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Comment Re:Zune or Xbox? (Score 1) 712

>Now you might think "lol whatever", but look at Bill Gates his 1993 keynote called "Information at you fingertips". Everything Apple has 'invented', was actually all Microsoft vision.

In 1993, Apple shipped their first PDA, a primitive tablet-like device, the Newton. Which they had started work on in 1987. Obviously, Apple did not get the idea from a speech Bill Gates made in the 1990s. Although in all fairness, Apple didn't invent the idea, either. Psion had a shipping device in 1984. And Alan Kay had been pushing his Dynabook since the 1960s.

Comment Re:Zune or Xbox? (Score 1) 712

Cheers - After years of being read-only, I actually went and got my first UID just to respond to this.

Welcome aboard!

(If you're just talking about the original, then I agree - I can't remember anything ads from that)

I was talking about when they "entered the market", which was indeed the original xbox. The 360 and its ads were later. That's the point -- MSFT started out lame, and eventually figured it out.

Comment Zune or Xbox? (Score 5, Insightful) 712

The most important question is, which Microsoft model will this emulate, Zune or Xbox?

Zune -- MSFT enters an existing market with a device that is putatively well-speced and well-priced. But MSFT fails to get the details right, and has a crappy advertising campaign. MSFT sinks tons of money into it and eventually gives up.

Xbox -- MSFT enters an existing market with a device that is putatively well-speced and well-priced. But MSFT fails to get the details right, and has a crappy advertising campaign. MSFT sinks tons of money into it and eventually outspends the competitors and fixes enough hardware and software issues that it comes to dominate the market.

With Zune, MSFT's front-running competitor was Apple. With Xbox, it was Sony and Nintendo. Now, it's Apple again. This does not bode well for MSFT's ability to win through.

I only see two ways that MSFT can pull through this: (1) they can leverage the Office and desktop monopolies to go after the business space; (2) their sheer desperation to keep from becoming irrelevant will force them to keep spending until they figure it out. With Zune, failure was on the table -- music players did not directly threaten their core Windows business. The iPad and Apple ecosystem, OTOH, now are threatening their core Windows business.

Comment Re:Murder is against the law (Score 1) 430

So you believe that anyone who contradicts what you believe on these quotes is lying to you. Convenient.

Here is a fix: you should go and hunt down these sources for yourself and try to find these quotes for yourself. At which point, you will find what I told you above to be true, without having to rely on anyone else.

Comment Re:Murder is against the law (Score 1) 430

No. Most of quotes do not exist. Most of the *books* exist, but they've been misquoted -- if you read the originals, you'll see something else.

It would be like if someone presented a list of Christian holy books and said that the book of Matthew 180:37 says Christian must kill all non-Christians, while the book of Shadrach 3:4 says Christians must cheat non-Christians. The first book exists but has been misquoted; the second book does not exist. In both cases, the quote is wrong, but for different reasons.

A person can claim to be anything online. Whoever posted this list is wrong. This is not a list of Jewish beliefs.

Comment Re:...Or you could just not go to porn sites (Score 2) 430

Anybody who gives a rat's ass about kosher, isn't going to be bringing non-kosher food in to begin with, and anybody who has non-kosher food, doesn't give a rats ass about your kosher-ness.

This seems like a troll, but I'll bite anyway. Kosher restaurants are often frequented by groups of people who include both kosher and non-kosher folks. For example, if your workplace has a going-away party for an Orthodox person, you will probably hold it at a kosher restaurant. This means that you get plenty of people in a kosher restaurant who don't care about kashrus.

Another problem is that different people can have different kashrus standards. If the restaurant is certified OU, then all food brought in needs to acceptable to the OU certifiers. If a person comes in who keeps kosher, but whose standard is one that isn't acceptable to the certifier, that won't work very well. Using the OU example above, OU would not recognize a Conersvative certification, but a Conservative customer would have no problem the other way. Similarly, the customer could have prepared the food themselves, and genuinely believed they did so correctly, but made a mistake. So the certifier can't rely on a customer's claims that outside food is kosher.

Comment Re:...Or you could just not go to porn sites (Score 1) 430

Jews do not generally impose their religious rules on non-Jews, and the ultra-orthodox are not an exception. The reason the Haredi are so militant about their rules in Israel is that they are surrounded by other Jews in Israel

+1. I wish I had mod points. Everything said above by betterunixthanunix is exactly how the Haredi community thinks.

Comment Re:They pretty much have the answer already. (Score 1) 430

Then do it. Learn to control yourself and leave the internet alone.

The internet does not need to be made "more kosher" for you.

They didn't ask for the Internet to be made "more kosher." They said that they need better self-control, and to install filtering software on their own PCs and devices. RTFA. Hell, RTFS.

There are plenty of problems with that community. But one thing they mostly don't do: try to change the world to match their expectations for themselves. They believe that the laws for Jews are supposed to be more strict than the laws for the general population. So you mostly won't find them voting to impose their laws on the general population. And you also won't find them going door-to-door to convert Christians, Muslims, Atheists, and others. Unless your mother was Jewish, they don't think most Jewish laws apply to you.

Comment Re:Either you can control yourself, or you can't (Score 4, Informative) 430

If you are saying that you need filtering or censoring software, then you are saying you can't trust yourself to follow your beliefs.

Judaism has a concept of a "geder", a "fence" around a law to prevent oneself from getting close to violating it. For example, one is supposed to avoid being in a room alone with a woman one is not married to or related to, to prevent temptation. The geder isn't there to stop someone determined to violate the law, it's there to prevent a situation from casually escalating.

I suspect that these folks are viewing filtering software as a geder.

Comment Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (Score 3, Informative) 367

Then there is the $1 million patrol boat he donated to the Belizean coast guard. (In a letter to The New York Times, he described it as an act of philanthropy; later, he tells me he had to bribe members of the coast guard to prevent them from hassling his ferry business: "This is a third-world country. I had to bribe a whole bunch of folks.

indicating that he routinely gives large, overt, public bribes to get whatever he wants in Belize

Bribing foreign officials is a violation of the US law Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. So it's surprising that he would admit this to a journalist.

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