Yup. I find it an extremely rare occasion where I have to send a Dropbox link out. I only do that for semi-public files anyway, otherwise they can indeed get an encrypted file and good luck with it.

I'm using IE at work, the version where there is no omnibar. I hate it. Every time I want a website I'm used to typing part of it the URL and hitting enter. With IE7 or 8 (not sure) I have to type in the whole URL correctly. Brrr...

Aaarrrggghhhhh!!!!!

Or like the chemists, who designed tear gas, only to have the riot police use it against them when they demonstrated against the Vietnam war.

Your own creation turning against you. It's a rather old cliché but unfortunately, people insist on repeating it.

Rembrandt was considered a revolutionary modern painter in his days. Just compare the paintings before him, and after - a huge difference. He drastically changed the ways in which paintings were composed.

Now, Picasso could paint just as well as Rembrandt, except he chose to paint non-realistic paintings. I find him a great artist. Just as Eduard Munch, btw, whose "Scream" expresses a lot of feelings that would be nearly impossible to express using photorealistic paintings. Majakovsky's "Cloud in trousers" is a great poem. I appreciate him more than a lot of Shakespeare's sonnets. Does that make him a better artist? I doubt it - but it sure doesn't make him a bad one.

Or is modern defined a bit closer to now? I'm sure I can find some great artists. Within the 99% that's horrible, there is always that 1% that will likely stand the test of time. Who knows, it may even be Banksy or Damien Hirst (*).

(*) I'd vote for Banksy :)

Oh I agree, but that's usually why multinationals *do* have a real home. In case of Microsoft, it's the USA. So they're stuck with their laws. Their only solution is to give up control on part of their assets and split, but they'll fight tooth and nail to avoid that. So they're stuck. Or rather, they're not stuck - *we* are stuck. Because MS will just *shrug* and hand over the data, eventually.

Well... let's follow up on the argument a bit.

If MS Europe is *really* independent, they can now turn down the request of MS USA for the data and the request will have to go through the Irish courts. But if they are *not* all that independent, and the data is not in fact controlled by them but by MS USA, then they can't interfere, MS USA will have to comply and I can just imagine what the tax authorities are going to do the morning after they produce the data: go after MS with a pretty big hammer.

Interesting case, this :)

Data is legally owned and controlled by somebody, and that's the one getting the subpoena. So as far as I know the law over here (IANAL) the answer is yes: the court that can claim jurisdiction can apply its laws and if they say they can order you to give up the data and decrypt it, then you have to.

In my (amateur) opinion, the only way Microsoft would have gotten out of this one is if they had sold the data to another company that would reside in Ireland and that would be legally independent. Say, "MicrosoftDataHolding Ireland". However, *that* company could be ordered by the Irish courts to turn over the data to the Irish government, independent of what Microsoft USA would want. They wouldn't even be part of the case.

True. Friends of mine were warned specifically that asking too many questions in business meetings in the USA means you are critical of their ideas. In fact, that you are critical in the sense that you disapprove. While over here, asking questions means that you are interested and engaged - if you aren't asking questions people think you don't care.

After a good friend of mine asked too many questions again, they dropped his invitation for a guided tour. When he related this to his manager, the manager sent him to a course on multicultural trade relations :) Anyway, the US came up specifically in that course and this was one of the pitfalls. But it really says a lot about a culture when asking questions means that you disapprove. It must be hellish to be an intellectual kid in a US high school.

Oh yeah, the "I changed nothing" mantra.

I once had a sysadmin tell me the same thing. After a few minutes of diverting his attention to other subjects I just asked him, in the same tone of voice, to also tell me what he changed yesterday. It was a very short but interesting list (antivirus and a few untested patches). It took him a few seconds after I stayed quiet to realize what he had just said :)

Nowadays, if something falls over and they tell me "nothing changed" I just laugh at them.

Spouting logical fallacies really don't help your argument. Noone said there was a causal relationship between being available on one OS and being portable. In fact, GP claims exactly the opposite.

Unless OpenSSL is still using their original code :)

Mussolini created modern fascism, but his definition was both stupid and misleading. First, in any modern state government will always be intertwined with corporations because the state is the executive committee of the biggest corporations. That's not fascism, that's just capitalism working as intended. It becomes fascism when it removes all opposition, eliminating them first from the streets and then physically. And even then there are a few distinctions between just murderously oppressive states and fascist states.

You're pretty creative with your definitions of fascism. You may not like these things (and neither do I) but calling everything you dislike "fascist" is the old trap the Left fell in, in the seventies. It didn't work out all that well. It's also an argument used by entrepreneurs to defend themselves whenever their compatriots plunder the locals. "Oh, it's fascism, really it is! But it's not us doing it, we're allright" (the No True Scotsman argument in reverse).

You also trip lightly over the consequences of your words. If it were fascism, then we would have to take up arms and kill them, to avoid being killed ourselves. Well, that attitude recently got us a few political murders. A heaven-sent gift for the hawks advocating repression and horribly counterproductive. And if that isn't the consequence of something being fascism, then what's your plan of action? Petition them? Ask them nicely?

To summarize: you haven't a clue what fascism is. It's not people being "not nice" to others. It's about the physical destruction of a large part of the majority of the population, mainly aimed at their organisations and their organisers. It means bodies lying in the streets, knocks on the door at 4am, death squads and all that crap. It means that anyone suspected of being different is imprisoned, killed or terrorized into hiding.

Comparing that to "Elon Musk gets money from the government so we're living in fascism" is silly.

Since when did Mussolini have a valid opinion on anything? He was spouting propaganda, not delivering a scientific argument. As for writing a check to Elon Musk: are you implying that any government buying a service from a private company is a fascist state? Because I don't think you and I have the same definition of fascism in that case.

Okay, it's not as bad as I first assumed. It still looks to be pretty difficult to get a license if you didn't study and graduate and worked in the USA for at least a decade though. Still... locally, I don't know any profession that has this type of regulations. And we have less bridges collapsing or buildings falling over than the USA. So I'm still wondering what the regulation is meant to do, apart from limiting the number of PE's, or software engineers, that can apply for certain lucrative jobs.