I think they're trusting that more than one person will notice it. With OSS, we know that it's possible someone will find a security bug and not report it because that would benefit them. We also figure that there's a high enough probability of someone else noticing too that the first person's secrecy will be nullified anyway. With the people who pay for each issue you find, the hacker has a better shot at cash through trying to report it first than through hoping nobody else does.
Well, uh, ActiveX kinda fits into the "backdoor" thing as it lets any random bit of code run in your browser without you knowing it. Disabling ActiveX is the first thing anyone should do if they're going to use IE.
It wasn't meant to be a moral argument. It's a practical one. Some people will take anything they are ABLE to get for free, regardless of "supposed to."
Then why was there a thing last week about "zomg Mac users can't have Vista in Parallels!"? And why in Hell would anyone put Vista in a VM on top of Vista? Maybe an Ultimate in a VM of Basic or something, I guess, but that's not the same license.
Yeah, that's the other thing. I installed it on here WITHOUT a VM back during the RC. It was horrible because I have Intel graphics instead of a dedicated VRAM nVidia or ATi card. Funnily enough, the Intel graphics have been a blessing otherwise. There are never Intel graphics issues on Linux.
How is there less research involved using the software? Regardless of how you do your taxes, you have to figure out what invoices/receipts/credits/loans/etc fit into each category (because not everything counts the same way) before you can enter any data. My dad spends months just going through the stacks of paper work and organizing them so that he knows what goes where. He uses a CPA because he doesn't have time to enter numbers in a program or write them on a piece of paper, but he still has to sort all that paperwork BEFORE he can take it to the CPA. A CPA is the least-time-consuming way because you don't have to enter in any of the numbers in either a digital or analog form, but either way, you still have to organize your finances beforehand. For people with all kinds of assets, debts, investments, etc, that's still the largest time-drain. Then again, there's probably some more-expensive-than-my-dad's CPAs who will just accept a giant pile of papers and do the organizing and everything for you before doing the taxes.
USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software installed on the
licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.
See? It says you cannot install Home Basic (or Premium, it's in there too) in a VM (in general). The Ultimate says:
USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may use the software installed on the
licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system on the licensed device. If
you do so, you may not play or access content or use applications protected by any Microsoft digital,
information or enterprise rights management technology or other Microsoft rights management
services or use BitLocker. We advise against playing or accessing content or using applications
protected by other digital, information or enterprise rights management technology or other rights
management services or using full volume disk drive encryption.
See the first sentence? It says that you can use Vista Ultimate in a VM, but it specifically says "on the licensed device." I'm assuming that "licensed device" refers to either the computer on which it was pre-installed OR the one for which it was purchased/first-installed (depending on if you have OEM or Retail version), and so taking a computer that had it pre-installed, wiping it and putting XP back on (or FreeBSD or Linux or whatever) and then putting that computer's copy of Vista into a VM on a completely different computer would be illegal.
Wow, Washington still requires keeping receipts about sales tax? That's ridiculous. Don't you have to keep all of the receipts and organize all the paper records of what you did and itemize everything anyway, though? Maybe it's because I've never bothered with trying the software method, but it seems to me that it's like having a glorified Excel spreadsheet full of equations. You still need to know what goes where and what category under which to file everything. I would think the part about figuring out what's taxable and what's not is what you'd really need assistance for. And for that, just have a long long list that you can tack up instead of lawyer-jargon-ified section 1.2.7.4 article IV type of things.
Uh, yeah, but the recordings wouldn't have been illegal since at least one of them knew, so the first part doesn't work. For the second, it says they're exempt from hearsay rules (usually "I heard him say that..." is not allowed, but a recording isn't subject to hearing wrong or a bad memory), which means they'd be allowed, but that for impeachment they wouldn't. The spammer in this case would be committing perjury, not impeachment, since impeachment would require that the spammer be an official guilty of misconduct and/or misuse of power, so the impeachment thing has nothing to do with this case anyway.
Uh, no. If your way of thinking is "I will not pay," you find whatever you can free. If you can get Windows free, you use it free. If you can't, Microsoft thinks you'll suddenly decide to pay. Will you really? Probably not. You'll get something else that's free instead. Which does Microsoft prefer? Do they want you using pirated Windows or free GNU/Linux? Well, if you have pirated Windows, and you're using it, and your kids or students or whoever has access to it is using it, they are learning to use Windows. If you have free GNU/Linux, and you're using it, and your kids or students or whoever has access to it is using it, they are learning to use GNU/Linux. In the future, when they get a computer or get a job where they have to use a computer, they will ask for one with what they know how to use. If that's Windows, they buy a Windows computer or their employer gets a Windows computer for their office, which is something for which Microsoft is likely to see some money (businesses are less likely to engage in risky behaviour like software piracy). If that's GNU/Linux, they buy a Linux computer or their employer gets a Linux computer for their office, for which Microsoft will NEVER see any money. It's in Microsoft's interest to let those who flat-out will not pay use pirated Windows so that it is the only thing they will agree to work with in the future rather than driving them to the competition.
I'm considering putting Vista in a VM so I can learn where all the stuff got moved/hidden. I'd need to increase my RAM though. Running Vista on top of Linux won't work well with 1GB. It'll work, I know that. I set up a friend's computer like that, but Vista is really really slow in the VM (dedicated 512MB of RAM to it). I'll need to go up to 2GB before I can put it like that. And then you consider that you have to get the more-expensive Vista to use it in a VM...I'd rather someone just post a whole lot of screenshots online, so that when I'm on the phone saying "right click on My Computer, go to properties, now click the one that says something about disk cleanup," and getting "I don't see it, what does it look like again?" I can be staring at a screenshot and describe the button.
If you can file with a 1040EZ you don't need software. It has somewhere on the order of 30 or 40 lines (including the 2nd page where if you're a dependent of someone else you fill out that section), and 10 of them are "do you want to donate part of your return to ______?"
The problem with a slide rule for taxes is that you tend to end up with rounded numbers if it's not a very small number. The cents would get lost. Still, the forms are all just "fill in this number here" and "add those 2 lines and write the sum there." It's not hard math to do. The directions are the most confusing part (wait, is this taxable or non-taxable?), but you have to know which papers and receipts and whatnot fall into what category to do it on the computer anyway; otherwise, you'd be filling in the wrong numbers on the wrong computer lines and your computer would be calculating the wrong things.
What age is that, by the way? And actually, that's true in my family, if you count my dad and step-dad's laptops from work and the Windows computer that apparently borked itself a couple months ago and will no longer boot all the way to the desktop. I know what I get to do when I get home from college...fix the 2 Windows boxen and upgrade mom's Linux box.
My 8th grade math class included a section on taxes. My school's math program was weird though (6th grade major project was making blueprints of our bedrooms and then having a budget for remodeling them and using the measurements to figure out wallpaper and carpet and whatnot, and we also had to learn base-3 and binary in 6th grade), so even if yours didn't, how hard is it to read "add the quantities on lines 7, 8, 9, and 10, then write the sum on line 11," and do just that? Okay, not everyone's great with math. I don't think I'm any good with it. You might not be able to add with pencil and paper (okay, if you can't that's really bad, so maybe I should go with "you might not be able to figure out what 3.07% of 21392.97 is with pencil and paper"), but really, do you not own a calculator? You can get them at the dollar store. Why pay a large sum for tax software, a glorified calculator, when you can get a $1 calculator, or, even better, since you obviously have a computer if you're going to use software, use the calculator that's built into your OS? The most trouble I had was looking on the PA-IRS's website for a Schedule A form. There's only A/B/O, so I had to get a form with 3 parts instead of just the part I needed. Yeah, so hard. For the US-IRS? I had to click the link for a PDF of the instruction booklet to check that I was still in the 100% refund category, and not the 90% one. Oh my gosh, downloading and printing PDFs then using a calculator to add is such hard work! Gimme a break.
I'm confused. Did you just say Linux should support other platforms? Are suggesting yanking the NT kernel out of Windows and putting the Linux kernel in its place? If you mean architectures, Linux already supports a whole ton of them, while OSX supports 2 (PPC & x86) and Windows supports 1 (x86) or maybe 2 if the PDAs have a different processor. The most sense I can make out of what you said is that maybe you're confusing Linux with Free Software in general. If THAT's the case, then you should look at the Open CD, which is a cd for Windows with 30-something Win32 Free Software applications and a nice installation GUI. Of course, that's just a tiny selection. Quite a lot of Free Software is ported to (or written on) Windows. The ones that aren't? Generally, it's because A) the dev can't do it because s/he lacks Windows or B) there's already software serving the same purpose for Windows which may not be Free-libre but is free-gratis and then well, most people seem to care more about free-gratis than Free-libre, so...doesn't make a difference to most users.
The professor can't seem to figure out his Mac through the Winbox to the projector. A bit of class is wasted on him trying to get the projector to display his slides properly instead of all dim, then he gets fed up and PDFs them and attempts to navigate through Windows and show them. Then he realizes he needs to show some code too, but that the Winbox doesn't have BlueJ or Emacs, and then he fiddles with things trying to make his presentation work. While he muddles with the uncooperative technology, I go here.
I'll agree on that. We're taught to play with Barbies. I know I was. I had a fake kitchen thing. What did my brother have? A toy work bench. Who was encouraged to tinker and who was encouraged to be ladylike? I'd say this is probably a common thing in families. The boys are taught that they are supposed to tinker and be "Mr. Fix-It." The girls are taught that that's "for boys." Having your formative years being spent being told not to be interested in those things can certainly have an effect.
There was actually a "girls can't code" argument at my school a couple of weeks ago. One CS BS senior expressed his opinion that some of the students, especially the girls weren't up to par and shouldn't have been admitted. As you can imagine, this was not welcomed by the other students. Last week, I was "nominated" (read: appointed, there aren't enough underclassmen for a real election) to ACM secretary. When I said I'm bad with taking notes, I was told it's "woman's work," so I'd be fine even though girls are all dumb. Double fingers for that kid. The other girls got mad, and I chased the kid ("nominated" for president) out of the room. That resulted in a lot of discussion about girls, coding, intelligence, etc. Only a couple of kids even knew that the first programmer was a woman (Ada, Countess of Lovelace).
If he's in his early 20s, then I'm younger than him, the family fix it girl (hell, for the sake of the "girls can't code" argument last week at school, let's point that word out), and I know better than that. What an IDIOT.
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I think they're trusting that more than one person will notice it. With OSS, we know that it's possible someone will find a security bug and not report it because that would benefit them. We also figure that there's a high enough probability of someone else noticing too that the first person's secrecy will be nullified anyway. With the people who pay for each issue you find, the hacker has a better shot at cash through trying to report it first than through hoping nobody else does.
Well, uh, ActiveX kinda fits into the "backdoor" thing as it lets any random bit of code run in your browser without you knowing it. Disabling ActiveX is the first thing anyone should do if they're going to use IE.
It wasn't meant to be a moral argument. It's a practical one. Some people will take anything they are ABLE to get for free, regardless of "supposed to."
Then why was there a thing last week about "zomg Mac users can't have Vista in Parallels!"? And why in Hell would anyone put Vista in a VM on top of Vista? Maybe an Ultimate in a VM of Basic or something, I guess, but that's not the same license.
Yeah, that's the other thing. I installed it on here WITHOUT a VM back during the RC. It was horrible because I have Intel graphics instead of a dedicated VRAM nVidia or ATi card. Funnily enough, the Intel graphics have been a blessing otherwise. There are never Intel graphics issues on Linux.
How is there less research involved using the software? Regardless of how you do your taxes, you have to figure out what invoices/receipts/credits/loans/etc fit into each category (because not everything counts the same way) before you can enter any data. My dad spends months just going through the stacks of paper work and organizing them so that he knows what goes where. He uses a CPA because he doesn't have time to enter numbers in a program or write them on a piece of paper, but he still has to sort all that paperwork BEFORE he can take it to the CPA. A CPA is the least-time-consuming way because you don't have to enter in any of the numbers in either a digital or analog form, but either way, you still have to organize your finances beforehand. For people with all kinds of assets, debts, investments, etc, that's still the largest time-drain. Then again, there's probably some more-expensive-than-my-dad's CPAs who will just accept a giant pile of papers and do the organizing and everything for you before doing the taxes.
Wow, Washington still requires keeping receipts about sales tax? That's ridiculous. Don't you have to keep all of the receipts and organize all the paper records of what you did and itemize everything anyway, though? Maybe it's because I've never bothered with trying the software method, but it seems to me that it's like having a glorified Excel spreadsheet full of equations. You still need to know what goes where and what category under which to file everything. I would think the part about figuring out what's taxable and what's not is what you'd really need assistance for. And for that, just have a long long list that you can tack up instead of lawyer-jargon-ified section 1.2.7.4 article IV type of things.
Uh, yeah, but the recordings wouldn't have been illegal since at least one of them knew, so the first part doesn't work. For the second, it says they're exempt from hearsay rules (usually "I heard him say that..." is not allowed, but a recording isn't subject to hearing wrong or a bad memory), which means they'd be allowed, but that for impeachment they wouldn't. The spammer in this case would be committing perjury, not impeachment, since impeachment would require that the spammer be an official guilty of misconduct and/or misuse of power, so the impeachment thing has nothing to do with this case anyway.
Uh, no. If your way of thinking is "I will not pay," you find whatever you can free. If you can get Windows free, you use it free. If you can't, Microsoft thinks you'll suddenly decide to pay. Will you really? Probably not. You'll get something else that's free instead. Which does Microsoft prefer? Do they want you using pirated Windows or free GNU/Linux? Well, if you have pirated Windows, and you're using it, and your kids or students or whoever has access to it is using it, they are learning to use Windows. If you have free GNU/Linux, and you're using it, and your kids or students or whoever has access to it is using it, they are learning to use GNU/Linux. In the future, when they get a computer or get a job where they have to use a computer, they will ask for one with what they know how to use. If that's Windows, they buy a Windows computer or their employer gets a Windows computer for their office, which is something for which Microsoft is likely to see some money (businesses are less likely to engage in risky behaviour like software piracy). If that's GNU/Linux, they buy a Linux computer or their employer gets a Linux computer for their office, for which Microsoft will NEVER see any money. It's in Microsoft's interest to let those who flat-out will not pay use pirated Windows so that it is the only thing they will agree to work with in the future rather than driving them to the competition.
I'm considering putting Vista in a VM so I can learn where all the stuff got moved/hidden. I'd need to increase my RAM though. Running Vista on top of Linux won't work well with 1GB. It'll work, I know that. I set up a friend's computer like that, but Vista is really really slow in the VM (dedicated 512MB of RAM to it). I'll need to go up to 2GB before I can put it like that. And then you consider that you have to get the more-expensive Vista to use it in a VM...I'd rather someone just post a whole lot of screenshots online, so that when I'm on the phone saying "right click on My Computer, go to properties, now click the one that says something about disk cleanup," and getting "I don't see it, what does it look like again?" I can be staring at a screenshot and describe the button.
If you can file with a 1040EZ you don't need software. It has somewhere on the order of 30 or 40 lines (including the 2nd page where if you're a dependent of someone else you fill out that section), and 10 of them are "do you want to donate part of your return to ______?"
The problem with a slide rule for taxes is that you tend to end up with rounded numbers if it's not a very small number. The cents would get lost. Still, the forms are all just "fill in this number here" and "add those 2 lines and write the sum there." It's not hard math to do. The directions are the most confusing part (wait, is this taxable or non-taxable?), but you have to know which papers and receipts and whatnot fall into what category to do it on the computer anyway; otherwise, you'd be filling in the wrong numbers on the wrong computer lines and your computer would be calculating the wrong things.
What age is that, by the way? And actually, that's true in my family, if you count my dad and step-dad's laptops from work and the Windows computer that apparently borked itself a couple months ago and will no longer boot all the way to the desktop. I know what I get to do when I get home from college...fix the 2 Windows boxen and upgrade mom's Linux box.
My 8th grade math class included a section on taxes. My school's math program was weird though (6th grade major project was making blueprints of our bedrooms and then having a budget for remodeling them and using the measurements to figure out wallpaper and carpet and whatnot, and we also had to learn base-3 and binary in 6th grade), so even if yours didn't, how hard is it to read "add the quantities on lines 7, 8, 9, and 10, then write the sum on line 11," and do just that? Okay, not everyone's great with math. I don't think I'm any good with it. You might not be able to add with pencil and paper (okay, if you can't that's really bad, so maybe I should go with "you might not be able to figure out what 3.07% of 21392.97 is with pencil and paper"), but really, do you not own a calculator? You can get them at the dollar store. Why pay a large sum for tax software, a glorified calculator, when you can get a $1 calculator, or, even better, since you obviously have a computer if you're going to use software, use the calculator that's built into your OS? The most trouble I had was looking on the PA-IRS's website for a Schedule A form. There's only A/B/O, so I had to get a form with 3 parts instead of just the part I needed. Yeah, so hard. For the US-IRS? I had to click the link for a PDF of the instruction booklet to check that I was still in the 100% refund category, and not the 90% one. Oh my gosh, downloading and printing PDFs then using a calculator to add is such hard work! Gimme a break.
I'm confused. Did you just say Linux should support other platforms? Are suggesting yanking the NT kernel out of Windows and putting the Linux kernel in its place? If you mean architectures, Linux already supports a whole ton of them, while OSX supports 2 (PPC & x86) and Windows supports 1 (x86) or maybe 2 if the PDAs have a different processor. The most sense I can make out of what you said is that maybe you're confusing Linux with Free Software in general. If THAT's the case, then you should look at the Open CD, which is a cd for Windows with 30-something Win32 Free Software applications and a nice installation GUI. Of course, that's just a tiny selection. Quite a lot of Free Software is ported to (or written on) Windows. The ones that aren't? Generally, it's because A) the dev can't do it because s/he lacks Windows or B) there's already software serving the same purpose for Windows which may not be Free-libre but is free-gratis and then well, most people seem to care more about free-gratis than Free-libre, so...doesn't make a difference to most users.
I liked Trillian, but I'm used to Gaim now. You might try Kopete next time you're on Linux. It feels more like Trillian.
Yuck. If you want an IDE that draws the outlines of methods and you fill them in, use Eclipse. We don't need .NET or VB. They're rather sucky.
The professor can't seem to figure out his Mac through the Winbox to the projector. A bit of class is wasted on him trying to get the projector to display his slides properly instead of all dim, then he gets fed up and PDFs them and attempts to navigate through Windows and show them. Then he realizes he needs to show some code too, but that the Winbox doesn't have BlueJ or Emacs, and then he fiddles with things trying to make his presentation work. While he muddles with the uncooperative technology, I go here.
I'll agree on that. We're taught to play with Barbies. I know I was. I had a fake kitchen thing. What did my brother have? A toy work bench. Who was encouraged to tinker and who was encouraged to be ladylike? I'd say this is probably a common thing in families. The boys are taught that they are supposed to tinker and be "Mr. Fix-It." The girls are taught that that's "for boys." Having your formative years being spent being told not to be interested in those things can certainly have an effect.
There was actually a "girls can't code" argument at my school a couple of weeks ago. One CS BS senior expressed his opinion that some of the students, especially the girls weren't up to par and shouldn't have been admitted. As you can imagine, this was not welcomed by the other students. Last week, I was "nominated" (read: appointed, there aren't enough underclassmen for a real election) to ACM secretary. When I said I'm bad with taking notes, I was told it's "woman's work," so I'd be fine even though girls are all dumb. Double fingers for that kid. The other girls got mad, and I chased the kid ("nominated" for president) out of the room. That resulted in a lot of discussion about girls, coding, intelligence, etc. Only a couple of kids even knew that the first programmer was a woman (Ada, Countess of Lovelace).
I'm sitting in a data structures class right now.
If he's in his early 20s, then I'm younger than him, the family fix it girl (hell, for the sake of the "girls can't code" argument last week at school, let's point that word out), and I know better than that. What an IDIOT.
Please tell me that kid was somewhere around 8 years old. I consider myself a "kid" but I don't think anyone my age is that dumb...er, I hope.
I know Adium uses libpurple/libgaim, but there's no GTK+ on OSX? That's surprising...or does it require X11?
Try Gaim/Pidgin. It's cross-platform and supports MSN.
Because GPG is free.