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Gates and Security
An anonymous reader writes "Orwell was wrong about Big Brother! Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates told a homeland-security conference on Wednesday afternoon that Orwell's dystopian vision of the future, in which Big Brother used technology as a form of social control, 'didn't come true, and I don't believe it will.'" Other tidbits about this security conference: Gates had his own troubles with security (Drudge is copy-and-pasting from a subscriber-only Roll Call story). Gates is apparently trying to sell interoperability to HomeSec. Meanwhile, Microsoft viruses continue unchecked.
CNN Europe recently ran a similar story about Orwell's dystopian vision, and whether or not it has "come true" or not by now... Not much of the story is new for us that like to wear tin foil hats though... :^)
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Check this Inquirer article out:
here.
Rather bashful of Gates...
Your current pushes seem to be towards forwarding my information about EVERYTHING on my computer (including what hardware I am using when XP shuts itself off)
wah? are you talking about windows xp? the product id? nothing is sent to microsoft. the product id was used to prevent 'causual copying' and widespread use of product keys. it generated by your current hardware setup and the product key. nothing is sent during activation and there are many ways to get around the WPA. also, things like service pack 1a check for mainly two product ids that have been "blacklisted". what happens when xp shuts itself off? umm, beats me...
I really don't like it when people say he's "quite the philanthropist." It's quite the opposite. My father's a CPA and one of the first things he tells a rich client is to give a lot to charity for tax purposes. If someone makes $100,000/yr and gives away $5,000 that's 5% going to charity. If Bill G's assets are (let's just say) increasing by $1 billion per year, giving away $10,000,000 is only 1% going to charity. So giving $50 million to charity may seem like a lot, but it's a very small portion of what he's got.
But much more important are where the so-called charity is going. Most of it goes into the trust his wife manages. Do you know what that charity does with their assets under management? The money that's in holding and not going out to good use is put into investments - tax-free investments in companies who are Microsoft's allies. I can't find the link at the moment, but the "charitable" Bill G is using his donations to fund companies to help Microsoft and put competition out of business. Also, much of the donations are for Microsoft software to be put into school systems. There's a lot more going on than cash going to poor starving children.
Developers: We can use your help.
No, Animal Farm was written in 1945 and was intended as a direct attack on the Soviet Union at the time. Cite.
Um, or download AVG from grisoft.com for free, and aget a lower memory-footprint, and fewer clutter-things than McAfee or Norton.
No need to get illegal here for inferior products.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
registration free link - courtesy of google.
(To parent: you know, it's not all that hard to spend just an extra minute to provide such a link for the people here; saves a lot of them a lot of time...)
AAAAHHHH!!!! It's happening here too!! When my sister read Animal Farm in school they told her the same thing; read the book as an historical allegory. Be warned!! Avoid this reading at all costs!! The book (and 1984 too) will lose all art and relevance if you do such!
Yes, they were inspired by Orwell's dissillusionment with Stalinist SSR, but they were not strict allegories! They dealt with the nature of political power and the tools of oppression and control. They were inspired (nearly) as much by what he saw in Franco's Spain as by Stalist USSR.
Reading these two novels as strict historical allegory does them a tremendous disservice.
"I think we should tax people who stand in water! " - Mr. Gumby
Within the pages of "1984" itself, towards the start, Orwell leaves the exact date "1984" rather ambiguous. This specifically points to Orwell not giving an "exact" future date for his book.
> Its propaganda when the government controls a media outlet...
Such as, for example, when Attorney General Janet Reno effectively ordered the TV studios to "tone down" the shows "Law & Order", and "Murder, She Wrote"? That incident led to a protest by Michael Moriarty, and his eventual resignation and renouncement of his American citizenship.
It's fairly obvious what the Clinton White House didn't like about "Murder, She Wrote", and the early years of "Law & Order". Both shows were promoting the idea of _justice_.
By fucking caring, that's how. By spreading the understanding to those around you (if you are in the U.S.) that they live in a fucking bubble, which seems to be growing smaller every day. By living your life as if you have choices (of music, of movies, of religions, of beliefs, hell, of operating systems) besides those which society shoves down our throats. By not being fucking complacent, only then will things even begin to change.
Voting will never solve anything, as your options consist of a corporate-owned whore or a corporate-owned slut.
There's plenty of options. There are only two that are really shoved down our throats, and most likely the one elected will be one of them. BUT - if third-party (fourth-? fifth-?) candidates get significant amounts of votes, people will pay attention. They will see new names, new choices creeping into their field of vision.
I LOVE my country. I love the Constitution and rights it grants me. I love the ideals that the founders had in mind.
But I HATE what my country has become. I hate the laws that have created and the loopholes left gaping which circumvent my Constitution. I hate the ideals that my society expresses.
This world is not static; it is either evolving or devolving. It is up to us to care which direction it goes.
Yo mama so fake, she failed the Turing Test.
It sould also be noted that the main character *guessed* that the year was 1984. He didn't really know. History had been rewritten so much that it didn't really matter. 1984 was as good as any other number.
Remember, terrorists are what the big army calls the little army.
...and in fact 1984 is the year that the main character guesses it is....because in reality know one knows what yearit is.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
Orwell originally called it 1948, his publisher made him change it.
A controlling body such as the American political administration would covet very highly the ability to keep an extremely detailed and up-to-the-minute database on whomever they so wished and considering the size of the population in the United States of America today, keeping such close tabs on that amount of people would be a daunting, if not impossible, task. Since the introduction of the IBM compatible personal computer (PC) a few short decades ago, it and its spinoffs (PDA's etc) have become more of a necessity in the daily life for those people who live in a civilized urban or city environment and less of a luxury/novelty/curiosity item as they used to be. Now, loaded onto the vast majority of these computers worldwide is one of Microsoft's Windows operating systems. Here then is the perfect opportunity for said administration - in close collaboration with one of their major campaign sponsors mind you - to keep under close scrutiny millions of Americans with a degree of precision that would have been considered impossible only two decades ago. Microsoft's Palladium software will become all pervasive. It will become mandatory to have it installed on all practically all consumer computing devices which are capable of running an operating system (gaming consoles, PDA's, laptops, watches, mobile phones, home entertainment systems, car stereo systems etc) and furthermore, this trusted (trusted by whom exactly?) operating system will quietly, constantly and discreetly be feeding information into either one, huge database or numerous databases.
Of course, this is all speculation, but we all know how absolute power corrupts and one only has to look at the history of mankind to see that there are few - if any - exceptions to the rule. United States Presidents come and go but the underlying administration/power structure remains and quite frankly, it is probably as Machiavellian as any government can possibly be (although they are unfortunately not alone in this regard) - irrespective of whom is currently occupying the Whitehouse. Once the Uinted States government has declared that all non-TCPA compliant computing devices and untrusted operating systems (i.e. not Palladium) are illegal (using the PATRIOT Act to bolster it of course), then the rest of the civilized world will surely follow. If anyone or any country appears to be intending to "break ranks" as it were, then Microsoft - with the full support of the current U.S. government it seems (as the adage goes; "birds of a feather flock together") - will do its utmost to prevent such a rebellion. For instance, a few months ago, Microsoft managed to arrange to have the US ambassador to Peru petition the Peruvian government on Microsoft's behalf shortly after Peru stated their positive stance with regards to the use of open source software and earlier this week, Craig Mundie from Microsoft met with the Brazilian Minister for Education. That to me alone is a cause for concern. Sure. Banks may do it (although I've never heard of a bank arranging to have their country's Ambassador do their bidding) - but they're banks - not software companies.
As I said before, this is all pure speculation - but nevertheless, after looking at their past track record, I would not put it past them.