Not many employers are willing to take that risk even which is why its imposible to get a job unless you've worked for 2 years or know the boss personally. The employment laws cripple the UK economy in this respect.
Come on Blair will legislate so that you must install a camera in your bathroom just incase you try to hide illegal format shifting practices while in the bath, at the end of the day those with nothing to hide....
Privacy in this country is a dead thing, very soon New Labour will insist on knowing the pH level of your piss just in case you've drunk more beer than you paid tax on. Hopefully Blairs attempt to remove everything that seperates us from dictatorships will be dealt with when he eventually steps down and the Labour party tears itself apart when the socialist part of the party realises they've been supporting a neo-con leadership since 1997.
So you can do whatever you want with OSX by circumventing the law then. Can you run different WM's or DE's on OSX yet, what if you had a low powered machine that needs something along the lines of Fluxbox, you aren't going to be running OSX on there.
It's not as if Britain has got its own Cruise missles and that the same rules would apply to the US as well as Europe. No that would just make your argument kind of irrelevant. It's not even as if a World War like that makes all current technology irrelevant very quickly.
I'm not saying that Europe would definately win a war with the USA though. It's a posibility if it was EU as an entity directly against the USA simply due to numbers but I imagine in such circumstances at least the UK would end up either on the side of the US or at the very least remaining neutral.
So united EU against USA. Difficult to call.
Likely reality of half of EU tenatively vs USA. No chance.
The only hope of a united Europe would be the end of the CAP (which will not happen any time soon). It's far too divisive and badly hurts the European economy (and the world economy, its just plain bad quite frankly).
I think its all a bit of a non starter though. Without getting into wars a simple trade embargo between the EU and the USA would be extremely costly for both sides. We buy more from the US than we sell back so in the end the cost would mostly be on your end though.
I've never seen Dell sell Linux Desktops in Europe* but then again I haven't had a PC readily assembled since I was 9. Laptops are more of an issue to be honest, you can get inferior quality custom builds but its usually cheaper/better to pay the MS tax. The only real option for Linux Laptops is Emperor and while they do imports they are not exactly cheap.
When I can get a machine without Windows and have it cheaper for the privilege I will be happy. At the moment most companies charge you more for a free OS than for a holey and expensive one.
*it may be a price issue, as I allude to generally you pay more for getting a free OS. Generally I get a list of hardware and decide what its worth at the most, if it comes to more than that its just there for a laugh and generally I ignore everything above a certain threshold. Currently all Apple hardware is there for a laugh but thats another thing.
In most countries around the world sellers will only distribute Windows so yes a monopoly. Something that isn't a monopoly is when theres a choice at the point of purchase.
"I love how supposedly-intelligent people can't realize that at some level, at some point in time, members of a civilized society must have some acceptance of a system of laws and order, instead of just arbitrarily and indiscriminately breaking ones they personally disagree with, if there is to be any value to a legal system at all."
Then you posted:
"I could really care less if the act of "file sharing" or whatever euphemism people want to use is legal in its host country"
Surely people should accept there is a code of law and shouldn't pick and chose which ones they want to follow.
Anyway I disagree with the sentiment entirely. The original creators of law themselves said that for intelligent people laws are meerly guidelines. Even the Babylonians recognised that unrestricted enforcement of law is bad, sometimes because of fringe cases and other times because the law is quite frankly wrong. Modern society recognised it as well when judges were appointed to arbitrate law, as it stands though they may as well be machines, they don't utilise the license they were clearly put in place to use.
What about installing it on an UltraSparc or an AMD_64. Mac's have their advantages but to say they do everything as good as Linux is more than a bit off.
More like the hardware is overpriced. Theres no such thing as expensive though there is such as thing as value. Macs take a huge number of cost cutting measures* then charge you more for the privilege. I can get a top of the range PC for much cheaper than a Mac and the top line PC will be better in terms of pure hardware.
If I can save myself £300 and get a more powerful machine while running an OS more to my taste I will.
Given the difference between most people arms in weight is more than 1 pound I don't think it will cause much problem in the long term. It's not as if you're being asked to hold it out with your arm parallel to the floor all day.
What have Ubuntu done now. They are using apt/dpkg at the moment (though they plan to move to smart) which is changing what exactly. The only thing they don't do is waste their time making their patches compatible with all the Archs Debian supports when their only need is to patch the Archs Ubuntu supports. Whether this is a crime or not is for others to decide but theres a lot of unwarrented anti-Ubuntu stuff out there, if people don't want people to do things their way then they're in the wrong place in OSS.
You can actually use source archives to install software on Ubuntu believe it or not and can configure to your hearts content it just drops you off at a different position to other distros (you could even run the server install and compile almost all your software from source if you like).
It's not so much that its enough for anyone just that theres pretty much a natural limit on this. You'd have to find QM to be wrong to fill it to its maximum.
Lets be fair China is already far too big a fish for the US to tackle via bullying. Within 10 years they'll have greater financial resources than the USA and they aren't stupid enough to allow the USA to bully them out of they're enevitable position on the top of the food chain.
Software can be patented its just not legally recognised by the EU. It's kind of like me buying a piece of paper saying I am King off someone who doesn't have the power to make me King. The EPO are irrelevant since they don't decide the law.
How have people like myself spread AIDS. Ok I don't hold onto archaic practices like abstinence outside of marriage but I always say that position and precautions go hand in hand and you can only take that position with the use of appropriate measures. The Catholic Church was telling people that condoms caused AIDS in some areas, how can you justify that.
When the Catholic Church was on its mission it should have presented the argument as such. If you must break one rule then the other must go as well and they should have linked the 2 together as a realistic position. Instead they campaigned hard on the one and not the other leading to the current mess. Prehaps they knew that people were always going to keep their freedoms in this case but they should have been realistic in that position inspite of their beliefs. At the end of the day it was only their beliefs that lead the Nazi party to justify the deaths of so many people.
Also Atheist governments are exactly why religion should form no part of government and I include my own group in that but generally Atheists don't want people to be forced to be Atheist they just want the state institutions to be decided purely on logic, equality and reality rather than religious grounding. The state should be like OSS where you have freedoms, choice and as little interference as posible.
Fair enough I suspose but I'm not English, I'm Welsh and I agree people who believe in freedom are not hippies though crucial parts of what hippies believe in are freedoms that a lot of people have forgotten are crucial generally (though they obviously add a fair few of their own strange quirks on top as well). Generally the hippy movement was a response to people insisting on conformity which breaks a crucial freedom (the hippies response was of course extreme but all things of this nature are). It was crucial because if they hadn't existed we might all be nice conforming members of society and use Windows exclusively and hail Bill Gates as a god.
Also the reason that most people struggle with English is the incredible number of *sations and the z's everywhere thesedays. I still haven't figured out why Burglarised replaced Burgled, usually slang terms come in because they are easier rather than more complex. This is probably off topic as well but like the last post I've replied to something that was posted;).
Surely not another American mistaking the USA for the World. Gates isn't considered a hero by anyone I know. Larger corperations are treated with a healthy degree of scepticism in the UK. The US is the only country in the World that I know of where the big guy treading all over the little guys is considered a hero. At best Gates is considered a necessary evil and at worst just plain evil over here. Also Communism isn't a dirty word either here since its a system that has never been practiced* just like Free Market Capitalism in many respects.
*and we differentiate between Communism and the USSR, the Bolshevik party always said they never practiced Communism even if they were called the Bolshevik Communist Party. Anyway I don't think that actual Communism would be any better than USSR 'Communism' but just that people need to get their terminology in correct order.
At which point of history has Atheism burned people at the stakes and stoned people then. Also Atheism hasn't led crusades either. Religion has a horrible record and only the last 100 years has anything approaching good come out of it but even now we have a Catholic Church that encourages children abused by their clergy to cover up and has helped create a situation where 35m people in Africa are going to die from AIDS, not even the USSR killed that many people in its entire existance yet the Church managed it in a few years.
Actually the US victory in the War of Independance was mostly due to the French blockading the ports stopping fresh arrivals of troops. Only about 10,000 or so troops fought in the war and all of them were people living in the US, by comparison (and nobody is proud of Britains actions in this war) Britain brought 500,000 soldiers to the Boar War and likely would have done the same but a war with France at the time would have been extremely costly and the US wasn't considered to be worth it in comparison to the natural resources available in Africa and India (remember oil was worth nothing then).
Not that it matters of course but when patriotism tries to rewrite history somebody has to try and remember the facts.
WW1 was always safe anyway, Britain was a superpower at that point and the Germans were already on the back foot when the USA joined. The real breaking point was the invention of the tank which broke the trench stalemate.
WW2 was different though Britain had still secured its front and our factories were outproducing the Germans at the time, remember it was 2 years between the RAF holding off the Luftwaffe and the US entering the war, if the Germans could have invaded they would have but the British Navy was still huge and would have made such an invasion difficult in the extreme. No Nazi soldier ever set foot on British soil as a free man. The real result of the US entering the war is the USSR stoped at Berlin rather than having a situation where their borders extended all the way to the Channel.
So by all means the French owe their existence to the US and you could call it returning the favour for when they blockaded the ports during the American war of independance though;). I wouldn't doubt that post WW2 Britain would have be a more difficult place had the US not driven the Nazis from France (and hence stopped the Red army at Berlin). It's not as if there wasn't 1.9m British soldiers fighting during the later stages of WW2 either (not to mention millions from other areas of the old empire).
I'd like to point out that while patents have been awarded in the EU they are done by a seperate indepedant body (the European Patent Office which operates in countries outside of the EU as well as EU members, again it is not an EU institute) and currently have no basis in law. Both the EU parliment and the EU courts have said that software patents are not legal in the EU and parliment recently threw out an attempt to pass them into law*.
So essentially any software patent held in the EU is an expensive but worthless piece of paper. The EU does not have software patents and is unlikely to do so any time soon. Theres always the fear since each patent would have to be challenged individually but when they start falling over like flies people will just ignore them and say take us to court.
*which was quite an unexpected suprise. Eveyone was preparing for a 'here we go' again battle and it was defeated promptly and unanimously. The shit is together greatly in this case.
It doesn't matter in the slightest provided Ubuntu itself stays free. If they make money off support contracts then thats fine, nothing in the GPL or the philosophy against that. Ubuntu is just moving in the obvious economic direction which is a free product but paid for service.
Some people can find actual uses for old hardware. Because the idea of turning an older box into a firewall etc escapes you doesn't mean others should abandone otherwise useful hardware. Besides the main point of DSL is use as an admin tool.
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Not many employers are willing to take that risk even which is why its imposible to get a job unless you've worked for 2 years or know the boss personally. The employment laws cripple the UK economy in this respect.
Come on Blair will legislate so that you must install a camera in your bathroom just incase you try to hide illegal format shifting practices while in the bath, at the end of the day those with nothing to hide....
Privacy in this country is a dead thing, very soon New Labour will insist on knowing the pH level of your piss just in case you've drunk more beer than you paid tax on. Hopefully Blairs attempt to remove everything that seperates us from dictatorships will be dealt with when he eventually steps down and the Labour party tears itself apart when the socialist part of the party realises they've been supporting a neo-con leadership since 1997.
So you can do whatever you want with OSX by circumventing the law then. Can you run different WM's or DE's on OSX yet, what if you had a low powered machine that needs something along the lines of Fluxbox, you aren't going to be running OSX on there.
It's not as if Britain has got its own Cruise missles and that the same rules would apply to the US as well as Europe. No that would just make your argument kind of irrelevant. It's not even as if a World War like that makes all current technology irrelevant very quickly.
I'm not saying that Europe would definately win a war with the USA though. It's a posibility if it was EU as an entity directly against the USA simply due to numbers but I imagine in such circumstances at least the UK would end up either on the side of the US or at the very least remaining neutral.
So united EU against USA. Difficult to call.
Likely reality of half of EU tenatively vs USA. No chance.
The only hope of a united Europe would be the end of the CAP (which will not happen any time soon). It's far too divisive and badly hurts the European economy (and the world economy, its just plain bad quite frankly).
I think its all a bit of a non starter though. Without getting into wars a simple trade embargo between the EU and the USA would be extremely costly for both sides. We buy more from the US than we sell back so in the end the cost would mostly be on your end though.
Actually if MS open sourced their products there wouldn't be such a problem with using them anymore.
I've never seen Dell sell Linux Desktops in Europe* but then again I haven't had a PC readily assembled since I was 9. Laptops are more of an issue to be honest, you can get inferior quality custom builds but its usually cheaper/better to pay the MS tax. The only real option for Linux Laptops is Emperor and while they do imports they are not exactly cheap.
When I can get a machine without Windows and have it cheaper for the privilege I will be happy. At the moment most companies charge you more for a free OS than for a holey and expensive one.
*it may be a price issue, as I allude to generally you pay more for getting a free OS. Generally I get a list of hardware and decide what its worth at the most, if it comes to more than that its just there for a laugh and generally I ignore everything above a certain threshold. Currently all Apple hardware is there for a laugh but thats another thing.
In most countries around the world sellers will only distribute Windows so yes a monopoly. Something that isn't a monopoly is when theres a choice at the point of purchase.
Bit of a contradiction here. Firstly you posted:
"I love how supposedly-intelligent people can't realize that at some level, at some point in time, members of a civilized society must have some acceptance of a system of laws and order, instead of just arbitrarily and indiscriminately breaking ones they personally disagree with, if there is to be any value to a legal system at all."
Then you posted:
"I could really care less if the act of "file sharing" or whatever euphemism people want to use is legal in its host country"
Surely people should accept there is a code of law and shouldn't pick and chose which ones they want to follow.
Anyway I disagree with the sentiment entirely. The original creators of law themselves said that for intelligent people laws are meerly guidelines. Even the Babylonians recognised that unrestricted enforcement of law is bad, sometimes because of fringe cases and other times because the law is quite frankly wrong. Modern society recognised it as well when judges were appointed to arbitrate law, as it stands though they may as well be machines, they don't utilise the license they were clearly put in place to use.
What about installing it on an UltraSparc or an AMD_64. Mac's have their advantages but to say they do everything as good as Linux is more than a bit off.
More like the hardware is overpriced. Theres no such thing as expensive though there is such as thing as value. Macs take a huge number of cost cutting measures* then charge you more for the privilege. I can get a top of the range PC for much cheaper than a Mac and the top line PC will be better in terms of pure hardware.
If I can save myself £300 and get a more powerful machine while running an OS more to my taste I will.
What about CS:S
Given the difference between most people arms in weight is more than 1 pound I don't think it will cause much problem in the long term. It's not as if you're being asked to hold it out with your arm parallel to the floor all day.
What have Ubuntu done now. They are using apt/dpkg at the moment (though they plan to move to smart) which is changing what exactly. The only thing they don't do is waste their time making their patches compatible with all the Archs Debian supports when their only need is to patch the Archs Ubuntu supports. Whether this is a crime or not is for others to decide but theres a lot of unwarrented anti-Ubuntu stuff out there, if people don't want people to do things their way then they're in the wrong place in OSS.
You can actually use source archives to install software on Ubuntu believe it or not and can configure to your hearts content it just drops you off at a different position to other distros (you could even run the server install and compile almost all your software from source if you like).
It's not so much that its enough for anyone just that theres pretty much a natural limit on this. You'd have to find QM to be wrong to fill it to its maximum.
Lets be fair China is already far too big a fish for the US to tackle via bullying. Within 10 years they'll have greater financial resources than the USA and they aren't stupid enough to allow the USA to bully them out of they're enevitable position on the top of the food chain.
Software can be patented its just not legally recognised by the EU. It's kind of like me buying a piece of paper saying I am King off someone who doesn't have the power to make me King. The EPO are irrelevant since they don't decide the law.
How have people like myself spread AIDS. Ok I don't hold onto archaic practices like abstinence outside of marriage but I always say that position and precautions go hand in hand and you can only take that position with the use of appropriate measures. The Catholic Church was telling people that condoms caused AIDS in some areas, how can you justify that.
When the Catholic Church was on its mission it should have presented the argument as such. If you must break one rule then the other must go as well and they should have linked the 2 together as a realistic position. Instead they campaigned hard on the one and not the other leading to the current mess. Prehaps they knew that people were always going to keep their freedoms in this case but they should have been realistic in that position inspite of their beliefs. At the end of the day it was only their beliefs that lead the Nazi party to justify the deaths of so many people.
Also Atheist governments are exactly why religion should form no part of government and I include my own group in that but generally Atheists don't want people to be forced to be Atheist they just want the state institutions to be decided purely on logic, equality and reality rather than religious grounding. The state should be like OSS where you have freedoms, choice and as little interference as posible.
Fair enough I suspose but I'm not English, I'm Welsh and I agree people who believe in freedom are not hippies though crucial parts of what hippies believe in are freedoms that a lot of people have forgotten are crucial generally (though they obviously add a fair few of their own strange quirks on top as well). Generally the hippy movement was a response to people insisting on conformity which breaks a crucial freedom (the hippies response was of course extreme but all things of this nature are). It was crucial because if they hadn't existed we might all be nice conforming members of society and use Windows exclusively and hail Bill Gates as a god.
;).
Also the reason that most people struggle with English is the incredible number of *sations and the z's everywhere thesedays. I still haven't figured out why Burglarised replaced Burgled, usually slang terms come in because they are easier rather than more complex. This is probably off topic as well but like the last post I've replied to something that was posted
Surely not another American mistaking the USA for the World. Gates isn't considered a hero by anyone I know. Larger corperations are treated with a healthy degree of scepticism in the UK. The US is the only country in the World that I know of where the big guy treading all over the little guys is considered a hero. At best Gates is considered a necessary evil and at worst just plain evil over here. Also Communism isn't a dirty word either here since its a system that has never been practiced* just like Free Market Capitalism in many respects.
*and we differentiate between Communism and the USSR, the Bolshevik party always said they never practiced Communism even if they were called the Bolshevik Communist Party. Anyway I don't think that actual Communism would be any better than USSR 'Communism' but just that people need to get their terminology in correct order.
At which point of history has Atheism burned people at the stakes and stoned people then. Also Atheism hasn't led crusades either. Religion has a horrible record and only the last 100 years has anything approaching good come out of it but even now we have a Catholic Church that encourages children abused by their clergy to cover up and has helped create a situation where 35m people in Africa are going to die from AIDS, not even the USSR killed that many people in its entire existance yet the Church managed it in a few years.
Actually the US victory in the War of Independance was mostly due to the French blockading the ports stopping fresh arrivals of troops. Only about 10,000 or so troops fought in the war and all of them were people living in the US, by comparison (and nobody is proud of Britains actions in this war) Britain brought 500,000 soldiers to the Boar War and likely would have done the same but a war with France at the time would have been extremely costly and the US wasn't considered to be worth it in comparison to the natural resources available in Africa and India (remember oil was worth nothing then).
Not that it matters of course but when patriotism tries to rewrite history somebody has to try and remember the facts.
WW1 was always safe anyway, Britain was a superpower at that point and the Germans were already on the back foot when the USA joined. The real breaking point was the invention of the tank which broke the trench stalemate.
;). I wouldn't doubt that post WW2 Britain would have be a more difficult place had the US not driven the Nazis from France (and hence stopped the Red army at Berlin). It's not as if there wasn't 1.9m British soldiers fighting during the later stages of WW2 either (not to mention millions from other areas of the old empire).
WW2 was different though Britain had still secured its front and our factories were outproducing the Germans at the time, remember it was 2 years between the RAF holding off the Luftwaffe and the US entering the war, if the Germans could have invaded they would have but the British Navy was still huge and would have made such an invasion difficult in the extreme. No Nazi soldier ever set foot on British soil as a free man. The real result of the US entering the war is the USSR stoped at Berlin rather than having a situation where their borders extended all the way to the Channel.
So by all means the French owe their existence to the US and you could call it returning the favour for when they blockaded the ports during the American war of independance though
I'd like to point out that while patents have been awarded in the EU they are done by a seperate indepedant body (the European Patent Office which operates in countries outside of the EU as well as EU members, again it is not an EU institute) and currently have no basis in law. Both the EU parliment and the EU courts have said that software patents are not legal in the EU and parliment recently threw out an attempt to pass them into law*.
So essentially any software patent held in the EU is an expensive but worthless piece of paper. The EU does not have software patents and is unlikely to do so any time soon. Theres always the fear since each patent would have to be challenged individually but when they start falling over like flies people will just ignore them and say take us to court.
*which was quite an unexpected suprise. Eveyone was preparing for a 'here we go' again battle and it was defeated promptly and unanimously. The shit is together greatly in this case.
It doesn't matter in the slightest provided Ubuntu itself stays free. If they make money off support contracts then thats fine, nothing in the GPL or the philosophy against that. Ubuntu is just moving in the obvious economic direction which is a free product but paid for service.
Some people can find actual uses for old hardware. Because the idea of turning an older box into a firewall etc escapes you doesn't mean others should abandone otherwise useful hardware. Besides the main point of DSL is use as an admin tool.