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At least one of those is misleading.

Thurston Moore (a Sonic Youth cofounder) speaks in favor of file-sharing. The fact that a label he is on is one of the ones helping to fund lawsuits is unfortunate. However, to stop supporting their music is like not shopping at a store that pays "protection" money. Once you start hitting the major charts, it is difficult to release solely on independent labels.

Not only is this not a joke, but it's been around for 5 years. God forbid people know what they're doing before tagging stuff!

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2002 /06/53302

It'd be silly if the PR people would ignore Slashdot. They don't. [We are just like you, dear reader ... and we care about you ... sleep.]

Oh, that and Slashdot has a larger readership than Wired. Quit bullshitting.

Your PR goal, as is evident to your Wired target, is to make others carry your message. You dedicated 5,000 pages to that little spin how to. Your company's efforts here are just what they were for BBS's where you slammed and FUDed OS/2 and DRDoS. Your company also considers developers as pawns to be lied to, and slashdot gives you both - how convenient. The same tricks and bullshit are in play here today, but on a much larger scale.

It's not working. We know you for what you are and your "products" are things we'd rather avoid. The bottom line is that a billion dollars a month can't replace actual product. Zune, Vista and Office are second or third rate. Try as you might, the industry is liberating itself and the end of your monopoly is near.

They did not credit me for the template, even though the template explicitly requested credit.

Hmm. Sounds like someone broke a software license. Seems awful close to piracy. Someone call Orrin Hatch!

There are already microphones attached to telephone poles in high crime areas of Chicago to detect gunshots and alert police: wired.com

It's long been known that Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, etc. contain a vast wealth of programming talent. Look at the rankings of the world wide programming contests. Unfortunately, with their dismal economies, these talents are often used for ill rather than good. I, myself, have two anecdotal stories of my friend's user accounts being hacked by unknown parties in the Ukraine. All in the name of 50 USD.

Why?

Surely, I reasoned, with the amount of time they took to set up that scam and avoid authorities, they could have gotten a job like I have and done something good for even more cash--but, that's my naïve American attitude for you. The job market probably doesn't exist there where they live.

Nothing would make me happier than to see these people given an opportunity to move somewhere close to make money, help their economy, establish an industry/infrastructure for future generations & to get these programmers off the street and into a job ... however, that could just be my naïve American attitude again.

On an offtopic note, I used to "cool" my computers in Minnesota by placing them next to the window during the winters, I'm certain you could cut down cooling costs in Siberia using similar strategies.

So are you going to scan them ?

the machinations of the RIAA (which, let's face it, was a pretty benign organization until fairly recently) or the "music industry."

Not so much. For all their bellyaching, both the record and movie industries were founded on piracy. The music industry took advantage of new technologies that weren't covered by old copyright lays, like records and radio, to avoid paying musicians and songwriters royalties. The movie industry didn't settle down in California just for the nice weather, they also did it to get away from Thomas Edison's film patents.

"Joshua Kinberg, creator of Bikes Against Bush, was arrested in NYC [original link 404d] for vandalism while being interviewed by MSNBC. Kinberg's website describes his project as 'using a Wireless Internet-enabled bicycle outfitted with a custom-designed printing device, the Bikes Against Bush bicycle can print text messages sent from web users directly onto the streets of Manhattan in water-soluble chalk". Both Wired and Popular Science [original link changed] have done stories on Kinberg's work." Update: 08/30 01:30 GMT by J : Mr. Kinberg has been released; he describes his arrest and brief stay behind bars on this MSNBC blog.

in Florida in 2006

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,73048-0.htm l?tw=rss.index

Just look at the RFID passports. They are issued for 10 year durations, but their security was broken within 48 hours. Now they need to recall every passport, rethink their entire security scheme and reissue all the passports. Until they do this, every passport holder is at risk.

Do you seriously think that the makers of this car have hired a team of security experts, mathmeticians, and cryptologists to make a keyless entry system secure? If so, you can have your opinion that I jumped the gun. I'm satisfied with my pessimism based on experience from all the other uses of RFID currently (RFID Passports, RFID speedpass, RFID credit cards: all of which have been hacked and abused)

Barcodes are essentially too small to track individual people. The fields that make up a barcode are limited in the amount of information they can carry. You can tell a bar of soap apart from a 6-pack of Cokes using a barcode, but you couldn't tell one bar of Dove soap from another. When you start talking about tracking people, you simply run out of unique identifiers...

Where did you get the idea that UPC was the end-all be-all of barcodes?

The back of my WA driver's license already has a 2D barcode, which seems to have 23 rows and about 285 columns. Since each point is either black or white, that's about 2^(23*285) different numbers, or just under 1.785 x 10^1973. In terms of data, that's over 6 KB, which is way more than you need for identifying people.

If that's not enough, I note that it covers less than 1/3 of the height of the back of the card. Maybe they use that space for other things (truck/motorcycle qualifications?), but if not, you can bump it up to about 18 KB really easily.

As far as security goes... don't pay attention to the tin-foil hat crowd. The type RFID they would use on a passport/drivers license will have a strong (probably 128 bit) encription engine on the tag. Any concerns of reading an RFID tag from a distance (and becoming a target etc.) are easily engineered around. It's not difficult to limit read distance to a few centimeters if desired (and a simple piece of foil wrapped around the license would make it unreadable by anyone.)

That's a great theory, but in practice either it doesn't work so well, or the people implementing it know less than you do: passport RFID chips have been read from 30 feet away.

And wrapping a piece of foil only works when it's in the foil; the second you take it out to use it for anything, it's fair game.

WA state licenses already have a high-density barcode. Adding RFID increases cost, decreases security, and adds no new features that the barcode couldn't already accommodate.

The reason Mac falls behind Windows in security lies in the horror stories of the dreaded 10.4.9 update. http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/2007/03/os_1049_up date_.html#comments

The ClearChannel monopoly on our radio stations is the source of this problem. They "pay to play" the same 40 songs all day. ... they can always blame the pirates.

You are witnessing one of the biggest and dumbest misunderstandings of a market ever. The greed heads really think you will go out and buy the limited shit they dribble to you through the top 40. All that's really doing is killing radio too. This was all noticed and predicted seven years ago. People who share music are the industry's biggest promoters and customers. Recorded music has always been that way and always will be. If it's not cheap and easy it's not fun or worth having.

You could try doing what these guys did

"I don't care about pages, I want information, answers to questions."

In a world where just linking to another site can be illegal you expect to get information out of context?

Ironically enough I found this in one quick Google search using "deep linking violates copyright", along with a list of alternative sources about the same topic.

Face it, any OS that widely-used (read: "popular") enough is going to be subjected to bug exploitation. Even Linux has bugs http://www.wired.com/news/linux/0,1411,66022,00.ht ml although, _WAY_ less than M$. In an open source OS the bugs get fixed, IMO, faster and more reliably than your weekly M$ patch. The point is, ITS GOING TO HAPPEN!

Nothing is wrong with digital it all depends on the medium.

It depends on the content as well. Content that is inherently analog tends to be more 'robust' in analog form. For instance, in the military they say, "A computer with a bullet in it is just a paperweight. A map with a bullet in it is still a map."

If you haven't read about the brain implants for vision, then read this. The photo of the implant doesn't seem to be showing up in the article right now, but there's a sketch here. Suffice it to say, your friends are going to look at you funny, at least until Apple releases the iBrain, which by my calculations won't be before 2042. Of course, Apple's main innovation will be that they'll make the implant white, and advertise it so that people think it looks cool.

China monitors their internet very closely, they know who the criminals are. They will be shut down soon because to let them continue would 1) be an embarassment to China, and 2) could have disasterous economic consequences.

Just like they know who the pirates are and will swiftly bring them down and not just a couple of sacrificial sheep? http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.10/guthrie.h tml

When it comes down to it, these trojan authors are no real threat to China in terms of international politics. They've made it clear what their main priority is when it comes to their Great Firewall: the suppression of internal dissent.

Yeah, it's called 'meth', and Nazi soldiers used it while conducting Blitzkrieg. Not a new development.

My, that is a novel suggestion as to how the techniques of "Blitzkrieg" came into being. I suppose it should have been obvious me--it's well known that their soldiers are "fanatic" or "drug-crazed", while ours are "higly motivated".

Seriously, there's nothing new here. For example, benzedrine and other stimulants were routinely issued to U.S. Air Force pilots to keep them awake during WW II. In fact, the U.S. Air Force still issues amphetamines to its pilots and pressure them to take these "go pills". (For example, take a look at http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id= 1425252002 or http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/a pj/apj97/spr97/cornum.html or http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,57434,00. htmlhere.

It might be interesting to ask whether the pilots who were involved in the disturbingly frequent "friendly fire" incidents during our recent ventures in Afghanistan and Iraq were flying high in more than one sense. But nobody will.

Huh? You mean this Cobasys?

"Cobasys, the First Name in Nickel Metal Hydride Battery Solutions, provides commercial NiMH battery systems for the hybrid electric vehicle (HEV), electric vehicle (EV) and 42 Volt transportation markets. The NiMHax brand for EV, HEV, HD HEV, and 42 Volt systems, provides flexible standardized architecture for a wide-range of vehicle solutions."

Doesn't look very blocked to me. Let's search for more info. The company is greatly expanding...

http://www.chevron.com/news/press/2005/2005-05-18. asp

"ORION, MI, May 18, 2005 -- Cobasys, a leader in advanced Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) battery technology, today announced the grand opening of its new 84,000 square-foot headquarters in Orion, Michigan. The engineering, development, administrative, sales and marketing facility currently houses 175 of the company's 220 employees, and is expanding to accommodate anticipated employment growth of an additional 25 percent through 2006."

Further searches reveal that all sorts of cars are using Cobasys batteries -- for example, the Saturn Vue. Two companies also produce batteries on license from them -- Panasonic and Sanyo, which produce other hybrid car batteries. It looks like the negative press Cobasys has earned is because it aggressively enforces its patents against NiMH interlopers (one of which happened to produce the EV1's batteries). Looks, by all means, like they want to be the only ones selling NiMH in the US, and selling them in bulk -- not that they don't want anyone selling them.

From what I've seen, I have to agree with Wired.com's automotive blog:

"Chevron should be lauded for investing in technology that reduces the demand for its main products (gasoline). The company realizes that hybrids are a great opportunity, so following the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em), they are profiting from the growth of hybrids."

Oil companies will either adapt (by becoming "energy" companies) or die as the world slowly changes energy sources. That doesn't seem to stop the "it's a conspiracy to suppress energy-saving technology!" nuts.

http://downloads.wired.com/downloads/Audio15_03/Ca ll_NSA.mp3

Too bad my phone doesn't like MP3 or AMR ringtones.

"On top of that, the navy has all sorts of charts of the sea floor, many of which are probably classified to some degree or other. Subs can use "landmarks" on the sea floor to determine their position. Since highly precise navigation is usually only important in coastal waters, this works pretty well."

Not true:
USS San Francisco hit an underwater mountain.
See for yourself!

The only source readily available through a search claims $35k for a sysadmin. Sounds pretty damn low to me.

I believe that anonymous speech is very important. The U.S. Supreme Court agrees with me. There are things that people can say when anonymous that they wouldn't say normally for fear of embarrassment or retalition.

That is a beautiful twist of Bill Gates' alleged blurb that no one ever will need more than 640k.

Widespread adoption of Linux on the desktop isn't going to happen. Here's why.

In 2004, it looked close. You could buy Linux desktop machines, and even laptops, at WalMart. Dell and HP had offerings. Today, the Linux laptops are gone from mainstream vendors.

What happened?

First, the laptop has replaced the desktop. Laptops used to be niche machines, expensive, fragile, and less powerful than desktops. That's changed. Today, for many users, a laptop is their primary machine. Laptops have less-standard hardware, and getting Linux to run reliably on a laptop without manufacturer cooperation remains iffy. Take a look at the laptop support instructions on Linux.org. Almost all the machines listed are out of production. (Many of the companies listed no longer even make laptops.)

Second, the ability to handle content in proprietary formats has become much more important to consumers. Want to play a DVD, or talk to the iTunes store? Tough. There's been talk of a "legal DVD player" for Linux since 2000, and although two companies came close to shipping such a player, neither still does. Linspire does have one, but only for their version of Linux, and there are some players licensable by OEMs for embedded devices. Seven years after the first claims of "real soon now" in Wired, it didn't happen.

Linux missed the window. Microsoft won. Deal with it, fanboys.

Heck, if JPEG2000 and MP3Pro can't catch on, what makes them think this will?

If you were a developer, which format would you rather use? An old format that requires you to pay money to use it? Or a new one that doesn't?

We all know that C-SPAN gets money from cable subscribers (which is why C-SPAN stumps for "cable internet"), not direct government payout, but there's more to it then that. Carl Malamud says that C-SPAN gets tax relief. So someone pays for the things C-SPAN would have to pay for with taxes. Perhaps this means city and state funds are paying for C-SPAN's water, waste treatment, and roads that service C-SPAN's studios. To find out how powerful this is in another context, that of Wal-Mart, I recommend you watch Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. Tax incentives help businesses decide where to set up shop; towns know this, so they give far more than they should in the hope the business will go there and won't screw them later.

C-SPAN saves considerably because they don't have the same costs as other broadcast firms when they set up an on-location shoot. Here the taxpayer helps C-SPAN again by paying for some of the things C-SPAN uses: cameras in the House and Senate, and building renovations to add more space for media, to name a couple.

C-SPAN is also making money by claiming copyright on the things it records, which allows to commercially license that footage. This copyright power also comes at a price for the public: C-SPAN bullies people out of using this footage without commercially licensing it. If there were no copyright on these works at all, C-SPAN wouldn't be have this bullying power.

So, it seems to me that Malamud's claim is not "flat out, one-hundred-percent, plain wrong" nor do you provide any evidence to refute what he says. Not receiving government funding doesn't acknowledge the myriad other ways in which the public helps C-SPAN pay their bills. Also, it's not a good idea to take a corporation's word at face value because sometimes businesses lie.

I'm not against paying for C-SPAN, but I don't want to pay into a private tyranny. I want them to work for me creating, recording, archiving, and distributing public affairs works that I can do as I like with later. I think this meets all the needs of everyone involved: they get a living wage doing what they do now, I get programming I want with no strings attached.

Finally, the question of who pays for C-SPAN is almost a distraction from a more important question: should C-SPAN be able to assert a copyright on these recordings in the first place? How much of a "public service" is it if we cable subscribers and taxpayers have to comply with restrictive licensing on top of paying C-SPAN's bills? Should we tolerate corporate welfare? Is it in the public's interest when a government official speaks in their official capacity on a copyrighted show?

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,61890-0.html

If brain implant of microchips can do it in 2005, I'm sure it's trival with a helmet in 2007.

The pilots could just have a switch to "knock out" all the passengers...

Or if that's not "traction" enough for you.

To market, to market
In 1985, Patt's research team added to Tomasulo's limited dataflow technique and suggested applying it to all chip operations, through a microarchitecture called HPS, for high-performance substrate. And by the early '90s, most of the industry began listening. What is the Pro in the Pentium Pro? An on-the-fly dataflow architecture called dynamic scheduling or out-of-order execution. Dynamic scheduling applies the benefits of dataflow processing to conventional programs. And software coding is not an obstacle, because the dataflow elements are written into the chip. Instructions flow in and out of the processor in sequential program order, but internally they are converted into a dataflow graph and executed according to the availability of data."

Making a quarter what you would in the private sector?

I wouldn't really call it the private sector.
It's more like the black market.

Then there is the NSA.

"If Diamond and Creative were such dominant players in the market, as you put it, then how did Apple succeed in beating both of them when at the time the iPod wasn't even as good as other players?"

Because they provided a better product? Mp3-players sucked back then. Either you had a cheap player with tiny amounts of RAM. And those were next to useless. Or maybe one of those CD-players, that could play back data-cd:s with mp3-files im 'em? Or you could buy one of those HD-based players that looked like oversized CD-players with tiny LCD-screens. And let's not even talk about the software you used with those devices... Apple brought to market a device that was simply better. It felt better, it had better UI, it had big screen, it had lots of HD-space and you used it with intuitive software that "just worked". Yes, it does matter how the device feels in your hand. It does matter how easy it is to use it. It does matter how easy it is to move music to the device. It does matter how good the device looks. And Apple excelled at all of those things, whereas they competitors... Well, didn't. Their competitors focused on geeky features and geeky appearance, and the people buying those devices saw no value in them. They did see value in the features Apple gave them.

You say that "Their player wasn't even as good as the other players". But it was. Sure, there might have been players that had more space, more bells and whistles and so forth.... But in the end, that does not matter. Fact is that those players simply felt bad. I actually contemplated buying one of the first Nomad Jukeboxes. It felt cheap and flimsy. Sure, it might have had better specs than the iPod, but it felt like crap. And the UI consisted of crappy screen and multitude of cheap and plastique buttons. Same things is happening even today. We have people who say that iPod sucks because there are devices with more features etc. But those people are missing the point by a mile. iPod might not be better than some other player at all things, but it's better at things that matter.

This article does tell it quite well: http://www.wired.com/news/columns/cultofmac/0,7195 6-0.html

"Again, if that were truly the case then why did consumers flock to the iPod by the 10's of millions."

Would those devices stop working the moment Apple went bankrupt? They flocked to those devices because they were simply better than what was available.

Really? I was under the impression that patent law was intended to protect intellectual property. In the same way that real estate law is intended to protect greographical property.

Patent law may be this way or it may not be, however patents themself are meant to encourage progress:

USA Constitution:
Section 8 - Powers of Congress
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Thomas Jefferson was originally against patents but then his friend James Madison convinced him patents could encourage progress. Once convinced Jefferson sat down with an actuary table and calculated a patent term of 14 year with one 14 year extension possible was the optimum length they should last.

The US patent system is a well of misery, corporate bootlicking, and "let's crush the little guy" methodologies. Sure, everyone else looks to the US system, because it is a system designed to turn over money, not encourage innovation. The fact that it manages to encourage at least corporations to innovate can be considered a side effect. It certainly isn't the main goal of the system, which is to feed the legal profession a regular set of juicy, meaty bones.

As the patent system in the US is now it is a drag on progress, which it was originally supposed to do, however it has been corrupted. As have copyrights. Thomas Jefferson was originally against patents but then his friend James Madison convinced him patents could encourage progress. Once convinced Jefferson sat down with an actuary table and calculated a patent term of 14 year with one 14 year extension possible was the optimum length they should last.

The number of devices/programs you can actually create without running smack into someone's fool patent is very near zero. So much for encouraging innovation.

That's not the fault of patents, that's a symtom of a broken patent system. More needs to be done to investigate whether a patent application actually deserves to be awarded, whether prior art already exists or if something is actually novel. Also in no way, shape, or form, should patents be issued for either algorithms, business methods, or for software!!!

Maybe they don't always use the word evolution because it is not always evolution?

Bacteria are known to send messages to each other, and we don't know the full extent of what they can tell each other yet.

"More recently, scientists have begun to understand that the importance of cell-to-cell communication goes far beyond mere head counting. Many things that bacteria do, it turns out, are orchestrated by cascades of molecular signals. One such behavior is the formation of spores that make bacteria more resistant to antibiotics." http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/quorum.ht ml [Wired 2004]

What if bacteria have genes for living in certain extreme situations (heat, vacuum, cold, radiation, human white blood cells) but those genes are currently turned off. Say one bacterium has that turned on, and it is surviving OK, it transmits that info to other bacteria that are doing poorly. But say that message has the effect of turning on the inactive gene that they needed to survive. They start transmitting protein/peptide/whatever messages too and before you know it all the suriving bacteria have turned on the needed gene. They of course pass it on to their offspring when they divide.

Is what just happened evolution? Or is it communication? Maybe the gene the bacteria needed evolved in the past, but now it is not evolution, it is rather epigenetic change brought on by messages from other bacteria.

Maybe these medical researches don't say "evolution" because they know there are other possible processes, but they don't know specifically what process is at work. In that case it is better to be vague (emerge) than to be wrong (evolve).

Hmmm... opening doors from a mile away, what fun could that be! :-)

Hallo Martin, dachte mir schon, dass du dich mal googeln würdest :-)

the Taxman has a search spider that they use to flag up people who should be investigated for failing to report income. It's called xenon and Slashdot reported on it back in January of this year... why on earth the IRS don't take advantage of it is beyond me, but I suspect the IRs love lording it about over US based corporations and want to make eBay do the donkey work for them...

At least Americans have the potential to wipe the slate clean

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72774-0.html?t w=rss.index

First of all, the CEO of eMusic during the Napster Hearings was Gene Hoffman, and yes, he did agree with the court ordered injuction against Napster. Before he made that statement, he asked Napster to remove eMusic files from their index. He also asked that users who shared the songs be unbanned from Napster. Frankly, if I were selling unprotected music, I wouldn't call it "short-sighted" to ask another company not to let people give it away.

But eMusic wasn't just his company. Hoffman cofounded the company with Bob Kohn. Before that, both of them served on the board for Pretty Good Privacy. I know. Total "asshats".

Either way, the current CEO is David Pakman who has been speaking out against DRM since long before Steve Jobs did.

While I agree with boycotting companies for their beliefs and behavior (I don't buy major label music or anything Sony), I have to call bullshit in this case. eMusic provides distribution for many small record labels in a way that lets their users play the music whenever, and on whatever digital music player they want. They are priced fairly (I pay ~ $.18 a song). They have a good business model, and they're legal.

I'm sure it is possible to rationalize not paying for music no matter how it is provided to you. And if the option to obtain it for free exists, you certainly can take advantage of it. But criticizing a good company in a public forum based on outdated information to justify your refusal to pay for music only makes you look like an asshat.

People who start small businesses often have some unique product or widget (pun intended). Most of them don't have extensive training in accounting, so they think "Accounting! That's something I have to do as a small business owner." So they go look for accounting software for their computers. Or, they hope for the day they'll be large enough to justify the expense of hiring an accountant.

Like most people who have computers purchased or ordered with the Microsoft OS pre-installed, they have been brainwashed regarding security threats and can become paralyzed with paranoia regarding software installation. But they still continue to cling to the Microsoft way; they do so because they don't know any better or that the essential concept of "competition" among businesses and how competition is facilitated by innovation and hindered by lack of information. But who competes with Microsoft? Perhaps I'm idealist, but I really think there should be another option for people who don't want to feed the big dudes in corporate and governmental bureaucracy or the marketing hype and associated with the iPod generation.

Quickbooks is set up to be idiot-friendly, run like an installation disk . . . like people who go to have their taxes done by H&R Block or Jackson-Hewitt sit through an interview process or "consultation" are essentially just answering questions they could answer online. Tax accounting is the least logical form of any accounting. (Interesting side-note: the last place I interviewed for a job, it became OBVIOUS to me that the person interviewing me had not even read my resume, which she obtained online, or the "questionnaire" I'd subsequently filled out at her company's request prior to her interviewing me. That interview went bad fast.) Why should people be subjected to such redundancy? Hey, if you can read and type and comprehend, you've got some marketable skills. Headhunters don't like me when I tell them I prefer to not print out my resume, as it's easily available and viewable just as I have formatted it online.)

The people at the top of the income brackets usually try to figure out some way to keep people working in the lowest income brackets working in those low income brackets for as long as possible using various tax deductions. I've heard from the mouth of one CPA (former inlaw -- reason for the formerness of the relationship; would you be interested to know that he is married to a realtor?) something quite unethical regarding printing out of receipts which do not exist in order to claim the tax deduction and for the purpose of "itemizing deductions"! And they do it because they think they can get away with it at the expense of the less fortunate, all the while claiming a "tax deduction"!

If a company -- moreover a "staffing company or agency!" -- doesn't even have a website, or if that website has a glaringly amateur webpage spelling error for one of the most important words to people seeking work in their specific , I think there's a reason for concern.

So, and Why On Earth is there a technically-literate class of homeless people in this country?

People who start small businesses often have some unique product or widget (pun intended). Most of them don't have extensive training in accounting, so they think "Accounting! That's something I have to do as a small business owner." So they go look for accounting software for their computers. Or, they hope for the day they'll be large enough to justify the expense of hiring an accountant.

Like most people who have computers purchased or ordered with the Microsoft OS pre-installed, they have been brainwashed regarding security threats and can become paralyzed with paranoia regarding software installation. But they still continue to cling to the Microsoft way; they do so because they don't know any better or that the essential concept of "competition" among businesses and how competition is facilitated by innovation and hindered by lack of information. But who competes with Microsoft? Perhaps I'm idealist, but I really think there should be another option for people who don't want to feed the big dudes in corporate and governmental bureaucracy or the marketing hype and associated with the iPod generation.

Quickbooks is set up to be idiot-friendly, run like an installation disk . . . like people who go to have their taxes done by H&R Block or Jackson-Hewitt sit through an interview process or "consultation" are essentially just answering questions they could answer online. Tax accounting is the least logical form of any accounting. (Interesting side-note: the last place I interviewed for a job, it became OBVIOUS to me that the person interviewing me had not even read my resume, which she obtained online, or the "questionnaire" I'd subsequently filled out at her company's request prior to her interviewing me. That interview went bad fast.) Why should people be subjected to such redundancy? Hey, if you can read and type and comprehend, you've got some marketable skills. Headhunters don't like me when I tell them I prefer to not print out my resume, as it's easily available and viewable just as I have formatted it online.)

The people at the top of the income brackets usually try to figure out some way to keep people working in the lowest income brackets working in those low income brackets for as long as possible using various tax deductions. I've heard from the mouth of one CPA (former inlaw -- reason for the formerness of the relationship; would you be interested to know that he is married to a realtor?) something quite unethical regarding printing out of receipts which do not exist in order to claim the tax deduction and for the purpose of "itemizing deductions"! And they do it because they think they can get away with it at the expense of the less fortunate, all the while claiming a "tax deduction"!

If a company -- moreover a "staffing company or agency!" -- doesn't even have a website, or if that website has a glaringly amateur webpage spelling error for one of the most important words to people seeking work in their specific , I think there's a reason for concern.

So, and Why On Earth is there a technically-literate class of homeless people in this country?

SystemDoctor2006 has made an appearance over the past few days, coming complete with pop-up windows to trap and then cause horrific damage to the computers of unaware users -- causing them to then rush out to purchase Microsoft Defender?

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,68962-0.htm l Are we inventing the wheel 100 times?

"Security Researchers" are threatened with prosecution? Oh, mean hackers .

It doesn't help when normal researchers (see http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2006/10/make_your _own_f.html) is threatened by the FBI
for pointing out that a flawed security mechinism is flawed. It wouldn't stop the real hackers from exploiting it and causing REAL damage and
the FBI did us a REAL diservice by threatening and scaring someone who could have helped make the system actually work properly.

So yess, the FBI has been lead-footed recently when dealing with "security researchers"

Ben