THEbwana's original thesis was that everything that was wrong in India would be solved by a good healthy dose of neo-liberal free market nostrums, including dropping of tariffs, deregulation of industry and privatisation of much of the functioning of the state.
My response to this was that this approach (the classical International Monetary Fund/World Bank interventions, as also seen throughout sub-equatorial Africa and much of South America) hadn't worked particularly well, citing Argentina as an example. I further posited that Argentina had been the golden child of the classical, Smithian, "roll-back-the-boundaries-of-the-state" economists found in Washington, as evidenced by the WB/IMF reports I linked, due largely to it's willingness to privatise the state and to open its borders to the free flow of both raw materials, goods and capital in exchange for the largesse of the WB/IMF (and yes, I do believe that conflating these two bodies is valid insofar as they have, for a long time, promulgated a unified viewpoint).
That the Argentinian economy and, as a result, the Argentinian polity is in tatters is, I assume, taken as read.
The analysis you proffered had no relevance to the above - it appeared to be merely a statement of the worldview so beloved of those people who put dogma above observation: specifically, if the translation of an idea into practice fails to succeed then the translators weren't sufficiently rigorous in their application.
[This is, of course, a handy position beloved of social, political and economic theorists: since properly scientific (and I use the word here merely as a convenient shorthand to mean the sort of evidence obtained through rationalist post-Aristolian experimental approaches commonly known as "the scientific method") evidence is, for various reasons, hard to obtain in these fields, the most ridiculous theories can be posited without any need to match them to observed results. cf Dean Swift's 'A Modest Proposal':-) Absolutist positions have long been a favourite of a) religious zealots, b) neo-liberal fruitcakes and c) Leninist/Trotskyist fruitcakes. Frankly, they're all as ridiculous as each other.]
Comments? Or this could sensibly be taken to email before the/. discussion-closure hits.
Well, if the apps you are using were written by some fucknut who completely ignored the guidelines on, for example, how to use the file system to store users' data and Microsoft tightening its security breaks them - is this Microsoft's fault? Hell, if any *nix software required you to run as root, the developers would get a shoeing (see the oppobrium that Lindows has copped for it's amazing "everyone's root" model for an example).
Sadly, the average Windows application developer runs as a member of the local Administrators group and doesn't test with lowered privileges (this is getting better, but slowly), creates directories for his application under the root of the FS "because ain't no-one telling me that I can't install my app in C:\Whizzoo", splatters configuration all over the shop and generally craps all over the security model of Windows like a hippo with gastro-enteritis.
So, if your apps don't work, do you a) go to the vendor or (if they're in-house) development team or b) slag Microsoft for enforcing their guidelines. Me, I'll be doing b.
--
Jon
Go read the World Bank and IMF reports on the running of the Argentine economy. The World Bank reports dealing with Argentina are here - this one is particularly interesting. The IMF ones are here.
The best thing India could do to lift those 700 Million people out of poverty is to deregulate trade and privatize publicly owned industries. Is there anyone but the indians who arent surprised that socialism isnt generating wealth for the population?
After all, it worked so well for Argentina, right... erm...
Of course, not being an NT guru, there's a good chance that I'm missing something important
Just FYI (and for your peace of mind), that is pretty much it. I'd also recommend that you leave the auto-update feature turned on as that way it'll download security hotfixes as required, otherwise run Windows Update on a fairly frequent basis. Contrary to the beliefs of many among the tin-foil hat brigade, Microsoft probably aren't that interested in scanning your PC to find your pr0n collection and sending back to Redmond.
Oh, one interesting fact, "the.NET version required 14,004 lines of code, while the Java version featured 2,096."
If, instead of regurgitating the Register's errors, you'd bothered to read the report yourself, you'd know that the Reg, with its usual incomparable accuracy, had got their numbers arse about face.
It is already in place: I either heard on the Today program or read in one of Rod Liddle (sometime Today editor)'s columns in the Grauniad a few months back about one of the Today staffers who drove down the M11 every night at 3-4am to be in London for the start of the show. Predictably, there's little traffic about at that time of the night so said staffer wasn't *particularly* careful about observing the speed limits - until they got hit with a slew of tickets. Seems that the cameras on bridges are now being used to calculate average speeds between two points and automatically churn out fines.
Whether it'll get rolled out UK-wide is another question, of course... can't see it being too successful on the M1 or M4 on a Friday evening.
Aah, but then you might, by bowing down to the usability wishes of the AOL-using masses, offend the critical 733t-geek demographic who, when switching between their various desktop enviroments, want the same "looks-like-arse" theme throughout (see also: CDE, Athena, most any Gnome and KDE themes, all the "who needs MacOS X - I can theme Enlightenment to look just like it" comments passim ad nauseam etc.)
And if we offend the overweight-and-hairy Lynx-or-die brigade, Mozilla will surely fail.
The guy being tried is one David Shayler, who is being prosecuted for breaches of the Official Secrets Act. His defence is that he was whistle-blowing, which is an admissible defence in UK law (see R vs Ponting, where Clive Ponting was prosecuted for a breach of the OSA by the Crown for revealing to an MP (Tam Dalyell) that Ministers were mis-leading Parliament. He was found not guilty, basically because the jury refused to swallow the prosecution line that revealing Ministerial malfeasance was not a justification for breaching the OSA). Shayler revealed, extensively, just how much of a joke MI5 (the branch of the British goverment responsible for "internal security" - keeping tabs on subversives, terrorists, republicans (note the lower-case R), anti-apartheid campaigners and the like) was: among the individuals who MI5 kept files on were about half the members of the current Cabinet, while the organisation itself was a joke: hidebound, locked into a cold-war culture and mindset and staffed by demoralised alcoholics. See this article for a more forensic examination.
Unsuprisingly, MI5 wasn't at all happy about being held up for ridicule in this way and, while denying all the allegations, also pressed for Shayler to be prosecuted for breaching the OSA. Shayler, with the backing of various human rights organisations, has fought this, claiming, amongst other things, that the revelations were in the public interest and did not damage national security, and that the human rights act, which came into law in October 2000, protects whistle-blowers who act in the public interest. Various courts, up to and including the Law Lords, have decided that he has no absolute exemption and must stand trial, which is what is now happening.
So, did Shayler, by his actions, put Britain or British agents in danger. Well, no. Did he embarass the security services? Yes, absolutely. Does this mean he should be tried in camera. In my opinion, no: surely there is an absolute protection for the man who blows the whistle, and this includes (wherever possible) giving him his day in open court in front of the judge and jury, and in the public eye.
Does this mean that, for example, the UK's got extradition rights over anyone involved in NORAID, since such individuals are, beyond reasonable doubt, involved in a conspiracy to commit terrorist acts insideBritishborders?
Or does their American citizenship mean that, like the US armed forces, they're above and beyond the law.
Windows 3.1? Hell, it's way overspecced for that (what'd Windows 3.x do with 40MB of RAM?) My advice? Drop NT4 Workstation w/ sp6a, Office 97 and IE 6.0 onto it then lock it down the wazoo (you may also want to install something like NetOp or, if you're strapped for cash, VNC onto it to enable you to do support from the next town/county/country..)
Quick, easy and stable, and all your kit should just work out of the box. The remote manageability and increased stability of NT over 3.x (gack!) and 9x (urgh!) make this a nobrainer.
It should in fact have been modded Wrong, and displays both completely muddleheaded thinking and lack of understanding, but since that's not an option, Troll has to do...
Yeah, but you work 50% longer hours for it... Me, I like spending time with my girlfriend, not working my arse off.
Consider that output-per-hour-worked in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and the former West Germany is higher than in the US. Ireland, Austria and Denmark are all close behind. The only country which isn't closing the gap is (predictably) the UK - because our politicians believe, against all evidence, that the "american model" for running an economy is successful.
Re:"Single" user license.
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 1
Which bit of "single-user licence" did you fail to understand?
I wonder what kind of meme would displace open source...?
The Quality Software meme - quality being something which the majority of the public really want, unlike Openness or Freeness which most of them couldn't give a rat's ass about.
Maybe I'm misreading something but as far as I could tell from the articles linked, Nike got slapped down for issuing advertising which was untrue. Well, d'oh.
In Britain, at least, the Advertising Standards Authority exists to ensure, among other things, that advertisments are truthful: surely this is a basic requirement - otherwise we end up with "Smoke Ciggies - They're Good For You". I fail to see how the First Amendment should guarantee a corporation's right to lie to the public in its advertising - this seems to be even more of a perversion of First Amendment rights than most.
So, is there something I'm missing, or was Nike's case really "We can say what we like with no respect to truth because the First guarantees our right to lie to Joe Public"? If so, then they should have been slapped down, and hard.
Bollocks, mate. Cable monkeys are there to be sacrificed if necessary: it's part of the job description after all. The data's far more important than some punk who thinks he's a leet Perl haxor.
The world's full of replacement self-important "administrators" anyway - hell, in these days of recession they're 10 a penny.
Yeah: traditionally it was factory workers who all got given the same month off because it was easier to close the factory for a month than to try and run it half-staffed. I guess it just grew from that (plus the summer months - July and August - were always a good time not to be working in the factory or, even more historically, in school because you'd be needed to help with the harvest). But I digress.
And it's unfortunate that workers in service industries get screwed, but that's traditionally been the way it works (when did a burger-flipper ever get put at the top of *any* pile?) Remember that service industries are in themselves (with the exception of the retail trade) a relatively modern development and even, say, the local butcher could until fairly recently close the shop and go off for a week in Brighton.
Nowadays, of course, if you did that you'd come back to find that your business had been killed by WalMart/Tesco/[include your local mammoth retail chain here] - which is progress, I guess
Well, of course: my whole point is that (inefficient, socialist) European workers can add far more value for the same amount of effort than (right-sized, market-fit) Anglo-American ones. Hence it's possible to give European workers more holidays 'cos they get more work done while they're at work. Unfortunately American (and British) workplaces are so inefficient that the only way to get the output is to sweat the workers.
(gross oversimplification, I know, but contains enough truth to do for today)
Finally, my understanding is that the way much of Europe deals with those four weeks of vacation, is that everybody has to take them at the same time, and business essentially shuts down during the month of August. Is that the model we aspire to?
That's more of a tradition thing than anything else: the French and Italians in particular are famous for taking August off and heading for the beach/hills with the wife and kids. However, this certainly isn't mandatory, those of us who don't have kids in school get to take holidays whenever we want them (a week's ice climbing in March? That'll do nicely:-)
Oh, and when I was a self-employed consultant (rather than, as I am now, a wage-slave for the Man), one of the biggest benefits was that if I wanted a couple of months off at the end of a gig then hey, I took them.
You're also wrong on the productivity point: output per hour worked in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and the former West Germany is higher than in the US, while Ireland, Austria and Denmark are only slightly lower.
Interestingly, the only country not to have significantly closed the productivity gap over the last few years is the UK, which is also the country with the most American-style economic policy (sweat the assets, sweat the workers, don't invest, return cash to shareholders as fast as possible... aah, isn't Anglo-Saxon capitalism great:-)
not just a DataReader interface that inherits from Sql or OleDb
They do: it's called IDataReader. Go away, read about interface-based programming and then come back and rewrite your comment above (hint: you declare an instance of the interface, bind it to a concrete class such as SQLDataReader or OleDbDataReader and then make all your calls through the interface)
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My response to this was that this approach (the classical International Monetary Fund/World Bank interventions, as also seen throughout sub-equatorial Africa and much of South America) hadn't worked particularly well, citing Argentina as an example. I further posited that Argentina had been the golden child of the classical, Smithian, "roll-back-the-boundaries-of-the-state" economists found in Washington, as evidenced by the WB/IMF reports I linked, due largely to it's willingness to privatise the state and to open its borders to the free flow of both raw materials, goods and capital in exchange for the largesse of the WB/IMF (and yes, I do believe that conflating these two bodies is valid insofar as they have, for a long time, promulgated a unified viewpoint).
That the Argentinian economy and, as a result, the Argentinian polity is in tatters is, I assume, taken as read.
The analysis you proffered had no relevance to the above - it appeared to be merely a statement of the worldview so beloved of those people who put dogma above observation: specifically, if the translation of an idea into practice fails to succeed then the translators weren't sufficiently rigorous in their application.
[This is, of course, a handy position beloved of social, political and economic theorists: since properly scientific (and I use the word here merely as a convenient shorthand to mean the sort of evidence obtained through rationalist post-Aristolian experimental approaches commonly known as "the scientific method") evidence is, for various reasons, hard to obtain in these fields, the most ridiculous theories can be posited without any need to match them to observed results. cf Dean Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' :-) Absolutist positions have long been a favourite of a) religious zealots, b) neo-liberal fruitcakes and c) Leninist/Trotskyist fruitcakes. Frankly, they're all as ridiculous as each other.]
Comments? Or this could sensibly be taken to email before the /. discussion-closure hits.
Sadly, the average Windows application developer runs as a member of the local Administrators group and doesn't test with lowered privileges (this is getting better, but slowly), creates directories for his application under the root of the FS "because ain't no-one telling me that I can't install my app in C:\Whizzoo", splatters configuration all over the shop and generally craps all over the security model of Windows like a hippo with gastro-enteritis.
So, if your apps don't work, do you a) go to the vendor or (if they're in-house) development team or b) slag Microsoft for enforcing their guidelines. Me, I'll be doing b. -- Jon
Will that be all? :-)
Best Outlook patch ever
After all, it worked so well for Argentina, right... erm...
Just FYI (and for your peace of mind), that is pretty much it. I'd also recommend that you leave the auto-update feature turned on as that way it'll download security hotfixes as required, otherwise run Windows Update on a fairly frequent basis. Contrary to the beliefs of many among the tin-foil hat brigade, Microsoft probably aren't that interested in scanning your PC to find your pr0n collection and sending back to Redmond.
If, instead of regurgitating the Register's errors, you'd bothered to read the report yourself, you'd know that the Reg, with its usual incomparable accuracy, had got their numbers arse about face.
Whether it'll get rolled out UK-wide is another question, of course... can't see it being too successful on the M1 or M4 on a Friday evening.
And if we offend the overweight-and-hairy Lynx-or-die brigade, Mozilla will surely fail.
The guy being tried is one David Shayler, who is being prosecuted for breaches of the Official Secrets Act. His defence is that he was whistle-blowing, which is an admissible defence in UK law (see R vs Ponting, where Clive Ponting was prosecuted for a breach of the OSA by the Crown for revealing to an MP (Tam Dalyell) that Ministers were mis-leading Parliament. He was found not guilty, basically because the jury refused to swallow the prosecution line that revealing Ministerial malfeasance was not a justification for breaching the OSA). Shayler revealed, extensively, just how much of a joke MI5 (the branch of the British goverment responsible for "internal security" - keeping tabs on subversives, terrorists, republicans (note the lower-case R), anti-apartheid campaigners and the like) was: among the individuals who MI5 kept files on were about half the members of the current Cabinet, while the organisation itself was a joke: hidebound, locked into a cold-war culture and mindset and staffed by demoralised alcoholics. See this article for a more forensic examination.
Unsuprisingly, MI5 wasn't at all happy about being held up for ridicule in this way and, while denying all the allegations, also pressed for Shayler to be prosecuted for breaching the OSA. Shayler, with the backing of various human rights organisations, has fought this, claiming, amongst other things, that the revelations were in the public interest and did not damage national security, and that the human rights act, which came into law in October 2000, protects whistle-blowers who act in the public interest. Various courts, up to and including the Law Lords, have decided that he has no absolute exemption and must stand trial, which is what is now happening.
So, did Shayler, by his actions, put Britain or British agents in danger. Well, no. Did he embarass the security services? Yes, absolutely. Does this mean he should be tried in camera. In my opinion, no: surely there is an absolute protection for the man who blows the whistle, and this includes (wherever possible) giving him his day in open court in front of the judge and jury, and in the public eye.
Or does their American citizenship mean that, like the US armed forces, they're above and beyond the law.
Quick, easy and stable, and all your kit should just work out of the box. The remote manageability and increased stability of NT over 3.x (gack!) and 9x (urgh!) make this a nobrainer.
Love, your friendly local pedant -- Jon
Or have I just been beautifully trolled?
Yeah, but you work 50% longer hours for it... Me, I like spending time with my girlfriend, not working my arse off.
Consider that output-per-hour-worked in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and the former West Germany is higher than in the US. Ireland, Austria and Denmark are all close behind. The only country which isn't closing the gap is (predictably) the UK - because our politicians believe, against all evidence, that the "american model" for running an economy is successful.
Which bit of "single-user licence" did you fail to understand?
Nah, it only took me 5 seconds - it's here
The Quality Software meme - quality being something which the majority of the public really want, unlike Openness or Freeness which most of them couldn't give a rat's ass about.
Maybe I'm misreading something but as far as I could tell from the articles linked, Nike got slapped down for issuing advertising which was untrue. Well, d'oh.
In Britain, at least, the Advertising Standards Authority exists to ensure, among other things, that advertisments are truthful: surely this is a basic requirement - otherwise we end up with "Smoke Ciggies - They're Good For You". I fail to see how the First Amendment should guarantee a corporation's right to lie to the public in its advertising - this seems to be even more of a perversion of First Amendment rights than most.
So, is there something I'm missing, or was Nike's case really "We can say what we like with no respect to truth because the First guarantees our right to lie to Joe Public"? If so, then they should have been slapped down, and hard.
Bollocks, mate. Cable monkeys are there to be sacrificed if necessary: it's part of the job description after all. The data's far more important than some punk who thinks he's a leet Perl haxor.
The world's full of replacement self-important "administrators" anyway - hell, in these days of recession they're 10 a penny.
Yeah: traditionally it was factory workers who all got given the same month off because it was easier to close the factory for a month than to try and run it half-staffed. I guess it just grew from that (plus the summer months - July and August - were always a good time not to be working in the factory or, even more historically, in school because you'd be needed to help with the harvest). But I digress.
And it's unfortunate that workers in service industries get screwed, but that's traditionally been the way it works (when did a burger-flipper ever get put at the top of *any* pile?) Remember that service industries are in themselves (with the exception of the retail trade) a relatively modern development and even, say, the local butcher could until fairly recently close the shop and go off for a week in Brighton.
Nowadays, of course, if you did that you'd come back to find that your business had been killed by WalMart/Tesco/[include your local mammoth retail chain here] - which is progress, I guess
Well, of course: my whole point is that (inefficient, socialist) European workers can add far more value for the same amount of effort than (right-sized, market-fit) Anglo-American ones. Hence it's possible to give European workers more holidays 'cos they get more work done while they're at work. Unfortunately American (and British) workplaces are so inefficient that the only way to get the output is to sweat the workers.
(gross oversimplification, I know, but contains enough truth to do for today)
That's more of a tradition thing than anything else: the French and Italians in particular are famous for taking August off and heading for the beach/hills with the wife and kids. However, this certainly isn't mandatory, those of us who don't have kids in school get to take holidays whenever we want them (a week's ice climbing in March? That'll do nicely :-)
Oh, and when I was a self-employed consultant (rather than, as I am now, a wage-slave for the Man), one of the biggest benefits was that if I wanted a couple of months off at the end of a gig then hey, I took them.
Interestingly, the only country not to have significantly closed the productivity gap over the last few years is the UK, which is also the country with the most American-style economic policy (sweat the assets, sweat the workers, don't invest, return cash to shareholders as fast as possible... aah, isn't Anglo-Saxon capitalism great
They do: it's called IDataReader. Go away, read about interface-based programming and then come back and rewrite your comment above (hint: you declare an instance of the interface, bind it to a concrete class such as SQLDataReader or OleDbDataReader and then make all your calls through the interface)
Jeez, some people