Definitely -- I don't disagree. Well put. I was just talking about the user experience. I knew several die-hard Mac users who had the same glassy (or furious) expression on their face the first time they saw OS X as I've seen on people using Vista for the first time.
But when Mac users had to migrate from OS9 to OS X, it was a lot more like this situation. I jumped on board with OS X myself (I'm mostly a PC guy, but I'm a graphic designer and therefore have to have a Mac around, too), and it was a lot buggier in the beginning than it is now.
I'm not defending Vista by any stretch, nor am I equating Vista to OS X. But I think the OS9-OSX change is a more accurate parallel to the XP-Vista change. Both broke existing software, both introduced new interfaces that were confusing to users of the older OS, both had device driver issues at the outset, and so on.
Indeed -- I'd love to have a bigass Macbook Pro (I'm in the market now for a new laptop). The cost is a bit prohibitive, but your points are well taken. I hadn't really thought about it until you mentioned it, but I do recall a couple laptop screens with matte screens that did indeed disperse the glare more widely across the viewing area.
And I didn't know that you could run Windows so easily on one -- thanks for the info. It may affect my purchase (if I can dual boot Mac and Windows on one laptop, suddenly the cost doesn't sound so difficult).
Good thought -- thanks. For some reason I don't fully remember now (likely a crappy video card), I feel like this wasn't an option at the time. It's a non-issue for me now (as everything happens to be LCD now in my office), but I'll keep it in the hopper for my friends still on the CRT path.
All I was doing was offering my own experiences. I thought, in my own chowderheaded way, that this is how this thing works -- someone says something, someone else responds, we all take what we wish from each other's experiences. Or not. Maybe what I said wasn't of value to some. Apparently ignoring me is not an option when the alternative is being a shitbird to me.
I'm glad there's someone around here who has a handle on what a valid response is.
(Wait, I think I got this sarcasm thing down. I may yet become as wise as you.)
I had to switch away from CRTs because of eyestrain. The first laptop I had almost immediately stopped the eyestrain problems I'd been having, and going back to the CRT later when I was transferring files brought them back immediately.
I have a glossy laptop screen now and love it. I haven't noticed any of the "blown out" color people are talking about. The only issue I have is that I have a window behind me, and for a couple hours a day the sun is in the right spot to cause some reflection in the corner of my screen.
Mostly I just ignore it -- it makes me feel like an ambassador from Slashdot to the outside, sun-drenched world. We takes our self-importance where we can gets it, right?
I won't argue whether there was pressure from MS or not -- I happen to believe a lot of that is overblown, but other people feel they have strong evidence to the contrary. Fine.
But I WILL say, however, that even if MS did try to corrupt ISO, ultimately ISO corrupted itself. If I hand you a beer and car keys, ultimately it's up to you to decide what to do with them.
As I and others have said MANY times around here before: bash MS for the stuff they really do -- if you want to look for and interpret the evidence, there's probably enough to go around. But don't start painting ISO as the naive country girl in the big city, scammed and violated by big, bad Snidely Microsoft.
At best, it degrades the people at ISO who had to figure this crap out while everyone was barking half-truths at them from both sides.
I don't mean to defend Microsoft OR bash them, but this particular allegation has always been pretty shaky. I'm very old friends with a guy who works there and is involved in all of this stuff, and the parts of the story that get left out around here are often quite significant. It tends to range from WHAT people are being paid for to WHETHER they're being paid at all (the latter being the case more than anyone around here would like to believe). Put it this way -- MS is far from perfect, but there are as many or more lies and shadowy accusations coming from the anti-MS side as from Microsoft itself.
There's plenty wrong with the spec, plenty wrong with the process, but the accusations make it sound like Microsoft requires a Snidely Whiplash mustache for every employee. There aren't enough railroad tracks OR damsels in the world to match what people are accusing MS of. Attack them for the stuff they're actually getting wrong, and stay away from the shapeless accusations of bribery. It degrades the real arguments.
Look at it another way. You have a Mac, and you run Office. Somewhere during the routine update process, some new, not-ready-for-primetime version of IE gets installed and is set as your default browser.
The issue is in part that Safari is not related to iTunes or Quicktime. There's no reason to believe that by installing music software, the manufacturer will also push a browser to you.
All this will do is piss people off and make them turn off automatic update options, which will eventually result in some flaw in iTunes or Quicktime being less widely patched. It was not a capital crime, but it was dumb and irresponsible of Apple.
And the EULA thing is just funny. What with the ample fleet of lawyers they have in Cupertino, I'm surprised ANYTHING gets out without a full legal vetting. Software gets out with bugs, but EULAs don't typically get out without great scrutiny.
I was thinking the same thing -- there ain't much up there, but there's plenty of cold. Seems like they could use that somehow. Maybe it's a control issue -- if you spend as much power heating it back up to conventional freezing temperatures so you don't hurt yourself when you eat it, maybe you're burning as much power in the long run as you would with a normal freezer. Or it could be that it's more thought than it's worth given that you can send pudding or fruit leather up for dessert instead.
I agree to a point, but I think the larger point is that people around here are always griping that our legislators have no idea how technology works. Now we have one who might have a clue, and everyone's piping up that it doesn't matter. I, for one, welcome a nerd in Congress (not to mention that I'm from a district near his and the alternative for the office was, is, and will continue to be a real dickhead).
Finally, after living through weeks and weeks of sloppy, misleading slam ads against him, I have to say that he seems like a fairly square guy (in the good AND the nerdy way). So for those who feel that his nerd quotient is irrelevant, rest assured that he's also very possibly a good person with good ethical standing. All the better for society as a whole. And if he understands a bit about what it is to write code and conceive of big logical systems, all the better for us around here.
(And whoever around here sarcastically suggested that this was like the benefit of having a doctor in Congress, let's remember that Bill Frist was a doctor second and a heartless, grade-A bunghole who was being wet-nursed by the insurance lobby first. We have yet to see that Bill Foster is even a measurable fraction of the asshat that Frist was on a day-to-day basis. Let's give him a chance before we lump him in with Frist, please.)
Let's not get panicky. Many cities already have labyrinths of sub-basements under their downtown areas (the aforementioned one in Chicago, where I live, and many others). Moreover, think about the maze of tunnels running under Washington, D.C.?
The point is to be sensible about securing it, not to not have it. We still fly planes, don't we? We still allow rental of U-Haul trucks, right? Just because it CAN be used for bad behavior doesn't mean a) it will be, or b) it can't be secured with a reasonable amount of caution. Hell, if we felt THAT way about things, guns would have been outlawed a long time ago. (AND they would still exist anyway, AND people would still use them for bad stuff.)
All that said, though, of course subterranean tunnels make a tasty target for destructive behavior. The point is that a tunnel system under a metropolitan area should be carefully monitored. And if it can be quickly flooded (or all oxygen can be quickly removed) in the event of fire or "evildoers," all the better.
In effect, the tunnels under Chicago DID cause widespread damage a few years ago. A construction crew drove a piling down into the Chicago river and punched through the tunnel wall underneath, flooding the entire downtown area's basements with river water. So it can be dangerous to have the tunnels, but better provisions for evildoers and morons (probably more the latter) would have minimized the problem. That's an old tunnel system, but a new one could be built with the ability to quickly isolate one problem section.
I guess I'm reacting to the terror terror, you know? We must be wise and sensible, but if a tunnel system under the city is the only appropriate and complete solution to a given problem, we can't let fear of something rare (in fact, so rare as to be historically significant when it happens) take it off the table.
But Linux distros aren't getting the word out. Being free kind of leaves you fated to a very low advertising budget. Particularly when Microsoft and Apple can always, always outspend you, even if you raise a stack of money at the outset.
Moreover, having and maintaining a lucrative relationship with a PC manufacturer is hard if there's not name-brand software waiting for consumers to buy. There have been several attempts at consumer-focused Linux PCs (that Wal-Mart one, for example), but if they can't easily run Microsoft Money or Disney Princess games or whatever, people won't buy it and the hardware manufacturer will have to cut and run at some point. And Wine, while cool, isn't a solution for the typical consumer.
Neither "impingned" nor "impigned" is a word, either. Really, if you're going to play Word Cop, please use the preview button.
To get back to the point, though, I have little sympathy for this guy. Some, but not much. I am 36, and know better than to publicly bark about my employer (or my industry) and expect to keep my job. I completely have the right to do it, but they don't need to keep me as an employee if I gripe about them or narc them out, either. Why this guy thought he has some special right to employment despite his willingness to publicly contradict his very public employer is beyond me. He has every right to quit and speak his mind, but it seems to me that he doesn't get it.
Moreover, from a totally non-legal, non-ethical standpoint, I can't imagine wanting to work at CNN after a few weeks of publicly griping about them. I'd think that from a practical standpoint, work would become a very permanently unpleasant place to be.
... or does "Memorandum of Understanding" sound like the most boring D&D object ever? "You kill the orc. As he dies, he drops the Memorandum of Understanding, detailing the conflict between you and him and the specifics of its resolution. +2 mediation points."
While I've enjoyed all the jokes here, I have to echo a couple of posts. This guy HAS BEEN in space. It defies all logic that there's a smell, but this guy, presumably at least as sane as the rest of us (insert joke about jealous diaper-wearing astronauts here), smelled something. He draws no concrete conclusions, even seems slightly incredulous about it all. But a stink is a stink, and that's that.
I've had the opportunity to talk to Eugene Cernan for a few minutes and hear a much longer speech from him after that, and it kind of seemed like his level of wonder increased with the number of scientifically rooted things he did. In short, who the hell knows what's going to happen up there?
My immediate thought when I read it was, "oh, like when people smell cold." Anyone who's ever spent a cold winter anywhere knows that people coming in from the cold smell "cold." I don't know what the source of it is, but there's a very specific smell to cold people. I wonder if this is the same idea. Maybe it's what cold does to the various fibers in clothing, maybe it's the smell of skin and hair rehydrating after being in a very cold, dry environment. Or maybe it's some kind of short-circuit in our olfactory nerves that happens with a sudden temperature dip (though you don't smell it when you walk out into the cold -- you only smell it on people COMING IN from the cold). Never thought much about it until now, but I bet it's the same kind of thing.
Not to mention that almost everything they've done to promote Vista has been aimed at the end-user, the joe-blow consumer. That user has no idea what the kernel is or why they should care -- it's just geeky mumbo-jumbo that would scare their target Vista audience.
Indeed. I was walking the line between humor and history. Or stumbling the line, or something.
All I meant was that it was kind of our first modern attempt at writing the rules for other countries. The Marshall Plan was far more well-intentioned and well-designed than the silliness we barf on the world now, but it seemed to me even in high school history class* to be kind of a very early gateway drug to less altruistic endeavors. You know, if you happen to get the first one right (repairing Europe), you're going to be hard to shut up later when you're out of ideas but still leaking at the mouth.
But you're right -- the Marshall Plan wasn't about control. And if I'm going to claim the Nitpick hat, I need to stick to pure accuracy. All I meant (in my ham-handed way) was that it was the first post-war attempt by the U.S. to shape (or reshape) the world. And it may have been the last relatively agenda-free plan.
Mea culpa!
* not that we got much post-war history in 1988 high school history. We kind of petered out at the industrial revolution, with passing mention in the first week of June of the Great Depression and everything after it. But that's a rant for another day.
Marshall Plan: An early U.S. attempt at controlling everyone else's citizens. Martial Law: A country's attempt at controlling its own citizens.
But my anal retentiveness aside, if the U.S. goes under martial law, you can bet that they'll lock down the coastline, too. So whether your data is in a boat, in a moat, or on a goat, they'll get it if they want it. Whatever the benefits of this data center model are, I don't see international independence as one of them. Better to try to affect society and government so martial law doesn't happen (with a healthy dose of encryption anyway, of course).
Simmer down, please. Oh, and fuck you for calling me ignorant while hiding behind the AC. If you want to pick a shitfight, use your real name.
But our respective tantrums aside, here's the thing -- these mistakes happen. I appreciate your belief in the tenants of personal freedom and liberty. Honestly, I do. But I appreciate them in a vacuum. The U.S. Constitution (and other protective documents around the world) put forth the best-case scenario for personal rights and freedoms. However, on a practical level, police are going to make mistakes. Citizens are going to make mistakes. In fact, without any external prompting from a roadside sign, billboard, or anything else, I have a friend who was detained in a mall for hours because he took his daughter to a mall without a diaper bag (they live two blocks away) and was reported by concerned citizen to the mall cops.
It probably seems like I'm making your point, and perhaps in some senses I am. But do you have a problem with the pictures on milk cartons? With news coverage of abductions with surveillance footage? With reports of suspicious behavior of people by concerned neighbors? With reports by your neighbors of someone poking around your car in your driveway at night?
Every one of those things is prone to human error. But many times they prevent crime, and many times they are simple examples of a community working together to care for itself. The only difference here is that the officials might be making the mistake, not the citizens.
I know there's a difference (despite my well-documented ignorance) between my chowderhead neighbor making a mistake about a potential crime and my local police making the mistake. However, expecting complete and comprehensive protection from the police while holding them to an impossibly narrow standard of decorum is wrong. I'm not suggesting that they should be allowed to beat people up. I'm not suggesting we allow them to abuse their power in general. I am, however, suggesting that situations often are complicated enough that the police need to momentarily pin everyone involved down and THEN figure out the details.
They need to do this quickly and efficiently and politely and with the Constitutional rights of ALL involved parties in mind. But if I need to sit tight for an hour while they figure it out, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me if I fit some description they're actively looking for. That's not profiling or hassling, it's diligence. If at the end of that they hassle me or somehow otherwise curtail my rights, that's another story. But sometimes things don't end as cleanly as Scooby Doo.
My neighborhood currently has a lot of drug dealing and home entry right now, and the cops are doing their best to stop it. Some cops are good, some are bad. And unfortunately the descriptions of the guys doing the bad stuff will get more than few random guys around the neighborhood more scrutiny than they'd like. And that sucks for them. It would suck for me, too, if I fit that description. But the reason my neighborhood is in the pickle it's in right now is in part BECAUSE of the restrictions the police operate under. What is obviously drug dealing is not punishable unless the officers actually see drugs and money change hands. Is this a good place to draw that line? I don't know -- there are a lot of very visible bad guys around here, and they know exactly what they can and can't do in the public eye. And therein lies the difference between profiling and detention for criminal behavior. I don't want young black men in white t-shirts to be systematically rounded up, so I suppose it's where the line has to be drawn.
But if some guy who meets my description is reported to have committed a crime in my immediate area, I don't know how ELSE I would expect the police to respond but to detain me for a short period while they figure out who I am. Does that make me ignorant? I don't think so. It indicates my awareness of the gray area that exists between the pure Constitutional rights you seem to live under and the right to protection we all pay for and wish to enjoy.
And I'll thank you not to call me names, whoever the hell you are.
Slashdot Mirror
Definitely -- I don't disagree. Well put. I was just talking about the user experience. I knew several die-hard Mac users who had the same glassy (or furious) expression on their face the first time they saw OS X as I've seen on people using Vista for the first time.
But when Mac users had to migrate from OS9 to OS X, it was a lot more like this situation. I jumped on board with OS X myself (I'm mostly a PC guy, but I'm a graphic designer and therefore have to have a Mac around, too), and it was a lot buggier in the beginning than it is now.
I'm not defending Vista by any stretch, nor am I equating Vista to OS X. But I think the OS9-OSX change is a more accurate parallel to the XP-Vista change. Both broke existing software, both introduced new interfaces that were confusing to users of the older OS, both had device driver issues at the outset, and so on.
Nah, it's so thieves know that you already spent all your money on a Mac and there's no point in rifling through your glovebox.
Indeed -- I'd love to have a bigass Macbook Pro (I'm in the market now for a new laptop). The cost is a bit prohibitive, but your points are well taken. I hadn't really thought about it until you mentioned it, but I do recall a couple laptop screens with matte screens that did indeed disperse the glare more widely across the viewing area.
And I didn't know that you could run Windows so easily on one -- thanks for the info. It may affect my purchase (if I can dual boot Mac and Windows on one laptop, suddenly the cost doesn't sound so difficult).
Good thought -- thanks. For some reason I don't fully remember now (likely a crappy video card), I feel like this wasn't an option at the time. It's a non-issue for me now (as everything happens to be LCD now in my office), but I'll keep it in the hopper for my friends still on the CRT path.
Wow, you're being a dick.
All I was doing was offering my own experiences. I thought, in my own chowderheaded way, that this is how this thing works -- someone says something, someone else responds, we all take what we wish from each other's experiences. Or not. Maybe what I said wasn't of value to some. Apparently ignoring me is not an option when the alternative is being a shitbird to me.
I'm glad there's someone around here who has a handle on what a valid response is.
(Wait, I think I got this sarcasm thing down. I may yet become as wise as you.)
I had to switch away from CRTs because of eyestrain. The first laptop I had almost immediately stopped the eyestrain problems I'd been having, and going back to the CRT later when I was transferring files brought them back immediately.
I have a glossy laptop screen now and love it. I haven't noticed any of the "blown out" color people are talking about. The only issue I have is that I have a window behind me, and for a couple hours a day the sun is in the right spot to cause some reflection in the corner of my screen.
Mostly I just ignore it -- it makes me feel like an ambassador from Slashdot to the outside, sun-drenched world. We takes our self-importance where we can gets it, right?
I won't argue whether there was pressure from MS or not -- I happen to believe a lot of that is overblown, but other people feel they have strong evidence to the contrary. Fine.
But I WILL say, however, that even if MS did try to corrupt ISO, ultimately ISO corrupted itself. If I hand you a beer and car keys, ultimately it's up to you to decide what to do with them.
As I and others have said MANY times around here before: bash MS for the stuff they really do -- if you want to look for and interpret the evidence, there's probably enough to go around. But don't start painting ISO as the naive country girl in the big city, scammed and violated by big, bad Snidely Microsoft.
At best, it degrades the people at ISO who had to figure this crap out while everyone was barking half-truths at them from both sides.
Some documentation, please.
I don't mean to defend Microsoft OR bash them, but this particular allegation has always been pretty shaky. I'm very old friends with a guy who works there and is involved in all of this stuff, and the parts of the story that get left out around here are often quite significant. It tends to range from WHAT people are being paid for to WHETHER they're being paid at all (the latter being the case more than anyone around here would like to believe). Put it this way -- MS is far from perfect, but there are as many or more lies and shadowy accusations coming from the anti-MS side as from Microsoft itself.
There's plenty wrong with the spec, plenty wrong with the process, but the accusations make it sound like Microsoft requires a Snidely Whiplash mustache for every employee. There aren't enough railroad tracks OR damsels in the world to match what people are accusing MS of. Attack them for the stuff they're actually getting wrong, and stay away from the shapeless accusations of bribery. It degrades the real arguments.
Look at it another way. You have a Mac, and you run Office. Somewhere during the routine update process, some new, not-ready-for-primetime version of IE gets installed and is set as your default browser.
The issue is in part that Safari is not related to iTunes or Quicktime. There's no reason to believe that by installing music software, the manufacturer will also push a browser to you.
All this will do is piss people off and make them turn off automatic update options, which will eventually result in some flaw in iTunes or Quicktime being less widely patched. It was not a capital crime, but it was dumb and irresponsible of Apple.
And the EULA thing is just funny. What with the ample fleet of lawyers they have in Cupertino, I'm surprised ANYTHING gets out without a full legal vetting. Software gets out with bugs, but EULAs don't typically get out without great scrutiny.
I was thinking the same thing -- there ain't much up there, but there's plenty of cold. Seems like they could use that somehow. Maybe it's a control issue -- if you spend as much power heating it back up to conventional freezing temperatures so you don't hurt yourself when you eat it, maybe you're burning as much power in the long run as you would with a normal freezer. Or it could be that it's more thought than it's worth given that you can send pudding or fruit leather up for dessert instead.
Eeek! Conditional legislation? With all due respect, things are muddy enough as it is!
I agree to a point, but I think the larger point is that people around here are always griping that our legislators have no idea how technology works. Now we have one who might have a clue, and everyone's piping up that it doesn't matter. I, for one, welcome a nerd in Congress (not to mention that I'm from a district near his and the alternative for the office was, is, and will continue to be a real dickhead).
Finally, after living through weeks and weeks of sloppy, misleading slam ads against him, I have to say that he seems like a fairly square guy (in the good AND the nerdy way). So for those who feel that his nerd quotient is irrelevant, rest assured that he's also very possibly a good person with good ethical standing. All the better for society as a whole. And if he understands a bit about what it is to write code and conceive of big logical systems, all the better for us around here.
(And whoever around here sarcastically suggested that this was like the benefit of having a doctor in Congress, let's remember that Bill Frist was a doctor second and a heartless, grade-A bunghole who was being wet-nursed by the insurance lobby first. We have yet to see that Bill Foster is even a measurable fraction of the asshat that Frist was on a day-to-day basis. Let's give him a chance before we lump him in with Frist, please.)
Let's not get panicky. Many cities already have labyrinths of sub-basements under their downtown areas (the aforementioned one in Chicago, where I live, and many others). Moreover, think about the maze of tunnels running under Washington, D.C.?
The point is to be sensible about securing it, not to not have it. We still fly planes, don't we? We still allow rental of U-Haul trucks, right? Just because it CAN be used for bad behavior doesn't mean a) it will be, or b) it can't be secured with a reasonable amount of caution. Hell, if we felt THAT way about things, guns would have been outlawed a long time ago. (AND they would still exist anyway, AND people would still use them for bad stuff.)
All that said, though, of course subterranean tunnels make a tasty target for destructive behavior. The point is that a tunnel system under a metropolitan area should be carefully monitored. And if it can be quickly flooded (or all oxygen can be quickly removed) in the event of fire or "evildoers," all the better.
In effect, the tunnels under Chicago DID cause widespread damage a few years ago. A construction crew drove a piling down into the Chicago river and punched through the tunnel wall underneath, flooding the entire downtown area's basements with river water. So it can be dangerous to have the tunnels, but better provisions for evildoers and morons (probably more the latter) would have minimized the problem. That's an old tunnel system, but a new one could be built with the ability to quickly isolate one problem section.
I guess I'm reacting to the terror terror, you know? We must be wise and sensible, but if a tunnel system under the city is the only appropriate and complete solution to a given problem, we can't let fear of something rare (in fact, so rare as to be historically significant when it happens) take it off the table.
But Linux distros aren't getting the word out. Being free kind of leaves you fated to a very low advertising budget. Particularly when Microsoft and Apple can always, always outspend you, even if you raise a stack of money at the outset.
Moreover, having and maintaining a lucrative relationship with a PC manufacturer is hard if there's not name-brand software waiting for consumers to buy. There have been several attempts at consumer-focused Linux PCs (that Wal-Mart one, for example), but if they can't easily run Microsoft Money or Disney Princess games or whatever, people won't buy it and the hardware manufacturer will have to cut and run at some point. And Wine, while cool, isn't a solution for the typical consumer.
Neither "impingned" nor "impigned" is a word, either. Really, if you're going to play Word Cop, please use the preview button.
To get back to the point, though, I have little sympathy for this guy. Some, but not much. I am 36, and know better than to publicly bark about my employer (or my industry) and expect to keep my job. I completely have the right to do it, but they don't need to keep me as an employee if I gripe about them or narc them out, either. Why this guy thought he has some special right to employment despite his willingness to publicly contradict his very public employer is beyond me. He has every right to quit and speak his mind, but it seems to me that he doesn't get it.
Moreover, from a totally non-legal, non-ethical standpoint, I can't imagine wanting to work at CNN after a few weeks of publicly griping about them. I'd think that from a practical standpoint, work would become a very permanently unpleasant place to be.
... or does "Memorandum of Understanding" sound like the most boring D&D object ever? "You kill the orc. As he dies, he drops the Memorandum of Understanding, detailing the conflict between you and him and the specifics of its resolution. +2 mediation points."
While I've enjoyed all the jokes here, I have to echo a couple of posts. This guy HAS BEEN in space. It defies all logic that there's a smell, but this guy, presumably at least as sane as the rest of us (insert joke about jealous diaper-wearing astronauts here), smelled something. He draws no concrete conclusions, even seems slightly incredulous about it all. But a stink is a stink, and that's that.
I've had the opportunity to talk to Eugene Cernan for a few minutes and hear a much longer speech from him after that, and it kind of seemed like his level of wonder increased with the number of scientifically rooted things he did. In short, who the hell knows what's going to happen up there?
My immediate thought when I read it was, "oh, like when people smell cold." Anyone who's ever spent a cold winter anywhere knows that people coming in from the cold smell "cold." I don't know what the source of it is, but there's a very specific smell to cold people. I wonder if this is the same idea. Maybe it's what cold does to the various fibers in clothing, maybe it's the smell of skin and hair rehydrating after being in a very cold, dry environment. Or maybe it's some kind of short-circuit in our olfactory nerves that happens with a sudden temperature dip (though you don't smell it when you walk out into the cold -- you only smell it on people COMING IN from the cold). Never thought much about it until now, but I bet it's the same kind of thing.
... people in other countries won't give you so much crap.
Not to mention that almost everything they've done to promote Vista has been aimed at the end-user, the joe-blow consumer. That user has no idea what the kernel is or why they should care -- it's just geeky mumbo-jumbo that would scare their target Vista audience.
Indeed. I was walking the line between humor and history. Or stumbling the line, or something.
All I meant was that it was kind of our first modern attempt at writing the rules for other countries. The Marshall Plan was far more well-intentioned and well-designed than the silliness we barf on the world now, but it seemed to me even in high school history class* to be kind of a very early gateway drug to less altruistic endeavors. You know, if you happen to get the first one right (repairing Europe), you're going to be hard to shut up later when you're out of ideas but still leaking at the mouth.
But you're right -- the Marshall Plan wasn't about control. And if I'm going to claim the Nitpick hat, I need to stick to pure accuracy. All I meant (in my ham-handed way) was that it was the first post-war attempt by the U.S. to shape (or reshape) the world. And it may have been the last relatively agenda-free plan.
Mea culpa!
* not that we got much post-war history in 1988 high school history. We kind of petered out at the industrial revolution, with passing mention in the first week of June of the Great Depression and everything after it. But that's a rant for another day.
Moreover, if they CAN crank up the light output, what's that going to do for battery life?
Not to be nitpicky, but:
Marshall Plan: An early U.S. attempt at controlling everyone else's citizens.
Martial Law: A country's attempt at controlling its own citizens.
But my anal retentiveness aside, if the U.S. goes under martial law, you can bet that they'll lock down the coastline, too. So whether your data is in a boat, in a moat, or on a goat, they'll get it if they want it. Whatever the benefits of this data center model are, I don't see international independence as one of them. Better to try to affect society and government so martial law doesn't happen (with a healthy dose of encryption anyway, of course).
All of us down here in IT are alive and kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
Simmer down, please. Oh, and fuck you for calling me ignorant while hiding behind the AC. If you want to pick a shitfight, use your real name.
But our respective tantrums aside, here's the thing -- these mistakes happen. I appreciate your belief in the tenants of personal freedom and liberty. Honestly, I do. But I appreciate them in a vacuum. The U.S. Constitution (and other protective documents around the world) put forth the best-case scenario for personal rights and freedoms. However, on a practical level, police are going to make mistakes. Citizens are going to make mistakes. In fact, without any external prompting from a roadside sign, billboard, or anything else, I have a friend who was detained in a mall for hours because he took his daughter to a mall without a diaper bag (they live two blocks away) and was reported by concerned citizen to the mall cops.
It probably seems like I'm making your point, and perhaps in some senses I am. But do you have a problem with the pictures on milk cartons? With news coverage of abductions with surveillance footage? With reports of suspicious behavior of people by concerned neighbors? With reports by your neighbors of someone poking around your car in your driveway at night?
Every one of those things is prone to human error. But many times they prevent crime, and many times they are simple examples of a community working together to care for itself. The only difference here is that the officials might be making the mistake, not the citizens.
I know there's a difference (despite my well-documented ignorance) between my chowderhead neighbor making a mistake about a potential crime and my local police making the mistake. However, expecting complete and comprehensive protection from the police while holding them to an impossibly narrow standard of decorum is wrong. I'm not suggesting that they should be allowed to beat people up. I'm not suggesting we allow them to abuse their power in general. I am, however, suggesting that situations often are complicated enough that the police need to momentarily pin everyone involved down and THEN figure out the details.
They need to do this quickly and efficiently and politely and with the Constitutional rights of ALL involved parties in mind. But if I need to sit tight for an hour while they figure it out, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me if I fit some description they're actively looking for. That's not profiling or hassling, it's diligence. If at the end of that they hassle me or somehow otherwise curtail my rights, that's another story. But sometimes things don't end as cleanly as Scooby Doo.
My neighborhood currently has a lot of drug dealing and home entry right now, and the cops are doing their best to stop it. Some cops are good, some are bad. And unfortunately the descriptions of the guys doing the bad stuff will get more than few random guys around the neighborhood more scrutiny than they'd like. And that sucks for them. It would suck for me, too, if I fit that description. But the reason my neighborhood is in the pickle it's in right now is in part BECAUSE of the restrictions the police operate under. What is obviously drug dealing is not punishable unless the officers actually see drugs and money change hands. Is this a good place to draw that line? I don't know -- there are a lot of very visible bad guys around here, and they know exactly what they can and can't do in the public eye. And therein lies the difference between profiling and detention for criminal behavior. I don't want young black men in white t-shirts to be systematically rounded up, so I suppose it's where the line has to be drawn.
But if some guy who meets my description is reported to have committed a crime in my immediate area, I don't know how ELSE I would expect the police to respond but to detain me for a short period while they figure out who I am. Does that make me ignorant? I don't think so. It indicates my awareness of the gray area that exists between the pure Constitutional rights you seem to live under and the right to protection we all pay for and wish to enjoy.
And I'll thank you not to call me names, whoever the hell you are.