This was targeted for police especially in courtrooms and prisons where there is a higher likely hood that someone might try and take your gun from you.
And under those highly specialized, rarified circumstances, I can see why that would be a useful and probably reliable enough tool. But the people that hear about things like that, and then extrapolate them out as a cure for violent crime are, well... twits. Twits that, unfortunately, too often vote.
So what you're saying is that you think it's okay to kill anything by which you feel threatened, anywhere, anytime. Basically, you're an immoral person employing a doctrine of pre-emption in life.
Do you actually even think about what you're saying, or connect your response in any way to what you're reading? Just because I've cited circumstances in which lethal force, or the reserved option to use it, makes sense doesn't mean that every encounter with anything unpleasant is best dealt with that way.
Pre-emption would mean that if I see someone on the street that I'm pretty sure is going to try to break down my door in the middle of the night, that I do something about him before he acts. But I don't have that luxury, or generally the ability to even draw that conclusion. So, how is it "pre-emptive" to react to someone or something that is actually, literally, right that moment, being a threat? That's the opposite of pre-emption, and being hesitant under those circumstances frequently results in later regret. I've hesitated to deal with a diseased-looking feral cat, thinking that nature would just run its course... only to have it attack and infect a pet (also nature running its course, but if you're going to disrupt nature by doing things like domesticating animals in the first place, you've got a certain obligation to step in).
Basically, you're an immoral person
Really! So, how does putting a rabid animal out of its misery and thus preventing the likely (and horrid) death of other animals qualify as "immoral?" How does stopping a person who is, quite literally, terrifying your family in the middle of the night qualify as immoral? It's moral if I pay someone else to do it (say, the police), but it's immoral if I do it myself, with the urgent threat actually unfolding and about to escalate to actual injuries before the police could possibly arrive to help? Better to explain to your injured family that you were just doing the moral thing? These aren't hypotheticals, this is actual person experience. That you're so anxious to grind your witless anti-American axe in this way - especially given the context - says plenty about how distorted your view is.
It's McDonalds. How many fucking free refills of coke did your fat ass get? Multiply that by about the 52 billion served and you see what the problem is. People who expect to be waited on for 6 bucks should go fuck themselves.
Nice, thoughtful response, there. Let's see... how many refills? None. I essentially never do that - usually I prefer to have the cashier hand me my food in a bag, my drink in a cup, and I walk out. Places like McDonalds used to do that all the time, even after the "billions and billions served" signs started replacing actual numbers. I don't expect to be waited on for $6, I just found it funny that a place in the restaurant actually labeled "Convenience Center," is really just a speed booster for their own operations. Why not just call it "self service," and be honest about it? It's the slippery use of the language that's annoying, not the pouring of the drink.
I remember the first time (too many years back, now) that I experienced Convenience while I was in line at a McDonalds grabbing a burger on my way someplace. I told the cashier I wanted a Diet Coke as my combo drink. She handed me the now-expected empty cup and told me that I would be getting the drink from the "Convenience Center" across the store.
"Convenient for who?" I asked. And she told me, unblinkingly, that it had in fact really made their job a lot easier.
When was the last time you, or ANYONE you know, had to shoot a firearm in self defence? Do you really live in an area that is more dangerous than Baghdad?
That's the whole point of having a gun. The fact that it exists, as a deterrent, generally reduces the need to actually shoot it. In areas where right-to-carry is present, violent crimes go down. In areas (or whole countries) where guns are banned, violent crimes go way up.
But in cases where the conceptual deterrent isn't really registering with some punk, the far, far more common defense is called "brandishing." Showing someone the gun and a willingness to use it generally defuses the situation. I have personally been in that situation with a completely drug-addled bruiser beating on our back door in the middle of the night. The cops were 15 minutes in arriving, but his willingness to continue to beat down the door ended when he saw the business end of a gun pointed at him.
And, I guess you don't get out past the shopping mall much, huh? Ever dealt with a poisonous snake cornered in a barn? A 160-pound wounded buck crashing around your back yard? A rabid raccoon threatening a domestic pet? A coyote stalking your neighborhood kids and animals? A mountain lion raiding a camp site? People use guns in self defense all the time - thousands and thousands of times a year, against people and critters. I have, more than once. Many people I know have. Your ignorance is showing.
I presume this is to keep unauthorized people from firing your gun, in particular burglars and children. It seems to me they are overcomplicating the matter greatly.
And yet it wouldn't even really accomplish that. All it does it make sure that the gun and the ammo like each other. You'd still need the extra stuff to make sure that the gun likes the person holding it. Which takes us to:
There is already a good system in place that just needs a little improving. I have heard for years about the pistols that won't fire unless they sense the microchip to which they are encoded. This is usually embedded in a ring. Not too long ago I read that someone had developed a pistol grip that sensed palm prints.
How are either of those "good?" My strictly mechanical weapons will (short of rusting in place because they weren't oiled in 20 years) work when I ask them to. Something that requires enough battery power to process a print scan, or that may be working fine, enen though the Magic Bracelet Transmitter that goes with it has lost its juice, etc., is going to be down like an uncharged cell phone when you most need it. And scanning prints? What about a weapon you've just dropped in the dirt? What about dirty or oily (or bloody) hands? What about gloves? What about your spouse needing to use the gun, or your buddy? What about RF files dampening the signal from a ring? What about having to switch hands for some reason, faster than you can move the ring?
It's absurd, costly, unreliable in the extreme, and will do nothing to prevent violent crime.
Don't they already have in development guns that won't operate without the correct thumb scan?
In development, and absolutely loathed by anyone that actually considers using them. Hand dirty? You're dead. Need to toss your weapon to your partner, spouse, parent or friend? You're dead. Batteries gone? You're dead. Wearing gloves?. You're dead.
Putting up your dukes isn't very helpful against knives, or cricket bats, or just someone who is a lot larger or more drunk than you are.
Ever occurred to you that perhaps it's cultural? I suppose someone in your neck of the woods has decided so - I mean, if your folks can't manage to just go watch a sporting event without assaulting one another, then I suppose it makes sense that your medical community thinks that the only cure for violence is to ban objects, rather than holding people truly responsible for their actions. You know, we can't have Brits owning kitchen knives, now, can we? After all, the only way to prevent someone from being stabbed is to ban them entirely, right?
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that the sample ad looks horrible?
Just basic stuff, like the absurd hyphenation of "all-in-one" in that context... it screams "high school marketing project," and conveys the sense that the technology effort might not be any more fully executed.
Combine that with the low-brow attempt to appeal to some reflexively counter-culture audience, and the tone is just plain wrong. The project doesn't need more hipster nerds using the software, it needs more corporate IT people to like it. And those folks are not going to talk their bosses and users into using it on the grounds that doing so makes a political statement or somehow "gets even" with profit-oriented companies. Come on! It's profitable companies you want to attract, and conveying that whole "business is teh evil" atmosphere will do more to alienate prospective users than pretty much anything else.
And, of course, never mind that Excel can still kick its ass, which makes the "world's best" claim just transparently false... and isn't that sort of hucksterism the very thing that the F/OSS most hate about software from The Man?
Better to have a contest with marketing/design students - they've got a vested interest in building up their portfolios and can really use "won contest" on their resume. And, they may actually have a clue about how punctuation, capitalization, clauses, verbs, and those other little details play a role in communication.
There has to be some special, super-duper mod that's available, just once per year - perhaps made of some sort of extra-shiny tinfoil - that is reserved for this sort of thing.
You're missing the point. The roads are a bad analogy because there is no tax-payer provided/maintained fiber network. There are some rights-of-way, and involvement in ICAAN, etc., but that's the closest thing to the "roads," and has nothing to do with what the people who own, expand, and maintain the networks do with their networks. The trucking companies are like the ISPs, and they do charge different people different rates, they do route certain sorts of payloads faster than others, and they do show favoritism to certain sorts of customers because of what they can predict about volume, seaonality, etc. And it's their customers (like Amazon or other retailers, for example) that are the equivalent of the content providers using those competing networks. If you're running a trucking network and have taken on a lot of traffic from Amazon, don't you think you'll want some flexibility in deciding how to allocate your resources during the holiday season? Or do you think the government should do that for all of us, and all of our companies?
Let's see: if Novell had sent the same hundreds of workers there, would they be "stepping on the neck" of those companies trying to get people back to work and paid? Would the workers there who had years invested in functional systems that included some products from MS be glad, or mad, that they got hundreds of new laptops donated from Dell, and integrated with help from MS? Or, if you were running an operation in New Orleans, and couldn't place a purchase order for goods, or pay your staff's payroll, without a working system built from the same tools that you were using before the hurricane, would you rather take that moment to hunt down IT people who could integrate Red Hat and a brand new accounting system you've never used and which can't show your historical data, or would you rather have what you've already got your people using, and actually conduct business, right away?
Do you care that a part of what MS brought in and set up was racks and racks of Cisco gear? Or APC power management hardware? Or wireless-mesh interface gear? NONE of which does anything other than pass around packets and provide power for whatever uses it? Or people to pull cables, do data recovery from swamped servers, and write enormous checks for all sorts of non-MS things? You know, like the $700,000 they spent one day buying off another vendor's overdue invoices to the city so that the city could regain those services... which had nothing to do with IT? Is that sort of work "locking" the city into using MS's products?
And, if you really think that operations in New Orleans were just ready to jump on some other OS, and had all sorts of business-ready applications ready go to, and people who knew how to use them, why wouldn't they just burn down those boxes and stick Mandriva on them? Because there is no Linux-based package to manage public housing administration. There is no Linux-based package to directly replace software like Great Plains or Solomon or Axapta or Navision... all of which were make-or-break for those operations, and all of which MS helped those people get up and running immediately. Would you care to take a poll of IT workers and tax payers in that city and ask them if they feel their throats being stepped on? No doubt they'd rather that stuff was taken away an replaced with Macs, right? Oh... there is no equivalent app, for a Mac, that can do what they need. They also got huge grants from MS, to do with as they pleased. If you're right, and there are better options to replace those apps and pieces of the system, then that's what they'll buy. But guess what: there aren't.
Providers like SAP also offered services - but they were declined because there wasn't time or budget (and SAP wasn't savvy enough to promise they'd support a migration) to change horses in the middle of an emergency. Instead of lambasting MS for donating the very thing that they are best equipped to deliver, why aren't you bitching at the city and its businesses for not using SAP's products (or Oracle, etc) in advance? Because that would be too much like asking them why they didn't use their fleet of school buses to evacuate their stricken residents when they had the chance? Would a bus company donating a replacement fleet of school buses also be "holding down" New Orleans by making it necessary for them to buy a certain type of replacement part, down the road, for their free buses? You're just not connected to the reality of trying to salvage businesses and city operations in an emergency. Thinking that MS should have just gone and bought their competitor' products and provided those is assinine. And thinking that if they'd donated the cash equivalent to the Red Cross, and that the Red Cross would somehow magically have solved the local IT integration issues without using MS products is even more ridiculous.
And if MS hadn't done all that they did, all you'd be doing is complaining about how they're an evil corporation.
Yes, roads are a good argument for network neutrality.
Gaah! No they're not! Several businesses that all ship goods to their customers rely on the effectiveness of the businesses that actually operate the vehicles that carry the freight, and the sophistication/efficiency of those operations. That's why UPS, FedEx, DHL et al duke it out so thoroughly. But since those companies adjust their business practices and prices around what they tend to be recently carrying, and for whom, and to which destinations... there's always a state of flux, price-shifting, and increasing/decreasing value from one to the next. All of them (um, except the USPS) pay taxes for their road use, just like everyone else... but the effectiveness of their networks, and the biases they deliberately give to certain specific shippers, consignees, or types of shippers and consignees is what makes choosing between them a continual business issue.
The public roads may be the public roads, but the strategic placement of shipping hubs, locally negotiated pricing, and a thousand other factors contribute to a competitive, rather than an artificially "neutral" shipping environment. Which is a really good thing.
Don't like the fact that UPS charges more for delivery to certain areas, because they've got the stats to show that deliveries there are more dangerous, harder on their equipment, more likely to be disprupted by weather, and so on? Choose a carrier that's hungrier for that sort of business, or is making up for their risks and peaks in other ways. It's very much like competing ISPs and should be. Freight companies all pay taxes and use the same public roads/airways, but they don't and shouldn't have to provide uniform service to everyone with a box to ship. If FedEx wants to deploy another 1000 trucks just to carry Amazon shipments from a new warehouse - and wants to pay for that investment by adjust rates elsewhere in their system, or for specific types of customers/deliveries - that's their business. If their decisions cost them customers, then UPS reaps the rewards of being smarter in how they relate to their customers, and their customers' customers.
What is so difficult for you in making voting system for stories?
The same thing that makes it difficult in Florida and Ohio. Even when it turns out that it was working, people who don't like the outcome say it's the system that's broken. When they do like the outcomes (because they've figured out how to perform the Digg equivalent of Karma-whoring or stirred up a bunch of traffic for their simpering Google-ad spam page), then, gosh, Digg sure is timely and wonderful!
Nope, just like the recent discussion here about how even the Washington Post web site is turning into a "conversation" instead of journalism - I fear that the droning of Digg will become the norm, and only people who appreciate some editorial steerage will populate sites that perform at least a little thoughtful editing. Which is not to say that Timothy counts.
This is the alternative model. The rest of us know that such waves actually propogate via infinitely long strands of pasta.
But seriously - if things all point to a likely model, and nothing (rationally) points to an alternative, why kill yourself (and your budget) documenting hollow alternatives just so that you're sticking to academic form?
So, where was Apple, with truckloads of servers and workstations? Where was Novell? Where was IBM? Where was Sun? I believe Sprint showed up telco stuff, as did Verizon, but MS was the only substantial player that offered the sort of tech that businesses and municipal government needed. And why was it so immediately appreciated? Because most of those people were already using vanilla WinTel-type stuff, and that's what they needed to get their familiar apps and data available again.
Is Coca-Cola not being generous unless they truck in Pepsi products? Would Red Hat have been being unreasonable if they didn't also provide Windows platforms, even though a Red Hat server can't run the apps upon which many operations have chosen to depend? You're really reaching, here, for a reason to wish the people in that city didn't get the immediate and substantial support they got - and there were no strings attached. If they wanted to burn that hardware down and install your favorite distro, they certainly could have - but why take a functional gift and make more work, under those circumstances, that would require a bunch of non-available technicians to train thousands of people on how to use something completely outside their experience? If I were to "help" my customers through a disaster recovery by showing up with a different OS, different apps, and a set of tools that their IT people would need weeks/months of training to securely master - they'd have a harder time feeling very grateful.
:That's an investment not altruism
Indeed! And that's exactly what New Orleans has needed for years. That city's biggest problem, prior to the hurricane, was the lack of investment from any outside parties. Crushing poverty and rampant crime in that city persisted despite a steady stream of subsidization, altruism, and the non-stop rule of local and state politics leaning heavily to the left. "Altruism" failed that city's population miserably, and did more to keep its citizens in poverty than any other factor. Investment - real investment by people who do it because they know it works for all parties involved - is what raises cities like that up from dysfunction. Even the mayor of that town understands that now, and got re-elected in part by clearly stating that the people of the city need less altruism and more self-sufficiency if they want to attract the investment they need.
Lacking those things certainly would have made dealing with the Soviets and their proxies harder, of course. I was refering to the more "strategic" things that dominated military spending and development afterwards - nukes of all sorts (and delivery systems), high-end surveilance goodies, and so on. The more traditional military hardware was certainly needed in Korea and Vietnam, but the fancy stuff would certainly dominate as time went on.
I'm certainly all for WAY more spending on basic space-related research. The only way to free up a lot of what's getting spent on military activities is to make their mission less important and demanding. And that means, just as it did with the Soviets, outlasting the forces against which they are arrayed.
You're confusing the end of WWII with the beginning of the Cold War. The type of spending that was done for WWII (other than that which finally ended it for Japan) wasn't really aligned for staring down the Soviets. Of course, that new wave of R&D sure didn't hurt the space program.
You're confusing the mechanics of cash and banking with the underlying things that make a dollar worth what it will buy. The other, and largest, variable is the shifting level of expectations, which are almost universally disconnected from any particular change in the "availability" of dollars to be spread around.
Not just a minimal percentage of the population. But a rabid one. And by implication, obviously wrong
It's not about how well grounded, or even how correct such opinions may be on certain aspects of Gates' history through the last 20 years. What I'm pointing out is the ambivalence among most of the population (beyond the normal wealth envy) and, more to the particular point, the degree of venom spouted by those who don't like him. It's not the "wrongness" of those positions, it's the shrillness. And the more breathless it becomes, and the more "Gates is teh eeevil" is becomes, the less credibility that corner of the IT world has on the subject - because it just sounds like sour grapes, rather than a rational position. If you spend any time here, you have to know what I mean.
... and I will stop hating Microsoft when they give back the ~10 years that they set back the computer/software industry.
And thank you for making my point. Do you really that millions of people who use their PCs every day to IM their friends or do what they do to make their own companies productive personally feel that it's been set back 10 years? It doesn't matter if you do (or even if you're at all right), because you're fantastically not representative of the average computer user - your perspective is simply too close to the topic for you to see it the way that most of the worlds millions of users see it. So when he (or Buffet) pony up umpty-billion dollars for charity, they don't quite spend as much time looking for so many ways to spit at it.
this is only possible due to a system in which the vast majority are pushed into poverty and a tiny minority accumulate nearly all the wealth
You're falling into the classic "the pie is only so big" trap. Do you really think that if Bill Gates and MS had never happened (likewise with, say, IBM or Sun or anyone/everyone else) that poor people would have somehow had a share of his billions in their pockets, instead? They don't call it "making" money for nothing: you do something people want and are willing to buy, and that creates demand and sets a price. Those people do the same with what they do for a living (or don't do it, if they don't produce anything, of course). The point is that vast fortunes have been made by lots of people because of MS's economic activity and innovation (yes, innovation - despite the groupthink, they do some of that, and their marketing vigor is no small bit all by itself, and is something that lots of other less-innovative companies copy, BTW). Some of that income has been earned by people like school bus drivers with some of their 401k in a mutual fund that has invested in MS's future.
This notion that the only reason Michael Jordon is rich is because someone else is now poor... or that Michael Moore's $200M from making his silly "documentary" is money that those movie-goers would have otherwise have used to buy applesauce for starving babies... it's nonsense. No matter how much people resent successful businesses (or just what their thriftier neighbor is able to buy for not having wasted so much on stupid crap), it's usually just that: frustration at not having cowboyed up and done the same sort of work themselves, and created value where it didn't exist before. The really busy people make the pie bigger. We can split hairs over whether or not Netscape might one day have made some piece of that pie bigger than MS made it - but would you say that Netscape's early pile of cash and investment somehow made poor people poorer? Or that Red Hat does?
He and Buffett will be remembered as great Americans for their charity, while his past role as founder and leader of Microsoft will be debated for decades.
It will only be debated in the very tiny circle that even thinks about such things. The huge majority of people who will sit down Monday morning and fire up their copy of Outlook to swap mail with their friends about this, and then pass around Excel sheets and PowerPoint slides about rates of giving, etc, just simply don't have the same bizarre, abiding hatred for Bill that a small, rabid corner of the IT world does. It's hard to remember, sloshing your way through Slashdot, that very little of the world ever goes that far out of its way to hate someone whose tools they use every day (to say nothing of the fact that, really - come on now - it really does just work for most people, at least well enough that the things about it that don't pale compared to the other issues in their lives).
memorably screwing over hundreds of thousands of homeless in the wake of Hurricane Katrina
Hello, Mr. Troll.
Please try a little bit of reality in there, somewhere. B-H does not provide insurance to homeowners, or own companies that do. They re-insured insurance companies so that those had anything like the financial backing to even be in the insurance business at all. If you think you can raise the capital to start offering insurance to people who live below sea level in a hurricane zone, only charge them a few dollars a month because that's all they can afford, and then pay out enormous amounts to the residents of thousands of square miles while staying solvent enough to continue to cover the cars, businesses, and other customers you have all around the country... go for it.
Oh, and just in case you forgot: private insurace never covers floods. That's the government flood insurance program you're thinking about. Warren Buffet has absolutely nothing to do with that, never did, and never could. Just relax, have a nice cold Coke, and cool down before you post again.
MS made all that money at the expense of innovation. The lost innovation could have cured the problem of ~7,000 children that die each day because of toxic water
Riiiight. Because Netscape and Apple were just on the brink of their new Magic Clean Water From Sewage For A Penny technology when Bill pushed them out of the way.
which always has to come off sounding from the far left
You think? I think you'd better not actually say crazy things in the same post you're using to lament that people (from the left, as you say in your example) sometimes seem to say crazy things.
Slashdot Mirror
This was targeted for police especially in courtrooms and prisons where there is a higher likely hood that someone might try and take your gun from you.
And under those highly specialized, rarified circumstances, I can see why that would be a useful and probably reliable enough tool. But the people that hear about things like that, and then extrapolate them out as a cure for violent crime are, well... twits. Twits that, unfortunately, too often vote.
So what you're saying is that you think it's okay to kill anything by which you feel threatened, anywhere, anytime. Basically, you're an immoral person employing a doctrine of pre-emption in life.
Do you actually even think about what you're saying, or connect your response in any way to what you're reading? Just because I've cited circumstances in which lethal force, or the reserved option to use it, makes sense doesn't mean that every encounter with anything unpleasant is best dealt with that way.
Pre-emption would mean that if I see someone on the street that I'm pretty sure is going to try to break down my door in the middle of the night, that I do something about him before he acts. But I don't have that luxury, or generally the ability to even draw that conclusion. So, how is it "pre-emptive" to react to someone or something that is actually, literally, right that moment, being a threat? That's the opposite of pre-emption, and being hesitant under those circumstances frequently results in later regret. I've hesitated to deal with a diseased-looking feral cat, thinking that nature would just run its course... only to have it attack and infect a pet (also nature running its course, but if you're going to disrupt nature by doing things like domesticating animals in the first place, you've got a certain obligation to step in).
Basically, you're an immoral person
Really! So, how does putting a rabid animal out of its misery and thus preventing the likely (and horrid) death of other animals qualify as "immoral?" How does stopping a person who is, quite literally, terrifying your family in the middle of the night qualify as immoral? It's moral if I pay someone else to do it (say, the police), but it's immoral if I do it myself, with the urgent threat actually unfolding and about to escalate to actual injuries before the police could possibly arrive to help? Better to explain to your injured family that you were just doing the moral thing? These aren't hypotheticals, this is actual person experience. That you're so anxious to grind your witless anti-American axe in this way - especially given the context - says plenty about how distorted your view is.
It's McDonalds. How many fucking free refills of coke did your fat ass get? Multiply that by about the 52 billion served and you see what the problem is. People who expect to be waited on for 6 bucks should go fuck themselves.
Nice, thoughtful response, there. Let's see... how many refills? None. I essentially never do that - usually I prefer to have the cashier hand me my food in a bag, my drink in a cup, and I walk out. Places like McDonalds used to do that all the time, even after the "billions and billions served" signs started replacing actual numbers. I don't expect to be waited on for $6, I just found it funny that a place in the restaurant actually labeled "Convenience Center," is really just a speed booster for their own operations. Why not just call it "self service," and be honest about it? It's the slippery use of the language that's annoying, not the pouring of the drink.
I remember the first time (too many years back, now) that I experienced Convenience while I was in line at a McDonalds grabbing a burger on my way someplace. I told the cashier I wanted a Diet Coke as my combo drink. She handed me the now-expected empty cup and told me that I would be getting the drink from the "Convenience Center" across the store.
"Convenient for who?" I asked. And she told me, unblinkingly, that it had in fact really made their job a lot easier.
When was the last time you, or ANYONE you know, had to shoot a firearm in self defence? Do you really live in an area that is more dangerous than Baghdad?
That's the whole point of having a gun. The fact that it exists, as a deterrent, generally reduces the need to actually shoot it. In areas where right-to-carry is present, violent crimes go down. In areas (or whole countries) where guns are banned, violent crimes go way up.
But in cases where the conceptual deterrent isn't really registering with some punk, the far, far more common defense is called "brandishing." Showing someone the gun and a willingness to use it generally defuses the situation. I have personally been in that situation with a completely drug-addled bruiser beating on our back door in the middle of the night. The cops were 15 minutes in arriving, but his willingness to continue to beat down the door ended when he saw the business end of a gun pointed at him.
And, I guess you don't get out past the shopping mall much, huh? Ever dealt with a poisonous snake cornered in a barn? A 160-pound wounded buck crashing around your back yard? A rabid raccoon threatening a domestic pet? A coyote stalking your neighborhood kids and animals? A mountain lion raiding a camp site? People use guns in self defense all the time - thousands and thousands of times a year, against people and critters. I have, more than once. Many people I know have. Your ignorance is showing.
I presume this is to keep unauthorized people from firing your gun, in particular burglars and children. It seems to me they are overcomplicating the matter greatly.
And yet it wouldn't even really accomplish that. All it does it make sure that the gun and the ammo like each other. You'd still need the extra stuff to make sure that the gun likes the person holding it. Which takes us to:
There is already a good system in place that just needs a little improving. I have heard for years about the pistols that won't fire unless they sense the microchip to which they are encoded. This is usually embedded in a ring. Not too long ago I read that someone had developed a pistol grip that sensed palm prints.
How are either of those "good?" My strictly mechanical weapons will (short of rusting in place because they weren't oiled in 20 years) work when I ask them to. Something that requires enough battery power to process a print scan, or that may be working fine, enen though the Magic Bracelet Transmitter that goes with it has lost its juice, etc., is going to be down like an uncharged cell phone when you most need it. And scanning prints? What about a weapon you've just dropped in the dirt? What about dirty or oily (or bloody) hands? What about gloves? What about your spouse needing to use the gun, or your buddy? What about RF files dampening the signal from a ring? What about having to switch hands for some reason, faster than you can move the ring?
It's absurd, costly, unreliable in the extreme, and will do nothing to prevent violent crime.
Don't they already have in development guns that won't operate without the correct thumb scan?
In development, and absolutely loathed by anyone that actually considers using them. Hand dirty? You're dead. Need to toss your weapon to your partner, spouse, parent or friend? You're dead. Batteries gone? You're dead. Wearing gloves?. You're dead.
Whatever happened to "putting up your dukes".
Putting up your dukes isn't very helpful against knives, or cricket bats, or just someone who is a lot larger or more drunk than you are.
Ever occurred to you that perhaps it's cultural? I suppose someone in your neck of the woods has decided so - I mean, if your folks can't manage to just go watch a sporting event without assaulting one another, then I suppose it makes sense that your medical community thinks that the only cure for violence is to ban objects, rather than holding people truly responsible for their actions. You know, we can't have Brits owning kitchen knives, now, can we? After all, the only way to prevent someone from being stabbed is to ban them entirely, right?
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that the sample ad looks horrible?
Just basic stuff, like the absurd hyphenation of "all-in-one" in that context... it screams "high school marketing project," and conveys the sense that the technology effort might not be any more fully executed.
Combine that with the low-brow attempt to appeal to some reflexively counter-culture audience, and the tone is just plain wrong. The project doesn't need more hipster nerds using the software, it needs more corporate IT people to like it. And those folks are not going to talk their bosses and users into using it on the grounds that doing so makes a political statement or somehow "gets even" with profit-oriented companies. Come on! It's profitable companies you want to attract, and conveying that whole "business is teh evil" atmosphere will do more to alienate prospective users than pretty much anything else.
And, of course, never mind that Excel can still kick its ass, which makes the "world's best" claim just transparently false... and isn't that sort of hucksterism the very thing that the F/OSS most hate about software from The Man?
Better to have a contest with marketing/design students - they've got a vested interest in building up their portfolios and can really use "won contest" on their resume. And, they may actually have a clue about how punctuation, capitalization, clauses, verbs, and those other little details play a role in communication.
Can anyone say Ohio National Guard?
Modded as... interesting? Simply slashdotalicious.
There has to be some special, super-duper mod that's available, just once per year - perhaps made of some sort of extra-shiny tinfoil - that is reserved for this sort of thing.
You're missing the point. The roads are a bad analogy because there is no tax-payer provided/maintained fiber network. There are some rights-of-way, and involvement in ICAAN, etc., but that's the closest thing to the "roads," and has nothing to do with what the people who own, expand, and maintain the networks do with their networks. The trucking companies are like the ISPs, and they do charge different people different rates, they do route certain sorts of payloads faster than others, and they do show favoritism to certain sorts of customers because of what they can predict about volume, seaonality, etc. And it's their customers (like Amazon or other retailers, for example) that are the equivalent of the content providers using those competing networks. If you're running a trucking network and have taken on a lot of traffic from Amazon, don't you think you'll want some flexibility in deciding how to allocate your resources during the holiday season? Or do you think the government should do that for all of us, and all of our companies?
Wow, you really are a crank.
Let's see: if Novell had sent the same hundreds of workers there, would they be "stepping on the neck" of those companies trying to get people back to work and paid? Would the workers there who had years invested in functional systems that included some products from MS be glad, or mad, that they got hundreds of new laptops donated from Dell, and integrated with help from MS? Or, if you were running an operation in New Orleans, and couldn't place a purchase order for goods, or pay your staff's payroll, without a working system built from the same tools that you were using before the hurricane, would you rather take that moment to hunt down IT people who could integrate Red Hat and a brand new accounting system you've never used and which can't show your historical data, or would you rather have what you've already got your people using, and actually conduct business, right away?
Do you care that a part of what MS brought in and set up was racks and racks of Cisco gear? Or APC power management hardware? Or wireless-mesh interface gear? NONE of which does anything other than pass around packets and provide power for whatever uses it? Or people to pull cables, do data recovery from swamped servers, and write enormous checks for all sorts of non-MS things? You know, like the $700,000 they spent one day buying off another vendor's overdue invoices to the city so that the city could regain those services... which had nothing to do with IT? Is that sort of work "locking" the city into using MS's products?
And, if you really think that operations in New Orleans were just ready to jump on some other OS, and had all sorts of business-ready applications ready go to, and people who knew how to use them, why wouldn't they just burn down those boxes and stick Mandriva on them? Because there is no Linux-based package to manage public housing administration. There is no Linux-based package to directly replace software like Great Plains or Solomon or Axapta or Navision... all of which were make-or-break for those operations, and all of which MS helped those people get up and running immediately. Would you care to take a poll of IT workers and tax payers in that city and ask them if they feel their throats being stepped on? No doubt they'd rather that stuff was taken away an replaced with Macs, right? Oh... there is no equivalent app, for a Mac, that can do what they need. They also got huge grants from MS, to do with as they pleased. If you're right, and there are better options to replace those apps and pieces of the system, then that's what they'll buy. But guess what: there aren't.
Providers like SAP also offered services - but they were declined because there wasn't time or budget (and SAP wasn't savvy enough to promise they'd support a migration) to change horses in the middle of an emergency. Instead of lambasting MS for donating the very thing that they are best equipped to deliver, why aren't you bitching at the city and its businesses for not using SAP's products (or Oracle, etc) in advance? Because that would be too much like asking them why they didn't use their fleet of school buses to evacuate their stricken residents when they had the chance? Would a bus company donating a replacement fleet of school buses also be "holding down" New Orleans by making it necessary for them to buy a certain type of replacement part, down the road, for their free buses? You're just not connected to the reality of trying to salvage businesses and city operations in an emergency. Thinking that MS should have just gone and bought their competitor' products and provided those is assinine. And thinking that if they'd donated the cash equivalent to the Red Cross, and that the Red Cross would somehow magically have solved the local IT integration issues without using MS products is even more ridiculous.
And if MS hadn't done all that they did, all you'd be doing is complaining about how they're an evil corporation.
Yes, roads are a good argument for network neutrality.
Gaah! No they're not! Several businesses that all ship goods to their customers rely on the effectiveness of the businesses that actually operate the vehicles that carry the freight, and the sophistication/efficiency of those operations. That's why UPS, FedEx, DHL et al duke it out so thoroughly. But since those companies adjust their business practices and prices around what they tend to be recently carrying, and for whom, and to which destinations... there's always a state of flux, price-shifting, and increasing/decreasing value from one to the next. All of them (um, except the USPS) pay taxes for their road use, just like everyone else... but the effectiveness of their networks, and the biases they deliberately give to certain specific shippers, consignees, or types of shippers and consignees is what makes choosing between them a continual business issue.
The public roads may be the public roads, but the strategic placement of shipping hubs, locally negotiated pricing, and a thousand other factors contribute to a competitive, rather than an artificially "neutral" shipping environment. Which is a really good thing.
Don't like the fact that UPS charges more for delivery to certain areas, because they've got the stats to show that deliveries there are more dangerous, harder on their equipment, more likely to be disprupted by weather, and so on? Choose a carrier that's hungrier for that sort of business, or is making up for their risks and peaks in other ways. It's very much like competing ISPs and should be. Freight companies all pay taxes and use the same public roads/airways, but they don't and shouldn't have to provide uniform service to everyone with a box to ship. If FedEx wants to deploy another 1000 trucks just to carry Amazon shipments from a new warehouse - and wants to pay for that investment by adjust rates elsewhere in their system, or for specific types of customers/deliveries - that's their business. If their decisions cost them customers, then UPS reaps the rewards of being smarter in how they relate to their customers, and their customers' customers.
What is so difficult for you in making voting system for stories?
The same thing that makes it difficult in Florida and Ohio. Even when it turns out that it was working, people who don't like the outcome say it's the system that's broken. When they do like the outcomes (because they've figured out how to perform the Digg equivalent of Karma-whoring or stirred up a bunch of traffic for their simpering Google-ad spam page), then, gosh, Digg sure is timely and wonderful!
Nope, just like the recent discussion here about how even the Washington Post web site is turning into a "conversation" instead of journalism - I fear that the droning of Digg will become the norm, and only people who appreciate some editorial steerage will populate sites that perform at least a little thoughtful editing. Which is not to say that Timothy counts.
This is the alternative model. The rest of us know that such waves actually propogate via infinitely long strands of pasta.
But seriously - if things all point to a likely model, and nothing (rationally) points to an alternative, why kill yourself (and your budget) documenting hollow alternatives just so that you're sticking to academic form?
So, where was Apple, with truckloads of servers and workstations? Where was Novell? Where was IBM? Where was Sun? I believe Sprint showed up telco stuff, as did Verizon, but MS was the only substantial player that offered the sort of tech that businesses and municipal government needed. And why was it so immediately appreciated? Because most of those people were already using vanilla WinTel-type stuff, and that's what they needed to get their familiar apps and data available again.
:That's an investment not altruism
Is Coca-Cola not being generous unless they truck in Pepsi products? Would Red Hat have been being unreasonable if they didn't also provide Windows platforms, even though a Red Hat server can't run the apps upon which many operations have chosen to depend? You're really reaching, here, for a reason to wish the people in that city didn't get the immediate and substantial support they got - and there were no strings attached. If they wanted to burn that hardware down and install your favorite distro, they certainly could have - but why take a functional gift and make more work, under those circumstances, that would require a bunch of non-available technicians to train thousands of people on how to use something completely outside their experience? If I were to "help" my customers through a disaster recovery by showing up with a different OS, different apps, and a set of tools that their IT people would need weeks/months of training to securely master - they'd have a harder time feeling very grateful.
Indeed! And that's exactly what New Orleans has needed for years. That city's biggest problem, prior to the hurricane, was the lack of investment from any outside parties. Crushing poverty and rampant crime in that city persisted despite a steady stream of subsidization, altruism, and the non-stop rule of local and state politics leaning heavily to the left. "Altruism" failed that city's population miserably, and did more to keep its citizens in poverty than any other factor. Investment - real investment by people who do it because they know it works for all parties involved - is what raises cities like that up from dysfunction. Even the mayor of that town understands that now, and got re-elected in part by clearly stating that the people of the city need less altruism and more self-sufficiency if they want to attract the investment they need.
Radar? B-2 bombers? Jet fighters? High-altitude spy planes? Tanks? Aircraft carriers? Navy destroyers?
Lacking those things certainly would have made dealing with the Soviets and their proxies harder, of course. I was refering to the more "strategic" things that dominated military spending and development afterwards - nukes of all sorts (and delivery systems), high-end surveilance goodies, and so on. The more traditional military hardware was certainly needed in Korea and Vietnam, but the fancy stuff would certainly dominate as time went on.
I'm certainly all for WAY more spending on basic space-related research. The only way to free up a lot of what's getting spent on military activities is to make their mission less important and demanding. And that means, just as it did with the Soviets, outlasting the forces against which they are arrayed.
like it did for the Millitary starting after WWII
You're confusing the end of WWII with the beginning of the Cold War. The type of spending that was done for WWII (other than that which finally ended it for Japan) wasn't really aligned for staring down the Soviets. Of course, that new wave of R&D sure didn't hurt the space program.
You're confusing the mechanics of cash and banking with the underlying things that make a dollar worth what it will buy. The other, and largest, variable is the shifting level of expectations, which are almost universally disconnected from any particular change in the "availability" of dollars to be spread around.
Not just a minimal percentage of the population. But a rabid one. And by implication, obviously wrong
It's not about how well grounded, or even how correct such opinions may be on certain aspects of Gates' history through the last 20 years. What I'm pointing out is the ambivalence among most of the population (beyond the normal wealth envy) and, more to the particular point, the degree of venom spouted by those who don't like him. It's not the "wrongness" of those positions, it's the shrillness. And the more breathless it becomes, and the more "Gates is teh eeevil" is becomes, the less credibility that corner of the IT world has on the subject - because it just sounds like sour grapes, rather than a rational position. If you spend any time here, you have to know what I mean.
... and I will stop hating Microsoft when they give back the ~10 years that they set back the computer/software industry.
And thank you for making my point. Do you really that millions of people who use their PCs every day to IM their friends or do what they do to make their own companies productive personally feel that it's been set back 10 years? It doesn't matter if you do (or even if you're at all right), because you're fantastically not representative of the average computer user - your perspective is simply too close to the topic for you to see it the way that most of the worlds millions of users see it. So when he (or Buffet) pony up umpty-billion dollars for charity, they don't quite spend as much time looking for so many ways to spit at it.
this is only possible due to a system in which the vast majority are pushed into poverty and a tiny minority accumulate nearly all the wealth
You're falling into the classic "the pie is only so big" trap. Do you really think that if Bill Gates and MS had never happened (likewise with, say, IBM or Sun or anyone/everyone else) that poor people would have somehow had a share of his billions in their pockets, instead? They don't call it "making" money for nothing: you do something people want and are willing to buy, and that creates demand and sets a price. Those people do the same with what they do for a living (or don't do it, if they don't produce anything, of course). The point is that vast fortunes have been made by lots of people because of MS's economic activity and innovation (yes, innovation - despite the groupthink, they do some of that, and their marketing vigor is no small bit all by itself, and is something that lots of other less-innovative companies copy, BTW). Some of that income has been earned by people like school bus drivers with some of their 401k in a mutual fund that has invested in MS's future.
This notion that the only reason Michael Jordon is rich is because someone else is now poor... or that Michael Moore's $200M from making his silly "documentary" is money that those movie-goers would have otherwise have used to buy applesauce for starving babies... it's nonsense. No matter how much people resent successful businesses (or just what their thriftier neighbor is able to buy for not having wasted so much on stupid crap), it's usually just that: frustration at not having cowboyed up and done the same sort of work themselves, and created value where it didn't exist before. The really busy people make the pie bigger. We can split hairs over whether or not Netscape might one day have made some piece of that pie bigger than MS made it - but would you say that Netscape's early pile of cash and investment somehow made poor people poorer? Or that Red Hat does?
He and Buffett will be remembered as great Americans for their charity, while his past role as founder and leader of Microsoft will be debated for decades.
It will only be debated in the very tiny circle that even thinks about such things. The huge majority of people who will sit down Monday morning and fire up their copy of Outlook to swap mail with their friends about this, and then pass around Excel sheets and PowerPoint slides about rates of giving, etc, just simply don't have the same bizarre, abiding hatred for Bill that a small, rabid corner of the IT world does. It's hard to remember, sloshing your way through Slashdot, that very little of the world ever goes that far out of its way to hate someone whose tools they use every day (to say nothing of the fact that, really - come on now - it really does just work for most people, at least well enough that the things about it that don't pale compared to the other issues in their lives).
memorably screwing over hundreds of thousands of homeless in the wake of Hurricane Katrina
Hello, Mr. Troll.
Please try a little bit of reality in there, somewhere. B-H does not provide insurance to homeowners, or own companies that do. They re-insured insurance companies so that those had anything like the financial backing to even be in the insurance business at all. If you think you can raise the capital to start offering insurance to people who live below sea level in a hurricane zone, only charge them a few dollars a month because that's all they can afford, and then pay out enormous amounts to the residents of thousands of square miles while staying solvent enough to continue to cover the cars, businesses, and other customers you have all around the country... go for it.
Oh, and just in case you forgot: private insurace never covers floods. That's the government flood insurance program you're thinking about. Warren Buffet has absolutely nothing to do with that, never did, and never could. Just relax, have a nice cold Coke, and cool down before you post again.
MS made all that money at the expense of innovation. The lost innovation could have cured the problem of ~7,000 children that die each day because of toxic water
Riiiight. Because Netscape and Apple were just on the brink of their new Magic Clean Water From Sewage For A Penny technology when Bill pushed them out of the way.
which always has to come off sounding from the far left
You think? I think you'd better not actually say crazy things in the same post you're using to lament that people (from the left, as you say in your example) sometimes seem to say crazy things.