> That's because "IT" there is incompetent.

Sorry. You lose.

You have just admitted that it "requires a competent IT professional" just to install a printer on Windows.

That's simply not something that should be tolerated in 2014. You certainly wouldn't accept it for Linux.

Hypocrite.

...bullshit.

The same old bullshit.

"This years version of WinDOS finally got things right."

It's such a cliche that Apple even made a commercial about it. You guys always say that the latest and greatest fixes everyone's complaints but it's never like that if you actually try it.

Now TVs are funny beasts. They like to LIE. Yes, LIE. So they aren't a very good basis for comparison.

Windows still has driver issues. It's not just all "automagic". This is especially true if you try to install the thing yourself (like a Linux user might). Simple standard hardware is quite often NOT automagically sorted. This even applies to "market leading products" that you wouldn't think would suffer from such issues.

The emperor is still naked.

Not that this has any relevance to an enterprise corporate installation.

For document exchange in government, something that is an actual standard probably trumps all of the shiny shiny. In a lot of the legal field in the US, PDF is perfectly adequate for document exchange. It was widely adopted when Microsoft was having security issues with it's revisioning features.

The need for actual revisable documents is very likely a very marginal thing for a city government.

> Most peons growing up and using Microsoft Windows exclusively are too dumb to learn anything new, even if they are paid to do so.
>
> It's like a brothel staffed by people with down syndrome.

Actually, that couldn't be further from the truth. Kids have no problems dealing with different platforms. HELL, the barely acknowledge that there are different platforms. They just use similar software the same way as the people from Xerox Parc intended.

It's the aging dinosaurs that have problems with Brand X of word processor versus Brand Y.

If they don't like Open Office, just wait till they see Ribbon and Win8.

I've seen people in small businesses nearly defect over either of those.

...none of which is remotely relevant in an enterprise corporate environment where you DON'T WANT your end users their PCs or the rest of the network and where even Windows setup is managed by specialists from another department.

When our department moved. there was a lot of fun getting the network printer to work with people's WinDOS desktops. An entire department full of programmers had problems getting a mundane Dell printer to work with their Win7 desktops.

Most of them had to be rescued by IT.

Plus, that part of the body that gets cut off itself tends to harbor infections.

That is why that "horrible superstitious religious practice" became a common medical practice once society realized that you should sterilize surgical instruments.

Just like with evolution, two similar things don't have to be parent and child. They can be siblings or cousins sharing a common origin.

Rockwell and Bazille likely share common influences including the general culture at large.

This is the sort of thing that should be obvious to anyone that's ever been in any serious kind of art museum. Art documents the culture that created it. You can easily see how that changes over time.

A number of these cultural transitions are really quite dramatic.

Suits are expense, expensive and hard to maintain, and easy to destroy. They are also uncomfortable and restrictive. They represent a degree of overhead that's completely unecessary for the task at hand.

It's little wonder that an engineer might object to being forced into a suit for anything short of a presentation for a client.

> Wait, are you really saying that C++ isn't a proven technology? Pretty much everything important and widely used is written in it.

You lost it right there.

That assertion hasn't been true for at least 10 years. Can you possibly be that stale while still being employed or are you retired already?

What a dinosaur...

The problem with equating "engineer" with "software engineer" is that there's more to computing than being a code monkey. A lot of companies won't even have any code monkeys but will still have computing professionals to manage their computing infastructure.

By making the false equivalency you are making the entire thesis less clear.

> So... who gives a shit?

Clearly some butthurt slashbots do. Otherwise they wouldn't be objecting to the idea so fiercely.

If you don't have to sign your name to it and take personal responsibility for it when it breaks, you simply aren't a professional engineer. You're just a wannabe trying to pretend you're more respectable than you really are.

Software is Max Max territory compared to any real engineering discipline.

The food? Anything you can buy from someone else, I can probably do better. That's the flip side of not living in some closet in an overhyped urban center.

The "lawn" also comes with fresh fruits,vegetables and herbs.

You don't sound like someone that's ever had to live in a place where drive by shootings are problem. Clearly you are not because you don't acknowledge the problem of violent crime in general. You clearly have no clue what else people in poor violent neighborhoods have to deal with.

It's not just the guns.

You think you can be smug because "there are no guns" but the guns really have nothing to do with it.

The real reason you can be smug is that you don't live in some festering ghetto. Your silver spoon protects you from harm. Repressive gun laws really have squat to do with it.

> Mandatory validation of sexual preference

Nope. Not forced "validation", just "forced" tolerance. That is a manifestation of our founding ideals regarding religion. We are simply not a Sharia Law nation. Even our devout founding fathers knew the dangers of mixing church and state.

Religious wars and repression weren't such a distant memory for them.

If you can't handle all of this, I suggest moving to Iran where you will find like minded people.

It's not small minded. It actually makes a remarkable amount of sense. Foreign nationals that like to lecture anyone else are like the GOP crowd that thought they could mold Iraq into a western style democracy while ignoring the fact that the Iraqis are a distinct people with their own history and characteristics.

Bleeding heart liberals and Eurotrash that think that they can just impose foreign ideas on the US are just like that.

Take a good long look in the mirror. The face that should be looking back at you should be George Bush the younger because you are EXACTLY like him and a moron for the same reasons.

Even in Europe neighboring countries have wildly divergent cultures and trying to impose the same regime on all of them is problematic. So trying to impose a European style nanny state in the US might run into problems.

The US is pretty much made up of all the people that rejected the European way of doing things at one time or another. That's still very much reflected in our politics. A US solution needs to be something blindly transplanted from somewhere else and imposed upon us Bush+Iraq style.

Plus there's the obvious scaling issue. The US is just bigger.

Is there a successful beaurocracy of any kind that covers the entire EU?