I'm no Microsoft fan, but like everyone else who works on web applications, I can say that it will make my life much easier if IE9 does a good job of implementing the standards.
Unfortunately, the technology I'm really waiting to see from Microsoft is something that will cause all of the existing copies of IE6 to spontaneously combust.
I just don't think that this acquisition will be good for the industry, but only for Oracle; certainly not for the customers of the former Sun. In the long run, it might make things crappier overall.
That much is certain, especially with a company like Oracle, which views everything as a zero-sum game.
I've been trying to figure out if this is a strategy by Oracle, or a side-effect they don't really care about.
It's a side-effect. Oracle isn't in the application software business. They wanted Sun because their OS and hardware are a good platform for their database, which is where their money comes from.
Now, we know they want Java because they've invested a lot in it.
They want Java because their primary commercial competitor, IBM, is heavily invested in Java, so it gives them a solid inroad to luring IBM's customers away and breaking compatibility with IBM's Java solutions. They just wanted MySQL just to kill it.
There's nothing mysterious about Oracle's actions if you remember that they are here to sell their database software and associated services. That's how they made their billions, and that's how they plan to continue making more billions. Microsoft tries to compete with everyone on everything; Oracle is just aiming to absolutely dominate the database space. Everything else is useful or not in terms of that single-minded goal. OO.o and its development team are a total non-issue to Oracle. They're not in the office suite business, and it's entirely irrelevant to the database.
The really important thing here is not how many OO.o forks there are, it's that they all handle the same document formats properly. If that much is granted, then having many competing versions is a good thing. Not only will some of that competition result in improvements on all sides, but the variations will suit a larger set of users.
After you work in BI for a while you'll come to realize that where business logic is kept isn't nearly as important as that it's only kept in one place.
God yes. I used to hate the idea of stored procedures and the like because that meant losing control (as an application programmer). But over time, I've come to realize that what it really means is that I don't have to worry about all the other application programmers implementing the same goddamn thing in a dozen different places.
Funny you mention it, but the first thing I thought of was Japanese text entry, followed by the autocorrect/text-expansion facility that most word processors have, which is much the same thing applied to western languages. I've also thought it would be good to be able to make use of mathematical symbols for, you know, mathematics. The same could be said of word processor-like formatting for comments. I'm dubious about using it for actual code, but I'm open to having my mind changed about that.
(Color-as-syntax has already been done in Chuck Moore's latest implementation of Forth. It's not a bad idea, though I suspect it works better with low-level languages like Forth than it would with a higher level language.)
The second thing I thought of was what I always think when someone starts complaining about what languages should and shouldn't have, which is this: Quit bitching and go implement it, smart boy. Come up with something good, and I'll use it, but I am not about to run out and implement someone else's ideas. I have a day job where I get to do that all fucking day long, and they actually pay me. And contrary to popular belief, ideas are cheap and plentiful, including good ideas. The time, effort, and dedication that it takes to actually implement them are what's in short supply.
Speaking as someone with a degree in Physics, I can safely say that I've only used literary analysis one time in my life: when learning it in school.
I was thinking much the same thing. Other than to inculcate reading skills and the very narrow case of teaching how to write persuasively, I'm not sure there's any reason to teach literature in school. It's a form of entertainment involving few transferable skills. There are much stronger arguments for teaching music, though even then not as a core subject.
Mind you, I love literature: I have over 2000 books in my house and a degree in English literature. I've also spent the last twenty years working as a software engineer, and I've never had occasion to resort to my knowledge of literature for any practical purpose. Someone will inevitably object that literature teaches us about human nature, but that is quite frankly bullshit. Psychology and sociology teach us about human nature; literature just teaches us about writers' ideas of human nature. Literature as a compulsory subject is an archaic hangover from the time when only the aristocracy had access to education, and its function was to prepare students for aristocratic social norms.
I don't have any problem with curtailing math instruction with the proviso that it should be offered for those who are interested, and preferably taught by a better grade of teacher than the current lot. If I'd had even one math teacher in high school who knew what the applications of the subject were, I'd have been much more interested. As it was, I had to wait until college to discover the applications, and even that was entirely self-guided.
What I would like to replace compulsory higher math with is formal logic and, as several other posters have suggested, basic statistics. Everyone can get a lot of mileage out of logic and statistics no matter what they end up doing as adults: even fast-food employees get to vote. If they never discover the brilliance of F. Scott Fitzgerald, that's their loss, but the world will go on.
where users can no longer tell the difference between content and advertising
These are the same people who need warning labels to tell them to put the jelly on their toast after it comes out of the toaster. While I'm definitely sympathetic to the arguments in TFA, there's a limit to how much a search engine can compensate for the cognitive deficits of its users.
In any case, honesty in advertising is not a technological issue, it's a question of legislation and law enforcement. And if we lack the will to rein in abuses in a single country, good luck with the internet.
Only in the parallel universe where web applications are an appreciable percentage of the total software in use.
Web apps are certainly more visible than other apps, but for much the same reason that TV shows are more visible than other forms of art: everyone (or nearly everyone) has a web browser and a TV. But just as all the television shows ever made represent fewer works than are in the average large chain bookstore this evening, web applications represent a negligible proportion of the software in use.
Of course, if you spend a lot of time browsing the web and/or writing web apps, you might not notice this. It's the same phenomenon where a programmer who works mostly in language A on platform B announces that language X on platform Y to the amusement of the huge number of programmers and users of X and Y.
Some applications translate well to the web, others do not. And even for the former, there are often reasons to prefer local versions, e.g., security (nothing beats an air gap), lack of reliable (or any) network access, limited resources in embedded apps, and just plain stubbornness, etc.
So no, we're not doomed to do everything in HTML5, just as neither C++ nor Java took over the world nor even retained what dominance they had. Your pet technology won't conquer the world, either. By the time it gets here, the Singularity will probably turn out to be the Multiplicity, and we'll get to spend all day just trying to get the gist of flamewars on Slashdot between superhuman intelligences.
The science may be there but something tells me that other interests will prevent this from going anywhere.
The science probably isn't there, so the Great Petroleum Conspiracy can probably sleep well tonight. What they're describing doesn't violate any laws of physics per se, but the amount of power transferred in the time they're claiming is highly suspicious. The waste heat alone would be enormous unless their secret is room-temperature superconductors, in which case the electric car market is small potatoes, and someone is going to get a Nobel for this.
I'm not going to call bullshit on this story, but I will note that the article makes extraordinary claims without providing the requisite extraordinary evidence. At this point, it's just another startup making unsubstantiated claims. I hope it's true, but I am definitely not holding my breath.
It's hard for me to believe that a bunch of "moron" as you put it put together the second most popular browser. Even more shocking is that a bunch of morons are now leading the browser market.
Popularity does not equal intelligence. Vastly more people are avid followers of professional wrestling than any branch of the sciences. While the OP rather overstates his point, yours has no merit at all.
It's not very often that researchers stumble onto something cheap and simple that could potentially save hundreds of millions of lives. I sure hope it pans out in practice.
Why is it some people just cannot accept that windows is quite good these days I wonder?
Possibly because some of us have experience with environments that involve as many as two orders of magnitude more clients than your toy 250-client setup?
Windows has improved significantly from Win2k onwards, but I still don't want it running my life support.
we should all be so lucky, to die pioneering new frontiers
He did no such thing. He died using an unproven technology as a single point of failure in a critical system. Windows sysadmins the world over do that day in and day out.
But I realise I also have a little OCD, and struggle a bit to keep on top of information (whether hobbies or personal life) in a way that I feel I have complete control over. So how do you all do it?
I have a prescription. Works like a charm, aside from some tenseness in the jaw and occasional vertigo.
It's cross-browser and cross-platform, so it works on iPhones, iPads and other devices that don't support Flash.
It would be more accurate to say that iPhones and iPads don't permit Flash. Adobe would be more than happy to support Flash on those platforms -- and probably has code ready to go -- if Apple allowed them to deploy it. The difference is significant and should not be ignored: Flash doesn't work on iDevices because Apple doesn't want it to. It's a repeat of Microsoft's unofficial MSDOS-era policy, "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run," only much, much more brazen.
(Before we resurrect the flamewar about why Apple doesn't allow Flash on its iDevices, allow me to note that I detest Flash and understand Apple's objections, at least the technical ones. I just think that users should be allowed to use whatever software they want on the devices that they've paid for, no matter how much it sucks.)
I'm curious why we've not seen any releases of Russian actions in Chechnya, by these folks.
Is the implication here that records of (frankly, very well-known) Russian atrocities in Chechnya would somehow make it okay for us to do similar things? Everything will be alright if we're not as bad as the Russians?
Well, we aren't as bad as the Russians. And I'll bet that comes as a huge relief to the victims of our war crimes.
Top level officials not wanting these documents publicly released is unfortunate but the fact that these documents even exist is a testament to professionalism on the part of the Armed Forces.
At the risk of invoking Godwin, it's worth pointing out that the Nazis maintained meticulous records on the operation of their extermination camps that make these documents look like scribbling on the back of a napkin. Professionalism is value-neutral. You can be perfectly professional about both good and evil, and it has no effect on the moral value of what you're being professional about.
In short, if what you're doing is torturing people and murdering civilians, professionalism is really neither here nor there. Whether our forces a) stop doing these things, and b) hold accountable the people who did them (and their superiors) is the issue at hand.
I'm not holding my breath about either one. My guess is that instead, we'll be treated to a bunch of bloviation about WikiLeaks' danger to our national security, what an exception to the professionalism of the armed forces these thousands of anomalous incidents are, and, if all else fails, a tour of historic military atrocities aimed at arguing that everyone else does it, too, only with more words and no awareness of the consequences of letting our morality be determined by the lowest common denominator.
Oh, and that word you're using, "unfortunate"? It's not actually a synonym for "criminal coverup".
...it does seem quite irrelevant to the offense at hand. But speaking from the gut, I think bicycle thieves ought to be beaten to death, preferably more than once, so I'd say he got off light.
I wouldn't expect this to go very far beyond a bunch of public posturing and some quiet diplomacy. China's economy is as dependent on ours as we are on theirs, and at the end of the day, they have an unimaginable amount of money locked up in US debt, and the merest hint that we might possibly be even just a little bit late on a payment -- never mind the apocalyptic specter of defaulting -- is Beijing's worst nightmare. Conversely, our worst nightmare is that they might possibly be even just a little less eager to keep buying Treasury bonds from us. And both sides know this as well as they know the direction in which the sun rises.
Odds are that Beijing just wants to make a good show of strength to their domestic audience and maybe swap concessions behind the scenes. Neither they nor us can afford anything remotely approaching a full-blown trade war even in good times, never mind during a major economic slump.
MS Word's speed is on par with Abiword, although the former has many more features.
MS Word is vastly faster than Abiword if you're working on a large (and by large, I mean 1000+ pages with complex formatting, indexing, etc.) document. But that's a problem that I run into in a lot of FOSS office apps: it seems like the developers on those projects just never use them the way ordinary users in a business environment use them, so it never comes to their attention how badly they perform on real-world tasks. Granted, the ways Word and particularly Excel are used in most corporate environments are horrifying -- using vast spreadsheets as ad hoc databases, for example -- but that's just the way it is. And just because I don't abuse Excel that way doesn't mean that I don't have to deal with documents from people who do.
What bothers me most is that Office 97 did everything I needed and then some, and very little that's been added in the meantime has been of any use to me. Office 97 ran very well on a 120MHz Pentium with 16 megs of RAM. What I hoped to see come out of FOSS office software was something like that. Instead, we get OpenOffice, which is at least as bloated as MS Office and actually performs less well in many respects.
This is why I just can't get into fanboyism. Apple, Microsoft, and the equivalent major applications in the FOSS world all suck. They suck in different ways, and depending on what you're doing, one of the three will suck less than the rest. But whichever you choose will still suck -- and by that, I don't mean the less-than-perfect quibbles we all have with pretty much everything; I mean that you'll be dealing with serious deficiencies. If you complain, Apple will tell you that you don't get it, Microsoft will ignore you, and most FOSS developers will tell you to submit a patch if it bothers you so much.
It's a shame that the current crop of politicians haven't got the guts to stand up the bullies of the world; their predecessors worked hard and bravely during the Cold War, risking total annihilation, and I'm sure they'd be ashamed to know that their spineless children are frightened by their own shadows.
That's because they don't have Soviet shadows to be afraid of anymore. Cold warriors had guts? These were the same people who were fond of the slogan, "Better dead than Red," which is to say, they'd rather have ended the human race forever in a blaze of nuclear fire than fight a long guerrilla struggle against Soviet domination in the astronomically unlikely event of Soviet world conquest.
You can always spot the chickenshits by looking for the people who talk loud and thump their chests a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no Microsoft fan, but like everyone else who works on web applications, I can say that it will make my life much easier if IE9 does a good job of implementing the standards.
Unfortunately, the technology I'm really waiting to see from Microsoft is something that will cause all of the existing copies of IE6 to spontaneously combust.
I just don't think that this acquisition will be good for the industry, but only for Oracle; certainly not for the customers of the former Sun. In the long run, it might make things crappier overall.
That much is certain, especially with a company like Oracle, which views everything as a zero-sum game.
I've been trying to figure out if this is a strategy by Oracle, or a side-effect they don't really care about.
It's a side-effect. Oracle isn't in the application software business. They wanted Sun because their OS and hardware are a good platform for their database, which is where their money comes from.
Now, we know they want Java because they've invested a lot in it.
They want Java because their primary commercial competitor, IBM, is heavily invested in Java, so it gives them a solid inroad to luring IBM's customers away and breaking compatibility with IBM's Java solutions. They just wanted MySQL just to kill it.
There's nothing mysterious about Oracle's actions if you remember that they are here to sell their database software and associated services. That's how they made their billions, and that's how they plan to continue making more billions. Microsoft tries to compete with everyone on everything; Oracle is just aiming to absolutely dominate the database space. Everything else is useful or not in terms of that single-minded goal. OO.o and its development team are a total non-issue to Oracle. They're not in the office suite business, and it's entirely irrelevant to the database.
The really important thing here is not how many OO.o forks there are, it's that they all handle the same document formats properly. If that much is granted, then having many competing versions is a good thing. Not only will some of that competition result in improvements on all sides, but the variations will suit a larger set of users.
After you work in BI for a while you'll come to realize that where business logic is kept isn't nearly as important as that it's only kept in one place.
God yes. I used to hate the idea of stored procedures and the like because that meant losing control (as an application programmer). But over time, I've come to realize that what it really means is that I don't have to worry about all the other application programmers implementing the same goddamn thing in a dozen different places.
Funny you mention it, but the first thing I thought of was Japanese text entry, followed by the autocorrect/text-expansion facility that most word processors have, which is much the same thing applied to western languages. I've also thought it would be good to be able to make use of mathematical symbols for, you know, mathematics. The same could be said of word processor-like formatting for comments. I'm dubious about using it for actual code, but I'm open to having my mind changed about that.
(Color-as-syntax has already been done in Chuck Moore's latest implementation of Forth. It's not a bad idea, though I suspect it works better with low-level languages like Forth than it would with a higher level language.)
The second thing I thought of was what I always think when someone starts complaining about what languages should and shouldn't have, which is this: Quit bitching and go implement it, smart boy. Come up with something good, and I'll use it, but I am not about to run out and implement someone else's ideas. I have a day job where I get to do that all fucking day long, and they actually pay me. And contrary to popular belief, ideas are cheap and plentiful, including good ideas. The time, effort, and dedication that it takes to actually implement them are what's in short supply.
Speaking as someone with a degree in Physics, I can safely say that I've only used literary analysis one time in my life: when learning it in school.
I was thinking much the same thing. Other than to inculcate reading skills and the very narrow case of teaching how to write persuasively, I'm not sure there's any reason to teach literature in school. It's a form of entertainment involving few transferable skills. There are much stronger arguments for teaching music, though even then not as a core subject.
Mind you, I love literature: I have over 2000 books in my house and a degree in English literature. I've also spent the last twenty years working as a software engineer, and I've never had occasion to resort to my knowledge of literature for any practical purpose. Someone will inevitably object that literature teaches us about human nature, but that is quite frankly bullshit. Psychology and sociology teach us about human nature; literature just teaches us about writers' ideas of human nature. Literature as a compulsory subject is an archaic hangover from the time when only the aristocracy had access to education, and its function was to prepare students for aristocratic social norms.
I don't have any problem with curtailing math instruction with the proviso that it should be offered for those who are interested, and preferably taught by a better grade of teacher than the current lot. If I'd had even one math teacher in high school who knew what the applications of the subject were, I'd have been much more interested. As it was, I had to wait until college to discover the applications, and even that was entirely self-guided.
What I would like to replace compulsory higher math with is formal logic and, as several other posters have suggested, basic statistics. Everyone can get a lot of mileage out of logic and statistics no matter what they end up doing as adults: even fast-food employees get to vote. If they never discover the brilliance of F. Scott Fitzgerald, that's their loss, but the world will go on.
where users can no longer tell the difference between content and advertising
These are the same people who need warning labels to tell them to put the jelly on their toast after it comes out of the toaster. While I'm definitely sympathetic to the arguments in TFA, there's a limit to how much a search engine can compensate for the cognitive deficits of its users.
In any case, honesty in advertising is not a technological issue, it's a question of legislation and law enforcement. And if we lack the will to rein in abuses in a single country, good luck with the internet.
So, future of programming is HTML5?
Only in the parallel universe where web applications are an appreciable percentage of the total software in use.
Web apps are certainly more visible than other apps, but for much the same reason that TV shows are more visible than other forms of art: everyone (or nearly everyone) has a web browser and a TV. But just as all the television shows ever made represent fewer works than are in the average large chain bookstore this evening, web applications represent a negligible proportion of the software in use.
Of course, if you spend a lot of time browsing the web and/or writing web apps, you might not notice this. It's the same phenomenon where a programmer who works mostly in language A on platform B announces that language X on platform Y to the amusement of the huge number of programmers and users of X and Y.
Some applications translate well to the web, others do not. And even for the former, there are often reasons to prefer local versions, e.g., security (nothing beats an air gap), lack of reliable (or any) network access, limited resources in embedded apps, and just plain stubbornness, etc.
So no, we're not doomed to do everything in HTML5, just as neither C++ nor Java took over the world nor even retained what dominance they had. Your pet technology won't conquer the world, either. By the time it gets here, the Singularity will probably turn out to be the Multiplicity, and we'll get to spend all day just trying to get the gist of flamewars on Slashdot between superhuman intelligences.
The science may be there but something tells me that other interests will prevent this from going anywhere.
The science probably isn't there, so the Great Petroleum Conspiracy can probably sleep well tonight. What they're describing doesn't violate any laws of physics per se, but the amount of power transferred in the time they're claiming is highly suspicious. The waste heat alone would be enormous unless their secret is room-temperature superconductors, in which case the electric car market is small potatoes, and someone is going to get a Nobel for this.
I'm not going to call bullshit on this story, but I will note that the article makes extraordinary claims without providing the requisite extraordinary evidence. At this point, it's just another startup making unsubstantiated claims. I hope it's true, but I am definitely not holding my breath.
It is not necessarilly a good idea to do everything in the browser.
Damn straight. That's what emacs is for.
It's hard for me to believe that a bunch of "moron" as you put it put together the second most popular browser. Even more shocking is that a bunch of morons are now leading the browser market.
Popularity does not equal intelligence. Vastly more people are avid followers of professional wrestling than any branch of the sciences. While the OP rather overstates his point, yours has no merit at all.
Surely there should be a box to abstain from voting (spoil your ballot), and this neutral should be checked by default.
This has actually been tried in a few places. It always ends up being discontinued because "None of the Above" wins too many elections.
It's not very often that researchers stumble onto something cheap and simple that could potentially save hundreds of millions of lives. I sure hope it pans out in practice.
Why is it some people just cannot accept that windows is quite good these days I wonder?
Possibly because some of us have experience with environments that involve as many as two orders of magnitude more clients than your toy 250-client setup?
Windows has improved significantly from Win2k onwards, but I still don't want it running my life support.
we should all be so lucky, to die pioneering new frontiers
He did no such thing. He died using an unproven technology as a single point of failure in a critical system. Windows sysadmins the world over do that day in and day out.
But I realise I also have a little OCD, and struggle a bit to keep on top of information (whether hobbies or personal life) in a way that I feel I have complete control over. So how do you all do it?
I have a prescription. Works like a charm, aside from some tenseness in the jaw and occasional vertigo.
It's cross-browser and cross-platform, so it works on iPhones, iPads and other devices that don't support Flash.
It would be more accurate to say that iPhones and iPads don't permit Flash. Adobe would be more than happy to support Flash on those platforms -- and probably has code ready to go -- if Apple allowed them to deploy it. The difference is significant and should not be ignored: Flash doesn't work on iDevices because Apple doesn't want it to. It's a repeat of Microsoft's unofficial MSDOS-era policy, "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run," only much, much more brazen.
(Before we resurrect the flamewar about why Apple doesn't allow Flash on its iDevices, allow me to note that I detest Flash and understand Apple's objections, at least the technical ones. I just think that users should be allowed to use whatever software they want on the devices that they've paid for, no matter how much it sucks.)
On the other hand, if it works, maybe high school jocks with start to find it counterproductive to bully the math geeks.
I'm curious why we've not seen any releases of Russian actions in Chechnya, by these folks.
Is the implication here that records of (frankly, very well-known) Russian atrocities in Chechnya would somehow make it okay for us to do similar things? Everything will be alright if we're not as bad as the Russians?
Well, we aren't as bad as the Russians. And I'll bet that comes as a huge relief to the victims of our war crimes.
Top level officials not wanting these documents publicly released is unfortunate but the fact that these documents even exist is a testament to professionalism on the part of the Armed Forces.
At the risk of invoking Godwin, it's worth pointing out that the Nazis maintained meticulous records on the operation of their extermination camps that make these documents look like scribbling on the back of a napkin. Professionalism is value-neutral. You can be perfectly professional about both good and evil, and it has no effect on the moral value of what you're being professional about.
In short, if what you're doing is torturing people and murdering civilians, professionalism is really neither here nor there. Whether our forces a) stop doing these things, and b) hold accountable the people who did them (and their superiors) is the issue at hand.
I'm not holding my breath about either one. My guess is that instead, we'll be treated to a bunch of bloviation about WikiLeaks' danger to our national security, what an exception to the professionalism of the armed forces these thousands of anomalous incidents are, and, if all else fails, a tour of historic military atrocities aimed at arguing that everyone else does it, too, only with more words and no awareness of the consequences of letting our morality be determined by the lowest common denominator.
Oh, and that word you're using, "unfortunate"? It's not actually a synonym for "criminal coverup".
...it does seem quite irrelevant to the offense at hand. But speaking from the gut, I think bicycle thieves ought to be beaten to death, preferably more than once, so I'd say he got off light.
I wouldn't expect this to go very far beyond a bunch of public posturing and some quiet diplomacy. China's economy is as dependent on ours as we are on theirs, and at the end of the day, they have an unimaginable amount of money locked up in US debt, and the merest hint that we might possibly be even just a little bit late on a payment -- never mind the apocalyptic specter of defaulting -- is Beijing's worst nightmare. Conversely, our worst nightmare is that they might possibly be even just a little less eager to keep buying Treasury bonds from us. And both sides know this as well as they know the direction in which the sun rises.
Odds are that Beijing just wants to make a good show of strength to their domestic audience and maybe swap concessions behind the scenes. Neither they nor us can afford anything remotely approaching a full-blown trade war even in good times, never mind during a major economic slump.
MS Word's speed is on par with Abiword, although the former has many more features.
MS Word is vastly faster than Abiword if you're working on a large (and by large, I mean 1000+ pages with complex formatting, indexing, etc.) document. But that's a problem that I run into in a lot of FOSS office apps: it seems like the developers on those projects just never use them the way ordinary users in a business environment use them, so it never comes to their attention how badly they perform on real-world tasks. Granted, the ways Word and particularly Excel are used in most corporate environments are horrifying -- using vast spreadsheets as ad hoc databases, for example -- but that's just the way it is. And just because I don't abuse Excel that way doesn't mean that I don't have to deal with documents from people who do.
What bothers me most is that Office 97 did everything I needed and then some, and very little that's been added in the meantime has been of any use to me. Office 97 ran very well on a 120MHz Pentium with 16 megs of RAM. What I hoped to see come out of FOSS office software was something like that. Instead, we get OpenOffice, which is at least as bloated as MS Office and actually performs less well in many respects.
This is why I just can't get into fanboyism. Apple, Microsoft, and the equivalent major applications in the FOSS world all suck. They suck in different ways, and depending on what you're doing, one of the three will suck less than the rest. But whichever you choose will still suck -- and by that, I don't mean the less-than-perfect quibbles we all have with pretty much everything; I mean that you'll be dealing with serious deficiencies. If you complain, Apple will tell you that you don't get it, Microsoft will ignore you, and most FOSS developers will tell you to submit a patch if it bothers you so much.
It's a shame that the current crop of politicians haven't got the guts to stand up the bullies of the world; their predecessors worked hard and bravely during the Cold War, risking total annihilation, and I'm sure they'd be ashamed to know that their spineless children are frightened by their own shadows.
That's because they don't have Soviet shadows to be afraid of anymore. Cold warriors had guts? These were the same people who were fond of the slogan, "Better dead than Red," which is to say, they'd rather have ended the human race forever in a blaze of nuclear fire than fight a long guerrilla struggle against Soviet domination in the astronomically unlikely event of Soviet world conquest.
You can always spot the chickenshits by looking for the people who talk loud and thump their chests a lot.