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Actually, I agree with the original point of the thread. What Google is doing with Chrome is:

1) Explicitly authoring its own web properties to specifically work better with Chrome, in hopes that its high market share for things like search and webmail will increase Chrome adoption.

2) Authoring its own web properties to only work with WebKit (e.g. a number of Google's sites sniff UAs and send WebKit-only content to any mobile UA).

3) Urging authors to create Chrome-only content (and more generally, together with Apple, encouraging WebKit-only content).

4) Paying other companies to bundle Chrome with their software so that people end up using it whether they want to or not. This part Microsoft didn't have to do because they just bundled with Windows, of course.

They're not _quite_ as bad as Microsoft was because a lot of this is in fact open source (though they don't exactly take contributions much or plan to share control, so most of what you can do with the source is fork). This does mean that some other project could import some part of Chrome or V8 if desired. But given that none of this code is static (security fixes, spec changes, etc), it's not like a one-time import is useful. You have to keep importing (and hoping that Google doesn't change something you care about) or as I said fork and take over maintenance. In practice, for most situations, both options suck to a good extent. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GBSGBbc9UtA/TmexwLaJN9I/AAAAAAAAAKs/06OaexCT5Ms/s1600/Lead%2Bdevice%2Bconcept.png is a good look into Google's general thinking on open in this context, for what it's worth.

One other important note is that Google is a bit better at participating in the standards process than Microsoft was in 2001 (though not than Microsoft in 1998, say). That's a net plus for them.

So no, comparing what Google is doing with what Microsoft was doing with IE6 is not at all ludicrous. There are some important differences, and Google doesn't have a browser monopoly, so they have to play a bit nicer so far, but the overall strategy looks similar to me. The key to frustrating it, of course, is for them to not end up with said browser monopoly.

The growth of engineering, technician, geek, nerd, or "tinkerer" networks in developing nations is critical to successful democratic development. Democracy can either thrive beside, or be stifled under, any religion, there's nothing special Islam does that Christianity hasn't tried. Egypt tried to "put the genie back in the bottle" in 2008, banning imports of used computers. Pakistan tried the same Pakistan Computer Association. These days the usual excuse to crack down on geeks and nerds in converging market is accusing them of "environmental crime" such as the 'e-waste hoax'.. But they will keep thinking of others, like "porn" or "piracy". It's a good idea to improve and reform "e-waste" imports, porn and piracy, but complete crackdowns on internet cafes and affordable white box manufacturers are the usual result. Dictators (usually not religious) create the backwards cultures by arresting network tinkerers, creating the conditions for reactionary religion. But Al-Jazeera will never put up with censorship. Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are all going to be fine... and Iran too... The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth.

I try to use it every now and again but rapidly go back to Gnome 2, which generally stays out of the way and doesn't waste my time with stupid animations.

Funny you should mention stupid animations. For a long time, I was looking for a way to turn off that unspeakably ugly "wireframe" minimize animation for windows in Gnome2. I mean, it looked like something from early 90s, and took long enough that it was seriously distracting. Turned out that there was a very non-obvious way to do so, but once you do that, your windows will show up in wireframe mode when you drag them around, rather than showing window content. One way or another, Gnome2 would make you feel like it was early 90s.

The real solution to the problem, of course, was to install XFCE. Now that really doesn't have any animations, if you don't want it to have them.

Of course.

http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/2011/02/comics-864-and-865-naked-women-floating.html

It's not going so well for Samesung http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/12/french-court-denies-samsung-request-for.html

You can clearly see the bumps in photos and schematics of some models.

When dealing with cutting edge and secret military technology there are bound to be changes no civilian has seen. The US did admit they lost one too.

Because Fox News is really going to do a hit piece on Issa. You'd be much more correct naming the Grey Bitch, aka the NY Times because lo and behold, they DID publish a hit piece on Issa

http://conservativenewsreports.blogspot.com/2011/08/darrell-issa-hit-piece-most-inaccurate.html

Apparently that's horseshit. The publishers make the authors do most of the promotion, price badly, and overcharge. Authors who are doing it themselves have found this all out and many of them won't work with big publishing any more as a result.

Read this blog some -> http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ Do especially read his much older postings where he was just realizing how full of crap the publishers are and how he has learned to outsource, at HUGE discount, the many functions big publishing charges so much for...

You can also get a laugh from this blog -> http://blog.macmillanspeaks.com/

"More people mean a greater ferment of ideas, more enthusiasm and more energy."
-Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung

http://markschinablog.blogspot.com/2010/06/more-population-means-more-power.html

Here's a nice picture

""The IGZO technology is perfect in that it offers near-OLED power consumption while having a lower cost and thinness that is only 25% greater than OLED, based on our checks," said Jeffries analyst Peter Misek."

So let me get this right. It's 25% thicker than OLED and uses MORE power, but it costs less to make. On the face of it, that doesn't seem like a very Appley component choice. On the other hand, getting high quality (Super) AMOLED screens means dealing with Samsung, something which Apple doesn't seem to want to do at the moment for silly grudge purposes. So the question becomes, "Does Apple want to sacrifice product quality in exchange for a small savings and sticking it to Samsung?"

If Steve Jobs were still around, I'd say "Yes."--he had a well noted penchant for carrying a grudge to extremes. I'd like a bigger screen as much, or more than the next guy, but I'm not 100% sure how plausible this whole story seems to me in a post-Steve Apple era. On the other, other hand, it might have more to do with the fact that Samsung is too big to bully, and Apple likes to have total control over it's supply chains. iphone

Overheated market?

What overheated market?

When I see stupidity like this:

A software developer on the other hand, can float free on the Internet, making money in mercenary ways, with no deep loyalties, if he/she so desires

... it's like this guy has never heard of outsourcing to cheap 3rd-world and eastern European countries and crap sites like elance.

Or this ...

An ex-Microsoft engineer is valuable anywhere in the economy if he voices support for buying Microsoft wherever he goes.

He's never read the posters on the minimsft blog, all swearing that after being "managed out", they will never, ever recommend Microsoft products.

A talented high-school kid who starts hacking away at an iPhone app at 14 is likely to stay in orbit around Apple for his/her entire career.

Really? So none of those iPhone or Android devs got their start on anything but Apple or ... what? Gmail?

Of course, it's all based on a false premise:

Today, this abstract point specifically translates to: people who can invest in developers, developers, and everybody else. This means that if you are in apparently more fundamental professions - perhaps you are a baker with a small business - you are effectively useless, not because bread isn't important, but because surviving in the bread business is now a matter of having developers on your side who can help you win in a game that Yelp, Groupon and other software companies are running to their advantage. If your bakery doesn't have an iPhone app, it will soon be at the mercy of outfits like Yelp.

And god forbid, if you donâ(TM)t have a skill, like baking, which the developer-centric economy can actually use, you are in deep trouble.

The bakers and butchers will still be eating when Groupon is bankrupt. And almost nobody gives a crap about Yelp. They get their recommendations from friends, not strangers trying to game the system. And certainly not from an iPhone app spamming them with "Eat at Joe's".

Like so much from Forbes, this is just more idiot drivel!

Apparently not.

Or check this out: Mississippi River Bason Model in decay

How many damn times do people need telling?

How many times do people need to read the follow-ups to that story to realize that it was wrong? Even Dan Sullivan who were central in driving the original story went back on this claim in a follow-up blog post after he learned more about it.

It all depends on the effect of these actions.
Google works very hard to fine tune their search results so that majority of people get what they are looking for as fast as they can ( and for minimal cost, that is cost of watching personalized advertisement ). Even if you give it fancy names like "watching user behaviour" etc the fact remains that the 'Search Results' came from Google's research and Microsoft allowed to copy it is INSANELY bad, because search is a very important (I cannot emphasize this point enough) and extremely hard problem. If people flock to Bing because they copy Google's results and Google goes bankrupt (yes, that can happen : even big companies which fought with Microsoft has gone bankrupt like Netscape, Sun [nearly] ) where will they steal the results from afterwards ? Remember how Microsoft lost interest in IE after Netscape folded?
This is issue is VERY serious. And please, don't delude yourself into thinking it is the same as building upon other people's ideas like "Infinite Scroll For Image Search" or "Tablet Computers with Rounded Corners", which may or may not be wrong, but still not the same.

Here's the thing. I think this whole CarrierIQ debacle is being played up in the media for exactly the reason stated in the title, because it ISN'T logging data, texts. It really isn't sending your data back to the carrier, government, or whomever. What it does, is far beyond the understanding of the average consumer of the nightly news. So the media will trot out the experts who say, "This software does not send your data back to the carrier, it just hooks the keyboard for diagnostic purposes at a level beneath the userland of the Android operating system."

And, whoosh.

In the minds of the masses, it was harmless.

But it isn't harmless. The software certainly has the capability of monitoring/logging/reporting every keypress on the phone and sending it to whomever it's configured to send it to. No one outside the "slashdot-esque" crowd knows much about rootkits, system hooks, etc. etc., however. But now, whenever someone mentions the fact that phones are spying on you, everyone can come out and say "No, they're not. Didn't you hear? CarrierIQ was harmless. You're a tinfoil-hat nutter!" Even though they still will be monitoring everyone, either through this method, ones hidden better, at the switching center, or voluntarily (Facebook, etc.) And it'll be business as usual.

Right now, you can be pretty certain your phone isn't doing any real, wholesale spying, since to transport that amount of voice/video, or whatever type of data will kill your connection and drain your battery faster than you can say "fourth amendment" (until you connect to wi-fi, of course). The real trojan horses are the 4G networks. Especially once LTE connections are the norm, it will be trivial to log a tremendous amount of real-time "intelligence" (because that's exactly what these phones are, intelligence gathering tools) and quickly whisk it up to whomever wants to see your data without you noticing. I'm sure it'll be as simple as someone in a spook hideout pressing a button and, voila, the 4G network is providing them a real-time peek and listen into your life.

They're not kidding: Intelligence Everywhere!

I think they just hired on whoever made the old sci-fi magazine covers. Some poor sod with an addiction to airbrushing spheres over and over and over again, whom they finally replaced in the late nineties with his son, a man obsessed with Photoshopping spheres over and over and over again. Every now and then, a rocket, ring system, or black hole. Yee-haw.

How many damn times do people need telling?

How many times do people need to read the follow-ups to that story to realize that it was wrong? Even Dan Sullivan who were central in driving the original story went back on this claim in a follow-up blog post after he learned more about it.

There are micro-organisms that live in stone. They would have survived the mining, and they might not be adverse to living in water, as long as there's enough food for them. And proliferating in water ought to be easier than proliferating in stone.

So perhaps what we're seeing are not new types of microbes.

Perhaps they're ancient life forms that have been released from the depths of the earth. (Queue dramatic music and image of intelligent sludge rising from the lake.)

Seriously though, I think that's pefectly possible.

Quick search...
http://nanopatentsandinnovations.blogspot.com/2010/09/yummy-basalt-tasty-granite-how-microbes.html
http://www.enotes.com/science/q-and-a/there-stone-eating-bacteria-286363

How many damn times do people need telling?

The same with public transport. Unless it reaches everywhere, it isn't usable. That is why early electricity producers PAID big bucks to get everyone hooked up. But they would only do that where it made sense. Getting a line out to the farms often didn't. And so they didn't.

Society NEEDS infrastructure even in areas YOU as a person never use. That road to nowhere DOES go somewhere and those people at the end need it.

And if the need is so great, they will find a way to fill it. Take our resourceful residents of Kauai for example:
Island DIY: Kauai residents don't wait for state to repair road

And if left on their own, without forcing everyone to pay for it, one of two things would happen:
1) The people leaving themselves out in the middle of nowhere will pay a premium among (hopefully) several competing delivery firms.
2) They would move to a location more amenable to service. (Location,location, location)

Don't believe it? Go live in areas of the world where only individual interests are catered for. Somalia is nice for that.

Ah yes, the half-assed "go move to Somalia" argument. The mess Somalia was left in is the result of post WW2 intervention and the damning effects of the previous socialism that existed there and its gun toting neighbors of Ethiopia and Kenya.

"From a U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion and brutal military occupation that left more than 16,000 civilians dead and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, destroying the first semblance of normalcy the country had experienced in nearly two decades, to an ongoing U.S. war involving CIA torture chambers and drone strikes, Somalia has been ravaged by powerful nation-states, not anarchy.

But hey, let's put that all aside and just concede for a moment that Somalia is in fact some anarchist's wet dream, "a libertarian's paradise." Let's just ignore the fact Somalia was ruled by a military dictator for decades and not make the cheap point that the period preceding its current "anarchist" stage therefore indicts anyone who believes in the justness and necessity of centralized power."

See : false dichotomy of Somalia

Link.

The two are Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill, and Sam Farr, D-Ca.

The last time I posted that here, years ago, It was met with a bunch of "but those two are liberal pinko" comments. Now you have Immigration and Customs enforcement going after kids downloading music, under the umbrella of "Homeland Security."

Do you not see a problem with that blatant and inappropriate mission-creep?

The problem in Egypt is that the liberal forces that started and lead the peaceful revolution couldn't compete against the better organized theocratic opposition. While they were allies during the revolution, on victory it became a contest between the organized and the unorganized, and a lesson for anyone interested in politics. So yes Egyptians did vote in some theocrats, but in an election the theocrats worked to hasten to deny the liberals the time to organize.

And that's if you assume that both cities get water in the streets at high tide now (hint: they don't).

then basically you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.

yes they most certainly do flood with seawater on very high tides and even category 1 low pressure storm systems.

2 minutes with google images:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vI4A1cFjRWU/TlraMAG9teI/AAAAAAAAAnY/e1SejDjKJ5Q/s1600/FDR+underwater.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7kqY21iqXlI/TlaC80z7F7I/AAAAAAAAEHQ/XNP27DbCJi4/s1600/Hurricane%2BIrene%2Bstory%2BLaguardia%2BAirport%2Bflooding%2Bin%2Bthe%2B1930s.jpg
http://icons.wxug.com/hurricane/2011/nyc_subway_flood_1992_640.jpg
http://daughterofthegreatdepression.blogspot.com/2011/08/wednesday-august-23-1933.html

And that's if you assume that both cities get water in the streets at high tide now (hint: they don't).

then basically you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.

yes they most certainly do flood with seawater on very high tides and even category 1 low pressure storm systems.

2 minutes with google images:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vI4A1cFjRWU/TlraMAG9teI/AAAAAAAAAnY/e1SejDjKJ5Q/s1600/FDR+underwater.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7kqY21iqXlI/TlaC80z7F7I/AAAAAAAAEHQ/XNP27DbCJi4/s1600/Hurricane%2BIrene%2Bstory%2BLaguardia%2BAirport%2Bflooding%2Bin%2Bthe%2B1930s.jpg
http://icons.wxug.com/hurricane/2011/nyc_subway_flood_1992_640.jpg
http://daughterofthegreatdepression.blogspot.com/2011/08/wednesday-august-23-1933.html

And that's if you assume that both cities get water in the streets at high tide now (hint: they don't).

then basically you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.

yes they most certainly do flood with seawater on very high tides and even category 1 low pressure storm systems.

2 minutes with google images:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vI4A1cFjRWU/TlraMAG9teI/AAAAAAAAAnY/e1SejDjKJ5Q/s1600/FDR+underwater.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7kqY21iqXlI/TlaC80z7F7I/AAAAAAAAEHQ/XNP27DbCJi4/s1600/Hurricane%2BIrene%2Bstory%2BLaguardia%2BAirport%2Bflooding%2Bin%2Bthe%2B1930s.jpg
http://icons.wxug.com/hurricane/2011/nyc_subway_flood_1992_640.jpg
http://daughterofthegreatdepression.blogspot.com/2011/08/wednesday-august-23-1933.html

You may want to listen to some of the more "contrarian" sources instead of business-as-usual la-la land. They have proven a lot more reliable lately.
The Automatic Earth and Energy Bulletin are good starting points. Once you've digested those you can go to more hardcore places like George Mobus's or Guy McPherson's blogs.

I am not a physicist but I would probably try to explain it this way: Information isn't free. We know that. It "costs" something. We can call its most basic unit to be a "bit" but I'm not aware of any really solid equivalences between bits and energy. But if you knew this relationship, you could rewrite a lot of physics with the "bit" as one of the fundamental units of physics and get rid of -- say -- energy.

Not exactly what you were looking for, but a "bit" is equal to some number of Joules per Kelvin (the SI units for entropy). Both of them are measures of the degrees of freedom of a system. (Specifically, its logarithm.)

If your hard drive has a capacity of n bits, then it has n "binary degrees of freedom" (permitting it to be in one of 2^n possible distinct states).

Relatedly, temperature is a measure of energy per effective degree of freedom. So, crank out the units in the measure "Joules per Kelvin": it's energy per (energy per degree of freedom), which reduces to degrees of freedom.

Boltzmann's constant is 1.443 bits (or one nat).

Perhaps you should read this before you disparage the high precision moving parts of a HDD http://geekscomputer.blogspot.com/2008/07/hard-disk-drive-analogy.html

Since you're familiar with Calibre, why aren't you familiar with Unswindle? There's even a plugin for Calibre to link the two.

I rarely *buy* my ebooks. There's just too much good stuff out there that's price-free, DRM-free, or both.

When I *do* buy an ebook, I buy from Amazon, run it through unswindle+Calibre, and have the text, formatted, with pictures, table of contents, etc, exactly as purchased, in the format(s) I choose, with no DRM.

It's entirely possible to work within the system and still get an officially forbidden result.

This is why you never register your domain in the U.S. For maximum safety, host it overseas too. See http://thespamdiaries.blogspot.com/2008/03/dont-register-or-host-your-domain-in-us.html

This is nothing ! iPhones have been caught FLYING AWAY from their masters !

why should i put my testes near wifi anyway?
Century 21 Broker Properti Jual Beli Sewa Rumah Indonesia
Century 21 Broker Properti Jual Beli Sewa Rumah Indonesia

why should i put my testes near wifi anyway?
Century 21 Broker Properti Jual Beli Sewa Rumah Indonesia
Century 21 Broker Properti Jual Beli Sewa Rumah Indonesia

- Peter

It is good that some people are starting to realize that the toxic tailing ponds need to be cleaned up but it looks like this will be a huge problem.

http://notquiteunhinged.blogspot.com/2008/04/alberta-tar-sands-tailing-ponds-fast.html

And here's the current state of "cleanup":

"The tar sands tailings ponds currently contain around 190 billion gallons of waste water from strip-mining the Boreal forest for the bitumen that is eventually turned into fuels for our cars, trucks and airplanes. In melting the bitumen from the soil, tar sands producers are left with water mixed with naphthenic acids, ammonia, benzene, cyanide, oil and grease, phenols, toluene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, arsenic, copper and iron. "

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/sclefkowitz/clearing_the_waters_on_tar_san.html

"Canada keeps saying it wants better environmental management in the tar sands, yet it is failing to enforce laws already on the books that could make this happen. If Canada is sincere and wants to deal with tar sands pollution, it should put the focus and resources it currently dedicates to green-washing the tar sands into enforcing its existing laws at home to limit some of the worst pollution impacts. "

Before they die, penguin and seal would be on the menu. Seal is a good source of oil and that could be used to run their generators or at least some furnaces for heat.

I think if it came down to survival, those scientists would last a long time, perhaps permanently if they figured out how to use spears.

The camera is actually the least important piece of equipment when it comes to "taking images that actually look good". Any digital SLR will do fine. Unless you need movie capability, I'd strongly suggest getting one of the slightly older models for cheap on ebay, and save the money the more important stuff (listed below) Pick the brand that your friends use. Then you can borrow equipment from each other. (If you don't have friends that are into photography, then go with Canon or Nikon. That's the most likely brands your future friends will have.)

The absolutely easiest way to make "good-looking" pictures is to have plenty of background blur. For that you need at least an APS-sized sensor, and a lens like 85 mm f/1.8. Here is a picture i took a few years ago with a 350d (very cheap today) and a 100 mm f/2. No special lighting, just an overcast day. The background was actually pretty boring in real life, but once it's blurred it looks good.

The easy way to take good-looking indoor pictures is to have one, or preferably two, off-camera flashes. These will cost you about $200 each, plus $70 for a radio sync. Place them on top of a book-shelf and aim at the ceiling. Now you can shoot at iso 400 (any cheap old DSLR works) and because the light is diffused from the ceiling, you get good light in most of the room. (You can also do lots of other cool stuff with off-camera strobes.)

Last: Get a book that explains the basics of photography. It's not that difficult, but there are a few tricks that will help you a lot if you know about them. $50 spent on a book will make a lot of difference for your photos, while an extra $50 spent on the camera body will make no difference at all.

t would be too expensive to build a system that could conduct a real-time decryption of the data stream. Internet and Businesses Online http://www.easy-mony.blogspot.com/ download free hd images http://imgshowcase.blogspot.com/

t would be too expensive to build a system that could conduct a real-time decryption of the data stream. Internet and Businesses Online http://www.easy-mony.blogspot.com/ download free hd images http://imgshowcase.blogspot.com/

Many posters have spotted that this post is a rehash, a troll or perhaps a straight faced sendup joke from a design firm.

The graphic art accompanying the original article might have been copied from a 1930's art deco transportation fantasy science fiction book cover.

But here is a really good question: What client paid this design firm to develop this specific presentation? How much do design firms charge per hour? $100 at least?

From the name of the design firm, I guess this is a two person design firm, and the real point of the article is for the designer to promote his design firm.

The modern way to speed up public transit is to publish a distributed database that client applications can combine with client data. See a non-exclusive blog post on this subject by me at:

http://lessco2essay.blogspot.com/2011/04/ride-sharing-can-use-cell-phones-to.html

It's interesting to see the contrast in comments between this story, and the recent Google WiFi Geolocation Opt-Out story

Particularly since it's similar to how Google gets some of its traffic data.

"We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when you have chosen to enable location services on your phone."

I did an analysis of me, my Facebook friends, and my Facebook friends' Facebook friends who are Facebook friends with more than one of my Facebook friends.

The result is a pretty graphic.

Offtopic: Precrime: "FBI spied On George Carlin."
http://jourlaw.blogspot.com/2009/01/fbi-spied-on-george-carlin.html
Hitler would approved this technology. (Godwin rule now in play.).

Indeed, Michael Whelan's cover art was fantastic, introducing a whole group of people to late 70s, early 80s fantasy.

Samples:
Dragonflight
Dragonquest
The White Dragon

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_QMuDihPPyPA/TFBCC4Wv0qI/AAAAAAAANpU/qiFZoulx9cU/s1600/farside-hopeful-parents.gif

Change "Hopeful" to "South Korean"

Disagree. Small integrated reactors would solve all of America's energy problems but delete the energy monopolies that ex-government officials post themselves to run. That's why America, as a nation, refuses to invest in nuclear options except in the case of warships, where we have no other choice for power efficiency ratios.

Wind alone is a classic example of lies feeding lies.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/2910739/Wind-farms-fail-to-deliver-value-for-money-report-claims.html

http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/scotnews11/110407-wind.html

http://tohatchacrow.blogspot.com/2010/07/scottish-wind-farms-fail-to-deliver.html

http://papundits.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/electrical-power-statistics-renewables-fail-to-deliver-january-2011/

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/275673/texas-wind-energy-fails-again-robert-bryce

http://toryaardvark.com/2011/08/17/wind-turbines-how-long-before-the-golden-eagle-is-extinct/

http://toryaardvark.com/2011/08/22/wind-turbines-now-they-are-a-threat-to-national-security/

http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/46519

http://papundits.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/renewable-power-fail-as-usual-november-2010/

http://wind-works.org/SmallTurbines/SkystreamDeliversLessThanAdvertisedatFrenchTestSite.html

http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/why-wind-wont-work.pdf

As I understand it, this organisation's purported plan was to attempt to sue copyright infringers by the innovative idea of actually following due process as required by Australian law - getting a court order to force ISPs to hand over the details of infringing customers and then attempt to extract money.

This is basically the same spectacularly unsuccessful process that the RIAA has been following in the USA.

iiNet, a major ISP over here that has been in the news a lot in copyright battles after getting taken to court by the media industry for bullshit like aiding and abetting copyright infringement (and winning) stated they were completely happy for this group to exist if that was their process, I assume because they knew it would be too expensive to be productive if they weren't able to get ISPs to just hand over customer details.

The whole thing seemed to be a lot of noise about nothing to me. Things like SOPA are much, much scarier to me as an Australian because it sounds like that will short-circuit the entire legal process - and given that we seem to inherit a lot of American IP laws, there's a real chance we'll cop it here.

http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2006/12/various-ways-of-detecting-rootkits-in.html

I want to agree with you, but can't do it.

Major outbreaks? I read of one not to long ago - - - here it is: http://blogs.computerworld.com/14723/no_more_linux_security_bragging_botnet_discovery_worry

You should have said, "Linux is more secure than Windows, and we generally don't worry to much about viruses and other trash." Left at that, your statement would have been good.

Now, don't take this the wrong way. I very strongly dislike Microsoft. You might even say I hate Microsoft. And, I think that Microsoft should have concentrated on security from MSDOS 3.1, instead of waiting til they had cornered the market. But, the minute we forget that we have our own vulnerabilities, then we have effectively given control of Linux to the hackers.

In fact, the average vacuum headed Windows user who migrates to Linux brings his bad habits to LInux. And, his box is only slightly more secure than it was when it was running Windows.