A country where everybody is guaranteed freedom of religion (including freedom to have no religion) and freedom from discrimination on the grounds of religion by law, and where such laws are (pretty much) enforced is not a theocracy. Also, a country where the actual legislators and those who run the country* (MPs, including the PM) can be and are of any religion or none is definitely not a theocracy.
Yes, the UK has some left-over historical theocratic trappings ('decorations' if you like) but is not a theocracy in practice nowadays, any more having the 'flying lady' emblem from my great-grandfather's Rolls-Royce** on my Ford makes it a Rolls-Royce.
* Yes, I realize it can be argued that actually business people and/or the civil service run the country, but they are also of any or no religion.
** No, my great-grandfather did not actually have a Rolls-Royce or any other motor vehicle AFAIK.
In reality, no government would attempt to abolish the monarchy without a referendum, and no monarch would attempt to cling on if such a referendum passed. The current Queen has said as much (in reference to her being head-of-state in Australia, but the same principle applies).
Also, there is no prospect of such a referendum in the foreseeable future.
Technically you're probably right that no legal mechanism exists to bypass the monarch refusing Royal Assent. But it would (IMHO) never get to that point.
I think you may be confusing H5N1 ('Bird flu') with H5N2 ('Swine Flu').
In 2009 many people in the UK were infected with H5N2, not H5N1. H5N2 is much more infectious in humans, but much less deadly than H5N1. H5N2 was popularly known as Swine flu since it is also very infectious in pigs.
It remains true AFAIK that H5N1 is very deadly to humans but not generally transmissible from human to human.
The new strain appears to combine the deadly-to-humans aspect of H5N1 with the infectiousness of H5N2.
I thinks it's probably reasonable to say that most of your criticisms do not apply to IBM's z/OS Enterprise COBOL, particularly if you have the budget to buy all the related tools.
Or Ubuntu, see all the complains when Gnome2 went away with no easy way to get it back.
This is absolutely nothing like a 'remote kill switch' or 'forced upgrade'. If you want to you can carry on running Gnome 2 with your current version (e.g 10.4 LTS) of Ubuntu indefinitely. If you choose to upgrade to a new version of Ubuntu you are free to run Gnome 2 if you can make it work. If you don't like that you can switch to another Distro (e.g. Centos 6 with another 6+ years of Gnome 2). You can use a Gnome 2 fork (e.g. MATE). You can make you own fork. You can do anything you please with Gnome 2 apart from having it supplied as a default install for new Ubuntu releases. All these options are freely available with no jailbreaking or potential lawbreaking involved.
As I understand it, both the UK and Japan have privatized their mail delivery.
The UK's mail delivery is *not* privatised. It *is* being prepared for privatisation, and as part of that the current regulated 46p 1st class charge will be uncapped and is expected to rise considerably.
In theory, privatisation is supposed to lead to efficiencies, competition and a better deal for the consumer. In practice, in the UK we are being massively ripped off by the various monopolies and cartels (e.g in the water/energy sector) that were created over the last 20-30 years as a result of privatisation. And to put the icing on the cake, the taxpayer subsidies given to the private rail industry are about twice what they were when it was nationalised.
A person caught in the door gets torn in half and pulverized. There's no fix for this.
Door detects obstruction, fails to close; tram and train *remain docked* and both stop. You *must* allow enough parallel track so that can happen safely if the 'last safe undocking point' is passed without undocking having occurred.
You also have CCTV at the docking point, and massive fines etc. for anyone who obstructs it without a damn good reason, and lots of flashing warning sounds/lights etc if the docking area is obstructed just before undocking.
Not to say it's cost effective or practical, but it could be done safely.
(Not the GP or any previous poster in this thread)
I usually find your posts quite reasonable and informative, but telling someone to grow up because of *their* childish abuse when you've just used the word 'freetard' twice and mentioned 'having a bath' shows you've got some growing up to do yourself.
As you say, we can't run the alternate what-if time-line through, but this is always the case.
But in practical terms the austerity program will be seen (by most people, in retrospect) to have failed and been the wrong strategy if the UK ends up with high unemployment and low growth and *still* misses the deficit targets by a significant margin (due to revenue collapse exceeding even severe spending cuts).
Don't like it, don't take a cab, use another mode of transport.
OK, let's try this in a major UK city: Bus: Cameras on board Tram (where applicable): Cameras on board Train: Cameras on board Foot: Cameras throughout city centre Private Car: Cameras (on main roads and in car parks, plus as per foot once you've parked).
Looks like we're talking about teleportation then.
Not to say that I agree/disagree with any specific use, but suggesting you can avoid cameras by using another mode of transport is just not true in many places. The only real way to (largely) avoid them is to move to a rural area.
The important issue here is not the camera as such; many cabs (and other transport) in the UK have had no-sound cameras for years and most people accept that they help deter assaults on Taxi Drivers or catch the culprits, and accept the relatively small intrusion.
The big issue here is sound recording; people often have very personal or business confidential conversations in the back of cabs and do not want them recorded; it sounds like the information commissioner agrees this is too intrusive and this will not be allowed.
Our austerity measures aren't pleasant, but they're the sensible thing to do
A lot of economists think that the austerity measures are too extreme and could drag the economy into a vicious downward spiral where increased unemployment and decreased economic activity actually make the deficit worse, leading to the government having to chose either cutting spending even more to try to meet the deficit targets, further worsening unemployment (and so on) or losing credibility massively by abandoning the targets (causing the dreaded bond yield increases and their consequences). Credibility lost by abandoning the targets for something less 'austere' would be much worse than if the targets had been set more moderately in the first place...
So it's possible that slower deficit reduction (over two parliaments rather than one) will turn out to have been the most sensible and prudent option.
We'll find out in the next two years or so who's right. Although I'm sure if it all goes tits up, the govt will claim it's the eurozone and the world economy entirely to blame and nothing to do with 'overenthusiastic' austerity measures.
It's a poor car analogy. In the case of the car, once he removes the sign it has nothing in, on or of it which could be in any way construed as 'company property'. In the case of the twitter account, once he removes the company name from the account, he still has all the followers who he gained while the company name *was* in the account name. Arguably, at least some of them were (or thought they were) following him in his role as an employee of the company - i.e. they were following his 'post', not him as a person, and they could be said to 'belong' to the company.
Increases in the minimum wage increase unemployment,
This may be your belief, but the evidence does not really support it.
The evidence in regards to the UK, where the minimum wage was introduced in 1999 at a significantly higher level than the Federal minimum wage in the US is that there was no significant effect on employment, e.g.: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0781.pdf
The Conservatives (UK right wing party) who were in opposition at the time opposed it, as did the main employers' organization, predicting large unemployment increases. Both have since dropped that opposition due to the lack of evidence of negative effects (and also it being popular) and now both support the retention of the minimum wage in its current form.
As I said above, MATE (surely the worst-named project in history!) is still very much a "maybe" according to that blog post, which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
I suppose I read the blog post a bit more positively; anyhow, I feel as if Mint will probably either end up with a reasonable version of Gnome 2 supported for a few years, or will put enough extensions/customizations onto Gnome 3 to make it seem 'close enough'.
As a user who switched to linux mint because of Ubuntu's adoption of Unity and Gnome 3, I really hope they don't adopt Gnome 3 without a Gnome 2 fallback
They are going to try their best to provide a Gnome 2 fork (MATE) which can be installed alongside Gnome 3 without conflicts. See the MATE section in this post: http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851 If this works out and they match Ubuntu 12.04 LTS's further extended desktop support schedule, that means at least another 5 years of Gnome 2 if you want it.
Or there's always Centos 6.x or equivalent with 6 years Gnome 2 support.
.iso files that force you to jump through all sorts of hoops to write them to a USB stick
What, hoops like 'open usb writer application', 'select iso', 'select destination drive'. 'go'; i.e. pretty much exactly like writing the iso to CD or DVD?
BIOS issues affect booting from usb. Different BIOS behave differently depending on the size and geometry (pretend track/cylinder configuration) of the USB drive.
The most useful info I got from fiddling with usb drives was: Larger (8GB or more) USB flash drives will typically work like external usb hard drives - i.e format as and use as any hard drive for booting purposes. Smaller (4GB or less) USB flash drives may only work as boot devices if they are formatted as 'superfloppies' (i.e. no partition table) This can be done in Linux by using mkdosfs -I/dev/sdx (that's an upper case i, not clear in my font) USB drives may show up in two different places in a BIOS boot device menu (e.g. as a hard drive and as another boot device) and only one of these options may work. SD cards used via a USB adaptor seem to be better behaved than equivalent sized USB drives. HTH
My experience is that DVDs burn pretty fast but seem to take an unreasonable time to finalize (or whatever it is that k3b says at the end of the burn).
As a user I'd be unhappy. It's great to have one store where you'll find everything. I don't want to feel like I have to shop around 25 stores before I'm sure I've seen everything in the category of app I'm after.
This seems to be a bit of a spurious objection.
Every app that was 'approved' by Apple would probably be in the main app store (to maximize sales and visibility). The main purpose of extra app stores would be for apps rejected by Apple for business, taste or licensing reasons, which you currently can't get at all. So you probably wouldn't need to search multiple app stores if you were happy with the current setup (which you seem to be). Do you really object to *other users* being able to use multiple app stores to access apps that Apple have rejected?
Also, there's no good reason why you can't have a facility to seamlessly search and install from multiple app stores, in the same way that Linux can seamlessly search and install from multiple repos.
Nothing. Apple is not a monopoly, anti-trust doesn't apply, they can do whatever they want until they reach, whatever, 90% market saturation.
This is a common misconception. You can be subject to relevant competition laws even if you have less than 50% of the relevant 'market'. For example, two companies each with a 40-50% share of a given market who adopted policies tending to exclude any third or fourth companies from competing could easily fall foul of competition law (even if these policies were adopted with no collusion).
The real test is something like "one or more companies who alone or as a group dominate a given market and use that dominance to reduce or eliminate competition in related areas to the detriment of consumers". (This is my approximation of how EU competition law appears to be worded; I understand the US situation is similar).
NB I'm not implying anything here about how this does or does not apply to the current or future situation with Apple.
Make a/users folder. This would contain all user info.
To be honest, I think/home is still fine, though I wouldn't object to/users.
This is where/root belongs logically.
Yeah, agreed here as well./home/me and/root always struck me as strange. Presumably it's so you can split them on different partitions, so it's not a meaningless distinction... but I'd rather see that handled in some other way. Perhaps by allowing something like the equivalent of "mount/dev/sda0 on/home, except don't hide/home/root".
The point of deliberately having root's home on the root filesystem and not under/home is so you can login and run as root without/home being mounted, for example if/home is corrupted, or if you want to move or resize/home, or if/home is network mounted (for sharing across multiple systems) and currently unavailable. I've found this useful on a number of occasions.
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A system of government in which priests rule in the name of God or a god
The Queen reigns. She does not 'rule' any more.
That's pretty much the definition of a theocracy.
A country where everybody is guaranteed freedom of religion (including freedom to have no religion) and freedom from discrimination on the grounds of religion by law, and where such laws are (pretty much) enforced is not a theocracy. Also, a country where the actual legislators and those who run the country* (MPs, including the PM) can be and are of any religion or none is definitely not a theocracy.
Yes, the UK has some left-over historical theocratic trappings ('decorations' if you like) but is not a theocracy in practice nowadays, any more having the 'flying lady' emblem from my great-grandfather's Rolls-Royce** on my Ford makes it a Rolls-Royce.
* Yes, I realize it can be argued that actually business people and/or the civil service run the country, but they are also of any or no religion.
** No, my great-grandfather did not actually have a Rolls-Royce or any other motor vehicle AFAIK.
In reality, no government would attempt to abolish the monarchy without a referendum, and no monarch would attempt to cling on if such a referendum passed.
The current Queen has said as much (in reference to her being head-of-state in Australia, but the same principle applies).
Also, there is no prospect of such a referendum in the foreseeable future.
Technically you're probably right that no legal mechanism exists to bypass the monarch refusing Royal Assent. But it would (IMHO) never get to that point.
I think you may be confusing H5N1 ('Bird flu') with H5N2 ('Swine Flu').
In 2009 many people in the UK were infected with H5N2, not H5N1. H5N2 is much more infectious in humans, but much less deadly than H5N1. H5N2 was popularly known as Swine flu since it is also very infectious in pigs.
It remains true AFAIK that H5N1 is very deadly to humans but not generally transmissible from human to human.
The new strain appears to combine the deadly-to-humans aspect of H5N1 with the infectiousness of H5N2.
I thinks it's probably reasonable to say that most of your criticisms do not apply to IBM's z/OS Enterprise COBOL, particularly if you have the budget to buy all the related tools.
Or Ubuntu, see all the complains when Gnome2 went away with no easy way to get it back.
This is absolutely nothing like a 'remote kill switch' or 'forced upgrade'. If you want to you can carry on running Gnome 2 with your current version (e.g 10.4 LTS) of Ubuntu indefinitely. If you choose to upgrade to a new version of Ubuntu you are free to run Gnome 2 if you can make it work. If you don't like that you can switch to another Distro (e.g. Centos 6 with another 6+ years of Gnome 2). You can use a Gnome 2 fork (e.g. MATE). You can make you own fork. You can do anything you please with Gnome 2 apart from having it supplied as a default install for new Ubuntu releases.
All these options are freely available with no jailbreaking or potential lawbreaking involved.
As I understand it, both the UK and Japan have privatized their mail delivery.
The UK's mail delivery is *not* privatised.
It *is* being prepared for privatisation, and as part of that the current regulated 46p 1st class charge will be uncapped and is expected to rise considerably.
In theory, privatisation is supposed to lead to efficiencies, competition and a better deal for the consumer.
In practice, in the UK we are being massively ripped off by the various monopolies and cartels (e.g in the water/energy sector) that were created over the last 20-30 years as a result of privatisation. And to put the icing on the cake, the taxpayer subsidies given to the private rail industry are about twice what they were when it was nationalised.
A person caught in the door gets torn in half and pulverized. There's no fix for this.
Door detects obstruction, fails to close; tram and train *remain docked* and both stop. You *must* allow enough parallel track so that can happen safely if the 'last safe undocking point' is passed without undocking having occurred.
You also have CCTV at the docking point, and massive fines etc. for anyone who obstructs it without a damn good reason, and lots of flashing warning sounds/lights etc if the docking area is obstructed just before undocking.
Not to say it's cost effective or practical, but it could be done safely.
Grow up.
(Not the GP or any previous poster in this thread)
I usually find your posts quite reasonable and informative, but telling someone to grow up because of *their* childish abuse when you've just used the word 'freetard' twice and mentioned 'having a bath' shows you've got some growing up to do yourself.
I don't think we'll ever find out who is right.
As you say, we can't run the alternate what-if time-line through, but this is always the case.
But in practical terms the austerity program will be seen (by most people, in retrospect) to have failed and been the wrong strategy if the UK ends up with high unemployment and low growth and *still* misses the deficit targets by a significant margin (due to revenue collapse exceeding even severe spending cuts).
Don't like it, don't take a cab, use another mode of transport.
OK, let's try this in a major UK city:
Bus: Cameras on board
Tram (where applicable): Cameras on board
Train: Cameras on board
Foot: Cameras throughout city centre
Private Car: Cameras (on main roads and in car parks, plus as per foot once you've parked).
Looks like we're talking about teleportation then.
Not to say that I agree/disagree with any specific use, but suggesting you can avoid cameras by using another mode of transport is just not true in many places.
The only real way to (largely) avoid them is to move to a rural area.
The important issue here is not the camera as such; many cabs (and other transport) in the UK have had no-sound cameras for years and most people accept that they help deter assaults on Taxi Drivers or catch the culprits, and accept the relatively small intrusion.
The big issue here is sound recording; people often have very personal or business confidential conversations in the back of cabs and do not want them recorded; it sounds like the information commissioner agrees this is too intrusive and this will not be allowed.
Our austerity measures aren't pleasant, but they're the sensible thing to do
A lot of economists think that the austerity measures are too extreme and could drag the economy into a vicious downward spiral where increased unemployment and decreased economic activity actually make the deficit worse, leading to the government having to chose either cutting spending even more to try to meet the deficit targets, further worsening unemployment (and so on) or losing credibility massively by abandoning the targets (causing the dreaded bond yield increases and their consequences).
Credibility lost by abandoning the targets for something less 'austere' would be much worse than if the targets had been set more moderately in the first place...
So it's possible that slower deficit reduction (over two parliaments rather than one) will turn out to have been the most sensible and prudent option.
We'll find out in the next two years or so who's right. Although I'm sure if it all goes tits up, the govt will claim it's the eurozone and the world economy entirely to blame and nothing to do with 'overenthusiastic' austerity measures.
It's a poor car analogy. In the case of the car, once he removes the sign it has nothing in, on or of it which could be in any way construed as 'company property'.
In the case of the twitter account, once he removes the company name from the account, he still has all the followers who he gained while the company name *was* in the account name. Arguably, at least some of them were (or thought they were) following him in his role as an employee of the company - i.e. they were following his 'post', not him as a person, and they could be said to 'belong' to the company.
Increases in the minimum wage increase unemployment,
This may be your belief, but the evidence does not really support it.
The evidence in regards to the UK, where the minimum wage was introduced in 1999 at a significantly higher level than the Federal minimum wage in the US is that there was no significant effect on employment, e.g.:
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0781.pdf
The Conservatives (UK right wing party) who were in opposition at the time opposed it, as did the main employers' organization, predicting large unemployment increases. Both have since dropped that opposition due to the lack of evidence of negative effects (and also it being popular) and now both support the retention of the minimum wage in its current form.
As I said above, MATE (surely the worst-named project in history!) is still very much a "maybe" according to that blog post, which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
I suppose I read the blog post a bit more positively; anyhow, I feel as if Mint will probably either end up with a reasonable version of Gnome 2 supported for a few years, or will put enough extensions/customizations onto Gnome 3 to make it seem 'close enough'.
As a user who switched to linux mint because of Ubuntu's adoption of Unity and Gnome 3, I really hope they don't adopt Gnome 3 without a Gnome 2 fallback
They are going to try their best to provide a Gnome 2 fork (MATE) which can be installed alongside Gnome 3 without conflicts. See the MATE section in this post:
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851
If this works out and they match Ubuntu 12.04 LTS's further extended desktop support schedule, that means at least another 5 years of Gnome 2 if you want it.
Or there's always Centos 6.x or equivalent with 6 years Gnome 2 support.
.iso files that force you to jump through all sorts of hoops to write them to a USB stick
What, hoops like 'open usb writer application', 'select iso', 'select destination drive'. 'go'; i.e. pretty much exactly like writing the iso to CD or DVD?
BIOS issues affect booting from usb.
Different BIOS behave differently depending on the size and geometry (pretend track/cylinder configuration) of the USB drive.
The most useful info I got from fiddling with usb drives was: /dev/sdx
Larger (8GB or more) USB flash drives will typically work like external usb hard drives - i.e format as and use as any hard drive for booting purposes.
Smaller (4GB or less) USB flash drives may only work as boot devices if they are formatted as 'superfloppies' (i.e. no partition table)
This can be done in Linux by using
mkdosfs -I
(that's an upper case i, not clear in my font)
USB drives may show up in two different places in a BIOS boot device menu (e.g. as a hard drive and as another boot device) and only one of these options may work.
SD cards used via a USB adaptor seem to be better behaved than equivalent sized USB drives.
HTH
My experience is that DVDs burn pretty fast but seem to take an unreasonable time to finalize (or whatever it is that k3b says at the end of the burn).
I figure Debian stable will keep using Gnome 2 for at least two more years
And RHEL/SL/Centos should keep using it for *six* years (if you can put up with an RPM distro).
As a user I'd be unhappy. It's great to have one store where you'll find everything. I don't want to feel like I have to shop around 25 stores before I'm sure I've seen everything in the category of app I'm after.
This seems to be a bit of a spurious objection.
Every app that was 'approved' by Apple would probably be in the main app store (to maximize sales and visibility). The main purpose of extra app stores would be for apps rejected by Apple for business, taste or licensing reasons, which you currently can't get at all. So you probably wouldn't need to search multiple app stores if you were happy with the current setup (which you seem to be). Do you really object to *other users* being able to use multiple app stores to access apps that Apple have rejected?
Also, there's no good reason why you can't have a facility to seamlessly search and install from multiple app stores, in the same way that Linux can seamlessly search and install from multiple repos.
Nothing. Apple is not a monopoly, anti-trust doesn't apply, they can do whatever they want until they reach, whatever, 90% market saturation.
This is a common misconception. You can be subject to relevant competition laws even if you have less than 50% of the relevant 'market'.
For example, two companies each with a 40-50% share of a given market who adopted policies tending to exclude any third or fourth companies from competing could easily fall foul of competition law (even if these policies were adopted with no collusion).
The real test is something like "one or more companies who alone or as a group dominate a given market and use that dominance to reduce or eliminate competition in related areas to the detriment of consumers". (This is my approximation of how EU competition law appears to be worded; I understand the US situation is similar).
NB I'm not implying anything here about how this does or does not apply to the current or future situation with Apple.
Make a /users folder. This would contain all user info.
To be honest, I think /home is still fine, though I wouldn't object to /users.
This is where /root belongs logically.
Yeah, agreed here as well. /home/me and /root always struck me as strange. Presumably it's so you can split them on different partitions, so it's not a meaningless distinction... but I'd rather see that handled in some other way. Perhaps by allowing something like the equivalent of "mount /dev/sda0 on /home, except don't hide /home/root".
The point of deliberately having root's home on the root filesystem and not under /home is so you can login and run as root without /home being mounted, for example if /home is corrupted, or if you want to move or resize /home, or if /home is network mounted (for sharing across multiple systems) and currently unavailable. I've found this useful on a number of occasions.
I might know it's a fake if there were grammatical errors
In most companies, you'd know it was bogus if it came from the CEO and *didn't* contain grammatical errors...