can just break a window if the door is locked. But people are comfortable with the level of security of their houses, and don't go to great lengths (typically) to lock them down to ridiculous levels. However, for some reason, our current culture does not take the same mentality with computer security. Everything in computer security is an arms race, and no one is ever content with "secure enough if I pay attention to what I'm doing." People don't want their content to be "secure enough." They want it LOCKED DOWN. Thus, DRM will be (and is) an escalating arms race, locking things down ever tighter, and inconveniencing the honest users more and more in the interest of "security." This is not an inherent problem with DRM, persay, but it is inherent in our current computer culture--especially in the eyes of content creators who want security for their content--and I don't see it changing anytime soon.
Other things that people might bring up are able to be controlled in the theoretical "non-abusive" implimentations of DRM. These things include perpetual copyrights (DRM never expires, but copyrights do), resale rights, and personal non-infringing copying. All three of those could be accounted for in a DRM implementation (but haven't yet). Unfortunately, the two points I mentioned above are showstoppers, and there is no such thing as "non-abusive DRM", even if it corrected for all those other abuses.
The concept of DRM is pretty neat--"we'll prevent the baddies from doing all those things that they're not allowed to do, while still letting the honest people retain their rights to legally use the content however they like!". However, in practice, it's not so simple, and the end result is that DRM tramples on the rights of the honest people for what amounts to very trivial reasons. It is impossible to use DRM without abusing it. I've always believed in the adage that "it's better to let 99 guilty men go free than to wrongly imprison 1 innocent man", and even though DRM is a fairly small part of my day and not a big deal in the larger scheme, I don't want it in my products, and do everything I can to subvert it in the products I buy.
The only thing making it illegal to break DRM for the purposes of non-infringing use is the "no reverse engineering" clause of the DMCA, and that particular clause has not yet been tested in court. Until it is, I consider it unconstitutional and will ignore it every chance I get.
In Europe, online gambling is very much accepted, and doesn't interfere with all the land-based casinos that spread all across Europe. They make enough money as it is. 888.com is very popular in Britain, for example. And people there don't see it as an addictive thing that should be banned, but rather as a way to get some entertainment. Instead of going out to a movie and dinner, you can enjoy a quick game of blackjack or roulette, and make sure to limit yourself to $50 or whatever your budget is. If you lose it - you lose it, and that's it. It's just like spending the same money on some other form of entertainment.
You talk as if banning online gambling has anything to do with morality.
The banning of online gambling boils down to two things in this country, as do almost all things political: money, and reelection.
Online gambling is currently not taxable, so the government has no reason to protect it. You'll notice that other casinos are not only not banned, but even have a certain protected status, mostly because they are taxable. As if giving some Native Americans a stack of chips and a blackjack table makes up for years of genocide.
These kinds of bills are also always drafted and proposed right before elections, because the extremist nuts who actually do vote in this country genuinely care about this from a moral standpoint. It makes no logical sense for these extremists to ban online gambling and not other forms of gambling (most of them are happily betting away in NFL office pools), but when a senator gets up on a box and tells them that gambling websites are WRONG and IMMORAL and BABY JESUS DOESN'T GAMBLE ONLINE, then they are more than happy to toss online gambling sites into a lake, declare them witches, and have them burned at the stake. After all, who doesn't love a good witch burning?
Additionally, why should addictive things be banned, simply because they are addictive? Anything can be addictive. How you destroy yourself is no business of mine.
I noticed that your post was immediately in defense of gambling, as if it was an action that needed defending. Do you also have to defend to me why you bought that cheeseburger (I was hungry, I certainly don't have an eating disorder), why you drove to work (I didn't want to walk in the rain, of course I'm not lazy), or why you watched Star Trek last Saturday instead of going out (I was tired and it's all that was on, I'm not a nerd!)? You have a right to gamble with your own money, for any reason, just like you have a right to buy a cheeseburger instead of a salad, drive to work instead of walking, and watch Star Trek instead of going out, all without explaining why those things are not harmful. You don't have to explain yourself.
The ability to attach completely unrelated riders to bills is not just a way to sneak things through congress; it's also a necessary check and balance on the party system, just like the other checks and balances in place in our government.
It serves its purpose to prevent the tyranny of the majority. Let's say (hypothetically, of course) that a single political party controlled both houses of congress AND the presidency (hahahahaha -- that would never happen). Suddenly, every single thing the minority party proposes as a bill gets immediately shot down and/or vetoed, simply on the merits of the Neener Neener Act of 1822. However, allowing riders will give the minority party a chance to get something done in the face of overwhelming majority dissent. "Oh yeah? Well, I won't let you pass the Give Giant Corporations Tons Of Money Act unless you also pass the Save The Starving Welfare Children rider I'm attaching to it! So there!"
Can it be abused? Certainly. Is it being abused right now? Absolutely.
But the alternative isn't any better.
And frankly, if you don't like the people abusing that power, vote them the hell out of office. Many of our problems with Congress would simply go away if we didn't have a 98% incumbency rate. So vote for someone who gives a damn, and will fight for the moderate majority!
Other then "gadget factor" whats the real value in this?
This reminds me of the "Tablet PC" revolution (I baught one). Although a great piece of technology there wasn't a significant increase in productivity or features that warented the extra effort to adapt to the technology.
Why does every advance in technology require that everyone and their brother eventually use one?
Different technologies have different uses, and should be treated as such. The Tablet PC may be cumbersome and awkward for someone who would really prefer a laptop, but they are being used extensively in hospitals and other areas where they are replacing clipboards, and in those areas are considered a smashing success.
The one handed keyboard (along with others, like the Dvorak keyboard) didn't take off because people didn't want to relearn how to type. QUERTY has been the defacto standard long enough that the general population doesn't have a compelling reason to relearn to type. However, those systems might work well in a court reporter or closed-captioning setting, if they are indeed faster than the shorthand systems in place now.
You don't see regular computer users moving their mouse around with a Wacom Tablet or a Spaceball, either, but they do have their own specialist uses (computer artwork and CAD systems, respectively) where they are incredibly successful.
I see this OLED keyboard being used by hardcore gamers (especially MMORPG players) who can show icons of the in-game action on their keyboard shortcuts. It would also be successful in a "Grandma's First PC" situation, where pressing Shift causes all the letters to go uppercase, and pressing Ctrl turns them into descriptions of hotkey functions (cut, copy, paste, for example). I, for one, would jump at the chance to map the shortcuts in programs like Blender to this keyboard to help me learn them.
Just because it isn't suited for everyone, doesn't mean it's going to fail as a product.
The question of whether a company owns the image of a logo/advertisement in any photograph is still open for debate, however, since the quoted ruling protected a (fictional) movie under the First Amendment. A personal photograph might not receive such protections, since it is not technically "speech."
Also, I still remember hearing Gandalf say "these are the times we've been given" 3 months after 9/11. I had the feeling that Jackson was subtly tying in to current events.
What? That line is directly from the books, written in the 1940s in response to the first World War (which Tolkien fought in) and the second World War (which was going on at the time). Peter Jackson filmed the line during principal photography in 1999 and 2000. Just because a truism applies to current events doesn't mean it was designed to be *about* current events. This line has nothing to do with 9/11, even if it's applicable.
I think a movie (with that same subtly) about the oppressed little guy (...literally!...) fighting against Sharkey's corrupt government could be a nice reminder of the need to protect our civil liberties.
Again, this theme is a truism, and need not be manipulated to be relevant to current events. Tolkien wrote the Scouring of the Shire to explore his own feelings after returning from World War I and discovering that most of his friends were dead, that industry had crept up on the idyllic English countryside, and the world had changed irrevocably from what he remembered. If you are able to derive meaning from this story and apply it to current events, then it is merely evidence that the story is timeless and well written.
Tolkien has said on many occasions that he despises allegory. He stated (and I'm paraphrasing) that allegory is when the author injects specific meaning into his/her works. A classic example would be the Chronicles of Narnia series, with the lion Aslan clearly representing Jesus Christ in the mythology of Narnia. Tolkien preferred instead to give his stories applicability, i.e., instead of injecting meaning, he simply wrote about timeless themes and allowed the reader to find their own meaning. Therefore, if you want to see the the Scouring of the Shire as the overthrow of a (current) corrupt government, you can. If you want to see Tom Bombadil as the embodiment of the uninvolved pacifist, you can. If you want to see the gift of Galadriel's three hairs to Gimli as a representation of the Christian Holy Trinity, you can. But Tolkien never intended these things to be allegory; that presupposes that there is a correct interpretation, and an incorrect one. He simply presented the mythology as he envisioned it, and allowed the reader to come to his/her own conclusions. I think Jackson followed that ideal faithfully, which is why those three movies will still be great in 100 years.
Since we are largely technologists here, do we not realize how, as technology advances, laws must advance to keep up with it?
Of course. But laws are always behind technology, which they clearly are in this case.
The arrest was not bad. The law enforcement officials were merely doing their jobs, and enforcing a law on the books the way it should be enforced. Whether the law makes sense or not is not up to the law enforcement officials to decide (excusing for a moment their duties as citizens).
What I really want to discuss is the LAW, not the arrest. Yes, in the past, I could have run a mail-order business where people in other countries could order my products and I would ship it to them. However, because a physical product was involved, the laws were very clear on whose country's laws were in effect at any given time during the transaction. If it is illegal to ship the product from country A to country B, that's illegal. If it's legal to posess in country A but illegal to posess in country B, then the buyer is breaking the law. These concepts were not difficult, and fit into the standard model of a country being a physical place.
Now, however, the Internet is making it very easy and profitable to offer not just products between countries, but services. A gambling site is not really selling a product, they are selling a service (specifically, entertainment). And because services are not physical things, it's a little more difficult to classify WHERE that service is being performed. It no longer fits the model of countries being physical places, because the physicality of the service (the server and client computers) is colocated in two countries, and could be connected through a large number of countries.
So where is this service being provided? In both places? What if the laws of the two countries contradict, as they do in this case?
As I said in my previous post, the government of the US right now is in panicky "On noes! Save teh children!" mode about gambling. They have decided that gambling online is a vile and morally reprehensible activity, but gambling at an Indian casino or riverboat is ok, and apparently so is going to Vegas. The hypocricy of this is stunning, and the government will have a few backlashes before they realize it. Then, like watching a lightbulb go off, we will suddenly see Congress realize, "Hey! We can TAX it!" and it will be a protected activity from then on.
As for the analogy comment, I didn't read the post you were responding to before I posted, so I apologize. But, notwithstanding, I still think all analogies are bad, because they remove nuance from the discussion, and the opportunity to use your own comment against you was too good to pass up.:-)
I think it just confirms what we all knew. At least 99% of Facebook users are idiots, and the other 1% are there because some of the 99% made them...
As a card carrying member of the 1%, I would like to just say that I am OUTRAGED that the information in my empty profile, which I was specifically coerced into posting on the internet with the intent of having other people read it, is now publicly readable by the very people who use that site. This kind of blatant privacy breach will not be tolorated, and the Facebook community is rising up against the oppressors who have forced their details to become public!
The citizens of Facebook will not tolerate this kind of privacy breach any more!
But large companies selling my private data to telemarketers and data miners, in return for a 2% discount? Naw, it's cool. I save money!
Its not the fact that they can see it, it is the fact that it is *broadcast* that makes it bad.
What part of "publishing on the internet" is not broadcasting information?
I don't care that people I know find out that I break up with a girl, but I don't want it to be sent RSS style to everyone I know.
Well, then you better not publish it on the internet.
The old way, sure you were posting it on the internet, but there was a certain anonymnity to be found in the data overload of facebook. Now that changes are highlighted, its too easy.
Security through obscurity is a Bad Thing (tm). For reference, please see every article about closed-source software on Slashdot.
Also, others are allowed to submit content to your page (like to my wall). If they do, I may want time to respond to it before all of my friends read it. Sure, the old way one or two might see it, but that risk is low.
And people might call all your friends and say bad things about you, too. How about not pissing people off?
This funtionality, if cut back, would be very useful.
Wait, isn't the whole purpose of Facebook to post your whole life online for everyone to read and keep up with? Isn't that what Facebook, MySpace, blogging, and the entirety of the narcissistic end of the internet are for? What part of this functionality doesn't fit the "I write about every inane detail of my life on here so other people can read it" model?
Some things should be exempt from the feed, or at least have the option to have them never broadcast, so that they can fly 'under the radar'.
Which is exactly what Facebook did, to appease people like you who write their personal details on a sign in a public park and then get angry when people read it.
If you don't want information to be read, DON'T POST IT ON THE FRIGGIN' INTERNET.
So, you would support arresting drug users and letting the dealers go: correct?
I now hereby dub YOU "Bad Analogy Guy, Jr." (in reference to your previous post, of course).
Last time I checked, using and selling drugs are BOTH illegal in the U.S. Therefore, both users and dealers should be arrested.
Whether the law makes sense or not makes little difference to the law enforcement community. This guy broke a U.S. law, and he was arrested for it.
The REAL question here is whether he broke the law on U.S. soil, which really boils down further to the question: where exactly is a website located? Is it located where the server is located? Or is it located where the person using the website is located? If it's the former, then the U.S. people who used the website could be considered to be gambling in a foreign country, and not on U.S. soil, because the website is technically located in the U.K. (and thus they were not breaking U.S. law). But if the latter question is true, then the administrator of any website can be held accountable by the laws of any country any user connects from, even those laws that contradict each other.
Either way, the U.S. government is going to do the same thing with online gambling that they did with alcohol: ignore it, then ban it, realize that ban creates crime, unban it, tax the ever living hell out of it, and finally protect the industry forevermore as a revenue stream.
My extensive experience with 2000 and XP is that about the only way to get the OS to crash is to have bad hardware or faulty drivers. It's really the only stability problem I've ever seen....Having said that though, I think Explorer is horrible. It's the buggiest piece of software MS has ever released and it never gets better.
This is precisely the grandparent's point.
For the vast majority of cubiclemonkeys and home users of Windows, Windows Explorer (the taskbar, the icons, the My Documents window...) IS Windows. If Explorer locks up, they consider that a Windows "crash."
If an application dies unexpectedly without saving, they say their "computer crashed."
Hell, I've seen people get error messages in Word and PowerPoint and call that a crash.
Slashdotters like you and me clearly know that those are merely appliations running on top of the OS layer, but it's a minor point to the overall "feel" of an OS, which is what the article was talking about. Laypeople using computers don't care about the cause of the problems, and they usually rank all problems with the same priority: if their computer froze and they had to reboot, that's the same severity problem as if Windows Explorer crashed and restarted, and it's the same severity problem as if they can't connect to one of the servers in their mapped drives. Something is "acting up", and they are frustrated. WHO exactly caused that problem (OS, application, hardware, drivers, network, ID-10-T error, whatever) is immaterial.
Now, the article only mentions three specific people (two of them bloggers), and then a nebulous blob of "early testers" which may or may not be regular users. But it also doesn't give any specific examples of things, other than to say that Solitaire and Minesweeper look Shiny and New (tm), and that the drivers "feel more grown up". What a solid, scientific study this was!
Vista will be riddled with as many problems as, if not more than, Windows XP. Many of these problems will not be Microsoft's fault. Many of them will. But most of these problems will not cause layperson crashes, such as lockups. These problems will undermine the security of the system, or prescribe inefficient workflow, or provide workarounds to quirks which should be fixed but aren't in order to maintain backwards compatibility. These are much more insidious and subtle problems, and do not show up in "how does it feel?" type studies. Joe and Jane Homeuser don't care about these problems. They only care that Windows doesn't lock up.
Slashdot Mirror
When Apple is convicted of a monopoly, then it will be a double standard. Until then, as an unconvicted company, Apple can bundle anything they want.
It does sound like an intriguing idea. Some of my thoughts on the subject:
In order to maintain a constant signal strength, each receiver/transmitter would need to "boost" the light signal, presumably by adding a beam of light of its own. The spillover light you mention is a result of the focus angle, and if some of it is not reflected, then the light signal degrades with each station. Also, reflection itself is lossy; some light is always absorbed by the mirror. The whole system would dim over time unless you boosted it back up periodically.
In order to boost the signal, you would probably need to have the signal not be reflected, but rather collected, processed, and retransmitted. Since nothing travels faster than light (according to Einstein, and I hear he was pretty good at math), it would be impossible to collect a signal, interpret it, and send an identical signal in the time it takes to reflect. So the boost signals would be slightly behind the source signals, resulting in some phasing of the signal over time. The whole thing would "blur." That means we're left not with reflection, but with collection and retransmission. There would be a slight delay, but it would work like the 7-second delay built into radio stations: if it's constant, no one notices. The other alternative would be to place enough mirrors between the reception mirror/signal collector and the transmission mirror/signal booster to keep the timing of the signals lined up. But the signal would still need to be collected and retransmitted, perhaps through a partially-silvered mirror at the outgoing end. All this would require that each station be powered. Even if you used the incoming light to power the system (and did no reflection at all, simply collect light -> generate power -> read signal during generation using generated power -> retransmit using generated power), the act of collection/retransmission, and the spillover, will result in a negative net power generation, and power would need to be supplied. This could probably be taken care of with solar cells or something, but that brings us to the question of...
Maintenance. The system you're talking about, with one giant ring of retransmission stations, allows for a single point of failure, which would result in loss of data. This is unacceptable. Instead, I would propose building each station so that redundancy is built in; there would actually be several rings transmitting identical data in parallel. With proper "junction" stations, one could even build a striping system that would ensure that even if several receivers/transmitters went down, no data would be lost.
However, if this were being accomplished in a solar system, it would have to be bounced off satellites in a polar orbit around the sun, to avoid the situations where the signal would need to travel close to the sun and receive interference. A better system than bouncing just between planets would be to have the planets be just stops on the loop, with the majority of stations as satellites in very eccentric orbits around the sun (all the solar systems we know of so far have all the planets basically in a single plane of orbits). The planet stations themselves, of course, would be satellites in orbit around those planets to avoid all the nastiness with transmitting through atmosphere.
Additionally, the stations themselves would need to be self-correcting for perturbations in orbits and pointing angles. This can't be accomplished by a central server or even by communication between the satellites, since that communication would take place at the speed of light, and misalignment would result in loss of data. Each station would have to be semi-intelligent about orbit perturbations and alignments.
That's the biggest load of crap ever.
As long as Marvell doesn't release drivers that broadcast on an illegal radio frequency, then it's the fault of the person who modified the card, not Marvell. Cars drive all over people's lawns, too, but no one blames Toyota when that happens.
So it's www2.tubes.internet?
That's a great analogy, and I'd like to extend it to explain why Web 2.0 will be the "computer as network" breakthrough, and Sun wasn't.
Sun was pushing the right concept, but they forced application developers to conform to one company's standard in order to participate, and that killed it. These kinds of grand, society-changing ideas almost never take hold when a single company is in charge of all the standards (MS excepted). Instead, they spring up from many different companies, and then coalesce into a coherent standard. To extend the analogy, imagine if all the private banks had their own currencies, and you could not transfer your money from one back to another. This is what Sun was proposing; proprietary solutions to interconnection problems. They don't work.
Instead, we had several different companies creating their own different standards which eventually coalesced into the defacto Web standards we have today (Java/ECMAScript, (X)HTML, TCP/IP, etc.), forming the basis for the "network is the computer" framework of Web 2.0. The same thing happened with the U.S. railroads in the 19th century
That's funny, I just select a rectangle, go to Select -> Rounded Rectangle..., choose my radius and click OK, go to Edit -> Stroke Selection, choose my stroke options, and click OK.
Rounded Rectangle is a Script-Fu, it's true, but it came in my standard install and is integrated directly into the UI. Where are you getting this strange copy of Gimp without standard Script-Fu scripts?
The Gimp is every bit as powerful as Photoshop, it's just DIFFERENT. And not just in the "commands have moved to different menus" sense of different; the entire paradigm of how to do things is different in The Gimp, with the exception of layers. And IMHO, it's worth the learning curve, because it's both free and Free. Photoshop apologists can get off their soapbox and actually spend some quality time with The Gimp before making their judgements (and that two weeks in 2002 you spent "messing about" with The Gimp don't count; the program has matured by leaps and bounds in the last few years).
That's not the opinion of the court, who convicted Microsoft of being a monopoly. Once you are convicted like that, the *rules change*. This is no different than if you had been convicted of killing someone... once that conviction is handed down, the rules change, and you no longer have the same rights you did before you were convicted (specifically, the right to not be held against your will).
Just because the U.S. doesn't seem interested in enforcing that conviction, and is instead relying on the European Union to hold Microsoft's feet to the fire, doesn't mean that Microsoft still has the same rights as other companies.
Microsoft is a *convicted monopoly*, and therefore does NOT have the right to include whatever they want in their OS. It's not rocket science.
Same here. I am a true conservative (pity we don't have a party anymore), but the Daily Show is a highlight of my evening. So is the Colbert Report, for different reasons.
I think the difference is that the news shows try very hard to appear non-biased, and as a result, never confront their own bias. They subscribe to the ridiculous notion that being completely unbiased is a physical impossibility, and it paralyses them.
The Daily Show, on the other hand, is much like a good editorial staff at a newspaper. They are not afraid to show their personal opinion, but they do not allow that opinion to color how they present the events. Witness that Jon Stewart himself is very liberal, and (I'm sure) voted for Kerry. He makes that clear in his interviews and his reactions to some of the jokes. However, he does not allow this personal opinion (which is not the same as bias) to affect who, how, or what he lampoons on the show. He is constantly giving the Democrats crap for their poor strategy and platform, making fun of the "Bleeding Heart Liberals" who are on the extreme end of the spectrum, and basically holding politicians' feet to the fire, regardless of party (in addition to all the crap he gives the other side, which frankly, is not difficult). Allowing himself to show his own personal opinion on the show is actually refreshing, because it allows him to be more honest with himself and his guests about the events. Instead of hiding behind a facade of "unbiased reporting" and becoming ultra sensitive to bipolar reporting, he actually uses critical thinking and common sense to point out the absurdities in the system, at a higher level than Democrat vs. Republican, liberal vs. conservative.
Jon Stewart is a man who "gets it", and he's not afraid to go on television to tell it like it is, from the moderate majority point of view. As a bonus, he's also very funny, highly intelligent, and very insightful as a result. I applaud his accomplishments.
The fact that the mainstream news outlets can't seem to live up to this is rather sad.
Yeah, The Daily Show does it, and they're one of the best news sources!
It takes you 30-40 minutes to finish a Dew?
That's it! I'm calling geek security! You're an imposter!
You mean he's the Secretary of Flannel Affairs.
Their main mandate is to ensure enough ambulances are available for handymen around the country.
I like your comparison of population densities, because it actually IS all about the population density.
Yes, Americans use more resources, per capita, than other nations. But let's explore WHY that is.
Most Americans live in a suburban setting, where housing, commecial, and industrial areas are all zoned off and kept separate and distinct from one another. We have the land available, so we use it. Someone living in the residential area can't just walk to the market, and public transportation is usually woefully inadequate in such a spread-out area, so they drive to the grocery store and their place of work (more gasoline, higher demand for automobiles, etc.). Then, because the grocery store is out of the way, and not easy to get to since it involves a drive in traffic, Americans visit the store less often (more packaged/prepared foods make more packaging, preservatives in food generate industrial waste in their creation, etc.). A higher demand for automobiles and prepared foods gives rise to entire industries which generate a lot of waste. These are just two examples.
So, yes, the average American generates more waste, but I think it's mostly *because* the population density is lower here, and we are more spread out. In a tight urban setting where you're living on top of your neighbors and can walk to the market on the way home from work, you will consume fewer resources than someone living in a spread-out suburban setting who needs to drive everywhere.
Let's work some numbers:
Data from this IEA page indicates that each person in the U.S. uses 7,920.9 kg of oil (energy equivalent) per year, and each person in Germany uses 4,263.5 kg of oil. And this Wikipedia page states areas of 9,629,091 sq. km in the United States and 357,022 sq. km in Germany. If we were to adjust the area of the United States to match the population density with that of Germany, the U.S. would have 1,285,400 sq. km. (basically cramming the U.S. population into the area west of Nevada's eastern border). Using these numbers, the U.S. uses 0.006 kg of oil per person per sq. km per year, and Germany uses 0.012 kg of oil per person per sq. km per year. Germany uses about twice as many resources per person per year as the United States, when you correct for population density. (Someone else with a firmer grounding in statistics could probably do this more robustly.)
So could Americans use fewer resources? Of course we could. But the way to do that would be to artificially constrain ourselves to only live in highly urban settings with high population densities and mixed residential/commercial/industrial zoning, and leave the open spaces completely devoid of human activity. I, for one, enjoy living more than 3 feet away from my neighbors. Those people are obnoxious, anyway.
I am all for copyrights in general (even though the current system of life+70 years is ridiculous and wrong), and I see your point about the difference between DRM and the abuse of DRM. However, I don't believe it's possible to use DRM without abusing it, and here's why:
1). There is no way for software to tell the difference between infringing use and non-infringing use. Those 10,000 copies of the album you're burning: is that to wallpaper your room with (legal) or to sell to people on the street (illegal)? There's no way for the software to know, so it is forced to restrict you in situations where you are not infringing. Software cannot know your intentions.
2). DRM is inherently insecure. There is no such thing as a secure DRM system: either content and key are stored with the content, in which case it's easy to bypass, or content is stored in a central server controlled by a content distribution company, and the content will no longer be decryptable if the company folds. This in itself is not a problem; houses are inherently insecure as well, since I can just break a window if the door is locked. But people are comfortable with the level of security of their houses, and don't go to great lengths (typically) to lock them down to ridiculous levels. However, for some reason, our current culture does not take the same mentality with computer security. Everything in computer security is an arms race, and no one is ever content with "secure enough if I pay attention to what I'm doing." People don't want their content to be "secure enough." They want it LOCKED DOWN. Thus, DRM will be (and is) an escalating arms race, locking things down ever tighter, and inconveniencing the honest users more and more in the interest of "security." This is not an inherent problem with DRM, persay, but it is inherent in our current computer culture--especially in the eyes of content creators who want security for their content--and I don't see it changing anytime soon.
Other things that people might bring up are able to be controlled in the theoretical "non-abusive" implimentations of DRM. These things include perpetual copyrights (DRM never expires, but copyrights do), resale rights, and personal non-infringing copying. All three of those could be accounted for in a DRM implementation (but haven't yet). Unfortunately, the two points I mentioned above are showstoppers, and there is no such thing as "non-abusive DRM", even if it corrected for all those other abuses.
The concept of DRM is pretty neat--"we'll prevent the baddies from doing all those things that they're not allowed to do, while still letting the honest people retain their rights to legally use the content however they like!". However, in practice, it's not so simple, and the end result is that DRM tramples on the rights of the honest people for what amounts to very trivial reasons. It is impossible to use DRM without abusing it. I've always believed in the adage that "it's better to let 99 guilty men go free than to wrongly imprison 1 innocent man", and even though DRM is a fairly small part of my day and not a big deal in the larger scheme, I don't want it in my products, and do everything I can to subvert it in the products I buy.
The only thing making it illegal to break DRM for the purposes of non-infringing use is the "no reverse engineering" clause of the DMCA, and that particular clause has not yet been tested in court. Until it is, I consider it unconstitutional and will ignore it every chance I get.
I hope that answered your question.
You talk as if banning online gambling has anything to do with morality.
The banning of online gambling boils down to two things in this country, as do almost all things political: money, and reelection.
Online gambling is currently not taxable, so the government has no reason to protect it. You'll notice that other casinos are not only not banned, but even have a certain protected status, mostly because they are taxable. As if giving some Native Americans a stack of chips and a blackjack table makes up for years of genocide.
These kinds of bills are also always drafted and proposed right before elections, because the extremist nuts who actually do vote in this country genuinely care about this from a moral standpoint. It makes no logical sense for these extremists to ban online gambling and not other forms of gambling (most of them are happily betting away in NFL office pools), but when a senator gets up on a box and tells them that gambling websites are WRONG and IMMORAL and BABY JESUS DOESN'T GAMBLE ONLINE, then they are more than happy to toss online gambling sites into a lake, declare them witches, and have them burned at the stake. After all, who doesn't love a good witch burning?
Additionally, why should addictive things be banned, simply because they are addictive? Anything can be addictive. How you destroy yourself is no business of mine.
I noticed that your post was immediately in defense of gambling, as if it was an action that needed defending. Do you also have to defend to me why you bought that cheeseburger (I was hungry, I certainly don't have an eating disorder), why you drove to work (I didn't want to walk in the rain, of course I'm not lazy), or why you watched Star Trek last Saturday instead of going out (I was tired and it's all that was on, I'm not a nerd!)? You have a right to gamble with your own money, for any reason, just like you have a right to buy a cheeseburger instead of a salad, drive to work instead of walking, and watch Star Trek instead of going out, all without explaining why those things are not harmful. You don't have to explain yourself.
Well, yes and no.
The ability to attach completely unrelated riders to bills is not just a way to sneak things through congress; it's also a necessary check and balance on the party system, just like the other checks and balances in place in our government.
It serves its purpose to prevent the tyranny of the majority. Let's say (hypothetically, of course) that a single political party controlled both houses of congress AND the presidency (hahahahaha -- that would never happen). Suddenly, every single thing the minority party proposes as a bill gets immediately shot down and/or vetoed, simply on the merits of the Neener Neener Act of 1822. However, allowing riders will give the minority party a chance to get something done in the face of overwhelming majority dissent. "Oh yeah? Well, I won't let you pass the Give Giant Corporations Tons Of Money Act unless you also pass the Save The Starving Welfare Children rider I'm attaching to it! So there!"
Can it be abused? Certainly. Is it being abused right now? Absolutely.
But the alternative isn't any better.
And frankly, if you don't like the people abusing that power, vote them the hell out of office. Many of our problems with Congress would simply go away if we didn't have a 98% incumbency rate. So vote for someone who gives a damn, and will fight for the moderate majority!
Why does every advance in technology require that everyone and their brother eventually use one?
Different technologies have different uses, and should be treated as such. The Tablet PC may be cumbersome and awkward for someone who would really prefer a laptop, but they are being used extensively in hospitals and other areas where they are replacing clipboards, and in those areas are considered a smashing success.
The one handed keyboard (along with others, like the Dvorak keyboard) didn't take off because people didn't want to relearn how to type. QUERTY has been the defacto standard long enough that the general population doesn't have a compelling reason to relearn to type. However, those systems might work well in a court reporter or closed-captioning setting, if they are indeed faster than the shorthand systems in place now.
You don't see regular computer users moving their mouse around with a Wacom Tablet or a Spaceball, either, but they do have their own specialist uses (computer artwork and CAD systems, respectively) where they are incredibly successful.
I see this OLED keyboard being used by hardcore gamers (especially MMORPG players) who can show icons of the in-game action on their keyboard shortcuts. It would also be successful in a "Grandma's First PC" situation, where pressing Shift causes all the letters to go uppercase, and pressing Ctrl turns them into descriptions of hotkey functions (cut, copy, paste, for example). I, for one, would jump at the chance to map the shortcuts in programs like Blender to this keyboard to help me learn them.
Just because it isn't suited for everyone, doesn't mean it's going to fail as a product.
The situation you describe is ridiculous, of course, but it has been tried before.
http://www.law.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-948441.html
The question of whether a company owns the image of a logo/advertisement in any photograph is still open for debate, however, since the quoted ruling protected a (fictional) movie under the First Amendment. A personal photograph might not receive such protections, since it is not technically "speech."
What? That line is directly from the books, written in the 1940s in response to the first World War (which Tolkien fought in) and the second World War (which was going on at the time). Peter Jackson filmed the line during principal photography in 1999 and 2000. Just because a truism applies to current events doesn't mean it was designed to be *about* current events. This line has nothing to do with 9/11, even if it's applicable.
Again, this theme is a truism, and need not be manipulated to be relevant to current events. Tolkien wrote the Scouring of the Shire to explore his own feelings after returning from World War I and discovering that most of his friends were dead, that industry had crept up on the idyllic English countryside, and the world had changed irrevocably from what he remembered. If you are able to derive meaning from this story and apply it to current events, then it is merely evidence that the story is timeless and well written.
Tolkien has said on many occasions that he despises allegory. He stated (and I'm paraphrasing) that allegory is when the author injects specific meaning into his/her works. A classic example would be the Chronicles of Narnia series, with the lion Aslan clearly representing Jesus Christ in the mythology of Narnia. Tolkien preferred instead to give his stories applicability, i.e., instead of injecting meaning, he simply wrote about timeless themes and allowed the reader to find their own meaning. Therefore, if you want to see the the Scouring of the Shire as the overthrow of a (current) corrupt government, you can. If you want to see Tom Bombadil as the embodiment of the uninvolved pacifist, you can. If you want to see the gift of Galadriel's three hairs to Gimli as a representation of the Christian Holy Trinity, you can. But Tolkien never intended these things to be allegory; that presupposes that there is a correct interpretation, and an incorrect one. He simply presented the mythology as he envisioned it, and allowed the reader to come to his/her own conclusions. I think Jackson followed that ideal faithfully, which is why those three movies will still be great in 100 years.
Of course. But laws are always behind technology, which they clearly are in this case.
The arrest was not bad. The law enforcement officials were merely doing their jobs, and enforcing a law on the books the way it should be enforced. Whether the law makes sense or not is not up to the law enforcement officials to decide (excusing for a moment their duties as citizens).
What I really want to discuss is the LAW, not the arrest. Yes, in the past, I could have run a mail-order business where people in other countries could order my products and I would ship it to them. However, because a physical product was involved, the laws were very clear on whose country's laws were in effect at any given time during the transaction. If it is illegal to ship the product from country A to country B, that's illegal. If it's legal to posess in country A but illegal to posess in country B, then the buyer is breaking the law. These concepts were not difficult, and fit into the standard model of a country being a physical place.
Now, however, the Internet is making it very easy and profitable to offer not just products between countries, but services. A gambling site is not really selling a product, they are selling a service (specifically, entertainment). And because services are not physical things, it's a little more difficult to classify WHERE that service is being performed. It no longer fits the model of countries being physical places, because the physicality of the service (the server and client computers) is colocated in two countries, and could be connected through a large number of countries.
So where is this service being provided? In both places? What if the laws of the two countries contradict, as they do in this case?
As I said in my previous post, the government of the US right now is in panicky "On noes! Save teh children!" mode about gambling. They have decided that gambling online is a vile and morally reprehensible activity, but gambling at an Indian casino or riverboat is ok, and apparently so is going to Vegas. The hypocricy of this is stunning, and the government will have a few backlashes before they realize it. Then, like watching a lightbulb go off, we will suddenly see Congress realize, "Hey! We can TAX it!" and it will be a protected activity from then on.
As for the analogy comment, I didn't read the post you were responding to before I posted, so I apologize. But, notwithstanding, I still think all analogies are bad, because they remove nuance from the discussion, and the opportunity to use your own comment against you was too good to pass up.
As a card carrying member of the 1%, I would like to just say that I am OUTRAGED that the information in my empty profile, which I was specifically coerced into posting on the internet with the intent of having other people read it, is now publicly readable by the very people who use that site. This kind of blatant privacy breach will not be tolorated, and the Facebook community is rising up against the oppressors who have forced their details to become public!
The citizens of Facebook will not tolerate this kind of privacy breach any more!
But large companies selling my private data to telemarketers and data miners, in return for a 2% discount? Naw, it's cool. I save money!
What part of "publishing on the internet" is not broadcasting information?
Well, then you better not publish it on the internet.
Security through obscurity is a Bad Thing (tm). For reference, please see every article about closed-source software on Slashdot.
And people might call all your friends and say bad things about you, too. How about not pissing people off?
Wait, isn't the whole purpose of Facebook to post your whole life online for everyone to read and keep up with? Isn't that what Facebook, MySpace, blogging, and the entirety of the narcissistic end of the internet are for? What part of this functionality doesn't fit the "I write about every inane detail of my life on here so other people can read it" model?
Which is exactly what Facebook did, to appease people like you who write their personal details on a sign in a public park and then get angry when people read it.
If you don't want information to be read, DON'T POST IT ON THE FRIGGIN' INTERNET.
Don't worry; they'll release a patch in a few days.
I now hereby dub YOU "Bad Analogy Guy, Jr." (in reference to your previous post, of course).
Last time I checked, using and selling drugs are BOTH illegal in the U.S. Therefore, both users and dealers should be arrested.
Whether the law makes sense or not makes little difference to the law enforcement community. This guy broke a U.S. law, and he was arrested for it.
The REAL question here is whether he broke the law on U.S. soil, which really boils down further to the question: where exactly is a website located? Is it located where the server is located? Or is it located where the person using the website is located? If it's the former, then the U.S. people who used the website could be considered to be gambling in a foreign country, and not on U.S. soil, because the website is technically located in the U.K. (and thus they were not breaking U.S. law). But if the latter question is true, then the administrator of any website can be held accountable by the laws of any country any user connects from, even those laws that contradict each other.
Either way, the U.S. government is going to do the same thing with online gambling that they did with alcohol: ignore it, then ban it, realize that ban creates crime, unban it, tax the ever living hell out of it, and finally protect the industry forevermore as a revenue stream.
Wait, it'll happen.
This is precisely the grandparent's point.
For the vast majority of cubiclemonkeys and home users of Windows, Windows Explorer (the taskbar, the icons, the My Documents window...) IS Windows. If Explorer locks up, they consider that a Windows "crash."
If an application dies unexpectedly without saving, they say their "computer crashed."
Hell, I've seen people get error messages in Word and PowerPoint and call that a crash.
Slashdotters like you and me clearly know that those are merely appliations running on top of the OS layer, but it's a minor point to the overall "feel" of an OS, which is what the article was talking about. Laypeople using computers don't care about the cause of the problems, and they usually rank all problems with the same priority: if their computer froze and they had to reboot, that's the same severity problem as if Windows Explorer crashed and restarted, and it's the same severity problem as if they can't connect to one of the servers in their mapped drives. Something is "acting up", and they are frustrated. WHO exactly caused that problem (OS, application, hardware, drivers, network, ID-10-T error, whatever) is immaterial.
Now, the article only mentions three specific people (two of them bloggers), and then a nebulous blob of "early testers" which may or may not be regular users. But it also doesn't give any specific examples of things, other than to say that Solitaire and Minesweeper look Shiny and New (tm), and that the drivers "feel more grown up". What a solid, scientific study this was!
Vista will be riddled with as many problems as, if not more than, Windows XP. Many of these problems will not be Microsoft's fault. Many of them will. But most of these problems will not cause layperson crashes, such as lockups. These problems will undermine the security of the system, or prescribe inefficient workflow, or provide workarounds to quirks which should be fixed but aren't in order to maintain backwards compatibility. These are much more insidious and subtle problems, and do not show up in "how does it feel?" type studies. Joe and Jane Homeuser don't care about these problems. They only care that Windows doesn't lock up.
All microsoft operating systems are crap. /* until near their end of life. */
There. Fixed that for ya.