While it needs to be admitted that an "honest investigation" might be extremely difficult, it is actually in nobody's interest for an honest investigation to take place.
The grant money is firmly tied to interests that want to see the application of the precationary principal. Honesty, one way or the other, is of no interest to the people with the money.
The non-belivers need (desperately) to find some evidence of tampering or complicit behavior.
The academic folks have an agenda, mostly political and somewhat pro-Gaia, that honesty again has no place in. This can easily be seen from a student's perspective. If you haven't bought into the Gaia hypothesis and are the least bit sceptical about anthropogenic climate change the surest way to a failing grade is to try to discuss this with a professor. There might be a few left that haven't been convinced, but very few. My daughter ran into the closed-mindedness of this in high school and be assured there is no room for dissent.
The US are about to embark on a bold economic experiment that will make the last forty years of enviromental activism seem very pale. Electricity generation has been a battle that we have managed to barely stay even with load - expect in the near future that we will be falling behind. We have spent nearly 100 years building cities around the idea of the automobile. Expect that automobiles will become far more costly to own and operate without any expenditure to reform cities away from their automobile-centric nature. The reality of there being no "green jobs" is beginning to sink in, but just barely - we are looking at a long period where "normal" unemployment will be 10-15% rather than 4% and the government doesn't seem to want to deal with this reality either.
Sure, it would be a good idea to reduce carbon emissions but it would not be a good idea to push a greatly reduced standard of living onto people. We have probably passed the point where we can not have significant electric power shortages over most of the country - we can't build generating plants fast enough to outpace the growth in demand as we haven't been building anything major for years and years. This is going to introduce significant changes in lifestyle and population. With a million or more people coming to the US each year from economic wastelands elsewhere the US can't help but increase the number of homes, cars, air conditioners and refrigerators. I think we are in for a wild ride over the next 10 years or so. Hope everyone can hang on because they clearly left out the safety belts on this ride.
This is the identical situation with Windows with one exception. There is nothing that you can point at and say "This is Internet Explorer and not involved with anything else" other than a very small executable. The rest of the "browser" is like Webkit is to OSX.
Why they didn't offer an uninstall for the IEXPLORE.EXE file is probably because it didn't make any sense to do so. It wouldn't have changed anything to speak of. You could still access "Internet Explorer" by typing a URL into any Windows Explorer address bar. And that level of integration is what pretty much means that IE is tied into the OS.
This level of integration is very much present in Windows 7.
It might have been nice, but that wasn't the decision that was made in 1995. Since then thousands or tens of thousands of applications have been built which use the MSHTML rendering engine with its unique (and either lightly documented or undocumented) COM interfaces with the OS to do its job.
Sure, it might have been nice to document how the MS rendering engine was interfaced with and provide for a smooth transition to replacing it by either later MS software or third party written renderers. That was not done and it has not been provided for in any respect since 1995.
So, no, today it is not possible to replace the MSHTML rendering engine with something else. And this decision dates from 1995 and I suspect we are pretty much stuck with it for a lot of compatability reasons.
Most of the newer displays that show links in Vista and Windows 7 are in fact rendered with an HTML renderer that is built into the operating system. IE uses the same HTML rendering engine.
I'd say that is pretty much a complete linkage between the OS and an HTML rendering engine with IE being a simple user interface that exposes the rendering of HTML pages. The fact that the Control Panel, Personalize and about 100 other displays now are also constructed from HTML pretty much means they are very tightly coupled.
The entire help system for displaying help files from third-party applications is also dependent on the MSHTML rendering engine.
There are also lightly documented and undocumented COM interfaces to the MSHTML rendering engine. So it isn't really possible to replace that with the rendering engine from, say Chrome or Firefox.
If you type http://slashdot.org/ into the address bar of a Windows Explorer window it will display the web page right there in that window using the MSHTML renderer.
Also, if you move from the "classic" window display you are actually displaying it with HTML, so again MSHTML is used.
There are many HTML displays in Windows that you would not suspect are done with MSHTML. This is pretty much the reason why MSHTML is part of the operating system - a decision was made in 1995 to use HTML for displaying stuff built into the OS. An HTML rendering control is a basic part of the system and you can't get away from it.
The problem is that everything to do with help and a bunch of the new Vista/7 displays are rendered using HTML. It is presumed that there will be something called MSHTML.DLL around which will do this rendering and have the COM/COM+ interfaces that are required.
Guess what? That pretty much limits it to the IE browser. Especially considering the level of documentation available about all the COM interfaces that are required for the HTML rendering object.
Take out that renderer and the OS is non-functional. Perhaps more so with Vista and Windows 7 than XP (and earlier), but substantial functionality of the operating system itself is indeed dependent on the exact implementation of the HTML renderer.
This doesn't preclude adding another browser which does not remove MSHTML.DLL, so naturally FireFox and Chrome will work just fine. It is just removing the HTML COM object that counts. And I would suspect that while there might be some flexibility with upgrading, it isn't going to be completely transparent. Having the HTML Help facility stop working or other displays that require HTML rendering would be a big problem.
Was introducing HTML Help the way they did it as a component of the OS a mistake? Maybe. But in 1995 it was a somewhat different decision and while Apple seems to have no trouble making their users re-buy software every few years the Microsoft users seem to really want to hang onto applications for a lot longer. One impediment to moving to 64-bit versions of the OS is the lack of support for 16-bit (Windows 3.1) applications, if you can believe it.
Most of the comments reflect an astounding lack of understanding of the current state of the legal system in the US. You would think that people would finally have gotten it through their heads what the state of things are now, but apparently not.
OK, so you have a kid making a semi-explosive device. That has a tendency to throw shrapnel around. Like fireworks, it makes a noise and is perfectly safe as long as everyone is a safe distance away. I want to stress everyone and safe distance. Unlike earlier in the 20th Century, it is today pretty difficult to find wide-open spaces without people. You can think you are out in the uninhabited desert and come across a bunch of people on ATVs. You can be in the woods and run into hikers. There just aren't a lot of places where there is nobody around anymore.
Now suppose that everyone has been responsible and made sure that before such a device goes off that everyone is a safe distance away. Now some fool comes stumbling into the area and is injured. Guess what? They are going to sue someone. Actually, they are going to sue everyone they can think of that might have deep pockets. This will include the local police for not preventing such activities. It can include the school if information about such a device was passed around between students at the school. In short, today when someone is injured - especially a child - there is a huge incentive to sue because (amazingly) lawsuits work. You take a chance at winning the lottery and the family is set for life. Sadly the kid with only one eye lost something irreplacable, but everyone else is happy.
The money awarded to the family isn't coming out of some magic box just for lottery... er, lawsuit... winners. It comes out of state and local governments, school systems and companies. This doesn't "teach anyone a lesson" nor does it do anything to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. What it does is cause financial havoc and that is about all. So of course the local police get the message real quick - better not let a lawsuit like this get started here.
End result is obvious: the police are going to do everything in their power to minimize lawsuits affecting the state and local government and all associated organizations, like the school system. They will do this in an utterly ruthless manner because their very survival depends on being successful. Hence you have rather strong enforcement when someone does something that could, in someone's wild imagining, present grounds for a lawsuit.
Signing of applications would seem to be a simple requirement. There is even a registry setting in XP and later versions of Windows to prevent any unsigned application from being executed.
Unfortunately, Windows is not usable in this mode. Microsoft doesn't bother signing pretty much anything. I wrote a test application to look to see what executable and DLL files were actually signed and who they were signed by. Conclusion: very little from Microsoft is signed and very little from anyone else is signed.
Because of backwards compatibility constraints, it wouldn't seem that Windows is ever going to require applications to be signed in the near future. It would make it impossible to run existing applications which is sort of a no-no for Microsoft.
Sorry, bur hate speech only applies to protected classes.
Rich old white men are not in a protected class and you can say anything you want about them. Actually, you can take out "rich" and "old" leaving "white men" and that covers it.
Christians are not in a protected class, so therefore it is perfectly legal to preach about killing them. However, should a Christian attempt to say that homosexuals have an offensive lifestyle they can be arrested for stating such things publicly. I am sure you can find examples of this.
Jews are just barely protected by hate speech laws in that it is illegal to burn a cross on a Jew's front lawn. But referring to a Jew as "Christkiller" doesn't seem to be protected.
Women are also only partly protected. In the workplace just about anything can be constrewed as sexual harrassment and many companies (esp. those with government contracts) will make this offical policy. But outside of work nearly anything goes.
Muslims aren't quite as protected as they would like to be. Native Americans haven't quite made the grade to fully protected.
African Americans are very much a protected class and any sort of denigration is legally actionable.
I think we have seen already that the customized battery is the way things are going. There is no hope for battery exchange without a single manufacturer dominating the market - like Edison did for light bulbs. There is a reason the standard screw base is called an "Edison base".
Unfortunately, what we are seeing is a number of manufacturers each building quite differently. There is no hope today of consolidation - Toyota seemed like an early winner but who exactly would buy a Prius with bad software today? And why would anyone expect that a Tesla battery would fit a Leaf? You wouldn't because the specifications (and requirements) for the two cars are vastly different.
As of yet I suspect very few Prius cars have been scrapped. At some point however, Toyota is going to shut off the continual extensions and any Prius that falls off the edge is essentially worthless. I understand the battery in a Prius goes for around $8,000 if it isn't covered by the warranty.
The problem has nothing to do with "newer, better batteries" and everything to do with simple battery life. When the battery wears out, the car is junk. This is especially true if any improvements whatsoever are made with respect to batteries, but even if battery technology is absolutely stagnent the value of the car without a battery is zero.
Unfortunately, what we are likely to see is a large number of different batteries that are unique to each car. This means there never will be any "economy of scale" with respect to electric car batteries - so they will likely all cost $8,000 or more.
Sure, an electric car would be interesting for a few years. But without major rework of the electric power supply in the US (like maybe building a few nuclear plants) it is unlikely to be practical to charge on in a few years. We are going to be seeing strict electricity rationing. For some folks in the Southwest, investing $30,000 in a solar array might be practical to keep the air conditioning and refrigerator running during the day.
You cannot reliably connect a signature with an individual.
However, you can look at the petition and see that "Frank McCoy" signed it. You can then take that information to try to intimidate every "Frank McCoy" that you encounter because supposedly one of them is an a irrational anti-gay bigot that wants to repress nice friendly gay people.
Further, you can go to the phone book and anyone named "Frank McCoy" is a potential target for whatever you would like to spew in their direction.
Does any of this mean that the "Frank McCoy" signature wasn't a fake name entered by a 12-year-old from Kentucky? No. In no way does it connect the signature with an individual. However, it does open all the people with the name "Frank McCoy" (or any other which appears on the petition) to the vindictive rage from the gay community that is intent on pushing their lifestyle as far as they can.
The argument pretty much goes along the lines of "Statistically, there is no reason why 50% of the population wouldn't be openly gay if there weren't consequences to being openly gay." So until it is 50-50 you can expect to keep getting the gay agenda pushed and pushed, at least by some people. Sure, Congress is filled with closeted gays. Sure, the Catholic church is filled with gay priests that hate themselves so much they keep preaching how terrible a sin it is. See, it really isn't that much of a stretch to 50%, now is it?
Making petition names available does not lead to better verification (impossible) nor does it lead to more responsible petition signers. What it does do is allow the opposition to the petition to harrass and intimidate signers insuring that nobody will ever sign petitions with strong opposition again.
How exactly does a signature connect with an individual? You could examine the petition and see "James Smith" as having signed it. Does that tell you which "James Smith" it is? No. Could it be a minor from Florida? Sure. You don't know.
There is no way to connect a signature with an individual. You might try matching up signatures from voting records, but I doubt anyone is really going to let you do that on a massive scale.
Sorry, this is an exercise in futility and it is designed to intimidate the petition signers. We have pretty much established homosexual males as a protected class in the US. Trying to stir up people to reduce their rights to rub their lifestyle in people's faces is offensive to them and this is a form of retaliation.
I'm sure there will be a huge incentive for you to have a functioning "ad-plate" on your car at all times. When the failure to do so incurs a higher vehicle use tax. Say $200 week.
California isn't doing this to make money, they are doing it to survive. This sounds like an interesting way for a state to get some more revenue, as idiotic as it sounds. It is at least not doing what other states already do - making you pay a personal property tax on your car yearly. In Arizona, which is a rather tax-light state, I get to pay over $800 a year for license plates because of this.
So yes, they are paying you to have ads on your car. And yes, there is a huge incentive to have it working because they will absolutely tax the heck out of you if it isn't.
Yes, and all this does is move the cost for distributing materials from the publisher to the customers.
Smart move on the part of the publisher - take your dedicated fan base and make them foot the bill.
In terms of reliability and ensuring the customer gets the real thing, it does nothing. It is incredibly easy to "fork" such distributions with who-knows-what additions or changes to the content. And how would the unsuspecting "customer" know the difference?
Yes, but don't you think something like "informed consent" would be nice? And what exactly do you do in a case where there is no possibility of "informed" - i.e., the clinic is promoting a treatment that virtually nobody actually believes in?
Maybe there is some science here, but another example is clinics in Mexico using various "herbal" treatments for cancer and other diseases at very large prices. This has been going on for decades and people continue to get taken in. Sure, they aren't really hurting anyone else (except maybe their relatives) and you can say they should have the right to kill themselves however they desire.
I would like to believe that most people would agree with the idea that people should have some idea of what they are really getting themselves into. If all they can get is "hope" and the dreams of someone that believes in their particular brand of treatment, I'd say there is no possibility of "informed consent" and therefore no consent at all. And no, nobody should be treated without their consent.
I suggest thinking, just a little bit, about the end points that are possible. How about picking from the list below:
We all live in the Star Trek Universe where everything is free for everyone all the time. Rent, food, clothes, everything.
Commercial media production and promotion ends. Anything supporting this or supported by it ends, like magazines, a whole lot of advertising and a lot of ad-supported stuff. Most "music venues" simply cease to be. Mostly, because there is no revenue, people just don't bother - they are too concerned with doing stuff to pay the rent and buy food with. After all, we are looking at 20-30% of the economy disappearing in the US overnight.
More and more DRM - you need to use your fingerprint (RF scanning, not optical - no gummy fingers here) to unlock everything. Your DNA is on file with the RIAA. You submit to a full body scan to watch TV in a small room that is controlled by the media associations. Physical media, like DVDs, are gone because they could escape from the controlled room and be copied.
Personally, I think number 2 is the way it is going. I wouldn't give #1 a ghost of a chance - my daughter owns a house that it rented out and she isn't about to start charging zero for it. But number 3 certainly seems like a real possibility and the more militant Internet users get the more likely it is all time.
Sure, I want everything I can consume for free. So does everyone I know. Why should I pay for something when I can get it for free? I am a smart, knowledgable person with a high-speed Internet connection - that by default means I can freely pirate media, software, etc. Today my risk is that someone will track me and "discover" my IP address is sharing outbound - anything I can do to prevent that discovery means less risk.
People that are not as smart, knowledgable and do not have high-speed Internet connections today have to pay for their media. This is a pity, but about all you can say now is too bad for them.
What Mr. Stallman seems to be advocating is that as long as nobody collects any money directly for distribution that it should all be free. It means an end to all revenue (after the first distribution) of anything digital - all the first recipient has to do is "share". And why wouldn't everyone on the Internet "share" in this manner? I cannot envision any reason why there wouldn't be web services set up to assist with this, probably ad supported.
It means the end of revenue from any commercial works. I suppose there might be some pretty creative ways to trick people into paying for something later on - restricted distribution, over-the-top embedded ads and using music, movies and books as advertising for other physical-world services that can't be copied digitally. But for the most part I think the idea of commercial media would pretty much end.
Some would say that it is about time. Some folks actually employed in the production of commercial media and software might notice they are going to lose their job. But they can join Mr. Stallman in donating their newly-found free time to non-commercial (free) software development. If they aren't a programmer, well, they don't fit in Mr. Stallman's world anyway. That's why we have welfare.
The difference between how electricity was used in the 1930s (in the USA) and 1980 is primarily convenience. The TV was instant-on, the refrigerator didn't need any attention to keep things cold and an electric dishwasher ended some more kitchen drudgery. Clocks became electrically powered instead of wind-up. Many "cordless" devices appeared which were constantly plugged in to keep the battery charged for (again) "instant use".
What we are seeing today is that with a rising population and utterly stagnant electric power industry electric power cannot be assumed to be present in unlimited quantities for the homeowner. It was (from 1930 to 1990) pretty much a given that you could use however much electricity you could pay for. Today it needs to be brought home to every person living in the US that this access and reliability is going to cease shortly. You will not have access to all the electricity you can pay for, and it will not be there when you want it.
We can start to turn back the clock on lifestyle - wind-up clocks, plugging things in when they are actually needed to be used and being aware that electric power is an unreliable, unstable thing. It is going to hit some folks pretty hard, but this is the price we are going to be paying for indulging the environmental wackos as we have for the last 40 years or so.
When was the last large-scale power plant built? I don't really know, but it can't have been after 1980. The licensing process for building such a thing today is insane and designed to prevent anything from being built. You can't build power transmission lines because of concerns of electromagnetic radiation and its (supposed) harmful effects.
We can build almost all of the wind turbines we want, and when the wind is blowing power will flow for short distances. The idea of linking up wind power all over the country with a new "Smart Grid" is a hopeless fantasy - there is no area immune to the protests, enviromental impact studies and public comment periods. So no "Smart Grid" will ever be built. Nuclear power generation could greatly reduce the current use of oil and natural gas for electric generation - but all we have built for the last 30 years or so has been "peaker plants" designed to supplement existing generating capacity. Well, in both Illinois and Arizona where I have lived these "peaker plants" were designed to quickly start when needed and turn off when not - but they are all running 100% of the time now. And being enlarged as much as the citizens and licensing will allow.
A possible view is that everyone has their own unstable, unreliable electric generation and no "grid" at all. This is seen as a great boon by many - the result would be that many would simply do without while the upper middle class and wealthy would have whatever they could afford. This wasn't the view of electricification in the 1930's at all - the idea was power for all. Well, maybe that is an idea who's time is ending.
In much of Florida your air conditioner is already "networked" to the power company so they can turn it off remotely when the load requires a cutback. This will certainly be extended to other parts of the country and extended to other major appliances. Your refrigerator will keep food cold all day long without any electricity as long as you don't open the door - so it will likely be shut off as well. Electric dryers, electric hot water heaters and electric heat are likely to be controlled too. What happens if you are home sick? Don't open the refrigerator!!
Intel and other companies will be making products not for the homeowner but for the power company, local government and maybe an "environmental oversight board" to control devices in your home. As the load exceeds the generating capacity we are going to have some hard decisions to make. Since today the factories are mostly gone we have an office by day, home by night distribution of the electric power load. It will be interesting to see what changes get made in homes to allow offices to have the power they need during the day.
Too bad Microsoft sold the idea of ActiveX to corporate America. There are millions of internal corporate applications that rely on ActiveX in the browser, running "privileged" code and writing stuff on the user's disk.
Microsoft and plenty of other companies use this as well. Yes, ActiveX was a silly idea from a security point of view, but it was "the" killer application that got things moving on the Web for Microsoft.
ActiveX as a technology allows for virtual unlimited extensability of the browser. ActiveX enables SaaS through a web page such that the application is downloaded, executed and removed from the computer all in a single step. Obviously it could be misused - and Microsoft seems to have thought that code signing would eliminate that as a problem. Except nobody, not even Microsoft, signs their executables.
So we have ActiveX: too unsafe for the Internet but just fine for the corporate intranet. Because of this annoying fact it isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
The difference between "a science" and "an art" is reproducibility and the state of predicability of events. If you want to call seismology "a science" then you better be prepared to produce results on demand.
Obviously, chemistry is "a science" and psychology is "an art" today and I don't think many would disagree. Seismology, as a branch of geology, isn't quite there yet. As is about to be proven in court. Having to prove this in court is a nuisance, but it isn't that unreasonable. Using proper terminology from the beginning might have clarified this a bit in the general public's mind.
I believe the difference here is that while in the UK a judgement from a US court may be viewed with suspicion and would need to be litigated in a UK court, in the US it is common for such foreign judgements to be accepted at face value unless there is substantial evidence (and a court decision) that the judgement is somehow faulty.
So a UK judgement from a UK court would have a strong presumption of being valid and enforcible in the US. The reverse may not be true at all.
Also, I have to say that not all foreign judgements are going to be treated that way. I suspect if you showed up with a judgement from a Nigerian court you might not get as far. However, after enough outcry of racisism and unequal treatment it might be accepted without question. A judgement from North Korea would probably just be laughed at as North Korea isn't the home of a distressed minority.
The way to not send spam is to not use email commercially. Any form of email that is sent out from a company that is not requested in writing (in triplicate!) by an anti-spam zealot is spam.
We have a double-opt-in mailing list. We have been blocked because the confirmation to join the email list has been sent to spam traps. Simple answer here is not to use a mailing list.
Receipts mailed to anti-spam zealots are considered to be spam and reported. This takes someone's time to sort out and try to get unblocked - which is usually successful. Simple answer is that we are trying to avoid emailing receipts for purchases. We either let some other eCommerce provider do it (and let them take care of the fallout) or moving to a web-based system where your information is retrievable on the web but never, ever emailed.
We have been blocked by Yahoo for some unknown reason, probably some rather uncommon RBL. There is no known way to get off this list because nobody has ever identified it to us. Yahoo is pretty much uncontactable for this and their blocking does not result in a "bounce" but just dropping the email.
Email is pretty much useless today for any sort of commercial communication.
Most of the people that I know that are under 30 understand only one thing - Internet == Free. If it isn't free, they aren't interested. If it can be obtained for free, they are going to take it if they are even remotely interested.
What this leads to is huge volumes of downloading crap that is then "archived" and never really watching it or using it.
It also means that any service that insists on being paid will simply not be used. And, the material will be pirated and distributed. Mostly by people that "buy" it once with a stolen credit card number and post it for everyone to download and take. This pretty much means anything digital will sell once.
Some people with more money than time will pay for media. The rest of the planet (and the majority) will never pay no matter how convenient or painless. Paying is pretty much doomed.
Slashdot Mirror
While it needs to be admitted that an "honest investigation" might be extremely difficult, it is actually in nobody's interest for an honest investigation to take place.
The grant money is firmly tied to interests that want to see the application of the precationary principal. Honesty, one way or the other, is of no interest to the people with the money.
The non-belivers need (desperately) to find some evidence of tampering or complicit behavior.
The academic folks have an agenda, mostly political and somewhat pro-Gaia, that honesty again has no place in. This can easily be seen from a student's perspective. If you haven't bought into the Gaia hypothesis and are the least bit sceptical about anthropogenic climate change the surest way to a failing grade is to try to discuss this with a professor. There might be a few left that haven't been convinced, but very few. My daughter ran into the closed-mindedness of this in high school and be assured there is no room for dissent.
The US are about to embark on a bold economic experiment that will make the last forty years of enviromental activism seem very pale. Electricity generation has been a battle that we have managed to barely stay even with load - expect in the near future that we will be falling behind. We have spent nearly 100 years building cities around the idea of the automobile. Expect that automobiles will become far more costly to own and operate without any expenditure to reform cities away from their automobile-centric nature. The reality of there being no "green jobs" is beginning to sink in, but just barely - we are looking at a long period where "normal" unemployment will be 10-15% rather than 4% and the government doesn't seem to want to deal with this reality either.
Sure, it would be a good idea to reduce carbon emissions but it would not be a good idea to push a greatly reduced standard of living onto people. We have probably passed the point where we can not have significant electric power shortages over most of the country - we can't build generating plants fast enough to outpace the growth in demand as we haven't been building anything major for years and years. This is going to introduce significant changes in lifestyle and population. With a million or more people coming to the US each year from economic wastelands elsewhere the US can't help but increase the number of homes, cars, air conditioners and refrigerators. I think we are in for a wild ride over the next 10 years or so. Hope everyone can hang on because they clearly left out the safety belts on this ride.
This is the identical situation with Windows with one exception. There is nothing that you can point at and say "This is Internet Explorer and not involved with anything else" other than a very small executable. The rest of the "browser" is like Webkit is to OSX.
Why they didn't offer an uninstall for the IEXPLORE.EXE file is probably because it didn't make any sense to do so. It wouldn't have changed anything to speak of. You could still access "Internet Explorer" by typing a URL into any Windows Explorer address bar. And that level of integration is what pretty much means that IE is tied into the OS.
This level of integration is very much present in Windows 7.
It might have been nice, but that wasn't the decision that was made in 1995. Since then thousands or tens of thousands of applications have been built which use the MSHTML rendering engine with its unique (and either lightly documented or undocumented) COM interfaces with the OS to do its job.
Sure, it might have been nice to document how the MS rendering engine was interfaced with and provide for a smooth transition to replacing it by either later MS software or third party written renderers. That was not done and it has not been provided for in any respect since 1995.
So, no, today it is not possible to replace the MSHTML rendering engine with something else. And this decision dates from 1995 and I suspect we are pretty much stuck with it for a lot of compatability reasons.
Most of the newer displays that show links in Vista and Windows 7 are in fact rendered with an HTML renderer that is built into the operating system. IE uses the same HTML rendering engine.
I'd say that is pretty much a complete linkage between the OS and an HTML rendering engine with IE being a simple user interface that exposes the rendering of HTML pages. The fact that the Control Panel, Personalize and about 100 other displays now are also constructed from HTML pretty much means they are very tightly coupled.
The entire help system for displaying help files from third-party applications is also dependent on the MSHTML rendering engine.
There are also lightly documented and undocumented COM interfaces to the MSHTML rendering engine. So it isn't really possible to replace that with the rendering engine from, say Chrome or Firefox.
If you type http://slashdot.org/ into the address bar of a Windows Explorer window it will display the web page right there in that window using the MSHTML renderer.
Also, if you move from the "classic" window display you are actually displaying it with HTML, so again MSHTML is used.
There are many HTML displays in Windows that you would not suspect are done with MSHTML. This is pretty much the reason why MSHTML is part of the operating system - a decision was made in 1995 to use HTML for displaying stuff built into the OS. An HTML rendering control is a basic part of the system and you can't get away from it.
The problem is that everything to do with help and a bunch of the new Vista/7 displays are rendered using HTML. It is presumed that there will be something called MSHTML.DLL around which will do this rendering and have the COM/COM+ interfaces that are required.
Guess what? That pretty much limits it to the IE browser. Especially considering the level of documentation available about all the COM interfaces that are required for the HTML rendering object.
Take out that renderer and the OS is non-functional. Perhaps more so with Vista and Windows 7 than XP (and earlier), but substantial functionality of the operating system itself is indeed dependent on the exact implementation of the HTML renderer.
This doesn't preclude adding another browser which does not remove MSHTML.DLL, so naturally FireFox and Chrome will work just fine. It is just removing the HTML COM object that counts. And I would suspect that while there might be some flexibility with upgrading, it isn't going to be completely transparent. Having the HTML Help facility stop working or other displays that require HTML rendering would be a big problem.
Was introducing HTML Help the way they did it as a component of the OS a mistake? Maybe. But in 1995 it was a somewhat different decision and while Apple seems to have no trouble making their users re-buy software every few years the Microsoft users seem to really want to hang onto applications for a lot longer. One impediment to moving to 64-bit versions of the OS is the lack of support for 16-bit (Windows 3.1) applications, if you can believe it.
Most of the comments reflect an astounding lack of understanding of the current state of the legal system in the US. You would think that people would finally have gotten it through their heads what the state of things are now, but apparently not.
OK, so you have a kid making a semi-explosive device. That has a tendency to throw shrapnel around. Like fireworks, it makes a noise and is perfectly safe as long as everyone is a safe distance away. I want to stress everyone and safe distance. Unlike earlier in the 20th Century, it is today pretty difficult to find wide-open spaces without people. You can think you are out in the uninhabited desert and come across a bunch of people on ATVs. You can be in the woods and run into hikers. There just aren't a lot of places where there is nobody around anymore.
Now suppose that everyone has been responsible and made sure that before such a device goes off that everyone is a safe distance away. Now some fool comes stumbling into the area and is injured. Guess what? They are going to sue someone. Actually, they are going to sue everyone they can think of that might have deep pockets. This will include the local police for not preventing such activities. It can include the school if information about such a device was passed around between students at the school. In short, today when someone is injured - especially a child - there is a huge incentive to sue because (amazingly) lawsuits work. You take a chance at winning the lottery and the family is set for life. Sadly the kid with only one eye lost something irreplacable, but everyone else is happy.
The money awarded to the family isn't coming out of some magic box just for lottery ... er, lawsuit ... winners. It comes out of state and local governments, school systems and companies. This doesn't "teach anyone a lesson" nor does it do anything to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. What it does is cause financial havoc and that is about all. So of course the local police get the message real quick - better not let a lawsuit like this get started here.
End result is obvious: the police are going to do everything in their power to minimize lawsuits affecting the state and local government and all associated organizations, like the school system. They will do this in an utterly ruthless manner because their very survival depends on being successful. Hence you have rather strong enforcement when someone does something that could, in someone's wild imagining, present grounds for a lawsuit.
Signing of applications would seem to be a simple requirement. There is even a registry setting in XP and later versions of Windows to prevent any unsigned application from being executed.
Unfortunately, Windows is not usable in this mode. Microsoft doesn't bother signing pretty much anything. I wrote a test application to look to see what executable and DLL files were actually signed and who they were signed by. Conclusion: very little from Microsoft is signed and very little from anyone else is signed.
Because of backwards compatibility constraints, it wouldn't seem that Windows is ever going to require applications to be signed in the near future. It would make it impossible to run existing applications which is sort of a no-no for Microsoft.
Sorry, bur hate speech only applies to protected classes.
Rich old white men are not in a protected class and you can say anything you want about them. Actually, you can take out "rich" and "old" leaving "white men" and that covers it.
Christians are not in a protected class, so therefore it is perfectly legal to preach about killing them. However, should a Christian attempt to say that homosexuals have an offensive lifestyle they can be arrested for stating such things publicly. I am sure you can find examples of this.
Jews are just barely protected by hate speech laws in that it is illegal to burn a cross on a Jew's front lawn. But referring to a Jew as "Christkiller" doesn't seem to be protected.
Women are also only partly protected. In the workplace just about anything can be constrewed as sexual harrassment and many companies (esp. those with government contracts) will make this offical policy. But outside of work nearly anything goes.
Muslims aren't quite as protected as they would like to be. Native Americans haven't quite made the grade to fully protected.
African Americans are very much a protected class and any sort of denigration is legally actionable.
I think we have seen already that the customized battery is the way things are going. There is no hope for battery exchange without a single manufacturer dominating the market - like Edison did for light bulbs. There is a reason the standard screw base is called an "Edison base".
Unfortunately, what we are seeing is a number of manufacturers each building quite differently. There is no hope today of consolidation - Toyota seemed like an early winner but who exactly would buy a Prius with bad software today? And why would anyone expect that a Tesla battery would fit a Leaf? You wouldn't because the specifications (and requirements) for the two cars are vastly different.
by simply extending the warranty on the battery.
As of yet I suspect very few Prius cars have been scrapped. At some point however, Toyota is going to shut off the continual extensions and any Prius that falls off the edge is essentially worthless. I understand the battery in a Prius goes for around $8,000 if it isn't covered by the warranty.
The problem has nothing to do with "newer, better batteries" and everything to do with simple
battery life. When the battery wears out, the car is junk. This is especially true if any improvements whatsoever are made with respect to batteries, but even if battery technology is absolutely stagnent the value of the car without a battery is zero.
Unfortunately, what we are likely to see is a large number of different batteries that are unique to each car. This means there never will be any "economy of scale" with respect to electric car batteries - so they will likely all cost $8,000 or more.
Sure, an electric car would be interesting for a few years. But without major rework of the electric power supply in the US (like maybe building a few nuclear plants) it is unlikely to be practical to charge on in a few years. We are going to be seeing strict electricity rationing. For some folks in the Southwest, investing $30,000 in a solar array might be practical to keep the air conditioning and refrigerator running during the day.
You cannot reliably connect a signature with an individual.
However, you can look at the petition and see that "Frank McCoy" signed it. You can then take that information to try to intimidate every "Frank McCoy" that you encounter because supposedly one of them is an a irrational anti-gay bigot that wants to repress nice friendly gay people.
Further, you can go to the phone book and anyone named "Frank McCoy" is a potential target for whatever you would like to spew in their direction.
Does any of this mean that the "Frank McCoy" signature wasn't a fake name entered by a 12-year-old from Kentucky? No. In no way does it connect the signature with an individual. However, it does open all the people with the name "Frank McCoy" (or any other which appears on the petition) to the vindictive rage from the gay community that is intent on pushing their lifestyle as far as they can.
The argument pretty much goes along the lines of "Statistically, there is no reason why 50% of the population wouldn't be openly gay if there weren't consequences to being openly gay." So until it is 50-50 you can expect to keep getting the gay agenda pushed and pushed, at least by some people. Sure, Congress is filled with closeted gays. Sure, the Catholic church is filled with gay priests that hate themselves so much they keep preaching how terrible a sin it is. See, it really isn't that much of a stretch to 50%, now is it?
Making petition names available does not lead to better verification (impossible) nor does it lead to more responsible petition signers. What it does do is allow the opposition to the petition to harrass and intimidate signers insuring that nobody will ever sign petitions with strong opposition again.
Sounds like a plan to me.
How exactly does a signature connect with an individual? You could examine the petition and see "James Smith" as having signed it. Does that tell you which "James Smith" it is? No. Could it be a minor from Florida? Sure. You don't know.
There is no way to connect a signature with an individual. You might try matching up signatures from voting records, but I doubt anyone is really going to let you do that on a massive scale.
Sorry, this is an exercise in futility and it is designed to intimidate the petition signers. We have pretty much established homosexual males as a protected class in the US. Trying to stir up people to reduce their rights to rub their lifestyle in people's faces is offensive to them and this is a form of retaliation.
I'm sure there will be a huge incentive for you to have a functioning "ad-plate" on your car at all times. When the failure to do so incurs a higher vehicle use tax. Say $200 week.
California isn't doing this to make money, they are doing it to survive. This sounds like an interesting way for a state to get some more revenue, as idiotic as it sounds. It is at least not doing what other states already do - making you pay a personal property tax on your car yearly. In Arizona, which is a rather tax-light state, I get to pay over $800 a year for license plates because of this.
So yes, they are paying you to have ads on your car. And yes, there is a huge incentive to have it working because they will absolutely tax the heck out of you if it isn't.
Yes, and all this does is move the cost for distributing materials from the publisher to the customers.
Smart move on the part of the publisher - take your dedicated fan base and make them foot the bill.
In terms of reliability and ensuring the customer gets the real thing, it does nothing. It is incredibly easy to "fork" such distributions with who-knows-what additions or changes to the content. And how would the unsuspecting "customer" know the difference?
Yes, but don't you think something like "informed consent" would be nice? And what exactly do you do in a case where there is no possibility of "informed" - i.e., the clinic is promoting a treatment that virtually nobody actually believes in?
Maybe there is some science here, but another example is clinics in Mexico using various "herbal" treatments for cancer and other diseases at very large prices. This has been going on for decades and people continue to get taken in. Sure, they aren't really hurting anyone else (except maybe their relatives) and you can say they should have the right to kill themselves however they desire.
I would like to believe that most people would agree with the idea that people should have some idea of what they are really getting themselves into. If all they can get is "hope" and the dreams of someone that believes in their particular brand of treatment, I'd say there is no possibility of "informed consent" and therefore no consent at all. And no, nobody should be treated without their consent.
I suggest thinking, just a little bit, about the end points that are possible. How about picking from the list below:
Personally, I think number 2 is the way it is going. I wouldn't give #1 a ghost of a chance - my daughter owns a house that it rented out and she isn't about to start charging zero for it. But number 3 certainly seems like a real possibility and the more militant Internet users get the more likely it is all time.
Sure, I want everything I can consume for free. So does everyone I know. Why should I pay for something when I can get it for free? I am a smart, knowledgable person with a high-speed Internet connection - that by default means I can freely pirate media, software, etc. Today my risk is that someone will track me and "discover" my IP address is sharing outbound - anything I can do to prevent that discovery means less risk.
People that are not as smart, knowledgable and do not have high-speed Internet connections today have to pay for their media. This is a pity, but about all you can say now is too bad for them.
What Mr. Stallman seems to be advocating is that as long as nobody collects any money directly for distribution that it should all be free. It means an end to all revenue (after the first distribution) of anything digital - all the first recipient has to do is "share". And why wouldn't everyone on the Internet "share" in this manner? I cannot envision any reason why there wouldn't be web services set up to assist with this, probably ad supported.
It means the end of revenue from any commercial works. I suppose there might be some pretty creative ways to trick people into paying for something later on - restricted distribution, over-the-top embedded ads and using music, movies and books as advertising for other physical-world services that can't be copied digitally. But for the most part I think the idea of commercial media would pretty much end.
Some would say that it is about time. Some folks actually employed in the production of commercial media and software might notice they are going to lose their job. But they can join Mr. Stallman in donating their newly-found free time to non-commercial (free) software development. If they aren't a programmer, well, they don't fit in Mr. Stallman's world anyway. That's why we have welfare.
The difference between how electricity was used in the 1930s (in the USA) and 1980 is primarily convenience. The TV was instant-on, the refrigerator didn't need any attention to keep things cold and an electric dishwasher ended some more kitchen drudgery. Clocks became electrically powered instead of wind-up. Many "cordless" devices appeared which were constantly plugged in to keep the battery charged for (again) "instant use".
What we are seeing today is that with a rising population and utterly stagnant electric power industry electric power cannot be assumed to be present in unlimited quantities for the homeowner. It was (from 1930 to 1990) pretty much a given that you could use however much electricity you could pay for. Today it needs to be brought home to every person living in the US that this access and reliability is going to cease shortly. You will not have access to all the electricity you can pay for, and it will not be there when you want it.
We can start to turn back the clock on lifestyle - wind-up clocks, plugging things in when they are actually needed to be used and being aware that electric power is an unreliable, unstable thing. It is going to hit some folks pretty hard, but this is the price we are going to be paying for indulging the environmental wackos as we have for the last 40 years or so.
When was the last large-scale power plant built? I don't really know, but it can't have been after 1980. The licensing process for building such a thing today is insane and designed to prevent anything from being built. You can't build power transmission lines because of concerns of electromagnetic radiation and its (supposed) harmful effects.
We can build almost all of the wind turbines we want, and when the wind is blowing power will flow for short distances. The idea of linking up wind power all over the country with a new "Smart Grid" is a hopeless fantasy - there is no area immune to the protests, enviromental impact studies and public comment periods. So no "Smart Grid" will ever be built. Nuclear power generation could greatly reduce the current use of oil and natural gas for electric generation - but all we have built for the last 30 years or so has been "peaker plants" designed to supplement existing generating capacity. Well, in both Illinois and Arizona where I have lived these "peaker plants" were designed to quickly start when needed and turn off when not - but they are all running 100% of the time now. And being enlarged as much as the citizens and licensing will allow.
A possible view is that everyone has their own unstable, unreliable electric generation and no "grid" at all. This is seen as a great boon by many - the result would be that many would simply do without while the upper middle class and wealthy would have whatever they could afford. This wasn't the view of electricification in the 1930's at all - the idea was power for all. Well, maybe that is an idea who's time is ending.
In much of Florida your air conditioner is already "networked" to the power company so they can turn it off remotely when the load requires a cutback. This will certainly be extended to other parts of the country and extended to other major appliances. Your refrigerator will keep food cold all day long without any electricity as long as you don't open the door - so it will likely be shut off as well. Electric dryers, electric hot water heaters and electric heat are likely to be controlled too. What happens if you are home sick? Don't open the refrigerator!!
Intel and other companies will be making products not for the homeowner but for the power company, local government and maybe an "environmental oversight board" to control devices in your home. As the load exceeds the generating capacity we are going to have some hard decisions to make. Since today the factories are mostly gone we have an office by day, home by night distribution of the electric power load. It will be interesting to see what changes get made in homes to allow offices to have the power they need during the day.
Too bad Microsoft sold the idea of ActiveX to corporate America. There are millions of internal corporate applications that rely on ActiveX in the browser, running "privileged" code and writing stuff on the user's disk.
Microsoft and plenty of other companies use this as well. Yes, ActiveX was a silly idea from a security point of view, but it was "the" killer application that got things moving on the Web for Microsoft.
ActiveX as a technology allows for virtual unlimited extensability of the browser. ActiveX enables SaaS through a web page such that the application is downloaded, executed and removed from the computer all in a single step. Obviously it could be misused - and Microsoft seems to have thought that code signing would eliminate that as a problem. Except nobody, not even Microsoft, signs their executables.
So we have ActiveX: too unsafe for the Internet but just fine for the corporate intranet. Because of this annoying fact it isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
The difference between "a science" and "an art" is reproducibility and the state of predicability of events. If you want to call seismology "a science" then you better be prepared to produce results on demand.
Obviously, chemistry is "a science" and psychology is "an art" today and I don't think many would disagree. Seismology, as a branch of geology, isn't quite there yet. As is about to be proven in court. Having to prove this in court is a nuisance, but it isn't that unreasonable. Using proper terminology from the beginning might have clarified this a bit in the general public's mind.
I believe the difference here is that while in the UK a judgement from a US court may be viewed with suspicion and would need to be litigated in a UK court, in the US it is common for such foreign judgements to be accepted at face value unless there is substantial evidence (and a court decision) that the judgement is somehow faulty.
So a UK judgement from a UK court would have a strong presumption of being valid and enforcible in the US. The reverse may not be true at all.
Also, I have to say that not all foreign judgements are going to be treated that way. I suspect if you showed up with a judgement from a Nigerian court you might not get as far. However, after enough outcry of racisism and unequal treatment it might be accepted without question. A judgement from North Korea would probably just be laughed at as North Korea isn't the home of a distressed minority.
The way to not send spam is to not use email commercially. Any form of email that is sent out from a company that is not requested in writing (in triplicate!) by an anti-spam zealot is spam.
We have a double-opt-in mailing list. We have been blocked because the confirmation to join the email list has been sent to spam traps. Simple answer here is not to use a mailing list.
Receipts mailed to anti-spam zealots are considered to be spam and reported. This takes someone's time to sort out and try to get unblocked - which is usually successful. Simple answer is that we are trying to avoid emailing receipts for purchases. We either let some other eCommerce provider do it (and let them take care of the fallout) or moving to a web-based system where your information is retrievable on the web but never, ever emailed.
We have been blocked by Yahoo for some unknown reason, probably some rather uncommon RBL. There is no known way to get off this list because nobody has ever identified it to us. Yahoo is pretty much uncontactable for this and their blocking does not result in a "bounce" but just dropping the email.
Email is pretty much useless today for any sort of commercial communication.
Yes, but your buddy down the street wants to have a copy of everything you paid Amazon for - for nothing, because you have it and can share.
Then he can post it through whatever mechanism he wants to share with the rest of the planet - after all, sharing is just being friendly, right?
With this model at most one copy of anything can be sold.
Most of the people that I know that are under 30 understand only one thing - Internet == Free. If it isn't free, they aren't interested. If it can be obtained for free, they are going to take it if they are even remotely interested.
What this leads to is huge volumes of downloading crap that is then "archived" and never really watching it or using it.
It also means that any service that insists on being paid will simply not be used. And, the material will be pirated and distributed. Mostly by people that "buy" it once with a stolen credit card number and post it for everyone to download and take. This pretty much means anything digital will sell once.
Some people with more money than time will pay for media. The rest of the planet (and the majority) will never pay no matter how convenient or painless. Paying is pretty much doomed.