On Windows you can read the hardware manufacturer out of the SMI Bios table in the registry - it gets copied there during booting. Or with GetSystemFirmwareTable.
I suppose you could do make the authentication process secure by having the installer verify a signature in one of the tables to check it was a genuine Apple machine. But people could always patch the installer so it doesn't check anymore, so it doesn't really help you stop people running the software on non Apple hardware. Then again you could make the software phone home for activation and have the trusted home server send down chunks of code which would check it was an uncracked exe running on the right hardware.
So you could do it technically. It would be a stupid idea of course.
I was joking. I just thought that if the pilot starts to make somewhat ambiguous announcements that the plane might be in serious trouble nothing could be more annoying than having to someone ask you a bunch of questions about what was going on.
They could still shank you with a plastic knife, gnawed to sharpness after the meal. On the upside, there is very little chance of hijacking on UK flights, since hoards of chavs would probably tear the terrorists to pieces and then eat the pieces.
That's quite a good idea actually. The cell could recommend silent mode when the phone camped on it. The other possibility would be some sort of bluetooth device that would recommend phones go silent. Both would need support to be added to phones of course. But that could be arranged. Old phones would still not understand the recommendation, and new phones might have a option to ignore it. Then again, why not just ask people to activate silent mode like they do in cinemas? That works in the sort of cinemas I visit more than once.
The worst problem is that people often have loud phone voices and it would be torture sitting in a transatlantic flight with everyone speaking. Maybe there could be a space at the back of the flight for mobile phone users, just like there used to be for smokers.
conversations would be justification for homicide. That's a common belief, but I have to inform you that legally this is often not the case. Even very annoying people still retain the right to life in most situations in 48 states of the US.
Actually, I quite like that. If you edit it and save for Word 97 then the changes in formatting will most likely be lost if they can't be expressed in Word 97 terms. But I think that's sort of OK.
But it does show that any standard that allows people to save as Word 97 needs to have support for legacy attributes. ODF doesn't have this and OOXML does. Lots of corporate machines still have ancient versions of MS Office on them, so this is quite important. What annoys me about people blocking OOXML is that there's an element of compulsion about the whole thing. They think that making ODF the only ISO standard for documents they can then get governments to force people to use it. If Microsoft did this, they would quite rightly be annoyed. There's a double standard that I really don't like.
If they just wrote a good competing office suite and tried to sell it to people, that would be fine. In fact I use OpenOffice at home or on test machines which don't have MS Office and it's actually quite good. The only thing I've seen is actually sort of ironic. If I edit some.xls files in OpenOffice then the GMail previewer can't view them properly anymore. MS Office seems quite happy with them though. Since the people I send them to have MS Office, I pretty much need to use.xls. So it's third party code that gets confused by OO's xls files, not MS Office.
I presume the PRC would attack if they thought Taiwan was close to nuclearizing. There's a time window where a country is committed to having nukes but hasn't deployed them or has deployed so few that they could be destroyed. Cuba essentially never past through this window in the Cuban Missile Crisis, because the US threated to attack them. The WMD justification for attacking Iraq was based on the idea that Iraq was in this window. Actually most Middle Eastern states have been stuck in the window for decades since they are probably committed to nukes but have run the program remarkably badly and have a very low industrial base.
North Korea is an interesting case. They have large amounts of WWII era artillery aimed at Seoul and could use it if America attacked them. So they have essentially got a deterrent against American attack even without nukes, since as you say the Americans probably can't accept large numbers of South Koreans being killed. As a nasty third world dictatorship they also spent a ridiculous time in the window, many decades at least.
Japan is an interesting case. They have vast amounts of plutonium but are under pressure from just about everyone not to build weapons. They could of course, some Japanese politician was quoted as saying "we have enough for thousands of warheads. If we ever got started no one could match us". But the political establishment there has decided that they are better off staying non nuclear, at least while the current strategic situation in Asia persists - i.e. that the US essentially offers them security guarantees in return for not saying or doing anything that might start a downward spiral into a regional war. I suppose you could say that Taiwan is in a similar situation - US military protection essentially makes the status quo very safe.
In window terms, they have to state categorically that they have no intention of entering the window, even though Japan could pass through it very quickly, possibly a matter of days or even hours.
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/officebinaryformats.mspx Wow I always thought they were closed, but they released a spec. Maybe they should have put those up for ISO standardisation.
How would it not still be patent encumbered? It's still patented but from the link I gave (this applies to the binary formats too, which is pretty impressive) "Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation to the extent it conforms to a Covered Specification"
Unless, y'know, they were required by law to use an open standard? Maybe an ISO standard? Maybe it would allow Ecma too, in which case, you've already got what you want. The law only covers the file format you send to the outside world and you can export to it using a converter. I seriously doubt many goverments are going to ban people using.doc internally. Maybe you can get the governments to force people to use your favourite OS and text editor too.
Also, I find it disgusting that you, like Microsoft, still seem to think that it's OK to just rubber-stamp something through as part of a means to an end. It's an file format for Office work, so I'd say considering it a means to an end is a lot more rational than something which can make you disgusted.
I hope you don't use USB mass storage devices, since that's another de facto standard that's a lot less documented than OOXML. Maybe the FSF should make an incompatible rival with less features and get governments to force people to use it?
So they shipped them some nose cones too. You know what it's like with DHL picking up the wrong boxes. And that damn intern down at shipping spends all her time texting. They made a mistake. Taiwan will get a few hundred kilos of Plutonium, some nuclear test data and some warhead schematics as a "please stop complaining" gift and they'll get over it. And the intern's leaving in six months anyway. Seriously what's the issue here?
http://www.mac.gov.tw/english/index1-e.htm
Generally, about 70 to 80 percent (69 to 87 percent) of the public support maintaining the status quo in a broader sense, consistent with the trends of previous surveys. At the same time, only a very small minority (less than 10 to 15 percent) support "independence as soon as possible" or "unification as soon as possible." 16.5% "maintaining the status quo with independence later." The largest bloc, 34.9%, advocated "maintaining the status and deciding on independence or unification later," and another 17.9% supported "maintaining the status quo indefinitely." Does that seem about right? It's a somewhat touchy subject so I don't like to ask people IRL. I don't know enough of them to get the answer anyway.
Taiwan has just had an election and Chen Shui Bian who was basically in favour of formal independence (which would cause China to attack) has been replaced with Ma Ying Jeou who's policy is "no independence, no unification and no war" and trying to increase economic ties with China and possibly sign some sort of peace treaty. The US strongly supports this since they don't want a war between large but totalitarian China and small but democratic Taiwan which they might get dragged into. Taiwan elects its own leaders, has its own army and so on anyway, and is a rich free country, quite unlike China. Formal independence wouldn't actually do any good, but it might do a lot of bad by triggering a full on war.
No I've no idea what the story behind all this, but I guess the US and/or Taiwan have decided to disclose this rather than risk China finding out about it later. Taiwan having nuclear weapons is one of the things that would cause the China to attack. Since China is in scheming mode rather than bullying mode because of the Taiwanese election result, maybe now is as good a time to make the announcement as any.
If you deregulated and allowed people to drive as fast as they wanted then people would all drive much faster. Accidents at hundreds of miles per hour would be very unlikely to have any survivors. Smart people could get computer controlled ejector seats that would fling them out of their vehicle milliseconds from impact so they narrowly miss the other vehicle while their abandoned vehicle plows into it at an effective speed of several hundred miles per hour. Broke assholes would be turned to jelly by the impact. The ejector seat would be decelerated by a mixture of friction and retro rockets and come to halt on the hard shoulder, though you'd be well advised to get far from the road as quickly as possible, see below.
Using your abandoned vehicle as a computer guided kinetic kill device would be legalised since it is a good deterrent against broke assholes that doesn't rely on bloated state. Expensive cars would have computer guidance systems to avoid the twisted wreckage on the highways or even be programmed to knock it to the hard shoulder billiards style in their kinetic kill phase. Other drivers would pay you a voluntary tip for leaving your kills off road, which you would use to buy your next car.
Does all this sound like common sense to you guys, or is it just me?
At the moment 100% of the editable documents I receive are in MS Office binary formats. Which are completely undocumented. Gmail's viewer and Open Office can read sometimes read them fairly well, but still by no means perfectly. I still use MS Office to edit them or to view them if OO or Gmail can't. MS Office comes presinstalled on every single corporate machine I have ever seen, and I think the per machine license fee they pay is very low.
People won't start to use ODF just because it is an ISO standard. OOXML is more open than the binary formats, in the sense that a spec is published. It's also the default format of Office 2007 and later and will thus be widely used as all those companies upgrade. Regardless of how you feel about it, OOXML will gradually take over from the old MS Office binary formats as the format most documents are saved in at work.
There are two ways this can happen. One is that it stays totally undocumented and patent encumbered like the old Office binary format, which is still only fully supported by MS Office.
I know which seems like the best option for me. Otherwise they'll close the standard, and sue anyone that implements patented features. The whole Government thing is bogus too. If they kept OOXML proprietary but convenient and provided inconvenient ODF support they can still end up with most people using OOXML. The small minority of people who need ODF will run their MS office documents through a converter just like they now do for PDF.
What's interesting is that Obama is generally seen as being the more left wing candidate, yet unlike Hilary Clinton he's actually opposed to mandatory insurance saying only that 'if insurance becomes affordable people will buy it'. So it's sort of gratifying in this case to see him ahead in the polls.
Actually, the NHS comparison brings up another issue. If the goverment runs a mandatory scheme, then at least in theory they have some say in the payouts*. But if private companies do, they can just small print their way out of a big chunk of payments. E.g. in the current cut throat US healthcare system, it seems quite possible that the healthcare industry would just take the extra premiums from HilaryCare and then try to minimise their payouts. So the net result would be a massive transfer of money from people who would not have bought healthcare because they can't afford it to a healthcare industry that is highly skilled at avoiding payouts. Which seems like a disaster to me.
Admittedly really poor people would probably get government help, but as I understand it there are people who are too rich to get government aid but don't currently buy healthcare. They'd end up being forced to pay for something that was pretty much worthless. And middle incomers who pay the majority of taxes would end up paying for the government help to people who can't afford stuff either. I'm not sure, but the whole thing looks like it could be a a net loss of significant numbers of people.
It's like pensions really. Lots of European Countries have discussed making private pensions mandatory for all but the poorest people. But I don't have a private pension because I don't trust the people selling them to be able to pay me anything when I retire, so I'm strongly opposed to being forced to be a customer.
* In practice this might not be very helpful. E.g. my grandparents voted Labour, which set up a state pension scheme and dutifully paid their compulsory National Insurance contributions. But when they retired the state pension scheme was starting to get expensive and Margaret Thatcher deindexed it, so it effectively devalued at whatever the inflation rate was per year. Since it wasn't very generous at that point anyway, that was disasterous. So the net effect was that government control of payouts worked very much against them. My parents had privately run University pensions, which turned out to be a terrible deal too.
Oh, and yeah, great, they documented the format. But it is NOT something that should be accepted as a standard. BF is a documented programming language, but if you had to pick a standard language, would you pick BF, if there was, oh, any other alternative? No one is forcing you to use it but the fact that you don't like doesn't mean it shouldn't be a standard.
What is so difficult about the two words "open" and "standard"? A proprietary trade secret is antithetical to that. Relying on proprietary trade secrets in a proposed "open standard" makes it neither. They have documented it, so it is no longer a trade secret. Which is what people have asked them to do for ages with their office formats. New versions of Office support the new, documented standard. That standard allows round tripping back to Word 95, which they pretty much have to do. Round tripping drags in the legacy stuff.
Oh, by the way, we have a way to store odd formatting, and maintain backwards translateability -- styles. Extend the style system to where it can support weird shit like adjusting the "justify" algorithm, and store a SpacingLikeWordPerfectForDos (or whatever) style, in the document, with some special flag to indicate how it translates back into legacy formats (like Word 95 binary.doc). That seems to be what OOXML is doing. It looks like it's an XML encoding for the Office binary formats to me, just like (as someone put it) 'SMB is a serialization of NT IO manager semantics on the wire'. The upside to them publishing a standard is that you get some idea of how this stuff works. If you were writing converters to and from some other format, that's kind of useful, even if it's hard to see what justifyLikeWordPerfect1980 or whatever does. But so what? Just keep the attribute associated with the paragraph and write it into the OOXML file when you save. Or peek at MS Office and see how it reacts to it.
The alternative is that you sabotage the standard and they have absolutely no incentive of documenting anything, which seems far worse.
And it's a free world. If you don't want to use it, install OpenOffice and use ODF. Hell there are loads of standards I can't stand and will never use. But if I ever want to interoperate with them it's good that information, no matter how incomplete is published. I'd much rather have a few probably unused corner cases I can't support, like justifyLikeWordPerfect1980 rather than a completely undocumented format which is the current case with MS Office.
Seriously nagging them for ages about publishing a spec and then complaining that it's full of MS Officeisms just seems pointless politicking to me, especially as 90% of users won't even understand why that's bad. And actually no matter what happens with the standard, I suspect that most people will stick with whatever version of Office is site licensed to their company, regardless of whether the standard is ISO approved or not.
OpenDocument does not have a robust mapping to the current Microsoft format. That requires an OpenXML that has completed the standards process. If OpenXML is unclear, it must be fixed in order to create a robust mapping between the two. Hah, I've been saying that for ages
It's pretty rich for people to complain that Microsoft used undocumented formats and then after they document the format complain that it contains cryptic legacy stuff. The cryptic legacy stuff is actually is actually their best trade secret, it's something that millions of third party documents rely on and only MS Office knows how to read.
And if you want something that allows you to convert a current MS Office document to it and convert back without loss of formatting, that something needs a way to store all the legacy attributes.
It's the same in the UK. Though originally it was possible to make a "specified deposit" to a government bank account instead of purchasing insurance. But the required amount has been increased so quickly (e.g. from £15,000 to £500,000 between 1988 and 1991 - see section 20 ) so this is essentially not really an option for most people anymore.
Would you support mandatory liability insurance in other areas like employment? What about mandatory insurance that covers more than third party liability, like Hilary's health care plan? What are the criteria for making insurance mandatory do you think?
Speed limits are a political thing mostly. You can do 250mph on German Autobahns in a good modern car. Most other countries limit speed to 70mph, but that's not really a technology issue, more an issue of politicians limiting people's rights to protect them from accidents. Which is actually nonsense, since the Autobahns have the same safety record as roads with speed limits, presumably since people are smart enough to drive at a speed which is safe for the road.
Of course there are always new dangers to protect people from and now environmentalists want to impose a speed limit on the Autobahns too, to reduce Germany's CO2 emissions by a whopping 0.5% http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3085749,00.html
You facts are a few years out of date These posts are from January this year.
They've had an audit since then to purge all code even remotely looking like it came from Microsoft without license. It's a lot harder to do that than to say it. Unless you have access to the XP2 SP2 source code it's very hard to tell if code is original and written according to the NT kernel style guide and thus legal or copied and thus illegal. Most of the people who do are not going to tip off Reactos as to which bits of their code need to be rewritten to avoid a lawsuit because they want to keep Microsoft's legal options open just in case someone starts to make money from the code.
Notice the comment about "retyping" in the thread. The idea that that is legal sounds like complete bollocks to me. Or if it is legal, does that mean I can "retype" GPL code by stripping the comments and release it under a proprietary license? Or maybe I can "retype" Harry Potter books and sell them?
There are other issues with ReactOS too. NT was written after Microsoft started to patent aggressively, and it would be very easy to patent a few things that are necessary in an NT compatible OS as a safety measure.
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It's worse than that! The cells don't even have wifi.
On Windows you can read the hardware manufacturer out of the SMI Bios table in the registry - it gets copied there during booting. Or with GetSystemFirmwareTable.
I suppose you could do make the authentication process secure by having the installer verify a signature in one of the tables to check it was a genuine Apple machine. But people could always patch the installer so it doesn't check anymore, so it doesn't really help you stop people running the software on non Apple hardware. Then again you could make the software phone home for activation and have the trusted home server send down chunks of code which would check it was an uncracked exe running on the right hardware.
So you could do it technically. It would be a stupid idea of course.
I was joking. I just thought that if the pilot starts to make somewhat ambiguous announcements that the plane might be in serious trouble nothing could be more annoying than having to someone ask you a bunch of questions about what was going on.
Yeah and ask the person next to you what's going on, how many engines have failed and how the attempts to restart them are going and so on.
They could still shank you with a plastic knife, gnawed to sharpness after the meal. On the upside, there is very little chance of hijacking on UK flights, since hoards of chavs would probably tear the terrorists to pieces and then eat the pieces.
That's quite a good idea actually. The cell could recommend silent mode when the phone camped on it. The other possibility would be some sort of bluetooth device that would recommend phones go silent. Both would need support to be added to phones of course. But that could be arranged. Old phones would still not understand the recommendation, and new phones might have a option to ignore it. Then again, why not just ask people to activate silent mode like they do in cinemas? That works in the sort of cinemas I visit more than once.
The worst problem is that people often have loud phone voices and it would be torture sitting in a transatlantic flight with everyone speaking. Maybe there could be a space at the back of the flight for mobile phone users, just like there used to be for smokers.
Actually, I quite like that. If you edit it and save for Word 97 then the changes in formatting will most likely be lost if they can't be expressed in Word 97 terms. But I think that's sort of OK.
.xls files in OpenOffice then the GMail previewer can't view them properly anymore. MS Office seems quite happy with them though. Since the people I send them to have MS Office, I pretty much need to use .xls. So it's third party code that gets confused by OO's xls files, not MS Office.
But it does show that any standard that allows people to save as Word 97 needs to have support for legacy attributes. ODF doesn't have this and OOXML does. Lots of corporate machines still have ancient versions of MS Office on them, so this is quite important. What annoys me about people blocking OOXML is that there's an element of compulsion about the whole thing. They think that making ODF the only ISO standard for documents they can then get governments to force people to use it. If Microsoft did this, they would quite rightly be annoyed. There's a double standard that I really don't like.
If they just wrote a good competing office suite and tried to sell it to people, that would be fine. In fact I use OpenOffice at home or on test machines which don't have MS Office and it's actually quite good. The only thing I've seen is actually sort of ironic. If I edit some
I presume the PRC would attack if they thought Taiwan was close to nuclearizing. There's a time window where a country is committed to having nukes but hasn't deployed them or has deployed so few that they could be destroyed. Cuba essentially never past through this window in the Cuban Missile Crisis, because the US threated to attack them. The WMD justification for attacking Iraq was based on the idea that Iraq was in this window. Actually most Middle Eastern states have been stuck in the window for decades since they are probably committed to nukes but have run the program remarkably badly and have a very low industrial base.
North Korea is an interesting case. They have large amounts of WWII era artillery aimed at Seoul and could use it if America attacked them. So they have essentially got a deterrent against American attack even without nukes, since as you say the Americans probably can't accept large numbers of South Koreans being killed. As a nasty third world dictatorship they also spent a ridiculous time in the window, many decades at least.
Japan is an interesting case. They have vast amounts of plutonium but are under pressure from just about everyone not to build weapons. They could of course, some Japanese politician was quoted as saying "we have enough for thousands of warheads. If we ever got started no one could match us". But the political establishment there has decided that they are better off staying non nuclear, at least while the current strategic situation in Asia persists - i.e. that the US essentially offers them security guarantees in return for not saying or doing anything that might start a downward spiral into a regional war. I suppose you could say that Taiwan is in a similar situation - US military protection essentially makes the status quo very safe.
In window terms, they have to state categorically that they have no intention of entering the window, even though Japan could pass through it very quickly, possibly a matter of days or even hours.
"Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation to the extent it conforms to a Covered Specification" Unless, y'know, they were required by law to use an open standard? Maybe an ISO standard? Maybe it would allow Ecma too, in which case, you've already got what you want. The law only covers the file format you send to the outside world and you can export to it using a converter. I seriously doubt many goverments are going to ban people using
I hope you don't use USB mass storage devices, since that's another de facto standard that's a lot less documented than OOXML. Maybe the FSF should make an incompatible rival with less features and get governments to force people to use it?
So they shipped them some nose cones too. You know what it's like with DHL picking up the wrong boxes. And that damn intern down at shipping spends all her time texting. They made a mistake. Taiwan will get a few hundred kilos of Plutonium, some nuclear test data and some warhead schematics as a "please stop complaining" gift and they'll get over it. And the intern's leaving in six months anyway. Seriously what's the issue here?
http://www.mac.gov.tw/english/index1-e.htm Generally, about 70 to 80 percent (69 to 87 percent) of the public support maintaining the status quo in a broader sense, consistent with the trends of previous surveys. At the same time, only a very small minority (less than 10 to 15 percent) support "independence as soon as possible" or "unification as soon as possible."
16.5% "maintaining the status quo with independence later." The largest bloc,
34.9%, advocated "maintaining the status and deciding on independence or unification later," and another 17.9% supported "maintaining the status quo indefinitely." Does that seem about right? It's a somewhat touchy subject so I don't like to ask people IRL. I don't know enough of them to get the answer anyway.
I'm in Taiwan at the moment.
Taiwan has just had an election and Chen Shui Bian who was basically in favour of formal independence (which would cause China to attack) has been replaced with Ma Ying Jeou who's policy is "no independence, no unification and no war" and trying to increase economic ties with China and possibly sign some sort of peace treaty. The US strongly supports this since they don't want a war between large but totalitarian China and small but democratic Taiwan which they might get dragged into. Taiwan elects its own leaders, has its own army and so on anyway, and is a rich free country, quite unlike China. Formal independence wouldn't actually do any good, but it might do a lot of bad by triggering a full on war.
No I've no idea what the story behind all this, but I guess the US and/or Taiwan have decided to disclose this rather than risk China finding out about it later. Taiwan having nuclear weapons is one of the things that would cause the China to attack. Since China is in scheming mode rather than bullying mode because of the Taiwanese election result, maybe now is as good a time to make the announcement as any.
Even when the US still had diplomatic relations with Taiwan instead of China, they forced Taiwan to dismantle some nuclear facilities to reduce the risk that they provoke a war with China. Despite the change in diplomatic recognition, which was forced on them by a vote in the UN General Assembly, the US still views Taiwan as a protege and would defend them if China attacked, unless they provoked that attack by declaring formal independence.
If you deregulated and allowed people to drive as fast as they wanted then people would all drive much faster. Accidents at hundreds of miles per hour would be very unlikely to have any survivors. Smart people could get computer controlled ejector seats that would fling them out of their vehicle milliseconds from impact so they narrowly miss the other vehicle while their abandoned vehicle plows into it at an effective speed of several hundred miles per hour. Broke assholes would be turned to jelly by the impact. The ejector seat would be decelerated by a mixture of friction and retro rockets and come to halt on the hard shoulder, though you'd be well advised to get far from the road as quickly as possible, see below.
Using your abandoned vehicle as a computer guided kinetic kill device would be legalised since it is a good deterrent against broke assholes that doesn't rely on bloated state. Expensive cars would have computer guidance systems to avoid the twisted wreckage on the highways or even be programmed to knock it to the hard shoulder billiards style in their kinetic kill phase. Other drivers would pay you a voluntary tip for leaving your kills off road, which you would use to buy your next car.
Does all this sound like common sense to you guys, or is it just me?
At the moment 100% of the editable documents I receive are in MS Office binary formats. Which are completely undocumented. Gmail's viewer and Open Office can read sometimes read them fairly well, but still by no means perfectly. I still use MS Office to edit them or to view them if OO or Gmail can't. MS Office comes presinstalled on every single corporate machine I have ever seen, and I think the per machine license fee they pay is very low.
People won't start to use ODF just because it is an ISO standard. OOXML is more open than the binary formats, in the sense that a spec is published. It's also the default format of Office 2007 and later and will thus be widely used as all those companies upgrade. Regardless of how you feel about it, OOXML will gradually take over from the old MS Office binary formats as the format most documents are saved in at work.
There are two ways this can happen. One is that it stays totally undocumented and patent encumbered like the old Office binary format, which is still only fully supported by MS Office.
The other is that they publish a standard and get the ISO stamp of approval. That means they publish a specification and allow other people to re implement it without fear of a lawsuit.
I know which seems like the best option for me. Otherwise they'll close the standard, and sue anyone that implements patented features. The whole Government thing is bogus too. If they kept OOXML proprietary but convenient and provided inconvenient ODF support they can still end up with most people using OOXML. The small minority of people who need ODF will run their MS office documents through a converter just like they now do for PDF.
Preach it brother! Who is John Galt?
What's interesting is that Obama is generally seen as being the more left wing candidate, yet unlike Hilary Clinton he's actually opposed to mandatory insurance saying only that 'if insurance becomes affordable people will buy it'. So it's sort of gratifying in this case to see him ahead in the polls.
Actually, the NHS comparison brings up another issue. If the goverment runs a mandatory scheme, then at least in theory they have some say in the payouts*. But if private companies do, they can just small print their way out of a big chunk of payments. E.g. in the current cut throat US healthcare system, it seems quite possible that the healthcare industry would just take the extra premiums from HilaryCare and then try to minimise their payouts. So the net result would be a massive transfer of money from people who would not have bought healthcare because they can't afford it to a healthcare industry that is highly skilled at avoiding payouts. Which seems like a disaster to me.
Admittedly really poor people would probably get government help, but as I understand it there are people who are too rich to get government aid but don't currently buy healthcare. They'd end up being forced to pay for something that was pretty much worthless. And middle incomers who pay the majority of taxes would end up paying for the government help to people who can't afford stuff either. I'm not sure, but the whole thing looks like it could be a a net loss of significant numbers of people.
It's like pensions really. Lots of European Countries have discussed making private pensions mandatory for all but the poorest people. But I don't have a private pension because I don't trust the people selling them to be able to pay me anything when I retire, so I'm strongly opposed to being forced to be a customer.
* In practice this might not be very helpful. E.g. my grandparents voted Labour, which set up a state pension scheme and dutifully paid their compulsory National Insurance contributions. But when they retired the state pension scheme was starting to get expensive and Margaret Thatcher deindexed it, so it effectively devalued at whatever the inflation rate was per year. Since it wasn't very generous at that point anyway, that was disasterous. So the net effect was that government control of payouts worked very much against them. My parents had privately run University pensions, which turned out to be a terrible deal too.
The alternative is that you sabotage the standard and they have absolutely no incentive of documenting anything, which seems far worse.
And it's a free world. If you don't want to use it, install OpenOffice and use ODF. Hell there are loads of standards I can't stand and will never use. But if I ever want to interoperate with them it's good that information, no matter how incomplete is published. I'd much rather have a few probably unused corner cases I can't support, like justifyLikeWordPerfect1980 rather than a completely undocumented format which is the current case with MS Office.
Seriously nagging them for ages about publishing a spec and then complaining that it's full of MS Officeisms just seems pointless politicking to me, especially as 90% of users won't even understand why that's bad. And actually no matter what happens with the standard, I suspect that most people will stick with whatever version of Office is site licensed to their company, regardless of whether the standard is ISO approved or not.
OpenXML that has completed the standards process. If OpenXML is unclear, it must be fixed in order
to create a robust mapping between the two. Hah, I've been saying that for ages
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=217540&cid=17678528
It's pretty rich for people to complain that Microsoft used undocumented formats and then after they document the format complain that it contains cryptic legacy stuff. The cryptic legacy stuff is actually is actually their best trade secret, it's something that millions of third party documents rely on and only MS Office knows how to read.
And if you want something that allows you to convert a current MS Office document to it and convert back without loss of formatting, that something needs a way to store all the legacy attributes.
It's the same in the UK. Though originally it was possible to make a "specified deposit" to a government bank account instead of purchasing insurance. But the required amount has been increased so quickly (e.g. from £15,000 to £500,000 between 1988 and 1991 - see section 20 ) so this is essentially not really an option for most people anymore.
Would you support mandatory liability insurance in other areas like employment? What about mandatory insurance that covers more than third party liability, like Hilary's health care plan? What are the criteria for making insurance mandatory do you think?
I agree. Making any kind of insurance mandatory is a very bad idea.
Speed limits are a political thing mostly. You can do 250mph on German Autobahns in a good modern car. Most other countries limit speed to 70mph, but that's not really a technology issue, more an issue of politicians limiting people's rights to protect them from accidents. Which is actually nonsense, since the Autobahns have the same safety record as roads with speed limits, presumably since people are smart enough to drive at a speed which is safe for the road.
Of course there are always new dangers to protect people from and now environmentalists want to impose a speed limit on the Autobahns too, to reduce Germany's CO2 emissions by a whopping 0.5%
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3085749,00.html
http://www.spamyourenemies.com/
Such a succinct website name.
Notice the comment about "retyping" in the thread. The idea that that is legal sounds like complete bollocks to me. Or if it is legal, does that mean I can "retype" GPL code by stripping the comments and release it under a proprietary license? Or maybe I can "retype" Harry Potter books and sell them?
There are other issues with ReactOS too. NT was written after Microsoft started to patent aggressively, and it would be very easy to patent a few things that are necessary in an NT compatible OS as a safety measure.