"And the British aren't even familiar with those words"
They are however extremely familiar with, and notably fond of "wog", "nigger", "coon", "jungle bunny", "chinkie", "kike", "dago", "wop", "frog", "sprout", "pakki", "kraut", "jock", "mick", and various other charming terms for people who were unfortunate enough to have evolved from the apes instead of being created in God's image like the English were.
"What have I done? Hell if I know. I'm a white non-religious male."
The "non-religious" bit might be a clue when your administration is being run by people who think that you can't have "American" without prefixing it with "God fearing".
"If we attack Iran, it's the only way we'll have enough soldiers."
Why would the Neo-Cons attack a tough nut like Iran when they could get their hands on plenty of oil by invading the much weaker and significantly closer Venezuela?
"I thought there was a prohibition against using the military (and by extension, military resources) on U.S. soil?"
They get around that by the fact that satellites are in space, which isn't US soil. Of course, they'd just as easily get around anything else they wanted to: "our new Christian Protection Force isn't part of the military because they wear black uniforms with white crosses on their arm-bands, and drive around in black tanks with white crosses on the side. Loyal patriots can ring their 24 hour hotline to anonymously report suspicious un-American terrorist behaviour such as breaking curfew, gathering in groups of more than three persons, owning or having access to media that isn't on the approved list, associating with agents of foreign powers..."
"The correct purpose of the justice system would then be to adjust the cost-benefit ratio of crime (deterrant), as well as to provide for restitution for the victim, and protection for society."
But this just raises further dilemmas, because in the absence of free will, people become crime victims because they are predisposed to be prey for the predators, so there's no justification for either compensating them for what they are, or for that matter protecting them from said predators who, like lions, hunt some animals, but very quickly learn to leave others such as porcupines alone.
"It was by my free will that I avoided the situation that he is in"
This is only true if every human in a society is born in identical circumstances, all are biologically similar enough to be considered equivalent according to the standards of that society, and there is no possibility of random events favouring some individuals over others.
"To support his theories he uses early written language examples which lack the concept of free will, let alone will at all. He argues that it was much more than just a literary device, but was in fact an accurate representation of human thinking in that time."
I also have a theory which says that pissing and crapping didn't happen in ancient times because the texts that we have don't say things like "And the Pharoah Ramses said unto the Hittites, Lo, I have marched many a day eating of dried dates and figs, so hold ye the battle, for my bottom runneth over."
Only a tiny fraction of the documents written in the remote past have survived, and many of the ones we have are both fragmentary and difficult to decipher due to the fact that the people writing them didn't bother to waste space on stuff that they reckoned was obvious to the rather small number of people who were educated enough to read it. Building a theory about the emergence of consciousness in our species around such sparse and possibly non-representative evidence is akin to judging the consciousness of modern man from a couple of worm-eaten pages from a scientology text, a 17th century recipe for making bread, a nearly complete version of "Hansel And Gretal", and some bricks with fragments of graffiti on them.
"Honestly I don't think this is a bad idea. NASA has lost its focus."
That's because it was formed in 1958 as a response to the Soviets putting Sputnik up in 1957 while the US was still pissing around with projects run by various branches of its military, which unsurprising were primarily concerned with producing weapons systems. NASA was therefore a product of the Cold War, and its primary goal was ensuring that the US maintained technological parity with (and hopefully technological superiority over) the Soviets in space. This was important both from a propaganda viewpoint when both sides are trying to prove their political system's superiority, and also strategically by preventing Soviet domination of the ultimate piece of high ground.
When the Cold War ended, the original political and military justification for NASA's existence, focus, and funding went with it, and therefore also the willingness by both the public and politicians to spend large sums on an organisation whose activities were of interest to a constantly shrinking minority of Americans.
"Democracy requires an intelligent and educated populace, and since that's what's currently lacking, I think the government needs to do some things that are unpopular just to fix the damn situation."
A society that lacks an intelligent and educated populace is unlikely to either produce or elect a government with enough intelligence or education to "fix the damn situation".
"Now consider the original published design goals for mandatory public education:
1. Create obedient drones to man the dehumanizing factories of the industrial revolution."
Nobody needed an education system to create mindless drones, because there were already plenty of them working the land who proved more than capable of learning the simple repetitive sets of tasks that were required of a factory worker, and would perform them for extremely long periods while being paid pittances and both living and working under appalling conditions.
Why do writers feel the need for using poor analogies to coin terms that add nothing to discussions because they have to looked up somewhere before people know what they're supposed to mean? The topic being written about has no parallels whatsoever with evapouration because it's entirely the result of conscious decisions by people, so this particular term (like so many others) obfuscates meaning instead of clarifying it.
Here's my term for the point the writer intends to make, together with its extremely short yet all-encompassing description:
The Law Of Progessive Incompetence
A system that rewards incompetence will always attempt to reach an equilibrium point where all vestiges of competence have been eliminated from it.
"In the eyes of many, what sets Microsoft apart from Siemens and other law breakers is that the others not only pay their fines, but they modify their business practices to comply with the court orders."
They paid the fine incurred for Windows Media Player, and complied with the ruling by offering a version of Windows XP without it to both OEMs and end-users in the EU. The current case was pending appeal until September of last year; after losing the appeal, MS stated that (a) they will not be launching any further appeals, and (b) have every intention of fulfilling all obligations placed on them by the ECJ rulings.
"As a corporation, Microsoft has shown a staggering degree of contempt for courts in both the USA and the EU (and possibly elsewhere, too)."
It was the Bush administration who showed contempt for both the US courts and the DOJ, just like a prior Republican administration (Raegan) showed contempt for the DOJ by closing a 12 year anti-trust investigation into IBM's business practices before it even got to court, despite it having accumulated a huge amount of evidence against them.
As far as the European rulings go, Microsoft's "contempt" amounts to appealing rulings (which they have a right to do under EU law), and taking more time than some people would like to publish information in way that satisfies certain conditions which weren't clarified until some time after the original rulings (e.g. reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing terms, which is so imprecise that it isn't really surprising MS and the Commission interpreted it differently).
NB: I'm not defending MS here, because they have done many shitty things in the past, and continue to do many shitty things that they should never have been allowed to get away with. What I'm disputing is the assertion that the rule of law is served in any way by basing decisions about companies or people on their popularity (or lack of it) or what a small group of politicians who are using popular sentiment to garner votes happen to say about it.
But the only time users generally see them is when installing stuff that wants to write things outside their home directory, which is something that doesn't happen very often during day-to-day operation.
"I could ignore the dialog box and get something done before allowing an update/reboot or whatever."
System modal dialogs are IMO very badly misused in Windows, both by MS and other software companies, who pop them up for all sorts of trivial reasons instead of reserving them for things that actually merit blocking all user interaction with the system. If I'm typing things into my keyboard that don't require constantly looking at the screen, I don't need an anti-virus program to throw up a system modal dialog telling me it's finished updating itself, thereby losing everything I thought I was typing in. And it's even worse when Windows emits one with several options, each of which has an accelerator key that can be triggered by accident when typing, thus initiating an action I don't want before I've realised that the thing was there.
The difference between Windows' intrusive modal dialogs and the OS X system of making icons on the dock bounce when they want to tell you something is like comparing a polite "excuse me" by somebody who requires attention to having them blast an air horn in your ear.
"UNIX, being directly derived from Multics, benefitted from this lineage by having such robust security throughout it's design at the expense of not being able to run on commodity hardware."
Except of course Microsoft's Xenix, which Altos ported to the 8088 in 1982, and SCO offered for the IBM PC in 1983 (MS licensed Xenix source code OEMs and software companies rather than selling the finished product directly to end-users). A lot of people seem to forget that MS were UNIX licensees in 1979 and added several BSD elements to the V7 code they got from AT&T when designing Xenix. All of this happened quite a while before they bought QDOS to satisfy IBM's requirement for a CP/M-like system.
"Windows's legacy lies in DOS, which was designed to run on commodity hardware that completely lacked these capabilities."
Windows' legacy is actually the Lisa and Macintosh, which were what inspired MS to write it. It's a single user system because the Mac was a single user system, and MS chose to use DOS as a launcher because they were aiming it at users of machines that already had DOS and software for it on them. If they'd chosen to use a different OS with a different file structure that required different software, they'd have risked pissing off their potential customer base. Selling a graphical shell that ran on top of DOS but offered multi-user and and pre-emptive multitasking on the other hand would have pissed off IBM, whose contract with MS forbade them from offering those facilities in DOS or DOS-based software to ensure the PC didn't compete with their then lucrative minicomputer business. And as neither were necessary for a Mac-like experience, MS decided to take the route that rubbed the least people up the wrong way.
"This is the logical next step, and a necessary one to preserve the rule of law"
There are plenty of other companies that have been convicted of breaking EU laws, e.g. Siemens, who were recently fined 396 million Euros by the Commission for their role in a price fixing cartel, which is a violation of EU anti-trust laws. None of the other companies that have been fined for breaking EC trade laws were barred from tendering for government contracts, so what's so special about MS that justifies treating them differently besides the fact that some posters to Slashdot hate them?
"They did, and Poland was up there too, thanks to the Holocaust."
The Holocaust was only one factor in Poland's high death toll. Both the Nazis and Soviets purged the country of anybody with a significant level of education, and the overall population was further decreased by forced migration of Polish children who were deemed "Aryans" to Germany for adoption by couples who would "bring them up properly".
"Does that mean that the recently proposed UK law [bbc.co.uk] to ban file-sharers from having Internet access (which I thought mentioned three strikes, although I can't find the article) won't be going through?"
The EP didn't vote to permit non-commercial file sharing in the EU, they voted against enacting new legislation that prohibits it, i.e. to continue with the current situation where each member's national legislators get to decide whether it is or isn't legal within their borders.
"And yes, I've been asked that seriously by an American I once met while travelling."
It's because few Americans know much about Australia beyond the fact that it has kangaroos, so they don't realise that Aussies far prefer the smooth ride that they get from a wombat to the tooth-jarring gait of a Roo.
"The French I've met are friendly, warm, helpful, hardworking, practical and resourceful."
This has been my experience as well (although I don't live there, I've visited various bits of it quite a lot). Yes, there are some arrogant pricks in France, just like there are arrogant pricks wherever you go, but I've seen nothing to indicate that France has a higher percentage of them than any other country.
"Ofcourse the US actually has the military power and cultural dominance to back that up"
France also had the military and cultural power to back up their arrogance fairly recently (in historic terms), hence the fact that, as others have observed, their language is used in various places that aren't part of France.
Slashdot Mirror
"And the British aren't even familiar with those words"
They are however extremely familiar with, and notably fond of "wog", "nigger", "coon", "jungle bunny", "chinkie", "kike", "dago", "wop", "frog", "sprout", "pakki", "kraut", "jock", "mick", and various other charming terms for people who were unfortunate enough to have evolved from the apes instead of being created in God's image like the English were.
"What have I done? Hell if I know. I'm a white non-religious male."
The "non-religious" bit might be a clue when your administration is being run by people who think that you can't have "American" without prefixing it with "God fearing".
"If we attack Iran, it's the only way we'll have enough soldiers."
Why would the Neo-Cons attack a tough nut like Iran when they could get their hands on plenty of oil by invading the much weaker and significantly closer Venezuela?
"I thought there was a prohibition against using the military (and by extension, military resources) on U.S. soil?"
They get around that by the fact that satellites are in space, which isn't US soil. Of course, they'd just as easily get around anything else they wanted to: "our new Christian Protection Force isn't part of the military because they wear black uniforms with white crosses on their arm-bands, and drive around in black tanks with white crosses on the side. Loyal patriots can ring their 24 hour hotline to anonymously report suspicious un-American terrorist behaviour such as breaking curfew, gathering in groups of more than three persons, owning or having access to media that isn't on the approved list, associating with agents of foreign powers..."
"Their process is a bit backwards, they have cheap, stable, easy to build large rockets."
A very backwards process indeed, especially when compared to one that produces expensive, difficult-to-build medium rockets.
"The only problem is that they are no where near as efficient as US rockets... they can lift Heavy... cheap... exactly what space building requires"
The qualifier that gets placed in front of "efficient" when describing a system with a higher cost per unit of work done isn't usually "more".
"The correct purpose of the justice system would then be to adjust the cost-benefit ratio of crime (deterrant), as well as to provide for restitution for the victim, and protection for society."
But this just raises further dilemmas, because in the absence of free will, people become crime victims because they are predisposed to be prey for the predators, so there's no justification for either compensating them for what they are, or for that matter protecting them from said predators who, like lions, hunt some animals, but very quickly learn to leave others such as porcupines alone.
"It was by my free will that I avoided the situation that he is in"
This is only true if every human in a society is born in identical circumstances, all are biologically similar enough to be considered equivalent according to the standards of that society, and there is no possibility of random events favouring some individuals over others.
"To support his theories he uses early written language examples which lack the concept of free will, let alone will at all. He argues that it was much more than just a literary device, but was in fact an accurate representation of human thinking in that time."
I also have a theory which says that pissing and crapping didn't happen in ancient times because the texts that we have don't say things like "And the Pharoah Ramses said unto the Hittites, Lo, I have marched many a day eating of dried dates and figs, so hold ye the battle, for my bottom runneth over."
Only a tiny fraction of the documents written in the remote past have survived, and many of the ones we have are both fragmentary and difficult to decipher due to the fact that the people writing them didn't bother to waste space on stuff that they reckoned was obvious to the rather small number of people who were educated enough to read it. Building a theory about the emergence of consciousness in our species around such sparse and possibly non-representative evidence is akin to judging the consciousness of modern man from a couple of worm-eaten pages from a scientology text, a 17th century recipe for making bread, a nearly complete version of "Hansel And Gretal", and some bricks with fragments of graffiti on them.
"Honestly I don't think this is a bad idea. NASA has lost its focus."
That's because it was formed in 1958 as a response to the Soviets putting Sputnik up in 1957 while the US was still pissing around with projects run by various branches of its military, which unsurprising were primarily concerned with producing weapons systems. NASA was therefore a product of the Cold War, and its primary goal was ensuring that the US maintained technological parity with (and hopefully technological superiority over) the Soviets in space. This was important both from a propaganda viewpoint when both sides are trying to prove their political system's superiority, and also strategically by preventing Soviet domination of the ultimate piece of high ground.
When the Cold War ended, the original political and military justification for NASA's existence, focus, and funding went with it, and therefore also the willingness by both the public and politicians to spend large sums on an organisation whose activities were of interest to a constantly shrinking minority of Americans.
"Democracy requires an intelligent and educated populace, and since that's what's currently lacking, I think the government needs to do some things that are unpopular just to fix the damn situation."
A society that lacks an intelligent and educated populace is unlikely to either produce or elect a government with enough intelligence or education to "fix the damn situation".
"Now consider the original published design goals for mandatory public education:
1. Create obedient drones to man the dehumanizing factories of the industrial revolution."
Nobody needed an education system to create mindless drones, because there were already plenty of them working the land who proved more than capable of learning the simple repetitive sets of tasks that were required of a factory worker, and would perform them for extremely long periods while being paid pittances and both living and working under appalling conditions.
Why do writers feel the need for using poor analogies to coin terms that add nothing to discussions because they have to looked up somewhere before people know what they're supposed to mean? The topic being written about has no parallels whatsoever with evapouration because it's entirely the result of conscious decisions by people, so this particular term (like so many others) obfuscates meaning instead of clarifying it.
Here's my term for the point the writer intends to make, together with its extremely short yet all-encompassing description:
The Law Of Progessive Incompetence
A system that rewards incompetence will always attempt to reach an equilibrium point where all vestiges of competence have been eliminated from it.
"In the eyes of many, what sets Microsoft apart from Siemens and other law breakers is that the others not only pay their fines, but they modify their business practices to comply with the court orders."
They paid the fine incurred for Windows Media Player, and complied with the ruling by offering a version of Windows XP without it to both OEMs and end-users in the EU. The current case was pending appeal until September of last year; after losing the appeal, MS stated that (a) they will not be launching any further appeals, and (b) have every intention of fulfilling all obligations placed on them by the ECJ rulings.
"As a corporation, Microsoft has shown a staggering degree of contempt for courts in both the USA and the EU (and possibly elsewhere, too)."
It was the Bush administration who showed contempt for both the US courts and the DOJ, just like a prior Republican administration (Raegan) showed contempt for the DOJ by closing a 12 year anti-trust investigation into IBM's business practices before it even got to court, despite it having accumulated a huge amount of evidence against them.
As far as the European rulings go, Microsoft's "contempt" amounts to appealing rulings (which they have a right to do under EU law), and taking more time than some people would like to publish information in way that satisfies certain conditions which weren't clarified until some time after the original rulings (e.g. reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing terms, which is so imprecise that it isn't really surprising MS and the Commission interpreted it differently).
NB: I'm not defending MS here, because they have done many shitty things in the past, and continue to do many shitty things that they should never have been allowed to get away with. What I'm disputing is the assertion that the rule of law is served in any way by basing decisions about companies or people on their popularity (or lack of it) or what a small group of politicians who are using popular sentiment to garner votes happen to say about it.
"Mac OSX has prompts for authorization also."
But the only time users generally see them is when installing stuff that wants to write things outside their home directory, which is something that doesn't happen very often during day-to-day operation.
"I could ignore the dialog box and get something done before allowing an update/reboot or whatever."
System modal dialogs are IMO very badly misused in Windows, both by MS and other software companies, who pop them up for all sorts of trivial reasons instead of reserving them for things that actually merit blocking all user interaction with the system. If I'm typing things into my keyboard that don't require constantly looking at the screen, I don't need an anti-virus program to throw up a system modal dialog telling me it's finished updating itself, thereby losing everything I thought I was typing in. And it's even worse when Windows emits one with several options, each of which has an accelerator key that can be triggered by accident when typing, thus initiating an action I don't want before I've realised that the thing was there.
The difference between Windows' intrusive modal dialogs and the OS X system of making icons on the dock bounce when they want to tell you something is like comparing a polite "excuse me" by somebody who requires attention to having them blast an air horn in your ear.
"UNIX, being directly derived from Multics, benefitted from this lineage by having such robust security throughout it's design at the expense of not being able to run on commodity hardware."
Except of course Microsoft's Xenix, which Altos ported to the 8088 in 1982, and SCO offered for the IBM PC in 1983 (MS licensed Xenix source code OEMs and software companies rather than selling the finished product directly to end-users). A lot of people seem to forget that MS were UNIX licensees in 1979 and added several BSD elements to the V7 code they got from AT&T when designing Xenix. All of this happened quite a while before they bought QDOS to satisfy IBM's requirement for a CP/M-like system.
"Windows's legacy lies in DOS, which was designed to run on commodity hardware that completely lacked these capabilities."
Windows' legacy is actually the Lisa and Macintosh, which were what inspired MS to write it. It's a single user system because the Mac was a single user system, and MS chose to use DOS as a launcher because they were aiming it at users of machines that already had DOS and software for it on them. If they'd chosen to use a different OS with a different file structure that required different software, they'd have risked pissing off their potential customer base. Selling a graphical shell that ran on top of DOS but offered multi-user and and pre-emptive multitasking on the other hand would have pissed off IBM, whose contract with MS forbade them from offering those facilities in DOS or DOS-based software to ensure the PC didn't compete with their then lucrative minicomputer business. And as neither were necessary for a Mac-like experience, MS decided to take the route that rubbed the least people up the wrong way.
"This is the logical next step, and a necessary one to preserve the rule of law"
There are plenty of other companies that have been convicted of breaking EU laws, e.g. Siemens, who were recently fined 396 million Euros by the Commission for their role in a price fixing cartel, which is a violation of EU anti-trust laws. None of the other companies that have been fined for breaking EC trade laws were barred from tendering for government contracts, so what's so special about MS that justifies treating them differently besides the fact that some posters to Slashdot hate them?
"They did, and Poland was up there too, thanks to the Holocaust."
The Holocaust was only one factor in Poland's high death toll. Both the Nazis and Soviets purged the country of anybody with a significant level of education, and the overall population was further decreased by forced migration of Polish children who were deemed "Aryans" to Germany for adoption by couples who would "bring them up properly".
"if Turkey joins then all those 'guest workers' in Germany who've been second-class for decades get full citizenship rights on the spot"
They would become legal residents, not citizens.
"I think those days came to an abrupt end in the last NATO summit when NATO balked at another round of expansion"
What relevance does NATO expansion have to EU expansion?
"The real question here is, how much would the necessary bribe be"
It would have to be quite substantial, because EU Commissioners get paid a lot and have substantial expense accounts.
"who is corrupt enough in the EU Commission to push this through for MSFT?"
Charlie McCreevy.
"Does that mean that the recently proposed UK law [bbc.co.uk] to ban file-sharers from having Internet access (which I thought mentioned three strikes, although I can't find the article) won't be going through?"
The EP didn't vote to permit non-commercial file sharing in the EU, they voted against enacting new legislation that prohibits it, i.e. to continue with the current situation where each member's national legislators get to decide whether it is or isn't legal within their borders.
"And yes, I've been asked that seriously by an American I once met while travelling."
It's because few Americans know much about Australia beyond the fact that it has kangaroos, so they don't realise that Aussies far prefer the smooth ride that they get from a wombat to the tooth-jarring gait of a Roo.
"The French I've met are friendly, warm, helpful, hardworking, practical and resourceful."
This has been my experience as well (although I don't live there, I've visited various bits of it quite a lot). Yes, there are some arrogant pricks in France, just like there are arrogant pricks wherever you go, but I've seen nothing to indicate that France has a higher percentage of them than any other country.
"The French annoy Americans, and Americans annoy the French"
And both of them annoy everyone else.
"Ofcourse the US actually has the military power and cultural dominance to back that up"
France also had the military and cultural power to back up their arrogance fairly recently (in historic terms), hence the fact that, as others have observed, their language is used in various places that aren't part of France.