There is a benefit to the consumer: playing video games on the new Xbox. The consumer doesn't pick, in isolation, whether they want always-on connectivity; they choose whether or not to buy the whole bundle of good and bad design decisions that make up the Xbox. There is presumably a group of people who will move from wanting an Xbox to not wanting one because of this feature, but my gut feeling is that they won't be that numerous, because I think that the games, not the technical requirements, are probably uppermost in peoples' minds when buying a console.
Where have you seen this used? It seems like it wouldn't work anywhere where you have external consultants or clients attending meetings, or meetings with more than a couple of people - in either case because it would be a big deal if you turned up and the conference room was being used.
You're imagining that things are so bad that a guarantee backed by the US government is not enough to stop a bank run, and the run is so widespread that the government cannot meet the bill. In that case the government has collapsed. The banks have collapsed. The stock market has collapsed, the hedge funds have collapsed, the insurance markets and pension companies and every other type of financial institution has collapsed. In this situation, you lose. It doesn't matter if your money was in bitcoins or invested in gold - you just lose. As I said above there's really little point in an American individual hedging against the collapse of the US government - if that happens you just lose.
You need to look at the bigger picture - taking depositors' money is only a small part of what happened in Cyprus. It's the result of widespread bank failure and the government defaulting. If the same happened in the US - the government defaulting on its debt and deposit banks collapsing - you would be in huge trouble whether the government took your savings or not. I'm not sure that there's any point in a private citizen living in the US hedging against the collapse of the government; if that happens you've lost no matter how prepared you are.
I assume that there's some sort of calculation behind this: presumably the extra usage that the cards get by being extremely convenient to use outweighs the losses. I say that because (at least in this country - I don't know about elsewhere) if your credit card is misused by a retailer it's the credit card company that bears the loss. They still haven't moved away from the old model - presumably because the amount of fraud is not great enough to justify the cost and loss of convenience of something more secure.
What they have said is that they won't be changing the scores because there's a significant disadvantage (people being unhappy with the lost nostalgia) and not much of an advantage, since having a couple of over- or under-valued letters doesn't make much difference in a game with so much inherent luck.
Yes, as with absolutely any type of lawsuit it is possible for a claimant to frame a defendant. They could equally crack their wireless and post defamatory statements about themselves or drop their belongings in the person's shopping bag. This is the reason that perjury is a serious criminal offence that renders a person liable to a lengthy period of imprisonment.
I suspect that the GP means the particular subset of (largely modernist/post-modernist) fiction that uses formatting, foot-notes and deliberately fragmented writing (so that flicking backwards and forwards is often necessary). Ebooks are indeed not much good for those.
I'm not sure that the problems that people have with ereaders are really the manufacturers' or publishers' fault. Locking and removing content remotely are irrelevant (and unheard of) to almost everyone; the Kindle's DRM has no impact at all on the common use case of buying your own books. It seems to me that ereaders have done extremely well - the only thing they have failed to do is to live up to the exaggerated predictions of some commentators.
There are limiting factors on ebooks that I think are inherent rather than being someone's fault. They aren't much good for books where you will want to flick from page to page or scan through for some half-remembered diagram - so a lot of non-fiction is better suited to paper books. They also lack the ability to spontaneously lend them to someone - if a friend is staying over and wants something to read, chances are they don't have their ereader with them. The screen size can never be right for every book you want to read, especially if you want to read newspapers and magazines as well as paperbacks. Those are, I think, bigger problems for the average user than the vague possibility that Amazon might remove their content - and I don't think they are really anyone's fault.
The people who need help are also often the ones who are going to struggle to seek help. University students are adults, but barely - in the UK people mostly go to university at 18. For many it will be their first time away from home and they will be at the other end of the country from their friends and family. For a lot of students it's the first time they come out as gay, which can be very tough, or the first time they have a serious relationship. If a student wants to sit at home rather than go to class then I say fair enough - in fact if they're not doing the work I would prefer that they stay away rather than slow the whole class down. But I do think that the university should try to identify those students who aren't coping and who need extra help. It doesn't have to be an inquisition or a punishment. When I was at university our attendance was monitored for exactly the reasons the GP mentioned - a particular memory of mine is that it meant that when a classmate had a breakdown the university found out and helped her. There were also plenty of people who just didn't turn up, but as long as they passed their exams nothing happened to them (bar the odd comment from the lecturer) as a result.
I think that if your benchmark is "it's no worse than it was 200 years ago" something has gone badly wrong. 200 years ago was before the birth of modern policing, and before the taming of the Wild West. "No worse" is not very impressive.
Opinion is not the same thing as conjecture. Neither is something a matter of opinion just because the truth is not known for certain.
I could try to describe the difference but I think that the easiest way to explain it is to ask what an opinion is. The key is that opinions are subjective; they are a matter of personal judgement and preference and while two people may disagree neither opinion is wrong. It flows from that that where something can be wrong it is not an opinion - it is a fact. This is the case even where the truth is not certain. It simply makes no sense to say, for example, that in your opinion 2 + 2 = 5 (if you don't agree try to articulate what that statement could possibly mean). Your claim that there might be a second Great Wall of China in Mexico illustrates the point nicely - even if that is possible it is still a question of fact; there either is or there isn't, even if we don't know. If you are inclined to disagree, once again answer the question: what could it possibly mean to say "in my opinion there is a Great Wall of China in Mexico"? The statement is meaningless because this is a matter of fact, not of opinion. Equally it makes no sense to say that objectively, red is better than blue - because that is an attempt to make a statement of fact about a matter of opinion. If it were meaningful to make statements of opinion about matters of fact you could say things like "in my opinion there is a Great Wall of China in Mexico, but there isn't". Again, what could that statement mean? What would an opinion be in these circumstances?
You are right that we do not know the facts. They are, however, still facts; either the public officials took bribes or they did not, even if we do not know which is the case. "In my opinion" does not simply mean "without reason or evidence I choose to believe the following". It makes no sense to say that in your opinion they took bribes, because that is a matter of objective truth and not subjective judgement. Once again if you disagree I defy you to articulate a coherent meaning of the phrase "in my opinion they took bribes".
And finally, I don't know where you live but here (the UK) it is certainly not the case that the media - or individuals - can make baseless accusations of criminal conduct against public officials, as is illustrated by the substantial damages being paid to Lord McAlpine after wrongful allegations were made against him without any foundation.
I'm not talking about tiny quirks or about using spaces to align text. Even without getting into features that Writer simply lacks - and there are enough - trading complicated documents between Writer and Word introduces a lot of problems and errors. This is not controversial - every review of LibreOffice notes them and the developers provide guidance on their website to help people correct by hand the most egregious errors. You may say that this is as much as problem with Word as with Writer, but that's irrelevant for a lot of users; when I'm at work I need to trade documents with other firms who use Word, and the result is that my job is a lot easier and quicker if I use Word. As I noted before it takes very little time for these slight delays to add up to more than the cost of Word.
Even where errors are due to the original author, if I have to correct the formatting in an execution clause before I can send it to my client that's just as much a cost to me if it comes from the original user not having used formatting properly as if the problem comes from a bug. In both cases Word gives me the result I want immediately and Writer does not. Why may be interesting to the developers but it is irrelevant to me when the delay costs me money. The German local government seems to me to have acted entirely reasonably here: they thought that the advantages of free software would outweigh the inconveniences and so tried it; the inconveniences were greater than expected so they have switched back.
and finally, this is slashdot, so i can accuse anyone of anything. it is obviously my opinion that there is corruption. if you disagree, that's fine, but i don't need to convince you with evidence or anything. if you're interested in past business practices of microsoft, try groklaw, otherwise google is your friend.
You cannot say that officials took bribes in your opinion. It makes no more sense than to say that in your opinion the Great Wall of China is in Mexico; whether they took bribes is a matter of fact, not opinion. Traditionally it has been considered at least impolite to make entirely baseless accusations of serious criminal conduct against public officials. The fact that you make your specious claims on Slashdot makes no difference.
Unfortunately some of us have jobs that require exchanging documents with local governments. They are obliged by law to comment on and amend them within a certain time period. If they won't accept my docx and the ODF loses elements then I'll have to send a pdf or a printout, which they will then have to markup by hand and retype, and to keep to their deadlines they will need a lot more staff and a much bigger budget. That seems like a lot of money to buy not very much.
In what way does that statement demonstrate a bone-headed mindset? It really doesn't work that way in business.
I work in a very competitive field. We have an enormous amount of support infrastructure designed so that we can work effectively, efficiently and quickly and ultimately bill less to the client. We do that because if our quote is more than our competitors then we don't get the work. I like OpenOffice - as I've posted above I used it at home for many years and it's a very impressive project. I don't think it's any disrespect to the team, though, to say that Microsoft Office is better. And better very quickly translates into getting work done faster. There's not a lot of point taking an idealogical position and using OpenOffice if by doing so you sink your business.
if they can't get word processing done in OpenOffice, perhaps they should check their keyboard connections or hire staff that aren't complete morons because they will likely also have difficulties with Microsoft Word
This is unreasonable. They explain the issues - formatting conversions, conversion problems, and missing functionality - which are common complaints of users of OpenOffice. They are the reason that I have paid for Office 2010 having spent years using OpenOffice; now that my work involves exchanging complicated documents with other companies the niggling bugs and the ongoing formatting conversion issues that I endured for years mean that OpenOffice is not a viable solution. Even ignoring the reputational problems if I send out documents that don't open properly or look bad, economically it makes no sense to use the free alternative - if I spend 10 minutes a week dealing with formatting conversion then it's more expensive using OpenOffice after six months.
Surely it's fair to say that while OpenOffice is a very impressive project and is fine for a lot of uses - as a student it saved me a lot of money - there are also a lot of professional users who need the extra features and polish of Microsoft Office. I don't think it's any criticism of the OpenOffice team to say that their free product is not as good as an expensive, professional and longer-lived competitor.
[I] know that the real reasons have nothing to do with the software and everything to do with bribery
It's very poor form to accuse public officials of taking bribes without solid evidence, much less with no evidence at all.
It could well mean that the huge university infrastructure was built without any engineers; that doesn't mean that it was built without any engineering.
In my country at least, you could write a contract, sue the other side and represent yourself in court, but you still wouldn't be a lawyer; you could perform life-saving surgery but you still wouldn't be a doctor. There is more to those jobs than doing the actual job - things like professional regulation, ethical standards and training requirements. Engineering is similar here; to be called an engineer you have to pass a lot of particular requirements, only one of which is actual work in engineering.
In general I regard this as a good thing. The regulation and requirements imposed on lawyers mean that when a solicitor at a large firm tells me over the phone that they will transfer £1m I can rely on that without even needing anything in writing. Similarly with engineers, when I buy property I look to see that a qualified structural engineer signed off on the structure. I don't need to go behind that because I can be confident that if he was qualified he knew what he was doing - and that if he was wrong he has enough insurance cover for me to recover my losses. I'm not quite so sure in the case of software engineers - there just doesn't seem to be the equivalent professional body and I'm not sure that the nature of IT development lends itself so easily to a regulated profession. It would be a shame however if people's desire to give themselves a more impressive title devalued the status of engineers in other fields, especially when (as is shown, I think, by this discussion) it doesn't really add anything to call someone a "software engineer" because the title has no fixed meaning.
Can you point me to the examples you have in mind? Without knowing what you're thinking of it's difficult to reply specifically, and I'm not managing to find examples of courts or published commentary taking the view that the originalist position is a useful one. The one reference I found was in the judgment in District of Columbia v Heller and referred to such points as being of "dubious interpretive worth".
As a general point of law it is very well established that the actual intention of the parties to a contract, or of the drafters of legislation, is irrelevant; the word "intention" is still used (rather misleadingly I think) but it refers to the intention of the parties or drafters as it can be deduced from the document.
I would not, to be perfectly honest, be surprised to see the originalist argument being trotted out to defend second amendment gun rights. It is often the case that logical consistency is an early casualty when passions and political pressures are high. I don't think that changes the fact that it is not a position that withstands intellectual scrutiny and that is widely recognised.
Originalism as you define it is pretty much defunct. It's one of what have been memorably referred to as judicial fairy-tales and has now been recognised as being intellectually indefensible. Anyone professing that view is well outside the judicial mainstream.
You have to understand that there is no way for the constitution to be "as is". No-one - including constitutional originalists - thinks that that is possible. The process of interpretation necessarily involves information that does not come from the constitutional document itself, and that is a role of judges - to interpret the statute in order to determine what it means in a limitless array of situations. Far from being a criticism your statement "well I interpret this to mean that so I am ruling X" is in fact the right and proper function of a judge.
The opposing view to the living document school of thought is not that no information external to the document can be used; that idea is intellectually moribund, as is apparent the moment you attempt the exercise. The opposing view is constitutional originalism, which looks outside the document just as much as do living-document jurists. The difference is where they look: instead of looking at the prevailing circumstances today and what the meaning of the words would be if enacted today they look at the circumstances at the time of enactment and what (in the judge's interpretation, for the judge is interpreting things just as much here) the words would have meant at the time. It is important to bear in mind that this does not normally have anything to do with what the authors of the constitution wanted the constitution to say or meant for it to say. The question is what it would generally have been understood to have meant at the time.
Personally I tend to lean toward a constitutional originalist view. It must be accepted, however, that there are considerable problems with it. The living document school grew up in large part because a constitution interpreted in line with the values that were held 200 years ago is often irrelevant or useless. Advances in technology mean that checks on privacy interpreted as they were understood in the 18th century can be completely impotent. Similarly a clause guaranteeing due process is of little comfort if all it guarantees is the quality of due process that was accepted in 1790. There is also to my mind a clear contradiction in the commonly held position that in relation to rights the constitution grants nothing that would not have been expected in the eighteenth century, but that the second amendment grants the right to own any weapon whenever devised.
I'm a lawyer with some experience in conveyancing and real estate. I would not recommend doing the legal work yourself to buy a house. I would not do the legal work to buy my own house.
For most people the reason that I wouldn't recommend doing it themselves is that lawyers take time to handle conveyancing for a reason. Yes, some take too long - but even a good lawyer takes some time. Put simply, there are a lot of things that can go wrong when buying a house, and many of them are not obvious. A small defect - whether legal or physical - can mean that the biggest purchase you will ever make is worthless.
Even if you're bullish about your legal ability I still wouldn't recommend doing your own conveyancing - as I said, I certainly wouldn't do my own. The reason is that a massive advantage of using a lawyer is that they will have huge public liability insurance. If they miss something and you end up buying a house that suffers from some cryptic and technical legal defect you can recover your money. If you did your own conveyancing you would simply have thrown ten years' wages or more down the toilet. It's not worth the risk. Good luck getting comparable insurance for less than the cost of the lawyer - and read your policy very carefully because it is very easy to invalidate them on a technicality or slip through the net.
Getting $50,000 in contributions may not show that lots of people support you, but not being able to get $50,000 in contributions is a pretty good sign that no-one supports you, for the reasons above. The submitter says he's polling 7%; he's not, he's polling 7% in a poll of 401 people with a stated error margin almost as big as that 7%. The fact that he can't raise $50,000 suggests that he's probably close to the bottom of that error bound.
I agree wholeheartedly with this. I would add that the submitter's comments are an example of the phenomenon that the barely-competent tend to delight in the failings of others. Those who are more skilled can recognise that everyone makes mistakes, and don't need to dwell on the mistakes that others make in order to prop up their self-esteem.
I think it would be an equally arrogant and condescending claim if made in the context of reading. Taking satisfaction from people less expert than you making mistakes is rather pathetic, and even more so when (like the submitter) you are not very good yourself and therefore make plenty of your own mistakes.
You don't get $$$ by being lucky unless you inherit it or you hit the lottery.
Except that you sort of do. Even discounting the factors that you have no control over that shape you - intelligence, parents, school, place of birth - there's still a lot of luck in making significant money. You can apply for a job and be the perfect candidate but be rejected, or you can be a mediocre candidate but get the job. Likewise you can start a business and run it perfectly but go insolvent, or make mistake after mistake but have huge success.
Hard work, intelligence, tenacity and so on all make it more likely that you will succeed, but it would be hopelessly naive to think that everybody with those attributes makes it or that every self-made man succeeded on his own merit.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a benefit to the consumer: playing video games on the new Xbox. The consumer doesn't pick, in isolation, whether they want always-on connectivity; they choose whether or not to buy the whole bundle of good and bad design decisions that make up the Xbox. There is presumably a group of people who will move from wanting an Xbox to not wanting one because of this feature, but my gut feeling is that they won't be that numerous, because I think that the games, not the technical requirements, are probably uppermost in peoples' minds when buying a console.
Where have you seen this used? It seems like it wouldn't work anywhere where you have external consultants or clients attending meetings, or meetings with more than a couple of people - in either case because it would be a big deal if you turned up and the conference room was being used.
You're imagining that things are so bad that a guarantee backed by the US government is not enough to stop a bank run, and the run is so widespread that the government cannot meet the bill. In that case the government has collapsed. The banks have collapsed. The stock market has collapsed, the hedge funds have collapsed, the insurance markets and pension companies and every other type of financial institution has collapsed. In this situation, you lose. It doesn't matter if your money was in bitcoins or invested in gold - you just lose. As I said above there's really little point in an American individual hedging against the collapse of the US government - if that happens you just lose.
You need to look at the bigger picture - taking depositors' money is only a small part of what happened in Cyprus. It's the result of widespread bank failure and the government defaulting. If the same happened in the US - the government defaulting on its debt and deposit banks collapsing - you would be in huge trouble whether the government took your savings or not. I'm not sure that there's any point in a private citizen living in the US hedging against the collapse of the government; if that happens you've lost no matter how prepared you are.
I assume that there's some sort of calculation behind this: presumably the extra usage that the cards get by being extremely convenient to use outweighs the losses. I say that because (at least in this country - I don't know about elsewhere) if your credit card is misused by a retailer it's the credit card company that bears the loss. They still haven't moved away from the old model - presumably because the amount of fraud is not great enough to justify the cost and loss of convenience of something more secure.
That's not a fair summary.
What they have said is that they won't be changing the scores because there's a significant disadvantage (people being unhappy with the lost nostalgia) and not much of an advantage, since having a couple of over- or under-valued letters doesn't make much difference in a game with so much inherent luck.
Yes, as with absolutely any type of lawsuit it is possible for a claimant to frame a defendant. They could equally crack their wireless and post defamatory statements about themselves or drop their belongings in the person's shopping bag. This is the reason that perjury is a serious criminal offence that renders a person liable to a lengthy period of imprisonment.
I suspect that the GP means the particular subset of (largely modernist/post-modernist) fiction that uses formatting, foot-notes and deliberately fragmented writing (so that flicking backwards and forwards is often necessary). Ebooks are indeed not much good for those.
I'm not sure that the problems that people have with ereaders are really the manufacturers' or publishers' fault. Locking and removing content remotely are irrelevant (and unheard of) to almost everyone; the Kindle's DRM has no impact at all on the common use case of buying your own books. It seems to me that ereaders have done extremely well - the only thing they have failed to do is to live up to the exaggerated predictions of some commentators.
There are limiting factors on ebooks that I think are inherent rather than being someone's fault. They aren't much good for books where you will want to flick from page to page or scan through for some half-remembered diagram - so a lot of non-fiction is better suited to paper books. They also lack the ability to spontaneously lend them to someone - if a friend is staying over and wants something to read, chances are they don't have their ereader with them. The screen size can never be right for every book you want to read, especially if you want to read newspapers and magazines as well as paperbacks. Those are, I think, bigger problems for the average user than the vague possibility that Amazon might remove their content - and I don't think they are really anyone's fault.
The people who need help are also often the ones who are going to struggle to seek help. University students are adults, but barely - in the UK people mostly go to university at 18. For many it will be their first time away from home and they will be at the other end of the country from their friends and family. For a lot of students it's the first time they come out as gay, which can be very tough, or the first time they have a serious relationship.
If a student wants to sit at home rather than go to class then I say fair enough - in fact if they're not doing the work I would prefer that they stay away rather than slow the whole class down. But I do think that the university should try to identify those students who aren't coping and who need extra help. It doesn't have to be an inquisition or a punishment. When I was at university our attendance was monitored for exactly the reasons the GP mentioned - a particular memory of mine is that it meant that when a classmate had a breakdown the university found out and helped her. There were also plenty of people who just didn't turn up, but as long as they passed their exams nothing happened to them (bar the odd comment from the lecturer) as a result.
I think that if your benchmark is "it's no worse than it was 200 years ago" something has gone badly wrong. 200 years ago was before the birth of modern policing, and before the taming of the Wild West. "No worse" is not very impressive.
Opinion is not the same thing as conjecture. Neither is something a matter of opinion just because the truth is not known for certain.
I could try to describe the difference but I think that the easiest way to explain it is to ask what an opinion is. The key is that opinions are subjective; they are a matter of personal judgement and preference and while two people may disagree neither opinion is wrong. It flows from that that where something can be wrong it is not an opinion - it is a fact. This is the case even where the truth is not certain. It simply makes no sense to say, for example, that in your opinion 2 + 2 = 5 (if you don't agree try to articulate what that statement could possibly mean). Your claim that there might be a second Great Wall of China in Mexico illustrates the point nicely - even if that is possible it is still a question of fact; there either is or there isn't, even if we don't know. If you are inclined to disagree, once again answer the question: what could it possibly mean to say "in my opinion there is a Great Wall of China in Mexico"? The statement is meaningless because this is a matter of fact, not of opinion. Equally it makes no sense to say that objectively, red is better than blue - because that is an attempt to make a statement of fact about a matter of opinion.
If it were meaningful to make statements of opinion about matters of fact you could say things like "in my opinion there is a Great Wall of China in Mexico, but there isn't". Again, what could that statement mean? What would an opinion be in these circumstances?
You are right that we do not know the facts. They are, however, still facts; either the public officials took bribes or they did not, even if we do not know which is the case. "In my opinion" does not simply mean "without reason or evidence I choose to believe the following". It makes no sense to say that in your opinion they took bribes, because that is a matter of objective truth and not subjective judgement. Once again if you disagree I defy you to articulate a coherent meaning of the phrase "in my opinion they took bribes".
And finally, I don't know where you live but here (the UK) it is certainly not the case that the media - or individuals - can make baseless accusations of criminal conduct against public officials, as is illustrated by the substantial damages being paid to Lord McAlpine after wrongful allegations were made against him without any foundation.
I'm not talking about tiny quirks or about using spaces to align text. Even without getting into features that Writer simply lacks - and there are enough - trading complicated documents between Writer and Word introduces a lot of problems and errors. This is not controversial - every review of LibreOffice notes them and the developers provide guidance on their website to help people correct by hand the most egregious errors. You may say that this is as much as problem with Word as with Writer, but that's irrelevant for a lot of users; when I'm at work I need to trade documents with other firms who use Word, and the result is that my job is a lot easier and quicker if I use Word. As I noted before it takes very little time for these slight delays to add up to more than the cost of Word.
Even where errors are due to the original author, if I have to correct the formatting in an execution clause before I can send it to my client that's just as much a cost to me if it comes from the original user not having used formatting properly as if the problem comes from a bug. In both cases Word gives me the result I want immediately and Writer does not. Why may be interesting to the developers but it is irrelevant to me when the delay costs me money. The German local government seems to me to have acted entirely reasonably here: they thought that the advantages of free software would outweigh the inconveniences and so tried it; the inconveniences were greater than expected so they have switched back.
and finally, this is slashdot, so i can accuse anyone of anything. it is obviously my opinion that there is corruption. if you disagree, that's fine, but i don't need to convince you with evidence or anything. if you're interested in past business practices of microsoft, try groklaw, otherwise google is your friend.
You cannot say that officials took bribes in your opinion. It makes no more sense than to say that in your opinion the Great Wall of China is in Mexico; whether they took bribes is a matter of fact, not opinion. Traditionally it has been considered at least impolite to make entirely baseless accusations of serious criminal conduct against public officials. The fact that you make your specious claims on Slashdot makes no difference.
Unfortunately some of us have jobs that require exchanging documents with local governments. They are obliged by law to comment on and amend them within a certain time period. If they won't accept my docx and the ODF loses elements then I'll have to send a pdf or a printout, which they will then have to markup by hand and retype, and to keep to their deadlines they will need a lot more staff and a much bigger budget. That seems like a lot of money to buy not very much.
In what way does that statement demonstrate a bone-headed mindset? It really doesn't work that way in business.
I work in a very competitive field. We have an enormous amount of support infrastructure designed so that we can work effectively, efficiently and quickly and ultimately bill less to the client. We do that because if our quote is more than our competitors then we don't get the work.
I like OpenOffice - as I've posted above I used it at home for many years and it's a very impressive project. I don't think it's any disrespect to the team, though, to say that Microsoft Office is better. And better very quickly translates into getting work done faster. There's not a lot of point taking an idealogical position and using OpenOffice if by doing so you sink your business.
if they can't get word processing done in OpenOffice, perhaps they should check their keyboard connections or hire staff that aren't complete morons because they will likely also have difficulties with Microsoft Word
This is unreasonable. They explain the issues - formatting conversions, conversion problems, and missing functionality - which are common complaints of users of OpenOffice. They are the reason that I have paid for Office 2010 having spent years using OpenOffice; now that my work involves exchanging complicated documents with other companies the niggling bugs and the ongoing formatting conversion issues that I endured for years mean that OpenOffice is not a viable solution. Even ignoring the reputational problems if I send out documents that don't open properly or look bad, economically it makes no sense to use the free alternative - if I spend 10 minutes a week dealing with formatting conversion then it's more expensive using OpenOffice after six months.
Surely it's fair to say that while OpenOffice is a very impressive project and is fine for a lot of uses - as a student it saved me a lot of money - there are also a lot of professional users who need the extra features and polish of Microsoft Office. I don't think it's any criticism of the OpenOffice team to say that their free product is not as good as an expensive, professional and longer-lived competitor.
[I] know that the real reasons have nothing to do with the software and everything to do with bribery
It's very poor form to accuse public officials of taking bribes without solid evidence, much less with no evidence at all.
It could well mean that the huge university infrastructure was built without any engineers; that doesn't mean that it was built without any engineering.
In my country at least, you could write a contract, sue the other side and represent yourself in court, but you still wouldn't be a lawyer; you could perform life-saving surgery but you still wouldn't be a doctor. There is more to those jobs than doing the actual job - things like professional regulation, ethical standards and training requirements. Engineering is similar here; to be called an engineer you have to pass a lot of particular requirements, only one of which is actual work in engineering.
In general I regard this as a good thing. The regulation and requirements imposed on lawyers mean that when a solicitor at a large firm tells me over the phone that they will transfer £1m I can rely on that without even needing anything in writing. Similarly with engineers, when I buy property I look to see that a qualified structural engineer signed off on the structure. I don't need to go behind that because I can be confident that if he was qualified he knew what he was doing - and that if he was wrong he has enough insurance cover for me to recover my losses.
I'm not quite so sure in the case of software engineers - there just doesn't seem to be the equivalent professional body and I'm not sure that the nature of IT development lends itself so easily to a regulated profession. It would be a shame however if people's desire to give themselves a more impressive title devalued the status of engineers in other fields, especially when (as is shown, I think, by this discussion) it doesn't really add anything to call someone a "software engineer" because the title has no fixed meaning.
Sorry for taking so long to reply.
Can you point me to the examples you have in mind? Without knowing what you're thinking of it's difficult to reply specifically, and I'm not managing to find examples of courts or published commentary taking the view that the originalist position is a useful one. The one reference I found was in the judgment in District of Columbia v Heller and referred to such points as being of "dubious interpretive worth".
As a general point of law it is very well established that the actual intention of the parties to a contract, or of the drafters of legislation, is irrelevant; the word "intention" is still used (rather misleadingly I think) but it refers to the intention of the parties or drafters as it can be deduced from the document.
I would not, to be perfectly honest, be surprised to see the originalist argument being trotted out to defend second amendment gun rights. It is often the case that logical consistency is an early casualty when passions and political pressures are high. I don't think that changes the fact that it is not a position that withstands intellectual scrutiny and that is widely recognised.
Originalism as you define it is pretty much defunct. It's one of what have been memorably referred to as judicial fairy-tales and has now been recognised as being intellectually indefensible. Anyone professing that view is well outside the judicial mainstream.
I think your comments in your final paragraphs are pretty much on the money. Scalia gave a lecture at Edinburgh university which I think might be the one you're referring to - it's at http://law-srv0.law.ed.ac.uk/media/46_justicescaliatercentenarylecture.mp3 if not.
You have to understand that there is no way for the constitution to be "as is". No-one - including constitutional originalists - thinks that that is possible. The process of interpretation necessarily involves information that does not come from the constitutional document itself, and that is a role of judges - to interpret the statute in order to determine what it means in a limitless array of situations. Far from being a criticism your statement "well I interpret this to mean that so I am ruling X" is in fact the right and proper function of a judge.
The opposing view to the living document school of thought is not that no information external to the document can be used; that idea is intellectually moribund, as is apparent the moment you attempt the exercise. The opposing view is constitutional originalism, which looks outside the document just as much as do living-document jurists. The difference is where they look: instead of looking at the prevailing circumstances today and what the meaning of the words would be if enacted today they look at the circumstances at the time of enactment and what (in the judge's interpretation, for the judge is interpreting things just as much here) the words would have meant at the time. It is important to bear in mind that this does not normally have anything to do with what the authors of the constitution wanted the constitution to say or meant for it to say. The question is what it would generally have been understood to have meant at the time.
Personally I tend to lean toward a constitutional originalist view. It must be accepted, however, that there are considerable problems with it. The living document school grew up in large part because a constitution interpreted in line with the values that were held 200 years ago is often irrelevant or useless. Advances in technology mean that checks on privacy interpreted as they were understood in the 18th century can be completely impotent. Similarly a clause guaranteeing due process is of little comfort if all it guarantees is the quality of due process that was accepted in 1790. There is also to my mind a clear contradiction in the commonly held position that in relation to rights the constitution grants nothing that would not have been expected in the eighteenth century, but that the second amendment grants the right to own any weapon whenever devised.
I'm a lawyer with some experience in conveyancing and real estate. I would not recommend doing the legal work yourself to buy a house. I would not do the legal work to buy my own house.
For most people the reason that I wouldn't recommend doing it themselves is that lawyers take time to handle conveyancing for a reason. Yes, some take too long - but even a good lawyer takes some time. Put simply, there are a lot of things that can go wrong when buying a house, and many of them are not obvious. A small defect - whether legal or physical - can mean that the biggest purchase you will ever make is worthless.
Even if you're bullish about your legal ability I still wouldn't recommend doing your own conveyancing - as I said, I certainly wouldn't do my own. The reason is that a massive advantage of using a lawyer is that they will have huge public liability insurance. If they miss something and you end up buying a house that suffers from some cryptic and technical legal defect you can recover your money. If you did your own conveyancing you would simply have thrown ten years' wages or more down the toilet. It's not worth the risk. Good luck getting comparable insurance for less than the cost of the lawyer - and read your policy very carefully because it is very easy to invalidate them on a technicality or slip through the net.
Getting $50,000 in contributions may not show that lots of people support you, but not being able to get $50,000 in contributions is a pretty good sign that no-one supports you, for the reasons above.
The submitter says he's polling 7%; he's not, he's polling 7% in a poll of 401 people with a stated error margin almost as big as that 7%. The fact that he can't raise $50,000 suggests that he's probably close to the bottom of that error bound.
I agree wholeheartedly with this. I would add that the submitter's comments are an example of the phenomenon that the barely-competent tend to delight in the failings of others. Those who are more skilled can recognise that everyone makes mistakes, and don't need to dwell on the mistakes that others make in order to prop up their self-esteem.
I think it would be an equally arrogant and condescending claim if made in the context of reading. Taking satisfaction from people less expert than you making mistakes is rather pathetic, and even more so when (like the submitter) you are not very good yourself and therefore make plenty of your own mistakes.
You don't get $$$ by being lucky unless you inherit it or you hit the lottery.
Except that you sort of do. Even discounting the factors that you have no control over that shape you - intelligence, parents, school, place of birth - there's still a lot of luck in making significant money. You can apply for a job and be the perfect candidate but be rejected, or you can be a mediocre candidate but get the job. Likewise you can start a business and run it perfectly but go insolvent, or make mistake after mistake but have huge success.
Hard work, intelligence, tenacity and so on all make it more likely that you will succeed, but it would be hopelessly naive to think that everybody with those attributes makes it or that every self-made man succeeded on his own merit.