This is a real shame because the *IDEA* of electronic voting is good - but none of the proposed implementations are done right. The electronic voting process *CAN* work with a level of security and verification equal or better than that of paper voting, but none of the companies currently involved have the incentive to bother - because the government isn't making such measures be a requirement of the spec - and THAT oversight (or deliberate omission perhaps?) will lead to our disenfranchisement. When the companies say their voting systems are secure, what they mean is that they tried making them secure from hacking. What they don't understand is that that's not what we're worried about. We, the voters, aren't so much worried about other voters altering the data, as about corruption withing the government itself doing it. (By which I collectively mean the company that wrote the voting software, the people running the polling stations, and the government apparatus that does the tallys.)
Electronic voting has the potential to be MORE corruption-proof than paper voting because you can dupicate the data and have it counted independantly by different parties, but for that to work, that duplication has to occur in a way that the voters themselves can see it happining anf verify it. (For example, print out three receipts, let the voter see all of them, and drop two of them in different 'reader' machines and keep one for taking home.) Then you've got the original databse count in the computer, two more made by another computer reading the paper reciept you scanned, and one you keep for yourself. These different tallys should then be counted by different independant groups entirely. (And the tallys should be not even using the same KIND of machine by the same company - have competiting companies doing the electronic counts of the same ballots, and make sure their counts agree.)
You can only do that if the spammers have correct return addresses to reply to. Most don't. If they did actually post REAL e-mail addresses, the problem could be solved vigilante-style with the backlash they would receive in spam back to them.
This brings to mind an interesting tangental issue I've been wondering about for a while. With pretty good digital media editing programs existing, that in the hands of a graphic artist can be used to merge two pictures together in a flawless manner (given enough time invensted in it), are we seing the end of the age where a picture is still considered good evidence? What's to stop me from "photoshopping" an image to make it look like you were caught on a security camera shoplifting? Sure, for low-profile cases like shoplifting, it's not worth the effort, but for bigger cases that sort of thing could be worth the time invested.
And with analog photography and film starting to die off and be replaced with all-digital techniques, this could become a real problem that affects all photos people take.
I seem to recall Shakespearian language saying "5 and 30" and "5 and 30 and twoscore".
Actually that number isn't 55 like you said, it would be 75. (It would be 55 if you had just said one score instead of two score).
But that's also NOT a good example, because it represents a change in the entire counting system, to a more roman-numeral style which is NOT positional with a radix. So it's a system in which the concept of most-signifigant-digit no longer even applies.
(And someone speaking that way would never have stated "thirty" if they were using 'scores' for twenties. They would have said "Fifteen and threescore" for 15 + 60 = 75. You are right in the implication that the use of "score" is what makes the teens very different numbers that don't match the pattern. Back in those days, one through nineteen were like the "ones" and "number of scores" was like the next digit, until you got to hundreds.)
I still disagree. That there is a cultural bias toward what feels "normal" is true. But that does not imply that there is no clear winner as to which is the best "natural" way. Often there *is*, and if you look at it with an open mind to both techniques you can see it. With sortable lists for example, the right answer is to be consistent. For example, numbers, dates, and addresses are all lists of sortable items with a sort order of signifigance. The natural sensible way to do it is to do them all consistently with each other. If numbers are big-endian, and addressses are little-endian and digits are middle-endian (those are the US conventions), then that makes no sense at all. They should all be done in a consistent way.
If you are speaking of having to scan the number in BOTH directions, with pass 1 being little-end to big-end, and then pass 2 being big-end to little-end, then in that case you have to have one of those two passes occur forward and one occur backward from your normal reading direction *anyway* - no matter which way around you write the number. The only difference then between little-endian and big-endian would be whether the backward scan comes before or after the forward scan. So you've just argued in favor of neither being any better than the other, NOT in favor of little-endian being better.
I'd heard (and I wasn't there so I don't know - correct me if I'm wrong) that the main reason the Australian vote for becoming a republic (and dumping the queen) failed was NOT that the country was against the idea of dumping the queen, but because the alternative presented was a pretty bad form of government. (So it wasn't *really* a vote of "become a republic or keep the monarchy", but one of "become this specific type of repbulic with these specific rules in place which are bad, or keep things as they are."
The American Revolution was a dispute between the British Parliament, not between 'democrats' and 'monarchists'.
I think part of the reason for this is that Britain had (and still does to a lesser degree) a tendency to refer to the government in flowery terms that specifically SAY it's the monarchy that's in charge. It wasn't referred to as "British Government", it was "Her/His Majesty's Government". And decrees coming from the British government to the colonies were *labelled* as royal decrees. "His Majesty King George the whateverth's government declares on this day that blah blah blah..."
It's only natural that we'd assume that when you labelled yourself a monarchy in all official communications that you actually MEANT it.
It's just human nature - everybody wants to believe that their country made the most significant breakthroughs or contributions, but the truth is often that everybody is actually building on everybody else's previous work, and it becomes very difficult to single out one person or group for the credit.
To use your examples, Joseph Swan may have invented a light bulb, but it didn't work as well as Edison's bulb, and didn't last. What Edison got was the first *lasting* light bulb that was practical. And before Swan, there were people to discovered that running current through some kinds of metals made them glow brightly but then they oxegenated and disappeared fast. And after Edison, Tesla figured out that Edison's direct current technique was impractical and the bulb really should be run from alternating current so the electrical transmission lines to reach the bulbs in the city would actually work well. So, the question is, which one of them gets the credit for being the inventor?
Basically, people stop looking when they hit the link in the chain of invention that was done in their own country. (Which is exactly what *you* did, too.) Since the chains are so long, you can claim your own country invented just about anything. If you look hard enough, some important step along the way will have been done in your own country. For example, the Wright Brothers didn't invent how to make wings that produce lift., nor did they invent the propellor concept. But they *did* invent the control system that allowed the craft to keep going and not crash. (some of the other designs before theirs did actually fly, but their flights were always cut short by control problems). (And then immediately went on to stifle the early aircraft technology in the USA by being waay to litigous about their invention and not allowing anyone else to further their work.)
To do what he claimed would have required time travel. The internet ALREADY EXISTED. His bill just added more infrastructure to it. That's no small thing, yes, but it's still a smaller thing that what he claimed it did.
The internet was created before Al Gore was even in office. So, no he couldn't have had a damn thing to do with it, not even as just someone who passed a bill to fund it. What he passed was a bill that *ADDED* more infrastructure to the already existing internet. Him claiming his bill CREATED the net would be like FDR claiming he CREATED the national park system when all he did was create work programs to add improvements to the existing system.
My mother used to have one of those pushbutton transmission cars in the '60s. She had discovered that if she tried pushing the "reverse" button when the car was rolling forward, there was a mechanical safety to prevent the switch from going all the way in and engaging - BUT the white taillights that indicate reverse gear is engaged were triggered by that switch, NOT by actually being in reverse. So if she pushed the button in partway while driving down the road, the reverse lights would come on but she'd stay in "drive" gear.
I wasn't born yet at the time so I didn't see it, but she said this was a *great* way to make tailgaters slam on their brakes *hard*.
Consider the number 10. In order to read that as "ten", you have to read the 0 first.
No. Calling it "one zero" is wrong, but calling it "zero one" is also wrong. No matter which end you read it from, you have to FIRST notice the overall size of the string and read both digits before you can begin describing the number.
And using "ten" is not a good example since the numbers from 10 to 20 are exceptions to the general case. (For every other two-digit number, you speak it as "{tens-word} {ones digit}" for example: 21 = "twenty-one", not "one-twenty". All the numbers from 21 to 99 follow this pattern.
A lot of people don't have a large number of "registers" to deal with in their brains, so your technique often is harder for people becasue of the need for the stack. I seem to recall somewhere that most people's short term 'registers' can remeber about seven quick simple things at once - the seven digits in a US Phone number, a list of seven people's names (provided they are common names already known to you and not some foreign names that are unfamiliar), a set of seven turns (left then right then straight, then...) etc.
But for me, I "feel" like I've only got about three registers to work with. To rememeber a stack context I'd have to pause and commit numbers to longer term memory along the way. If I don't, then I won't remember where I was in the list.
(Remember those verbal drills they used to do in grade school where they would test your arithmetic speed by rattling off a list of quick numbers to calculate? For example, "seven plus four minus two, then multiply that by six, now add twelve. What's your answer?" I sucked at those even though I could do math very fast. My problem was that I didn't have enough short term 'registers' to remember too many numbers at once. So at any given moment in the list I would have to remember the accumulated total so far, the next operand and next number, and in parallel be listening ahead to see if the teacher has started speaking the next operand and number after that. With only three "registers" to deal with, that was impossible. I would forget one of the things in the list and once I drop behind in that kind of test, I can't catch because the context I have to remember grows even larger.
But, when you present me the the exact same problem written on paper, I'm just as fast as everyone else. Writing the numbers on paper relieves me of the burden of trying to remember what is being said, and so I have enough room to work with. For me, math was always a visual thing because then I don't have to remember the lists of numbers - the paper is my memory. Once math skipped past the arithmetic phase and hit into the graphing phase, where you start doing trig and calc, my math grades went from D's to A's. Thinking through problems visually had been what I was doing all along, and some of the concepts they were explaining were ones I'd already figured out on my own, but had different names for them.
Actually, YMD is more logical than DMY, for exactly the same reason that we write numbers with the most signifigant digit first. When writing something for an international audience, I always write dates as YYYY-MM-DD, so that everyone knows it. (It looks different enough that Americans know it's not the standard form they are used to, wheras a number like 02/01/2003 could be the January the second or February the first depending on how you assume it was written.)
(And as far as why we Americans use MMDDYYYY, it's because that matches up with how the language is spoken: Christmas, for example, is spoken as "December Twenty-fifth" more often than "The twenty-fifth of December.")
either have to start from the little end and count as you read,
Bull. If you count as you read, then it doesn't matter which end you start from. If I see "123" and parse that as "3, then 2, then 1" or as "1, then 2, then 3", I'm still going to get a final count of "three digits" either way.
Think about what that phrase means: "least signifigant digits first". The phrase itself points out why little-endian doesn't make sense. It puts the digits that don't matter as much first - so you have to wait longer before you get to the part of the number you care about. If someone is telling me about a number, I want to hear about the signifigant parts more than the insignifigant parts. If I'm comparing two numbers, and one is "one million, four hundred fifty-two thousand, one hundred seventy-seven.", and the other is "seven million, four hundred fifty-two thousand, one hundred seventy-one", then most of the time I care more about the first part - one million versus seven million, than about the ones digits (seven versus one.) I don't want to wait until the end of the number to get to the imporatant part.
The security isn't for the customer - it's for the content provider who wants to be secure in the knowlege that the customer can't use the content any way other than how the provider wants it to be used. DRM has nothing at all to do with people breaking into your computer. It's not that kind of security.
Cost of living is not fixed. When the economy of the area does better, the cost of living goes up with it. Your bus driver starts wanting more pay. The farmer who grew the food in the market starts demanding more money for his product because he knows people have it to spend. It's just that there's a delay effect. First the wages go up, then the cost of living comes up to match after many years. Eventually it does equalize, but in the meantime the disparity generates profit for the international company doing the outsourcing. Once it starts to equalize, the company moves off to a more economically depressed area and starts over there. Eventually the countries it began in have become depressed enough that it can go back to them and use *them* for outsourcing. Thus they can keep chasing that 'gap', always operating in that "delay" between increased economy and increased cost of living, going from country to country in a round-robin fashion.
You describe a situation where IE would refuse non-trusted content. That's not how MS would use the system. They know where their money is coming from. What they'd do is go the other way around - have their servers refuse to give content to clients running on systems not privy to their DRM methods. That doesn't get *all* the servers, but it gets a lot of them. I remember back in the day where Unix server programmers in a company I was working for were getting Windows computers on their desks - the company's rationale was that since UNIX is remotable and Windows isn't (or at least wasn't very good at it yet at the time), then you need the OS that only works locally to be the one sitting on your desk. The OS that works remotely can exist just in the server room and everything will work fine for you. The really frustrating thing about this is that it's *TRUE*. It's completely unfair, but totally logical - the system with the crappier network functionality is the one that wins the most sales. And what really irked me about it was how the MS advocates would point this out as a "strength" of Windows. UNIX networkable technology was *too* good - it reduced the need to buy as many UNIX machines.
This is similar. If MS's servers refuse to speak to unix clients, then with MS clients you could visit all servers, and with unix clients you couldn't. Thus, just like with X-windows, the better technology loses, not just as a coincidence, but specifically BECAUSE it's better.
'The original intent' of the net didn't include protocols like hypertext,
The original intent was to make a system that was extensible in the future. Adding new kinds of data to send is *exactly* the sort of thing that fits the model they were going for. The reason the model only describes how to send streams or packets of bytes is because then ANYTHING can be put on top and not require a rewrite to the whole model. Was it written with hypertext in mind? No. Was it written to be extensible to handle whatever future ideas come along? (of which hypertext was one), abosolutely yes.
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This is a real shame because the *IDEA* of electronic voting is good - but none of the proposed implementations are done right. The electronic voting process *CAN* work with a level of security and verification equal or better than that of paper voting, but none of the companies currently involved have the incentive to bother - because the government isn't making such measures be a requirement of the spec - and THAT oversight (or deliberate omission perhaps?) will lead to our disenfranchisement. When the companies say their voting systems are secure, what they mean is that they tried making them secure from hacking. What they don't understand is that that's not what we're worried about. We, the voters, aren't so much worried about other voters altering the data, as about corruption withing the government itself doing it. (By which I collectively mean the company that wrote the voting software, the people running the polling stations, and the government apparatus that does the tallys.)
Electronic voting has the potential to be MORE corruption-proof than paper voting because you can dupicate the data and have it counted independantly by different parties, but for that to work, that duplication has to occur in a way that the voters themselves can see it happining anf verify it. (For example, print out three receipts, let the voter see all of them, and drop two of them in different 'reader' machines and keep one for taking home.) Then you've got the original databse count in the computer, two more made by another computer reading the paper reciept you scanned, and one you keep for yourself. These different tallys should then be counted by different independant groups entirely. (And the tallys should be not even using the same KIND of machine by the same company - have competiting companies doing the electronic counts of the same ballots, and make sure their counts agree.)
You can only do that if the spammers have correct return addresses to reply to. Most don't. If they did actually post REAL e-mail addresses, the problem could be solved vigilante-style with the backlash they would receive in spam back to them.
This brings to mind an interesting tangental issue I've been wondering about for a while. With pretty good digital media editing programs existing, that in the hands of a graphic artist can be used to merge two pictures together in a flawless manner (given enough time invensted in it), are we seing the end of the age where a picture is still considered good evidence? What's to stop me from "photoshopping" an image to make it look like you were caught on a security camera shoplifting? Sure, for low-profile cases like shoplifting, it's not worth the effort, but for bigger cases that sort of thing could be worth the time invested.
And with analog photography and film starting to die off and be replaced with all-digital techniques, this could become a real problem that affects all photos people take.
I seem to recall Shakespearian language saying "5 and 30" and "5 and 30 and twoscore".
Actually that number isn't 55 like you said, it would be 75. (It would be 55 if you had just said one score instead of two score).
But that's also NOT a good example, because it represents a change in the entire counting system, to a more roman-numeral style which is NOT positional with a radix. So it's a system in which the concept of most-signifigant-digit no longer even applies.
(And someone speaking that way would never have stated "thirty" if they were using 'scores' for twenties. They would have said "Fifteen and threescore" for 15 + 60 = 75. You are right in the implication that the use of "score" is what makes the teens very different numbers that don't match the pattern. Back in those days, one through nineteen were like the "ones" and "number of scores" was like the next digit, until you got to hundreds.)
I still disagree. That there is a cultural bias toward what feels "normal" is true. But that does not imply that there is no clear winner as to which is the best "natural" way. Often there *is*, and if you look at it with an open mind to both techniques you can see it. With sortable lists for example, the right answer is to be consistent. For example, numbers, dates, and addresses are all lists of sortable items with a sort order of signifigance. The natural sensible way to do it is to do them all consistently with each other. If numbers are big-endian, and addressses are little-endian and digits are middle-endian (those are the US conventions), then that makes no sense at all. They should all be done in a consistent way.
If you are speaking of having to scan the number in BOTH directions, with pass 1 being little-end to big-end, and then pass 2 being big-end to little-end, then in that case you have to have one of those two passes occur forward and one occur backward from your normal reading direction *anyway* - no matter which way around you write the number. The only difference then between little-endian and big-endian would be whether the backward scan comes before or after the forward scan. So you've just argued in favor of neither being any better than the other, NOT in favor of little-endian being better.
I'd heard (and I wasn't there so I don't know - correct me if I'm wrong) that the main reason the Australian vote for becoming a republic (and dumping the queen) failed was NOT that the country was against the idea of dumping the queen, but because the alternative presented was a pretty bad form of government. (So it wasn't *really* a vote of "become a republic or keep the monarchy", but one of "become this specific type of repbulic with these specific rules in place which are bad, or keep things as they are."
The American Revolution was a dispute between the British Parliament, not between 'democrats' and 'monarchists'.
I think part of the reason for this is that Britain had (and still does to a lesser degree) a tendency to refer to the government in flowery terms that specifically SAY it's the monarchy that's in charge. It wasn't referred to as "British Government", it was "Her/His Majesty's Government". And decrees coming from the British government to the colonies were *labelled* as royal decrees. "His Majesty King George the whateverth's government declares on this day that blah blah blah..."
It's only natural that we'd assume that when you labelled yourself a monarchy in all official communications that you actually MEANT it.
It's just human nature - everybody wants to believe that their country made the most significant breakthroughs or contributions, but the truth is often that everybody is actually building on everybody else's previous work, and it becomes very difficult to single out one person or group for the credit.
To use your examples, Joseph Swan may have invented a light bulb, but it didn't work as well as Edison's bulb, and didn't last. What Edison got was the first *lasting* light bulb that was practical. And before Swan, there were people to discovered that running current through some kinds of metals made them glow brightly but then they oxegenated and disappeared fast. And after Edison, Tesla figured out that Edison's direct current technique was impractical and the bulb really should be run from alternating current so the electrical transmission lines to reach the bulbs in the city would actually work well. So, the question is, which one of them gets the credit for being the inventor?
Basically, people stop looking when they hit the link in the chain of invention that was done in their own country. (Which is exactly what *you* did, too.) Since the chains are so long, you can claim your own country invented just about anything. If you look hard enough, some important step along the way will have been done in your own country. For example, the Wright Brothers didn't invent how to make wings that produce lift., nor did they invent the propellor concept. But they *did* invent the control system that allowed the craft to keep going and not crash. (some of the other designs before theirs did actually fly, but their flights were always cut short by control problems). (And then immediately went on to stifle the early aircraft technology in the USA by being waay to litigous about their invention and not allowing anyone else to further their work.)
To do what he claimed would have required time travel. The internet ALREADY EXISTED. His bill just added more infrastructure to it. That's no small thing, yes, but it's still a smaller thing that what he claimed it did.
The internet was created before Al Gore was even in office. So, no he couldn't have had a damn thing to do with it, not even as just someone who passed a bill to fund it. What he passed was a bill that *ADDED* more infrastructure to the already existing internet. Him claiming his bill CREATED the net would be like FDR claiming he CREATED the national park system when all he did was create work programs to add improvements to the existing system.
My mother used to have one of those pushbutton transmission cars in the '60s. She had discovered that if she tried pushing the "reverse" button when the car was rolling forward, there was a mechanical safety to prevent the switch from going all the way in and engaging - BUT the white taillights that indicate reverse gear is engaged were triggered by that switch, NOT by actually being in reverse. So if she pushed the button in partway while driving down the road, the reverse lights would come on but she'd stay in "drive" gear.
I wasn't born yet at the time so I didn't see it, but she said this was a *great* way to make tailgaters slam on their brakes *hard*.
Consider the number 10. In order to read that as "ten", you have to read the 0 first.
No. Calling it "one zero" is wrong, but calling it "zero one" is also wrong. No matter which end you read it from, you have to FIRST notice the overall size of the string and read both digits before you can begin describing the number.
And using "ten" is not a good example since the numbers from 10 to 20 are exceptions to the general case. (For every other two-digit number, you speak it as "{tens-word} {ones digit}" for example: 21 = "twenty-one", not "one-twenty". All the numbers from 21 to 99 follow this pattern.
. (i.e. country, prefecture, ward/city/town, region, etc. etc)
Uhhm, that *IS* big-endian order, just like the poster was advocating for numbers. The US style is little-endian, actually.
A lot of people don't have a large number of "registers" to deal with in their brains, so your technique often is harder for people becasue of the need for the stack. I seem to recall somewhere that most people's short term 'registers' can remeber about seven quick simple things at once - the seven digits in a US Phone number, a list of seven people's names (provided they are common names already known to you and not some foreign names that are unfamiliar), a set of seven turns (left then right then straight, then...) etc.
But for me, I "feel" like I've only got about three registers to work with. To rememeber a stack context I'd have to pause and commit numbers to longer term memory along the way. If I don't, then I won't remember where I was in the list.
(Remember those verbal drills they used to do in grade school where they would test your arithmetic speed by rattling off a list of quick numbers to calculate? For example, "seven plus four minus two, then multiply that by six, now add twelve. What's your answer?" I sucked at those even though I could do math very fast. My problem was that I didn't have enough short term 'registers' to remember too many numbers at once. So at any given moment in the list I would have to remember the accumulated total so far, the next operand and next number, and in parallel be listening ahead to see if the teacher has started speaking the next operand and number after that. With only three "registers" to deal with, that was impossible. I would forget one of the things in the list and once I drop behind in that kind of test, I can't catch because the context I have to remember grows even larger.
But, when you present me the the exact same problem written on paper, I'm just as fast as everyone else. Writing the numbers on paper relieves me of the burden of trying to remember what is being said, and so I have enough room to work with. For me, math was always a visual thing because then I don't have to remember the lists of numbers - the paper is my memory. Once math skipped past the arithmetic phase and hit into the graphing phase, where you start doing trig and calc, my math grades went from D's to A's. Thinking through problems visually had been what I was doing all along, and some of the concepts they were explaining were ones I'd already figured out on my own, but had different names for them.
Actually, YMD is more logical than DMY, for exactly the same reason that we write numbers with the most signifigant digit first. When writing something for an international audience, I always write dates as YYYY-MM-DD, so that everyone knows it. (It looks different enough that Americans know it's not the standard form they are used to, wheras a number like 02/01/2003 could be the January the second or February the first depending on how you assume it was written.)
(And as far as why we Americans use MMDDYYYY, it's because that matches up with how the language is spoken: Christmas, for example, is spoken as "December Twenty-fifth" more often than "The twenty-fifth of December.")
either have to start from the little end and count as you read,
Bull. If you count as you read, then it doesn't matter which end you start from. If I see "123" and parse that as "3, then 2, then 1" or as "1, then 2, then 3", I'm still going to get a final count of "three digits" either way.
Think about what that phrase means: "least signifigant digits first". The phrase itself points out why little-endian doesn't make sense. It puts the digits that don't matter as much first - so you have to wait longer before you get to the part of the number you care about. If someone is telling me about a number, I want to hear about the signifigant parts more than the insignifigant parts. If I'm comparing two numbers, and one is "one million, four hundred fifty-two thousand, one hundred seventy-seven.", and the other is "seven million, four hundred fifty-two thousand, one hundred seventy-one", then most of the time I care more about the first part - one million versus seven million, than about the ones digits (seven versus one.) I don't want to wait until the end of the number to get to the imporatant part.
The security isn't for the customer - it's for the content provider who wants to be secure in the knowlege that the customer can't use the content any way other than how the provider wants it to be used. DRM has nothing at all to do with people breaking into your computer. It's not that kind of security.
Cost of living is not fixed. When the economy of the area does better, the cost of living goes up with it. Your bus driver starts wanting more pay. The farmer who grew the food in the market starts demanding more money for his product because he knows people have it to spend. It's just that there's a delay effect. First the wages go up, then the cost of living comes up to match after many years. Eventually it does equalize, but in the meantime the disparity generates profit for the international company doing the outsourcing. Once it starts to equalize, the company moves off to a more economically depressed area and starts over there. Eventually the countries it began in have become depressed enough that it can go back to them and use *them* for outsourcing. Thus they can keep chasing that 'gap', always operating in that "delay" between increased economy and increased cost of living, going from country to country in a round-robin fashion.
You describe a situation where IE would refuse non-trusted content. That's not how MS would use the system. They know where their money is coming from. What they'd do is go the other way around - have their servers refuse to give content to clients running on systems not privy to their DRM methods. That doesn't get *all* the servers, but it gets a lot of them. I remember back in the day where Unix server programmers in a company I was working for were getting Windows computers on their desks - the company's rationale was that since UNIX is remotable and Windows isn't (or at least wasn't very good at it yet at the time), then you need the OS that only works locally to be the one sitting on your desk. The OS that works remotely can exist just in the server room and everything will work fine for you. The really frustrating thing about this is that it's *TRUE*. It's completely unfair, but totally logical - the system with the crappier network functionality is the one that wins the most sales. And what really irked me about it was how the MS advocates would point this out as a "strength" of Windows. UNIX networkable technology was *too* good - it reduced the need to buy as many UNIX machines.
This is similar. If MS's servers refuse to speak to unix clients, then with MS clients you could visit all servers, and with unix clients you couldn't. Thus, just like with X-windows, the better technology loses, not just as a coincidence, but specifically BECAUSE it's better.
Well when you and I die... if I'm wrong... I've lost nothing. If I'm right.... well then I fear for your soul.
If you want to be convincing, you'll have to do better than Pascal's Wager.
'The original intent' of the net didn't include protocols like hypertext,
The original intent was to make a system that was extensible in the future. Adding new kinds of data to send is *exactly* the sort of thing that fits the model they were going for. The reason the model only describes how to send streams or packets of bytes is because then ANYTHING can be put on top and not require a rewrite to the whole model. Was it written with hypertext in mind? No. Was it written to be extensible to handle whatever future ideas come along? (of which hypertext was one), abosolutely yes.
To the moderator: So now pointing out the truth makes me a troll? Sometimes being honest and being insulting are the same thing.
IE for Mac is not the same product. It's a totally different product with a confusingly similar name.