I mean come on... seriously, not even Microsoft can be THAT stupid. What is going on here? Did the guy who writes the anti-linux FUD not get his bonus? Did he decide to stick-it to the man by making anti-vista FUD instead? Did Stallman infiltrate MS to plantthis? Has the Storm botnet started to target OEMs by e-mailing trojans? Did an OEM switch to google and Balmer finally snapped? I mean seriously, what is going on? I mean we know they are stupid but not THAT stupid... Can you even make a marketing campaign worse than this without using the words "babies", "eat" and "we" ? I seriously don't understand this... They just can't be that stupid. This doesn't make any sense at all...
Instead of moaning about their pathetic adds web advertisers should have a look at the people that make it work. Take the fashion industry as an example. They have managed to get people to WANT to view their adds. I mean seriously, you have people sticking pictures of their idols onto the wall, yet these posters are essentially massive adds for the clothes or whatever series or music or whatever the model is related to. Hair dressers have used fashion magazines for ages, and you can bet that the fashion industry takes advantage of this.
Then you have car companies. They don't just stick a pretty model next to the Prius because of the environmental benefits you know...
Movies use trailers, games use demos, as do computer software, shampoo companies, parfumes...
Some magazines give you "2 free issues" with an easy way to continue with a subscription. Coca cola will give you all kinds of freebess with their logo on them.
Now have a look at on-line adds. Most of them have nothing to do with the content of the page they are at, they consume your bandwidth, slow down your browsing, they are generally just in the way, and in addition they are easy to filter. Gee, I can't possibly see why they don't work...
Sure, the numbers are not precise. 400 million could translate to only 100 million users, or even less, but there is still some level of information in there. That is, we know that the ballpark figure of a program which had 400 million downloads is likely to be higher than a program which only had 10.000 downloads. It is called uncertainty. Some numbers ( such as important physical constants ) are known to a very high precision, other numbers may be more difficult to measure, and are accurate within maybe a factor of 10 or so. As a friend of mine put it. "To a mathematician pi can be expressed as a converging series of fractions, to a physicist it is close to 3.14, to us engineers it is roughly 3, everything is linear, and 3inches of steel ought to be enough, so make it 10 just to be sure..." He was joking of course, but even if only 1% of downloads translate to actual use, 400 million is still a large number, and different uncertainties cancel ( i.e, many users get their copy of a mirror or dedicated repository. Companies download it once and push it to 300 computers etc... ). 400 million is a "rough" number, but it isn't completely meaningless.
Right, because of what I do I am used to ask questions along the lines of "but how do we know that it was actually one of the neutrons we detected or not a cosmic ray, error in my program, the detector, the circuits, thermal noise, random coincidence, small sample size, etc etc..." Once that is dealt with,typically giving a certainty of "this might be plausible", you start considering which of the five million or so possible nuclear reactions could have produced a neutron. Finally you write something along the lines of "This experiment seems to suggest that isotope-x has a higher level of activity... but the uncertainties are quite big...blah blah blah".
Then the press gets hold of the story, makes a headline saying "Nuclear power more dangerous than thought!" and then you get to have great fun trying to explain to "ordinary people" that you are not at the payroll of the nuclear power industry and that the media actually doesn't have a clue about physics. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I don't think this story is worth the time it took me to write this comment, but I'm bored and have nothing better to do.
The way I understood it the main problem with biofuels is that simply conservation of energy requires you to use a very huge area of land to grow the plants. Now the same area of land could instead be used to grow trees or other CO2 absorbing plants and this would have a [much] greater impact on the CO2 balance of the atmosphere. That is, even when you take into consideration that you displace a large quantity of fossil fuels, reforestation of farmland would be better for the environment.
I could be wrong but it seems to me that the best way to deal with energy distribution is through the electric grid. Whatever fuel will be used in the future it will probably be something that can be readily re-charged or regenerated using an electric current. That way you suddenly have a lot more options for actually generating the energy, ranging from renewables to nuclear or something else. Currently my bet is on batteries, probably not Li-Ion ones, but we shall have to see what comes out of nano-tech.
I have to admit thou, it would be rather cool to have a nuclear powered car. However, I'm guess giving every nut who owns a car access to a lethal radiation source is a rather bad idea.
Guys forget about judges, buses, smashing them to pieces and whatnot. You have two tracking devices. The obvious thing to do with them is to glue them to the politicians cars. One to a democrat, the other to a republican. Bonus points if you get a friend to cross-file fake DMCA requests from the respective victims to one another. Jackpot if you can crack their wireless connections and download a gig or two of child porn, Disney movies and instructions for growing pot. Then file an anonymous tip or two...
If things are to change it needs to have negative consequences for the people who make the rules...
Ok, now call me naive here, but why not just do what everyone else does when they have trouble like this and ask the IAEA to inspect their power plants? This is what Sweden did after the incident at Forsmark, it's what Japan did after the leaks associated with the recent earthquake, and I believe quite a few other countries have done so as well. As an extra bonus, getting the thumb down from IAEA would be rather embarrassing for the NRC, so chances are it would make them actually do their job... Really, the US pays for a huge portion of the UN's budget, so why not actually use its services...
The problem with the instruction set is not due to the chipmakers but because there is an awful lot of proprietary software ( in particular windows ) which relies on it. Just have a look at Linux, the BSDs and Solaris. They have all been ported to numerous architectures, but this just isn't possible with a closed source application unless the vendor decides to do it. As a consequence Intel and AMD has no choice but to continue using x86 because so much software depends on it, and it would be suicidal for them to stop supporting it.
There are plenty of places where water is naturally full of alligators, it doesn't mean it's okay or desirable to introduce crocs in places where there aren't any.
Is that another bad analogy I see? Oh yes... Ok, lets put it into perspective then. Based on the radiation dose people were exposed to from three mile island it was estimated that you could expect 0.5 cases of cancer as a result. I.e, there was a 50% chance that one person might develop cancer due to the radiation at some part during his/her life. Now, start comparing it to risks we accept every day. The risk of getting cancer from the Sun's UV rays. The risk of getting killed when you cross the road. The risk from fossil fuel emissions. The risk of drowning in a hydroelectric dam. The risk you will choke on a peanut... etc. Basically, if you don't think the risk from accidents like TMI is acceptable, you'd better not eat any solid food tonight, because there is a chance you will choke on it. Oh, and I wouldn't ever take a shower if I were you, you might slip and hit your head against the tub.
Not in general. If a laser can cause cancer or not depends on the wavelength of light used. For any form of EM radiation to be able to cause cancer, its photons must have sufficient energy to ionise atoms and molecules it strikes. The energy of the photons depends on the wavelength ( i.e colour ) of the light in question. The higher the energy the more types of molecules and atoms may be ionised. In practise there are relatively few compounds that respond to light in the visible region (thou some do) and even fewer that respond to infra-red light. So basically, if the laser is likely to cause radiation damage ( which can increase the risk of cancer ) depends on its colour. An UV laser would certainly be a concern, visible would probably be fairly harmless unless exposure was very long and intense, and infra-red certainly wouldn't be much of an issue. Note, however, that even lasers that are unlikely to cause cancer can have other dangers if they have sufficient intensity. In particular, because your eye will focus a ray from a laser into a point at the retina, a laser with relatively low power could cause quite some damage to your vision. This is why commercial laser pointers have a limited output power so that they are unlikely to cause any damage before the eye has time to blink.
A lot of posters here seem to believe that just because something contains a large amount of energy there is a reasonable possibility for that energy to be released in an ever accelerating manner. This is not true. The hydrogen in a cup of water could theoretically be fusioned to generate more energy than the Hiroshima bombs, yet a cup of water is by no means a dangerous device (well, mostly). Similarly a rusty iron bar next to a block of aluminium is far from dangerous, but powder the two and mix them together and you got thermite, which if ignited can easily melt its way straight through the hood of your car.
The problem with Li-ion batteries is NOT that they contain a lot of energy. In fact, a block of butter has higher energy density. The problem with these batteries is that lithium is a very reactive alkali metal, and the electrolytes used in most Li-ion batteries do not make things better. To suggest that it is the raw energy content of Li-ion batteries that make them dangerous really is ignorant at best. You probably have foods with higher energy densities back in your fridge.
So... I don't even bother trying the fglrx drivers since the reverse engineered free driver is more stable, and actually works. I mean seriously ATI, a non-profit project which bases its code on guessing how your hardware works has not only better, but in some cases superior, stability than your shitty driver, that really says something. I think it is time for a bad car analogy. Imagine a driver who memorises the layout of the town by carefully noting down where his car crashes as he drives. This guy's taxi company is currently beating your top of the line staff, even thou you have a full map of the town, a military grade GPS receiver, and real-time information about traffic congestion. Oh, and btw, your competitor's car has opaque windows, can only use the reverse gear and he is only able to turn left. Even so, the customers prefer him in front of you. In short: You suck! Big time...
If they do try to put this motion in place then it is time to appeal to the European court of human rights. They have bitch-slapped governments for authoritarian crap before and they can do it again. If that doesn't work then it is time to take to the streets. Identity cards, detentions without trial, and now this, things have gone too far...
Stop calling Sweden a socialist country. We have a free market, open borders, you can start a private school if you want, go to a private hospital, start a private newspaper, negotiate your wage with your boss, start a private company, make a fat load of cash and move abroad with it.. we are NOT a socialist country. Of course, we're not capitalist either. We have public schools, public hospitals, welfare benefits, unemployment benefits etc... Sweden is ( and I'm sure this will come as a great shock to you ) a mixed-economy which allows private markets to exist, supplementing it with publicly funded welfare programs. To call Sweden a socialist country is about as ignorant as calling the US a free market. The true difference between successful and disaster cases of countries lie in the ability to arrive at a reasonable compromise. It doesn't always work out, but blindly pushing some idealist fantasy is bound to result in an economic collapse. In this respect socialism, capitalism and other pure ideologies are doomed to fail because they don't recognise the problems of reality. I imagine that is almost what you tried to say, but your examples missed it by miles.
Stop moaning. The DHCP client SHOULD not do this, but then again, the DHCP server MUST accept these requests anyway.
Bullshit. The RFCs never say the server MUST implement the broadcast, so at worst the server is doing the same bad Microsoft is doing. The difference is of course that this server has been doing this without problems for scores of operating systems, including Microsoft's systems, and then MS decide to break things. Oh, and yes, it is probably deliberate. Their support page even says the problem is with "non-Microsoft servers". It is fairly simple. Microsoft deliberately made their implementation incompatible with many existing ones just to suggest that not using MS servers causes trouble. Or do you think they ditched the well tested BSD stack in favour of an in-house project for any other reason than to "de-comoditise protocols" as their own memos suggest...
Right people here are discussing RCFs and wonder what is going on, well I live in Lund and here is my take on what has happened:
a)Per the RFC servers do not need to implement the broadcast flag, but it is a good idea if you want to support systems that use it.
b)Per RFC Vista doesn't need to clear the broadcast bit, but it is strongly recommended and setting it is intended for legacy clients only.
c)Lund's energi's network doesn't support the broadcast and thus Vista machines do not get an IP over DHCP since they set the broadcast bit.
d)For reasons we don't yet know, Lund energi won't implement a workaround on their server. I don't know enough about DHCP or their systems to tell why, so I guess there might be a technical issue or perhaps they are just being jerks.
e)The fix is to set a registry key, which is easy for technical users, but a pain for those who don't know about it.
My judgement is that Lund's energi has a shitty DHCP server and Vista is a shitty DHCP client. Since the fix is so simple ( adding a registry key ) this really ought to be a non-issue, but because Microsoft and Lund's energi are both incompetent crappy companies the end user is left with a problem that would actually be rather easy to resolve. Those in the know can work around it, but non-technical users are left without service while those responsible point the finger at one another. The sad thing is that this really isn't particularly surprising. Hmm, did I forget something? Oh yea, the article summary is wrong since there are scores of ISPs in Lund, and this only affects one of them. So yea, I'm not very surprised at all...
BULLSHIT!. I've lived in Oslo for the last 10 years or so, and let me give a bit more accurate explanation of the situation:
a)Norway's economy is mostly based on Oil revenue, a lot of which has been mismanaged so that billions have been lost. b)Until recently there was a liberal right-wing coalition in charge and things worked fairly well. c)After the last election, where the social-democrats, borderline communist left-wingers, and greens came to power, a number of problems have arisen. To mention a few examples:
Because the government introduced a max-price on private daycare centres in an effort to stop richer families from getting better service many private daycare centres have closed down or gone bankrupt resulting in a shortage of places all across Oslo. Economists predicted this years ago, but the government found their ideology more important than economic theory.
The government has been taken to the European court of human rights after they banned schools independent from the government from opening unless they had religious connections. Meanwhile educational results continue to plummet.
All over the country hospitals are heavily understaffed, resulting in Nurses and doctors being overworked and eventually being forced to register as sick as a result. 60-100 hours per week of working shifts is not uncommon. This is obviously a problem which amplifies itself.
Unemployment is high, and many find it difficult to get a job.
You know, Norway is in many ways VERY similar to the US. There are lots of problems, but "Norway is the best country in the world" is a truthiness which the people swallow with hook,line and sinker because the state sponsored media tells them so. Problems are the fault of "capitalists" despite the fact that even the right-wing parties in Norway want a welfare state, and while you are not a "terrorist" unless you support Israel, try saying it isn't all Israel's fault and sit back and wait until you're branded "capitalist" , "zionist", "racist" , "republican" or similar.
My impression of how things work over here is that you put on your Nike T-shirt, go get your lunch at Burger King, and then you harp on about how Americans are fat hamburger consuming morons and how all US politic sucks while Norway is the best country in the world. Then you go out and vote for a government which finds it acceptable to prohibit alternative education systems.
Yea, I'm no fan of the US, but Norway isn't exactly a heaven on earth either.
You might be in the shadow group, and there might be a server application that is in said group in order to read/etc/shadow, so if you can exploit that service to gain access to the contents of the shadow file, you can then try to root the machine after cracking root's (or someone with sudo I guess) password.
The rulings ( both in the US and EU ) has so far been jokes. A real anti-trust ruling would be something along the following lines:
a)Microsoft are forced to offer the same price for OEM licenses to all retailers ( and disclose its magnitude ). b)Retailers are forced to offer systems without an OEM license, should the customer ask for it, with the cost reduced in accordance with the price of the license ( which Microsoft must disclose ) c)Microsoft is banned from charging more for their retail version than the OEM license.
Now THAT would actually cause them to shit themselves.
Oh, and before somebody starts claiming this is unfair and Microsoft having the right to charge whatever and whatnot... NO! They lost that right because they abused their market position. We give them those rights with the intention to stimulate development that benefits society, if Microsoft abuses those rights in a way that is detrimental to the market, we are perfectly justified in taking them away again.
Things have traditionally been so bad that only light entertainment artists, which are all bad clone's of ABBA, have had a chance. Only occasionally does anything else, like a recent group of death metal rockers from Finland, make any progress at all.
Personally I feel bad for my sister who will have to use it. I'd recomend she use Ubuntu instead, but she lives in another country and I won't be able to help her, and she doesn't feel prepared to try it on her own. I guess she would probably manage just fine, but sadly she doesn't even want to give it a shot. Oh well...
Slashdot Mirror
I mean come on... seriously, not even Microsoft can be THAT stupid. What is going on here? Did the guy who writes the anti-linux FUD not get his bonus? Did he decide to stick-it to the man by making anti-vista FUD instead? Did Stallman infiltrate MS to plantthis? Has the Storm botnet started to target OEMs by e-mailing trojans? Did an OEM switch to google and Balmer finally snapped? I mean seriously, what is going on? I mean we know they are stupid but not THAT stupid... Can you even make a marketing campaign worse than this without using the words "babies", "eat" and "we" ? I seriously don't understand this... They just can't be that stupid. This doesn't make any sense at all...
...and when I post that two of the links break...
Well , just goes to show. Web adverts suck...
Instead of moaning about their pathetic adds web advertisers should have a look at the people that make it work. Take the fashion industry as an example. They have managed to get people to WANT to view their adds. I mean seriously, you have people sticking pictures of their idols onto the wall, yet these posters are essentially massive adds for the clothes or whatever series or music or whatever the model is related to. Hair dressers have used fashion magazines for ages, and you can bet that the fashion industry takes advantage of this.
Then you have car companies. They don't just stick a pretty model next to the Prius because of the environmental benefits you know...
Movies use trailers, games use demos, as do computer software, shampoo companies, parfumes...
Some magazines give you "2 free issues" with an easy way to continue with a subscription. Coca cola will give you all kinds of freebess with their logo on them.
Now have a look at on-line adds. Most of them have nothing to do with the content of the page they are at, they consume your bandwidth, slow down your browsing, they are generally just in the way, and in addition they are easy to filter. Gee, I can't possibly see why they don't work...
So, let me see if we can teach these people a lesson. This is how the experts do it, take a hint...
http://www.dexigner.com/detail/files/11620.jpg
http://static.flickr.com/113/311915512_e24cc8c78f_b.jpg
http://image24.webshots.com/24/2/29/70/101722970ctqgDn_fs.jpg
The following one is particularily nice ; )
http://www.shop.linplus.de/catalog/images/gentoo_girl.jpg
Sure, the numbers are not precise. 400 million could translate to only 100 million users, or even less, but there is still some level of information in there. That is, we know that the ballpark figure of a program which had 400 million downloads is likely to be higher than a program which only had 10.000 downloads. It is called uncertainty. Some numbers ( such as important physical constants ) are known to a very high precision, other numbers may be more difficult to measure, and are accurate within maybe a factor of 10 or so. As a friend of mine put it. "To a mathematician pi can be expressed as a converging series of fractions, to a physicist it is close to 3.14, to us engineers it is roughly 3, everything is linear, and 3inches of steel ought to be enough, so make it 10 just to be sure..." He was joking of course, but even if only 1% of downloads translate to actual use, 400 million is still a large number, and different uncertainties cancel ( i.e, many users get their copy of a mirror or dedicated repository. Companies download it once and push it to 300 computers etc ... ). 400 million is a "rough" number, but it isn't completely meaningless.
Right, because of what I do I am used to ask questions along the lines of "but how do we know that it was actually one of the neutrons we detected or not a cosmic ray, error in my program, the detector, the circuits, thermal noise, random coincidence, small sample size, etc etc ..." Once that is dealt with ,typically giving a certainty of "this might be plausible", you start considering which of the five million or so possible nuclear reactions could have produced a neutron. Finally you write something along the lines of "This experiment seems to suggest that isotope-x has a higher level of activity ... but the uncertainties are quite big...blah blah blah".
Then the press gets hold of the story, makes a headline saying "Nuclear power more dangerous than thought!" and then you get to have great fun trying to explain to "ordinary people" that you are not at the payroll of the nuclear power industry and that the media actually doesn't have a clue about physics. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I don't think this story is worth the time it took me to write this comment, but I'm bored and have nothing better to do.
The way I understood it the main problem with biofuels is that simply conservation of energy requires you to use a very huge area of land to grow the plants. Now the same area of land could instead be used to grow trees or other CO2 absorbing plants and this would have a [much] greater impact on the CO2 balance of the atmosphere. That is, even when you take into consideration that you displace a large quantity of fossil fuels, reforestation of farmland would be better for the environment.
I could be wrong but it seems to me that the best way to deal with energy distribution is through the electric grid. Whatever fuel will be used in the future it will probably be something that can be readily re-charged or regenerated using an electric current. That way you suddenly have a lot more options for actually generating the energy, ranging from renewables to nuclear or something else. Currently my bet is on batteries, probably not Li-Ion ones, but we shall have to see what comes out of nano-tech.
I have to admit thou, it would be rather cool to have a nuclear powered car. However, I'm guess giving every nut who owns a car access to a lethal radiation source is a rather bad idea.
Jeg lever fortsatt. Er litt sliten da... tror jeg skal sove lidt...
Ok... *still trying to figure out how this is newsworthy* I know, I know.. I'm new here...
Guys forget about judges, buses, smashing them to pieces and whatnot. You have two tracking devices. The obvious thing to do with them is to glue them to the politicians cars. One to a democrat, the other to a republican. Bonus points if you get a friend to cross-file fake DMCA requests from the respective victims to one another. Jackpot if you can crack their wireless connections and download a gig or two of child porn, Disney movies and instructions for growing pot. Then file an anonymous tip or two... If things are to change it needs to have negative consequences for the people who make the rules...
Ok, now call me naive here, but why not just do what everyone else does when they have trouble like this and ask the IAEA to inspect their power plants? This is what Sweden did after the incident at Forsmark, it's what Japan did after the leaks associated with the recent earthquake, and I believe quite a few other countries have done so as well. As an extra bonus, getting the thumb down from IAEA would be rather embarrassing for the NRC, so chances are it would make them actually do their job... Really, the US pays for a huge portion of the UN's budget, so why not actually use its services...
The problem with the instruction set is not due to the chipmakers but because there is an awful lot of proprietary software ( in particular windows ) which relies on it. Just have a look at Linux, the BSDs and Solaris. They have all been ported to numerous architectures, but this just isn't possible with a closed source application unless the vendor decides to do it. As a consequence Intel and AMD has no choice but to continue using x86 because so much software depends on it, and it would be suicidal for them to stop supporting it.
... a reason to sue IBM. Seriously, Microsoft, Judges, Bush... can't we please throw in the Nazgul for good measure?
Is that another bad analogy I see? Oh yes... Ok, lets put it into perspective then. Based on the radiation dose people were exposed to from three mile island it was estimated that you could expect 0.5 cases of cancer as a result. I.e, there was a 50% chance that one person might develop cancer due to the radiation at some part during his/her life. Now, start comparing it to risks we accept every day. The risk of getting cancer from the Sun's UV rays. The risk of getting killed when you cross the road. The risk from fossil fuel emissions. The risk of drowning in a hydroelectric dam. The risk you will choke on a peanut... etc. Basically, if you don't think the risk from accidents like TMI is acceptable, you'd better not eat any solid food tonight, because there is a chance you will choke on it. Oh, and I wouldn't ever take a shower if I were you, you might slip and hit your head against the tub.
Not in general. If a laser can cause cancer or not depends on the wavelength of light used. For any form of EM radiation to be able to cause cancer, its photons must have sufficient energy to ionise atoms and molecules it strikes. The energy of the photons depends on the wavelength ( i.e colour ) of the light in question. The higher the energy the more types of molecules and atoms may be ionised. In practise there are relatively few compounds that respond to light in the visible region (thou some do) and even fewer that respond to infra-red light. So basically, if the laser is likely to cause radiation damage ( which can increase the risk of cancer ) depends on its colour. An UV laser would certainly be a concern, visible would probably be fairly harmless unless exposure was very long and intense, and infra-red certainly wouldn't be much of an issue. Note, however, that even lasers that are unlikely to cause cancer can have other dangers if they have sufficient intensity. In particular, because your eye will focus a ray from a laser into a point at the retina, a laser with relatively low power could cause quite some damage to your vision. This is why commercial laser pointers have a limited output power so that they are unlikely to cause any damage before the eye has time to blink.
A lot of posters here seem to believe that just because something contains a large amount of energy there is a reasonable possibility for that energy to be released in an ever accelerating manner. This is not true. The hydrogen in a cup of water could theoretically be fusioned to generate more energy than the Hiroshima bombs, yet a cup of water is by no means a dangerous device (well, mostly). Similarly a rusty iron bar next to a block of aluminium is far from dangerous, but powder the two and mix them together and you got thermite, which if ignited can easily melt its way straight through the hood of your car.
The problem with Li-ion batteries is NOT that they contain a lot of energy. In fact, a block of butter has higher energy density. The problem with these batteries is that lithium is a very reactive alkali metal, and the electrolytes used in most Li-ion batteries do not make things better. To suggest that it is the raw energy content of Li-ion batteries that make them dangerous really is ignorant at best. You probably have foods with higher energy densities back in your fridge.
So... I don't even bother trying the fglrx drivers since the reverse engineered free driver is more stable, and actually works. I mean seriously ATI, a non-profit project which bases its code on guessing how your hardware works has not only better, but in some cases superior, stability than your shitty driver, that really says something. I think it is time for a bad car analogy. Imagine a driver who memorises the layout of the town by carefully noting down where his car crashes as he drives. This guy's taxi company is currently beating your top of the line staff, even thou you have a full map of the town, a military grade GPS receiver, and real-time information about traffic congestion. Oh, and btw, your competitor's car has opaque windows, can only use the reverse gear and he is only able to turn left. Even so, the customers prefer him in front of you. In short: You suck! Big time...
If they do try to put this motion in place then it is time to appeal to the European court of human rights. They have bitch-slapped governments for authoritarian crap before and they can do it again. If that doesn't work then it is time to take to the streets. Identity cards, detentions without trial, and now this, things have gone too far...
Stop calling Sweden a socialist country. We have a free market, open borders, you can start a private school if you want, go to a private hospital, start a private newspaper, negotiate your wage with your boss, start a private company, make a fat load of cash and move abroad with it.. we are NOT a socialist country. Of course, we're not capitalist either. We have public schools, public hospitals, welfare benefits, unemployment benefits etc... Sweden is ( and I'm sure this will come as a great shock to you ) a mixed-economy which allows private markets to exist, supplementing it with publicly funded welfare programs. To call Sweden a socialist country is about as ignorant as calling the US a free market. The true difference between successful and disaster cases of countries lie in the ability to arrive at a reasonable compromise. It doesn't always work out, but blindly pushing some idealist fantasy is bound to result in an economic collapse. In this respect socialism, capitalism and other pure ideologies are doomed to fail because they don't recognise the problems of reality. I imagine that is almost what you tried to say, but your examples missed it by miles.
Right people here are discussing RCFs and wonder what is going on, well I live in Lund and here is my take on what has happened:
a)Per the RFC servers do not need to implement the broadcast flag, but it is a good idea if you want to support systems that use it.
b)Per RFC Vista doesn't need to clear the broadcast bit, but it is strongly recommended and setting it is intended for legacy clients only.
c)Lund's energi's network doesn't support the broadcast and thus Vista machines do not get an IP over DHCP since they set the broadcast bit.
d)For reasons we don't yet know, Lund energi won't implement a workaround on their server. I don't know enough about DHCP or their systems to tell why, so I guess there might be a technical issue or perhaps they are just being jerks.
e)The fix is to set a registry key, which is easy for technical users, but a pain for those who don't know about it.
My judgement is that Lund's energi has a shitty DHCP server and Vista is a shitty DHCP client. Since the fix is so simple ( adding a registry key ) this really ought to be a non-issue, but because Microsoft and Lund's energi are both incompetent crappy companies the end user is left with a problem that would actually be rather easy to resolve. Those in the know can work around it, but non-technical users are left without service while those responsible point the finger at one another. The sad thing is that this really isn't particularly surprising. Hmm, did I forget something? Oh yea, the article summary is wrong since there are scores of ISPs in Lund, and this only affects one of them. So yea, I'm not very surprised at all...
BULLSHIT!. I've lived in Oslo for the last 10 years or so, and let me give a bit more accurate explanation of the situation:
a)Norway's economy is mostly based on Oil revenue, a lot of which has been mismanaged so that billions have been lost.
b)Until recently there was a liberal right-wing coalition in charge and things worked fairly well.
c)After the last election, where the social-democrats, borderline communist left-wingers, and greens came to power, a number of problems have arisen. To mention a few examples:
Because the government introduced a max-price on private daycare centres in an effort to stop richer families from getting better service many private daycare centres have closed down or gone bankrupt resulting in a shortage of places all across Oslo. Economists predicted this years ago, but the government found their ideology more important than economic theory.
The government has been taken to the European court of human rights after they banned schools independent from the government from opening unless they had religious connections. Meanwhile educational results continue to plummet.
All over the country hospitals are heavily understaffed, resulting in Nurses and doctors being overworked and eventually being forced to register as sick as a result. 60-100 hours per week of working shifts is not uncommon. This is obviously a problem which amplifies itself.
Unemployment is high, and many find it difficult to get a job.
You know, Norway is in many ways VERY similar to the US. There are lots of problems, but "Norway is the best country in the world" is a truthiness which the people swallow with hook,line and sinker because the state sponsored media tells them so. Problems are the fault of "capitalists" despite the fact that even the right-wing parties in Norway want a welfare state, and while you are not a "terrorist" unless you support Israel, try saying it isn't all Israel's fault and sit back and wait until you're branded "capitalist" , "zionist", "racist" , "republican" or similar.
My impression of how things work over here is that you put on your Nike T-shirt, go get your lunch at Burger King, and then you harp on about how Americans are fat hamburger consuming morons and how all US politic sucks while Norway is the best country in the world. Then you go out and vote for a government which finds it acceptable to prohibit alternative education systems.
Yea, I'm no fan of the US, but Norway isn't exactly a heaven on earth either.
http://www.bash.org/?701504
The rulings ( both in the US and EU ) has so far been jokes.
A real anti-trust ruling would be something along the following lines:
a)Microsoft are forced to offer the same price for OEM licenses to all retailers ( and disclose its magnitude ).
b)Retailers are forced to offer systems without an OEM license, should the customer ask for it, with the cost reduced in accordance with the price of the license ( which Microsoft must disclose )
c)Microsoft is banned from charging more for their retail version than the OEM license.
Now THAT would actually cause them to shit themselves.
Oh, and before somebody starts claiming this is unfair and Microsoft having the right to charge whatever and whatnot... NO! They lost that right because they abused their market position. We give them those rights with the intention to stimulate development that benefits society, if Microsoft abuses those rights in a way that is detrimental to the market, we are perfectly justified in taking them away again.
Fixed that for you.
Personally I feel bad for my sister who will have to use it. I'd recomend she use Ubuntu instead, but she lives in another country and I won't be able to help her, and she doesn't feel prepared to try it on her own. I guess she would probably manage just fine, but sadly she doesn't even want to give it a shot. Oh well...