So what if it is your intention to provide open access? What is the protocol for broadcasting that intention? Is it somehow not to leave the AP open? I just don't get it. The door is open, the sign says 'OPEN', there is a little DHCP ticket machine saying 'please take a number and wait for service' - and this isn't where I queue to get my bread?
Seriously, this is a lovely example of why RFCs and so on should contain sections about the legal intention of protocols. The clear technical intention is to invite access - but evidently to a lawyer this is not enough. So could we not give them a few words more?
How much easier the legal landscape would be if protocol documents said, as appropriate, "by employing this protocol element the ENDPOINT (now, of course, an expanded term that touches on delegation of authority) expresses its intention/invites a request/makes no attempt to enter into a legal contract to..."!
To take another example, the FTP protocol could specify explicitly that by performing this protocol handshake it expresses the intention to transfer uninterpreted sequences of octets, and declares that any interpretation of those data as property in any sense is the responsibility of higher-level mechanisms acting independently at the endpoints. See? I didn't download your song. I downloaded an octet sequence into a file and then elected to use an MP3 player and some speakers to interpret the file as your song. Perhaps the law was broken when the song was encoded to MP3 (did we have an agreement forbidding this?), or perhaps when it was played back into the room (is this illegal?), but bits are bits are bits and we could have said so.
The lawyers always tell us that all we have to do is explain to them what we're really trying to accomplish... couldn't we call them on it?
Am I deeply confused? According to wikipedia (and my own memories of the issue), slavery was definitively outlawed in England (if it ever existed, and the legal theory is that, de jure, it did not) in 1772. American revolution, 1775-1783. Slave ownership was abolished in the British Empire in 1833; in the USA in 1865. The will to keep slaves could plausibly have helped motivate the American revolution, but the will to abolish it? That doesn't seem to align with the historical sequence of events.
I'm not claiming that this bears on the primary point one way or the other, but the US certainly did not have a monopoly on Liberal thought in the 18th century, any more than it does now!
Perhaps it's just because of my abstraction-rich background, but I believe that legislators would make more useful progress by considering issues such as this - or, to take another example, what the process is for establishing the rights of an alien intelligence - than micromanaging society through point fixes on transient social details. Why in the first place you would legislate a drinking age instead of developing a standard mechanism for determination of social responsibility is completely beyond me, but developing a taste for looking at boundary cases is probably the easiest way of addressing this problem.
I see! It's like the terrorism thing! "Anyone who has fly-by-wire steering is obviously a car thief and deserves to die, taking any nearby pedestrians (who, if they are near a new car, are obviously car thieves too!) with them."
Furthermore, power steering might be a minor luxury for you, but perhaps for my disabled mother it is another matter entirely.
The question is not what most cars have historically done, it's what any car on the road within the lifetime of this gadget might do. It is not, furthermore, a question of under what circumstances you could control a car, it is one of under what circumstances anyone could control a car. Summary execution (whether entirely deliberate or not) is not a matter for the balance of probabilities!
...And again, even if it were, given that confusion does occur, we should be asking about the effect on those least likely to be car thieves, should we not?
I agree: patriotism should be punished, not rewarded. Betraying the people you live with for the sake of a political abstraction is mindbogglingly uncool, no matter whose abstraction it may be.
Do you think? I think we currently pay a factor of four or more in cruft, and it won't go away by itself. So our choices for 30 years from now, assuming things go as they have been going, are a factor of 16 or a factor of 64 slowdown, depending on whether we make an effort in this generation or not... not that we will.
Certainly the situation is much subtler than that. If time to market were the overriding concern, then complex systems like x86, C++, Windows and the Web would not be in use, since their excessive complexity makes them expensive both to develop and to develop for. Instead, I suspect that their complexity and long effort-to-market is part of the barrier to entry for newer, more sophisticated, better engineered and simpler systems; only the great behemoth developers have the resources to get to the market in a timely fashion, or perhaps even at all, past this mountain of complexity.
To put it bluntly, more complex designs are harder to copy, and thus to the advantage of entrenched players, even at the cost of product quality and time to market.
This is a bit like saying that a truck with a rocket plane inside has 'many of the features of a rocket plane.' The point of RISC is to manage the complexity of the processor, minimise the amount of unnecessary work, and shift load onto software wherever that has zero or negative performance impact. By, effectively, adding an on-the-fly compiler in hardware, the Intel engineers have not done this, even if they have streamlined the back-end execution engine using tricks published in the RISC literature.
But Intel's traditional expertise is in memory and process—and since caches now dwarf execution units, well, there's no need to worry about doing it 'right' anymore! And sadly, I almost mean that.
The situation is common in computing. The engineering design of familiar systems such as C++ or the Web itself is nothing short of incoherent: layer upon layer of patches and transformative interfaces where a little planning and a more minimalist approach would reduce both resource consumption and programmer effort all around. But performance and efficiency are nowhere near as important to industry as back-compatibility and, well, marketing; and the overheads are concealed by providing capacity that honestly grows much faster than the task at hand.
Meanwhile, since I live in Canada and by this time of year I do need heating, I have my boinc client running at 100%, I'm doing some good, and (since the peak capacity of the machine is justified in other ways) it's not costing a penny. The heating here is electric anyway; it may as well do some computation on its way into my home!
Doing whatever@home in the winter is just good sense.
Now what's needed is a distributed computing client that is controlled by a room thermostat. No, really, I'm totally serious.
Mod parent down, please. There is nothing interesting or informative about not knowing French. (The domain ilesansfil.com is from île - island, cognate with English 'isle' - sans - without, cognate with the English word 'sans' - fil - wire, cognate with English 'filament.')
Parent should certainly have been aware that the verb 'to be' goes je suis/tu es/il est, even if he doesn't know the word 'fil,' before commenting on a Francophone's French!
Nobody here is choosing #2. I don't get it. First, statistics don't reduce to the individual in the manner you appear to assume. Second, and more specifically, this policy is an artificial measure intended to address, however so subtly, an entire list of social ills: peer pressure, industrial malfeasance, stress on the healthcare system, etc. etc. etc.. There is no law that you can't gargle bleach until you are 18, because there's no stupid fashion for gargling bleach.
So, no, if just one person wanted to smoke cigarettes, there wouldn't be, and wouldn't need to be a law.
Point A: it isn't about right or wrong, it's about socially destructive or socially tolerable. Point B: this is precisely why it's the government's business even though it infringes on personal liberties. It's the individual's responsibility to manage their own ethics (including conforming to laws without calculating the extent of the penalty, because...). It's the state's business to manage the interactions of bulk human behaviour. Because that's why we have one.
Myself I find it hard to understand why nobody considers a technical solution: clearly it should be part of the cell phone designs and standards that they accept input from the environment. First, they should stop encouraging loud speech in quiet places by adjusting their volume and input amplification to the ambient noise level effectively. Secondly, they should accept short range {radio, inductive, whatever} signals requesting particular behaviours; in particular, there should be standard environmental signals for 'this is a silent-mode zone,' 'this is an emergency-calls-only zone,' and 'this is a low radio energy zone'.
Oh, and as to what constitutes an emergency: both incoming and outgoing calls (other than 911) receive a message before connecting - 'your telephone/the telephone you are attempting to reach is currently within an emergency only zone. A $x fee applies, refundable if you can document the emergency. Press # to pay this fee and complete your call.' (Appropriate values of x are probably 10 in a school, 100 in a cinema, 1000 in a theatre, 10000 in a law court.)
Everything necessary to accomplish this is almost certainly already inside the phone. It's primarily a firmware issue. That and a matter of political will. But it's more fun to talk about what assholes people are and how you're going to teach them a lesson than it is to address the problem, isn't it?
Finally, and on a rather different and increasingly less well-adjusted note, <troll>I do wish that the rabid anti-cellphone types would just come out and admit it that their main objection is that they are intensely nosy and resent not being able to work out what other people's private conversations are about. I bet you want to ban public Chinese, too, you losers!</troll> Um, no, seriously, if you have trouble with feeling that foreigners are talking behind your back, too, then it is your problem. We're only honestly talking about cellphones after controlling for that sadly common effect. Reasonable people are not so angry about other people having social lives.
The thing I find amazing is quite the contrary: the incredible number of people who seem to think that vampires are in some sense 'real.' Now, I don't mean that they seriously think that the most likely thing to have happen to them in a back alley after midnight is that they get their throats bitten, but in the sense that they will have arguments about whether vampires 'really' have reflections or are 'really' stopped by running water—as if there were at least a cultural tradition to refer to and discuss. While in fact, as far as I know (and confirmed by TFA, FWIW), the entities they are discussing were lately invented by Bram Stoker and embellished by Hollywood and, more recently, White Wolf.
That's right, the whole thing was made up in 1897, and (according to Wikipedia, anyway) is the same age as institutional fingerprinting and the Boston subway.
<tongue-firmly-in-cheek>If I were American, I might think of Boston as 'one of our earliest civilisations'—but the London underground was there first.</tongue-firmly-in-cheek>
While I can see the technical merit in using the Ki/Mi/Gi prefix instead of K/M/G, I object to it for the simple reason that kibibyte, mibibyte and gibibyte are stupid sounding words and I refuse to use them for that reason alone.
I resolve this issue to my satisfaction by reading "KiB" as "Kibobytes."
The argument is structurally valid, but I do not think it is supported by the data. Otherwise, why do I recall so many forced migrations from Word Perfect to Word, where the entire staff was happy and productive with Word Perfect, and only the PHB favoured Word? I can't honestly think of a sinister explanation for this, but I can't think of a reasonable one, either! It was, and remains, just a mystery to me.
I will acknowledge that my timeout for negative experiences is quite long. It is possible that recent versions of Word are usable, and I simply wouldn't know, because I am still feeling burned from my previous attempt to use it, five or ten years ago. I still won't buy from Apple, because I'm still upset about the way support for the Newton was cancelled overnight, and I can't bring myself to trust them again, either.
Maybe I'll calm down in another decade or so (or maybe not, because I was cornered into getting a machine with Vista pre-installed, and now, after I was previously told that XP would not be supported any more, people are actively refusing to support Vista. At this rate I may be stuck in Prisoner's Dilemma hell until I die).
You want me to spend more money on something that already doesn't work? It is the idea of Word that is broken, unless perhaps they have added a "show codes" mode, removed (or possibly shifted to user-programmable macros) the attempts to be 'intelligent' about interpreting keyboard input, centralised and rationalised the layout control mechanisms, and stopped cacheing in-memory data structures in files?
You say that you doubt my word processing skills - well, it's certainly true that I'm not a professional secretary and have not devoted my life to mastering a single software tool. But my experience of what constitutes 'expertise' with Word is that experts know when they're screwed and change the design of the document when it's outside the rather small core that Word actually implements: any increase in efficiency derives largely from not trying any more.
Now, you are right; as I have already said, Writer isn't clearly better - it is also subject to bizarre glitches where bullet points want to change their formatting, unasked non-deletable blank lines insert themselves between tables, page breaks seemingly have more memory than they have control interface, and so on. But as I say, Open Office isn't more expensive to use, and it is much cheaper to buy. So until someone figures out how to make a product that uses what we learned from Emacs and TeX and package it for the end user (and, please note, the attempts to make LaTeX-based word processors are the exact opposite of what I mean - it's the power, not the lameness, of previous research that should be preserved!), it's still Writer for me.
Do you know, I (yes, I know this dates me) have worked in places where every single person who created documents, both technical and secretarial, knew and vastly preferred Word Perfect. So management made everyone use Word, "because it's standard, and everyone knows it." The problem is much bigger and weirder than is believed - for some reason, all overheads associated with Microsoft products are disregarded; overheads associated with its competition are charged.
Thing is, Office is the cheaper and faster option. It costs too much to go to microsoft free solutions, because the truly expensive stuff are employees (who generally can be expected to know Word and Excel automagically) and training time.
I've never understood people who say this. My experience with word processors, in particular, is that with Word it takes all fracking afternoon just to get the paragraph breaks to look vaguely normal, because the damned thing is always trying to intuit what you want, and then it leaves magic poop in the cracks so that everything you ever did wrong can come back from the dead. And then of course it crashes and you get to start over. Even if it were really true that the training were 'free' (rather than a constant 20% overhead in your office where the local 'expert' is stuck doing other people's work for them while gawkers stand around and try to learn from it), broken tools impose real costs.
The problem is, 'normal' people derive a sense of personal satisfaction from coercing broken tools to do what they want, in much the same way, I suppose, that musicians often prefer bizarre and impractical instruments for their 'character.' And, Scotland forgive me, Word is the bagpipes of the software world.
I take it you don't travel a lot? There are no visas or other preliminary formalities involved in travelling between the US and Canada; there's no mechanism by which you would normally find out the answer in advance. When I go on a business trip, I show up at the airport and take the plane. Or, in the case that the immigration people decide to take a dislike to me, I guess I don't take the plane. In which case I'm out the time, I'm out the money, the people I'm going to see don't see me, and while I agree that countries have their own sovreignty, it's altogether better for everyone concerned if that only happens where there's some need. Peace protests may be a damned nuisance, but they are not, in fact, illegal in Canada, any more than they are in the US.
Now of course we can hope that there is something more sinister going on, that these people are not in fact peace protestors, but, I dunno, blew up a bus and aren't telling us about it. Then the bureaucratic response would make some kind of sense. But if, as claimed, the US authorities are faking criminal records in order to prevent people doing things that are legal, well, something is definitely wrong with the picture. That's the kind of thing that isn't supposed to happen in the civilised world.
Perhaps my outlook is biased by the fact that I don't ever actually recall meeting anyone who isn't a world traveler. No no, I take that back, I once knew someone in Canada who had never left the city, and when we lived in the backwoods of Jamaica the majority had probably never been to a city at all. But then, this nonsense applies to domestic flights too, does it not? As you say, the economy is not too shabby; unlike the Jamaican rural poor, Americans who don't fly home for turkey day have to be pretty rare.
In any case, whether or not you think it is acceptable to have two or three hours, various random humiliations, problems getting your meds and the fear of knowing that they now deliberately put guns on planes added to other people's travel plans, I don't recall this happening after the first WTC incident; and I doubt that doing it then would have reduced the chances of the second. And that was my point. It's unnecessary and unhelpful, at least as regards its claimed objectives, even if it doesn't bother you personally.
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So what if it is your intention to provide open access? What is the protocol for broadcasting that intention? Is it somehow not to leave the AP open? I just don't get it. The door is open, the sign says 'OPEN', there is a little DHCP ticket machine saying 'please take a number and wait for service' - and this isn't where I queue to get my bread?
Seriously, this is a lovely example of why RFCs and so on should contain sections about the legal intention of protocols. The clear technical intention is to invite access - but evidently to a lawyer this is not enough. So could we not give them a few words more?
How much easier the legal landscape would be if protocol documents said, as appropriate, "by employing this protocol element the ENDPOINT (now, of course, an expanded term that touches on delegation of authority) expresses its intention/invites a request/makes no attempt to enter into a legal contract to..."!
To take another example, the FTP protocol could specify explicitly that by performing this protocol handshake it expresses the intention to transfer uninterpreted sequences of octets, and declares that any interpretation of those data as property in any sense is the responsibility of higher-level mechanisms acting independently at the endpoints. See? I didn't download your song. I downloaded an octet sequence into a file and then elected to use an MP3 player and some speakers to interpret the file as your song. Perhaps the law was broken when the song was encoded to MP3 (did we have an agreement forbidding this?), or perhaps when it was played back into the room (is this illegal?), but bits are bits are bits and we could have said so.
The lawyers always tell us that all we have to do is explain to them what we're really trying to accomplish... couldn't we call them on it?
Can't be true.
(Sorry.)
Am I deeply confused? According to wikipedia (and my own memories of the issue), slavery was definitively outlawed in England (if it ever existed, and the legal theory is that, de jure, it did not) in 1772. American revolution, 1775-1783. Slave ownership was abolished in the British Empire in 1833; in the USA in 1865. The will to keep slaves could plausibly have helped motivate the American revolution, but the will to abolish it? That doesn't seem to align with the historical sequence of events.
I'm not claiming that this bears on the primary point one way or the other, but the US certainly did not have a monopoly on Liberal thought in the 18th century, any more than it does now!
Good grief, man! If b0x3n is now singular, what's the plural? B0x3nZ? B0x3s3n? Or is it now ueberGermanic and something like b03x3n3n? :)
Perhaps it's just because of my abstraction-rich background, but I believe that legislators would make more useful progress by considering issues such as this - or, to take another example, what the process is for establishing the rights of an alien intelligence - than micromanaging society through point fixes on transient social details. Why in the first place you would legislate a drinking age instead of developing a standard mechanism for determination of social responsibility is completely beyond me, but developing a taste for looking at boundary cases is probably the easiest way of addressing this problem.
I see! It's like the terrorism thing! "Anyone who has fly-by-wire steering is obviously a car thief and deserves to die, taking any nearby pedestrians (who, if they are near a new car, are obviously car thieves too!) with them."
Furthermore, power steering might be a minor luxury for you, but perhaps for my disabled mother it is another matter entirely.
The question is not what most cars have historically done, it's what any car on the road within the lifetime of this gadget might do. It is not, furthermore, a question of under what circumstances you could control a car, it is one of under what circumstances anyone could control a car. Summary execution (whether entirely deliberate or not) is not a matter for the balance of probabilities!
...And again, even if it were, given that confusion does occur, we should be asking about the effect on those least likely to be car thieves, should we not?
Yes! That's why we need to x-ray the shoes and steal the water bottles of all the programmers.
I agree: patriotism should be punished, not rewarded. Betraying the people you live with for the sake of a political abstraction is mindbogglingly uncool, no matter whose abstraction it may be.
Do you think? I think we currently pay a factor of four or more in cruft, and it won't go away by itself. So our choices for 30 years from now, assuming things go as they have been going, are a factor of 16 or a factor of 64 slowdown, depending on whether we make an effort in this generation or not... not that we will.
Certainly the situation is much subtler than that. If time to market were the overriding concern, then complex systems like x86, C++, Windows and the Web would not be in use, since their excessive complexity makes them expensive both to develop and to develop for. Instead, I suspect that their complexity and long effort-to-market is part of the barrier to entry for newer, more sophisticated, better engineered and simpler systems; only the great behemoth developers have the resources to get to the market in a timely fashion, or perhaps even at all, past this mountain of complexity.
To put it bluntly, more complex designs are harder to copy, and thus to the advantage of entrenched players, even at the cost of product quality and time to market.
This is a bit like saying that a truck with a rocket plane inside has 'many of the features of a rocket plane.' The point of RISC is to manage the complexity of the processor, minimise the amount of unnecessary work, and shift load onto software wherever that has zero or negative performance impact. By, effectively, adding an on-the-fly compiler in hardware, the Intel engineers have not done this, even if they have streamlined the back-end execution engine using tricks published in the RISC literature.
But Intel's traditional expertise is in memory and process—and since caches now dwarf execution units, well, there's no need to worry about doing it 'right' anymore! And sadly, I almost mean that.
The situation is common in computing. The engineering design of familiar systems such as C++ or the Web itself is nothing short of incoherent: layer upon layer of patches and transformative interfaces where a little planning and a more minimalist approach would reduce both resource consumption and programmer effort all around. But performance and efficiency are nowhere near as important to industry as back-compatibility and, well, marketing; and the overheads are concealed by providing capacity that honestly grows much faster than the task at hand.
Meanwhile, since I live in Canada and by this time of year I do need heating, I have my boinc client running at 100%, I'm doing some good, and (since the peak capacity of the machine is justified in other ways) it's not costing a penny. The heating here is electric anyway; it may as well do some computation on its way into my home!
Doing whatever@home in the winter is just good sense.
Now what's needed is a distributed computing client that is controlled by a room thermostat. No, really, I'm totally serious.
Ah, but we're us and you're you. And that makes all the difference. See the current article about Yahoo's dealings with China for support.... :-}
Ah ja. Sorry if I overreacted. You are right; there's probably no realistic way you could have anticipated that little weirdness storm!
Mod parent down, please. There is nothing interesting or informative about not knowing French. (The domain ilesansfil.com is from île - island, cognate with English 'isle' - sans - without, cognate with the English word 'sans' - fil - wire, cognate with English 'filament.')
Parent should certainly have been aware that the verb 'to be' goes je suis/tu es/il est, even if he doesn't know the word 'fil,' before commenting on a Francophone's French!
Nobody here is choosing #2. I don't get it. First, statistics don't reduce to the individual in the manner you appear to assume. Second, and more specifically, this policy is an artificial measure intended to address, however so subtly, an entire list of social ills: peer pressure, industrial malfeasance, stress on the healthcare system, etc. etc. etc.. There is no law that you can't gargle bleach until you are 18, because there's no stupid fashion for gargling bleach.
So, no, if just one person wanted to smoke cigarettes, there wouldn't be, and wouldn't need to be a law.
Point A: it isn't about right or wrong, it's about socially destructive or socially tolerable. Point B: this is precisely why it's the government's business even though it infringes on personal liberties. It's the individual's responsibility to manage their own ethics (including conforming to laws without calculating the extent of the penalty, because...). It's the state's business to manage the interactions of bulk human behaviour. Because that's why we have one.
Myself I find it hard to understand why nobody considers a technical solution: clearly it should be part of the cell phone designs and standards that they accept input from the environment. First, they should stop encouraging loud speech in quiet places by adjusting their volume and input amplification to the ambient noise level effectively. Secondly, they should accept short range {radio, inductive, whatever} signals requesting particular behaviours; in particular, there should be standard environmental signals for 'this is a silent-mode zone,' 'this is an emergency-calls-only zone,' and 'this is a low radio energy zone'.
Oh, and as to what constitutes an emergency: both incoming and outgoing calls (other than 911) receive a message before connecting - 'your telephone/the telephone you are attempting to reach is currently within an emergency only zone. A $x fee applies, refundable if you can document the emergency. Press # to pay this fee and complete your call.' (Appropriate values of x are probably 10 in a school, 100 in a cinema, 1000 in a theatre, 10000 in a law court.)
Everything necessary to accomplish this is almost certainly already inside the phone. It's primarily a firmware issue. That and a matter of political will. But it's more fun to talk about what assholes people are and how you're going to teach them a lesson than it is to address the problem, isn't it?
Finally, and on a rather different and increasingly less well-adjusted note, <troll>I do wish that the rabid anti-cellphone types would just come out and admit it that their main objection is that they are intensely nosy and resent not being able to work out what other people's private conversations are about. I bet you want to ban public Chinese, too, you losers!</troll> Um, no, seriously, if you have trouble with feeling that foreigners are talking behind your back, too, then it is your problem. We're only honestly talking about cellphones after controlling for that sadly common effect. Reasonable people are not so angry about other people having social lives.
The thing I find amazing is quite the contrary: the incredible number of people who seem to think that vampires are in some sense 'real.' Now, I don't mean that they seriously think that the most likely thing to have happen to them in a back alley after midnight is that they get their throats bitten, but in the sense that they will have arguments about whether vampires 'really' have reflections or are 'really' stopped by running water—as if there were at least a cultural tradition to refer to and discuss. While in fact, as far as I know (and confirmed by TFA, FWIW), the entities they are discussing were lately invented by Bram Stoker and embellished by Hollywood and, more recently, White Wolf.
That's right, the whole thing was made up in 1897, and (according to Wikipedia, anyway) is the same age as institutional fingerprinting and the Boston subway.
<tongue-firmly-in-cheek>If I were American, I might think of Boston as 'one of our earliest civilisations'—but the London underground was there first.</tongue-firmly-in-cheek>
I resolve this issue to my satisfaction by reading "KiB" as "Kibobytes."
The argument is structurally valid, but I do not think it is supported by the data. Otherwise, why do I recall so many forced migrations from Word Perfect to Word, where the entire staff was happy and productive with Word Perfect, and only the PHB favoured Word? I can't honestly think of a sinister explanation for this, but I can't think of a reasonable one, either! It was, and remains, just a mystery to me.
I will acknowledge that my timeout for negative experiences is quite long. It is possible that recent versions of Word are usable, and I simply wouldn't know, because I am still feeling burned from my previous attempt to use it, five or ten years ago. I still won't buy from Apple, because I'm still upset about the way support for the Newton was cancelled overnight, and I can't bring myself to trust them again, either.
Maybe I'll calm down in another decade or so (or maybe not, because I was cornered into getting a machine with Vista pre-installed, and now, after I was previously told that XP would not be supported any more, people are actively refusing to support Vista. At this rate I may be stuck in Prisoner's Dilemma hell until I die).
You want me to spend more money on something that already doesn't work? It is the idea of Word that is broken, unless perhaps they have added a "show codes" mode, removed (or possibly shifted to user-programmable macros) the attempts to be 'intelligent' about interpreting keyboard input, centralised and rationalised the layout control mechanisms, and stopped cacheing in-memory data structures in files?
You say that you doubt my word processing skills - well, it's certainly true that I'm not a professional secretary and have not devoted my life to mastering a single software tool. But my experience of what constitutes 'expertise' with Word is that experts know when they're screwed and change the design of the document when it's outside the rather small core that Word actually implements: any increase in efficiency derives largely from not trying any more.
Now, you are right; as I have already said, Writer isn't clearly better - it is also subject to bizarre glitches where bullet points want to change their formatting, unasked non-deletable blank lines insert themselves between tables, page breaks seemingly have more memory than they have control interface, and so on. But as I say, Open Office isn't more expensive to use, and it is much cheaper to buy. So until someone figures out how to make a product that uses what we learned from Emacs and TeX and package it for the end user (and, please note, the attempts to make LaTeX-based word processors are the exact opposite of what I mean - it's the power, not the lameness, of previous research that should be preserved!), it's still Writer for me.
Do you know, I (yes, I know this dates me) have worked in places where every single person who created documents, both technical and secretarial, knew and vastly preferred Word Perfect. So management made everyone use Word, "because it's standard, and everyone knows it." The problem is much bigger and weirder than is believed - for some reason, all overheads associated with Microsoft products are disregarded; overheads associated with its competition are charged.
I've never understood people who say this. My experience with word processors, in particular, is that with Word it takes all fracking afternoon just to get the paragraph breaks to look vaguely normal, because the damned thing is always trying to intuit what you want, and then it leaves magic poop in the cracks so that everything you ever did wrong can come back from the dead. And then of course it crashes and you get to start over. Even if it were really true that the training were 'free' (rather than a constant 20% overhead in your office where the local 'expert' is stuck doing other people's work for them while gawkers stand around and try to learn from it), broken tools impose real costs.
The problem is, 'normal' people derive a sense of personal satisfaction from coercing broken tools to do what they want, in much the same way, I suppose, that musicians often prefer bizarre and impractical instruments for their 'character.' And, Scotland forgive me, Word is the bagpipes of the software world.
I take it you don't travel a lot? There are no visas or other preliminary formalities involved in travelling between the US and Canada; there's no mechanism by which you would normally find out the answer in advance. When I go on a business trip, I show up at the airport and take the plane. Or, in the case that the immigration people decide to take a dislike to me, I guess I don't take the plane. In which case I'm out the time, I'm out the money, the people I'm going to see don't see me, and while I agree that countries have their own sovreignty, it's altogether better for everyone concerned if that only happens where there's some need. Peace protests may be a damned nuisance, but they are not, in fact, illegal in Canada, any more than they are in the US.
Now of course we can hope that there is something more sinister going on, that these people are not in fact peace protestors, but, I dunno, blew up a bus and aren't telling us about it. Then the bureaucratic response would make some kind of sense. But if, as claimed, the US authorities are faking criminal records in order to prevent people doing things that are legal, well, something is definitely wrong with the picture. That's the kind of thing that isn't supposed to happen in the civilised world.
Perhaps my outlook is biased by the fact that I don't ever actually recall meeting anyone who isn't a world traveler. No no, I take that back, I once knew someone in Canada who had never left the city, and when we lived in the backwoods of Jamaica the majority had probably never been to a city at all. But then, this nonsense applies to domestic flights too, does it not? As you say, the economy is not too shabby; unlike the Jamaican rural poor, Americans who don't fly home for turkey day have to be pretty rare.
In any case, whether or not you think it is acceptable to have two or three hours, various random humiliations, problems getting your meds and the fear of knowing that they now deliberately put guns on planes added to other people's travel plans, I don't recall this happening after the first WTC incident; and I doubt that doing it then would have reduced the chances of the second. And that was my point. It's unnecessary and unhelpful, at least as regards its claimed objectives, even if it doesn't bother you personally.