Funny... I look at that website and I'm not finding an index of exhibits which do and don't have support. Where are you finding the financial data? Could you provide a more specific link?
I'm telling you. It's a tax writeoff issue. Last year the accountants saw it as financially more profitable to let the company have the writeoff. This year the money was paid to the execs because the execs saw it as more financially profitable for them to take the writeoffs personally. This whole thing is an exhibit of finding a better way to milk the IRS pyramid scheme. It has nothing to do with religious fundamentalists except for the spin/hype factor.
I no of no theory of abiogenesis that even starts with DNA
At the level under consideration there's no difference. The point was that some molecules possessing common molecular bonding characteristics predominated in the formation of the ministructures which, after a few million more years and a few million more lightning strikes, evolved into the predecessors to prehistoric life.
The debate of whether or not they were Ribonucleic or Deoxyribonucleic makes zero bit of difference. At the level of zapping a mixture of ammonia, carbon dioxide, water, and oxygen with a lightning bolt the statistical significance of the inclusion of an extra hydroxy is insignificant.
Pardon me. I'll be sure to subscribe to your theory next time. What if you're wrong?
Evolution does not guarantee that any structure will form
In terms of random occurences from the unordered primordial oceans there are some structures which are thermodynamically favorable. Those appear to be phosphate, amide, and carbon chain bonds. If it were any other bond type then life as we know it would have completely different chemistry.
At one time everything was ammonia, water, carbon dioxide, and oxygen. Then lightning struck and some of that turned into DNA fragments. After a few million years of floating randomly around in the ocean some of those DNA fragments came upon environments where they could catalyze ammonia, water, carbon dioxide, and oxygen to form similar DNA fragments. After a few million years of floating randomly around in the ocean some of those DNA fragments collected together and, after a few more lightning strikes, recruited some fatty carbon chains to encapsulate them. After a few million more years of floating randomly around...
Really. So companies are not donating to this exhibit, but it is not due to religous extremism? So what is it due to?
More likely it's due to changes in the tax code or the need for the CEO to still get his $3 million bonus for the year after prices for energy and health care went through the roof. The probability that this is truly due to any religious consideration is nil.
I wouldn't be surprised if this year's private donors are the high level execs of last year's corporate donors. They've probably figured out the pyramid scheme works out better if they pay themselves through the company and then take the private tax deduction for the non-profit contribution.
I suppose I'm the only person who thought of this... except for the people actually doing it.
I read all three articles and not a single one can honestly say that it was because of debate between scientists and fundamentalist Christians. First, it really isn't much of a debate. The only people debating it are people who've got their fingers lodged firmly in their ears. Second, the articles only acknowledge that corporate sponsors declined to participate this year. It's much more likely there was a change in a tax loophole which prompted the shift than there was any worry about fundamentalist Christians boycotting the museum's sponsors.
For Pete's sake... does anybody question anything anymore?
The whole thing is a troll. It's no different than the global warming debate. There are some extremists on both sides. There is some common data which everyone agrees upon in the middle. There are people who interpret the data to mean different things in all corners.
because American companies are anxious not to take sides in the heated debate between scientists and fundamentalist Christians over the theory of evolution'
They're right that they haven't been able to find funding but making the blanket claim that it's due to apprehension of Darwin vs. Creationism vs. Intelligent Design is pure bull. The three explanations aren't even at odds unless someone's being so enormously thick as to ignore any explanation that isn't their own. At that point we're arguing with someone who just wants to hear their own voice and has selectively tuned out all other voices just for the sake of argument.
I suggest a boycott of all articles which are spun to involve global warming or the creation of the universe. Let's stick to the real issue. In this case the real issue is who funded the project before and why they really dropped funding. None of this hand-waving "blame the religious fanatics" bunk.
3.2 million vs. 32,400. It's pretty easy to see that the term "neocon" is just useless jargon. One could say "troll". The use of the word neocon is meant to elicit a negative or inflammatory response. It has no real utility in defining a political group.
The point is not what "neocon" expands to. The point is whether or not neocon has any meaning more than a random insult.
More specifically, the term "neolib" wasn't used in a mainstream headline until about a week ago (New York Times). So if there weren't any neolibs for the last decade, and there wasn't a clear distinction between neocons and eldercons, then, as the GP said, WTF is a neocon? Is that like a Decepticon?
The GP was pointing out the ridiculous use of meaningless jargon whenever politics becomes involved. The speech pattern is the same as someone with Tourette's only they don't use the 7 swear words; they use meaningless political labels.
It's times like these I wish I could find the MS official who admonished the entire world that there is no such thing as a 0-day exploit.
I get laughed at all the time but I'm still saying the same thing that I was saying 11 years ago when Chicago Beta (Win95) was put on store shelves as production quality software,"Every bug is a potential exploit you fools!" Somehow the EULA manages to sheild them from listening. It's the software equivalent of singing "la-la" with their fingers in their ears.
Actually, considering the etymology of patent, it stands to reason that patent was used as an adjective before it came into use as a noun. That etymology would then justify the adverb patently and would further mean that the adjective form patented is a late-comer to the language. So that does make my rant patent nonsense.
But since you didn't address this from an etymological point of view I still win the point even though my rant is debunked.
I guess that depends whether or not you recognize that many nouns are made into adjectives by adding -ed. If you look up patented you will see that it is also the adjective form of the noun patent.
As per my original rant I consider the adjective form "patent" to be lazy. It's a result of most people not being able to easily pronounce the phonetic sound "-a-ten-ted" choosing instead to quit after "-a-tent". Many people have problems with the staccato inflection.
In the case of patent vs. patented as the adjective it stands to reason that "patented" is preferable as it follows the general method of forming the adjective by adding -ed or -ish to the noun. Refusing to recognize the typical transformations of words is trollish behavior. You may have a patent on being a troll but few people will follow your patented behavior. You may argue that your behavior is best described as patent tomfoolery but that would be patentedly out of line with the established conventions of forming an adjective from the noun and a case of patented laziness.
patently - adj. "Very", as in: that is patently absurd. Synonyms: literally, incredibly, totally
It's an adverb just like all the others you've cited. As an adverb it should be formed from the adjective--meaning it should be "patentedly". Merriam-Webster, however, supports the lazy "patently" formed from the noun or verb "patent". If you look at all adverbs, though, they're nearly always formed from the adjective.
It makes me cringe every time I see it. "patently"... -ly on the end of a noun form.
You don't grin sheeply (from the noun). You grin sheepishly (from the adjective). You don't speak forcely (from the noun). You speak forcefully (from the adjective). You shouldn't do something that's patently illegal (from the noun). That should be patentedly absurd (from the adjective).
And no, I don't really care. I've been wanting to write this grammar rant for years.:)
That was my thought, too. I'm all in favor of Google as the search engine but the capability that a network of these things would give to a single corporation which owns them outright makes me more than a little uneasy. For no particular reason other than the sheer "dayum. Is there anything you can't do if you have that at your disposal?"
the reason people use IP is because they don't know what else to do with ideas
That's perhaps the most insightful point I've ever heard on the issue.
The reason people use IP is because they don't know what else to do with ideas. That is so true. Some moron sitting around has an idea and the concept that their brain actually functions is so astounding to them that they make it their life work to guard and protect that idea--like they have nothing better to do with their life.
That is so much the IP trump card. You win. All of us win.
I'm going to spend the next week snickering at everyone I work with. This behavior is so true that it classifies all of corporate America.
What you can't do is then turn around and say "because we don't have a good explanation, God did it."
That's where you're exactly wrong.
Knowledge is a continuous process. When you're born you don't know much so the phenomena which makes the toaster work in the morning is at the level of God. When you finally ask your parents how the toaster makes the bread crunchy then God, working through your parents, imparts that knowledge on to you. Depending upon your developmental level you may or may not fully understand it. Whether or not you understand it affects how many further questions you ask about that topic.
As you grow older God teaches you more and more about the world. Even the most enlightened physicists, however, still have a couple of things to work out. At their level in their lives those few remaining unknowns are where God is for them.
That's precisely the point why there must always be a God. There is always something, somewhere, which we haven't quite figured out yet. That's where God is. Depending upon how much effort we put into it God may choose to share that knowledge with us.
Your point is well observed and noted. I also agree. Leaving autorun off for all but the most introlerable applications had really, in the end, no effect. To which my response is:
If it's not necessary then why the hell did the software keep bringing up error boxes for all those years asserting that it was? Are you disputing the error boxes with the Autorun admonishments? It's called boiling a frog and social engineering. These companies knew that they were engineering the userbase to accept what would eventually be software automatically installed upon the insertion of a CDROM. Go ahead. Deny the facts. People always fsckin' do.
If ever tinfoil had a legitimate reason it's in this situation.
You did notice from '95 to '98 nearly every CD enabled application would annoy you with the "it is recommended to enable Autorun by going to the Control Panel... etc. etc. etc" Oh wait? You didn't notice that? Probably because you didn't think to disable autorun 'til now so that you could take part in the brow-beating.
You did notice that, from '98-'02, nearly every CD burning application on Windows began to annoy you with the "It is required for this application to function properly that you enable the Autorun feature of the CD drive by going to the Control Panel... etc. etc. etc." Oh? What's that? You didn't notice these error boxes? Probably because you didn't think to disable autorun until now so that you could take part in the brow-beating.
I, on the other hand (am an arrogant prick), and I did spend all of those years turning off Autorun until it just became impossible to use any CDROM enabled Windows software without it.
By the way, I like most of your posts. I've just been waiting for the last two weeks to slam someone on the "just disable autorun" issue and you happened to be the poster of the day.:)
Paying "us" licensing fees? What critical technology or protocol did YOU develop?
What critical portion of any technology do the investors develop? None. That's why they're the investors. They supply the money and they reap the profit. That's how VCs work. Do you know anything about investing at all?
I don't care who laid the actual cable. The moment Cisco and Dlink thought they could start making routers functioning on communication protocols developed with taxpayer money they should have been paying the licensing fees back to the government to ease our tax burden. WTF are we investing in the gov't for anyway? Don't give me any crap about bettering society. We're funding businesses so that we can just fscking give them away for someone else to profit off of? WTF? When's the last time someone just dropped a business technology in your lap and said,"Okay. We've fleeced the taxpayers to bring this to a marketably viable point. You just go play golf and collect the profit."
More like I'd been using a word processor long before Win95 and MS-Office were even a clue in anyone's business plan and I didn't appreciate the featureware.
Do you get it? Some of us don't like featureware. Get it? We don't want featureware. If it has a legitimate function then fine, code it in. If it's purely featureware to help fsckin' morons who don't know how to format their own page, check their own spelling, or complete their own words... Leave it the fsck out of the system.
The very first thing I've done for the last 8 years is to turn off every little bit of featureware that crops up with each new revision of any MS Office component. In many cases I find that I must disable the option in multiple locations. eg. Turning off autocorrect and autospelling in Word won't necessarily turn it off in Outlook. Outlook starts with all the folders having these horrible dividing lines, sorted into groups, blah blah blah. You can manually turn all this crap (yes, C-R-A-P, crap) off. Then, each time you create a new folder you must do it again.
Oh look, here's a toilet with a pencil sharpener. If you don't want the pencil sharpener you can fold it down but it pops back up every time you flush the toilet.
The link in my post has all kinds of things to try
That's precisely my point about why Windows still sucks. I don't need all kinds of things to try. I need to know how to find out 1) what icons are supposed to be there, 2) what processes are getting in the way, 3) why processes are getting in the way of the tool tray icons.
Look. I'm a scientist. I do not go around randomly pushing buttons and pulling levers until things seem to work. "Trying all kinds of things": making random changes; most of which are likely completely unrelated and trying them could very well break other things. That's the stupidest approach to solving a software problem that anyone has ever proposed. But that's become the norm in today's world where crappy software and object oriented buzzwords run the market.
If something's broken I want to know exactly what, exactly why, exactly how, and exactly what it will take to fix it. Open source gives me this option. Proprietary software gives me "all kinds of things to try." I know what I'll try: I'll try formatting Windows and installing Linux. Look! Problem gone!
rather than just give up and blame/write-off the OS for a relatively minor problem
When I call customer support for my hardware vendor they tell me it's an OS issue. When I call Microsoft they tell me to talk with the vendors of the various software loaded at login. When I call the various vendors they tell me to file a bug report. I'm not giving up and blaming anything. I'm making a statement of fact. Proprietary software is the industries' way of giving up and blaming someone else because, obviously, the faulty code couldn't possibly be theirs. They have far too many certifications and QA audits to make any mistakes.
Maybe the problem is that there are a dozen different methods to register an icon in the tooltray and each one of those methods is polled at a different time during the login sequence. That's where my money is. If the software design wasn't so hush-hush proprietary secret then they could've standardized on one method years ago. Simplify. Standardize. Secure. That's not something they teach in the $10k blanket certification courses, though. Oh look. Another piece of paper for a 160-hour course in clicky-clicky. Whup-dee-effing-doo. You can keep your paper certs. I'll keep my peronsal skills.
There's no zealotry here. I've been watching this same bullshit since Windows 3.1 and it gets worse and worse with each release. Every release there are a hundred of these little things. Yes, they're little things. Yes, most users don't notice them. Every potential bug is a potential exploit. What's happening when 5 out of the 12 methods of registering a tool tray icon are faililng? Where's that data being lost and what memory register is it landing in? What else could break that sequence and exploit it? If these were such little bugs perhaps they could've fixed it sometime in the last 10 years rather than shoving new bloatware and featureware into the installation.
Simplify. Standardize. Secure. That's a cooperative model which OSS fits nicely into. Proprietary software fails before Simplify is even finished.
Taxpayer money. It's complete BS that we even have to pay for access at all. We, the taxpayers, created the Internet. The government and the companies should be paying us the licensing fees to use our technology.
Oh, but no one remembers the finer points of whose money it was that got the whole thing started. That always seems to be the least relevant point for some reason. I wonder why...
Slashdot Mirror
I can find financial statements but they're not broken down by exhibit.
I'm telling you. It's a tax writeoff issue. Last year the accountants saw it as financially more profitable to let the company have the writeoff. This year the money was paid to the execs because the execs saw it as more financially profitable for them to take the writeoffs personally. This whole thing is an exhibit of finding a better way to milk the IRS pyramid scheme. It has nothing to do with religious fundamentalists except for the spin/hype factor.
The debate of whether or not they were Ribonucleic or Deoxyribonucleic makes zero bit of difference. At the level of zapping a mixture of ammonia, carbon dioxide, water, and oxygen with a lightning bolt the statistical significance of the inclusion of an extra hydroxy is insignificant.
Pardon me. I'll be sure to subscribe to your theory next time. What if you're wrong?
At one time everything was ammonia, water, carbon dioxide, and oxygen. Then lightning struck and some of that turned into DNA fragments. After a few million years of floating randomly around in the ocean some of those DNA fragments came upon environments where they could catalyze ammonia, water, carbon dioxide, and oxygen to form similar DNA fragments. After a few million years of floating randomly around in the ocean some of those DNA fragments collected together and, after a few more lightning strikes, recruited some fatty carbon chains to encapsulate them. After a few million more years of floating randomly around...
More than likely they have but you don't see the news story about it because the spin potential isn't there.
I wouldn't be surprised if this year's private donors are the high level execs of last year's corporate donors. They've probably figured out the pyramid scheme works out better if they pay themselves through the company and then take the private tax deduction for the non-profit contribution.
I suppose I'm the only person who thought of this... except for the people actually doing it.
I read all three articles and not a single one can honestly say that it was because of debate between scientists and fundamentalist Christians. First, it really isn't much of a debate. The only people debating it are people who've got their fingers lodged firmly in their ears. Second, the articles only acknowledge that corporate sponsors declined to participate this year. It's much more likely there was a change in a tax loophole which prompted the shift than there was any worry about fundamentalist Christians boycotting the museum's sponsors.
For Pete's sake... does anybody question anything anymore?
They're right that they haven't been able to find funding but making the blanket claim that it's due to apprehension of Darwin vs. Creationism vs. Intelligent Design is pure bull. The three explanations aren't even at odds unless someone's being so enormously thick as to ignore any explanation that isn't their own. At that point we're arguing with someone who just wants to hear their own voice and has selectively tuned out all other voices just for the sake of argument.
I suggest a boycott of all articles which are spun to involve global warming or the creation of the universe. Let's stick to the real issue. In this case the real issue is who funded the project before and why they really dropped funding. None of this hand-waving "blame the religious fanatics" bunk.
No shit!
Try a googlefight for neocon vs. neolib.
3.2 million vs. 32,400. It's pretty easy to see that the term "neocon" is just useless jargon. One could say "troll". The use of the word neocon is meant to elicit a negative or inflammatory response. It has no real utility in defining a political group.
The point is not what "neocon" expands to. The point is whether or not neocon has any meaning more than a random insult.
More specifically, the term "neolib" wasn't used in a mainstream headline until about a week ago (New York Times). So if there weren't any neolibs for the last decade, and there wasn't a clear distinction between neocons and eldercons, then, as the GP said, WTF is a neocon? Is that like a Decepticon?
The GP was pointing out the ridiculous use of meaningless jargon whenever politics becomes involved. The speech pattern is the same as someone with Tourette's only they don't use the 7 swear words; they use meaningless political labels.
It's times like these I wish I could find the MS official who admonished the entire world that there is no such thing as a 0-day exploit.
I get laughed at all the time but I'm still saying the same thing that I was saying 11 years ago when Chicago Beta (Win95) was put on store shelves as production quality software,"Every bug is a potential exploit you fools!" Somehow the EULA manages to sheild them from listening. It's the software equivalent of singing "la-la" with their fingers in their ears.
Actually, considering the etymology of patent, it stands to reason that patent was used as an adjective before it came into use as a noun. That etymology would then justify the adverb patently and would further mean that the adjective form patented is a late-comer to the language. So that does make my rant patent nonsense.
But since you didn't address this from an etymological point of view I still win the point even though my rant is debunked.
I guess that depends whether or not you recognize that many nouns are made into adjectives by adding -ed. If you look up patented you will see that it is also the adjective form of the noun patent.
As per my original rant I consider the adjective form "patent" to be lazy. It's a result of most people not being able to easily pronounce the phonetic sound "-a-ten-ted" choosing instead to quit after "-a-tent". Many people have problems with the staccato inflection.
In the case of patent vs. patented as the adjective it stands to reason that "patented" is preferable as it follows the general method of forming the adjective by adding -ed or -ish to the noun. Refusing to recognize the typical transformations of words is trollish behavior. You may have a patent on being a troll but few people will follow your patented behavior. You may argue that your behavior is best described as patent tomfoolery but that would be patentedly out of line with the established conventions of forming an adjective from the noun and a case of patented laziness.
My original rant still stands.
It makes me cringe every time I see it. "patently"... -ly on the end of a noun form.
You don't grin sheeply (from the noun). You grin sheepishly (from the adjective). You don't speak forcely (from the noun). You speak forcefully (from the adjective). You shouldn't do something that's patently illegal (from the noun). That should be patentedly absurd (from the adjective).
And no, I don't really care. I've been wanting to write this grammar rant for years.
That's so beautiful. :) You should copyright that before Hollywood steals it.
That was my thought, too. I'm all in favor of Google as the search engine but the capability that a network of these things would give to a single corporation which owns them outright makes me more than a little uneasy. For no particular reason other than the sheer "dayum. Is there anything you can't do if you have that at your disposal?"
The reason people use IP is because they don't know what else to do with ideas. That is so true. Some moron sitting around has an idea and the concept that their brain actually functions is so astounding to them that they make it their life work to guard and protect that idea--like they have nothing better to do with their life.
That is so much the IP trump card. You win. All of us win.
I'm going to spend the next week snickering at everyone I work with. This behavior is so true that it classifies all of corporate America.
Hehehehe...
Knowledge is a continuous process. When you're born you don't know much so the phenomena which makes the toaster work in the morning is at the level of God. When you finally ask your parents how the toaster makes the bread crunchy then God, working through your parents, imparts that knowledge on to you. Depending upon your developmental level you may or may not fully understand it. Whether or not you understand it affects how many further questions you ask about that topic.
As you grow older God teaches you more and more about the world. Even the most enlightened physicists, however, still have a couple of things to work out. At their level in their lives those few remaining unknowns are where God is for them.
That's precisely the point why there must always be a God. There is always something, somewhere, which we haven't quite figured out yet. That's where God is. Depending upon how much effort we put into it God may choose to share that knowledge with us.
Your point is well observed and noted. I also agree. Leaving autorun off for all but the most introlerable applications had really, in the end, no effect. To which my response is:
If it's not necessary then why the hell did the software keep bringing up error boxes for all those years asserting that it was? Are you disputing the error boxes with the Autorun admonishments? It's called boiling a frog and social engineering. These companies knew that they were engineering the userbase to accept what would eventually be software automatically installed upon the insertion of a CDROM. Go ahead. Deny the facts. People always fsckin' do.
If ever tinfoil had a legitimate reason it's in this situation.
So the burning question in my mind is... Didn't any of the Symantec or Norton of McAfee firewalls pick up the unwanted network activity?
Oh wait... "XCP media player wishes to access the internet. Would you like to allow this action?"
Some effing firewall...
You did notice from '95 to '98 nearly every CD enabled application would annoy you with the "it is recommended to enable Autorun by going to the Control Panel... etc. etc. etc" Oh wait? You didn't notice that? Probably because you didn't think to disable autorun 'til now so that you could take part in the brow-beating.
:)
You did notice that, from '98-'02, nearly every CD burning application on Windows began to annoy you with the "It is required for this application to function properly that you enable the Autorun feature of the CD drive by going to the Control Panel... etc. etc. etc." Oh? What's that? You didn't notice these error boxes? Probably because you didn't think to disable autorun until now so that you could take part in the brow-beating.
I, on the other hand (am an arrogant prick), and I did spend all of those years turning off Autorun until it just became impossible to use any CDROM enabled Windows software without it.
By the way, I like most of your posts. I've just been waiting for the last two weeks to slam someone on the "just disable autorun" issue and you happened to be the poster of the day.
I don't care who laid the actual cable. The moment Cisco and Dlink thought they could start making routers functioning on communication protocols developed with taxpayer money they should have been paying the licensing fees back to the government to ease our tax burden. WTF are we investing in the gov't for anyway? Don't give me any crap about bettering society. We're funding businesses so that we can just fscking give them away for someone else to profit off of? WTF? When's the last time someone just dropped a business technology in your lap and said,"Okay. We've fleeced the taxpayers to bring this to a marketably viable point. You just go play golf and collect the profit."
I repeat... WTF?
Do you get it? Some of us don't like featureware. Get it? We don't want featureware. If it has a legitimate function then fine, code it in. If it's purely featureware to help fsckin' morons who don't know how to format their own page, check their own spelling, or complete their own words... Leave it the fsck out of the system.
Get it? We don't like featureware.
The very first thing I've done for the last 8 years is to turn off every little bit of featureware that crops up with each new revision of any MS Office component. In many cases I find that I must disable the option in multiple locations. eg. Turning off autocorrect and autospelling in Word won't necessarily turn it off in Outlook. Outlook starts with all the folders having these horrible dividing lines, sorted into groups, blah blah blah. You can manually turn all this crap (yes, C-R-A-P, crap) off. Then, each time you create a new folder you must do it again.
Oh look, here's a toilet with a pencil sharpener. If you don't want the pencil sharpener you can fold it down but it pops back up every time you flush the toilet.
Utter crap.
Look. I'm a scientist. I do not go around randomly pushing buttons and pulling levers until things seem to work. "Trying all kinds of things": making random changes; most of which are likely completely unrelated and trying them could very well break other things. That's the stupidest approach to solving a software problem that anyone has ever proposed. But that's become the norm in today's world where crappy software and object oriented buzzwords run the market.
If something's broken I want to know exactly what, exactly why, exactly how, and exactly what it will take to fix it. Open source gives me this option. Proprietary software gives me "all kinds of things to try." I know what I'll try: I'll try formatting Windows and installing Linux. Look! Problem gone!
When I call customer support for my hardware vendor they tell me it's an OS issue. When I call Microsoft they tell me to talk with the vendors of the various software loaded at login. When I call the various vendors they tell me to file a bug report. I'm not giving up and blaming anything. I'm making a statement of fact. Proprietary software is the industries' way of giving up and blaming someone else because, obviously, the faulty code couldn't possibly be theirs. They have far too many certifications and QA audits to make any mistakes.
Maybe the problem is that there are a dozen different methods to register an icon in the tooltray and each one of those methods is polled at a different time during the login sequence. That's where my money is. If the software design wasn't so hush-hush proprietary secret then they could've standardized on one method years ago. Simplify. Standardize. Secure. That's not something they teach in the $10k blanket certification courses, though. Oh look. Another piece of paper for a 160-hour course in clicky-clicky. Whup-dee-effing-doo. You can keep your paper certs. I'll keep my peronsal skills.
There's no zealotry here. I've been watching this same bullshit since Windows 3.1 and it gets worse and worse with each release. Every release there are a hundred of these little things. Yes, they're little things. Yes, most users don't notice them. Every potential bug is a potential exploit. What's happening when 5 out of the 12 methods of registering a tool tray icon are faililng? Where's that data being lost and what memory register is it landing in? What else could break that sequence and exploit it? If these were such little bugs perhaps they could've fixed it sometime in the last 10 years rather than shoving new bloatware and featureware into the installation.
Simplify. Standardize. Secure. That's a cooperative model which OSS fits nicely into. Proprietary software fails before Simplify is even finished.
Taxpayer money. It's complete BS that we even have to pay for access at all. We, the taxpayers, created the Internet. The government and the companies should be paying us the licensing fees to use our technology.
Oh, but no one remembers the finer points of whose money it was that got the whole thing started. That always seems to be the least relevant point for some reason. I wonder why...