Well, if this piece of but wad passes, I'm leaving the country for somewhere where the Luddites didn't win.
I'll do something else with my life, like fish or lie on a beach and masturbate or something.
Bin Laden didn't have to try to kill me, succeed with about 3000 people and and destroy my work place (yeah, I lived next door and I worked there,) because he was just a little impatient.
This piece of crap on a writ insures the destruction of America as a viable entity. (I am SO outta here.) The lawyers will choke you to death.
You'll be reduced to watching the same old crap on TV. They already OWN that. And you can bet your ass (which they will also own) that they won't be paying for anything new. Costs money.
By the way, updates from M$? Fuggedaboudid. That would violate the sacred covenant between the brown lipstick wearing media corporations and the equally brown lipstick wearing puppet politicians.
And the computer industry will be a fading memory.
The only way to get Congress' attention is either buy buying some attention (beaucoup bucks, [don't worry about soft money bans. They'll find someother loophole. After all they wrote the damn legislation,]) or stating a patent on something they might actually CARE about. (That leaves YOU out, that's for sure.)
Like the patenting ability to use the words "Yea" and "Nay" to record assent or dissent with a statement or perhaps the the passing of legislation for the purposes of levying taxes to pay for expernses without visibly providing any actual services...
Then you should duck real quick because the military will be shooting and they won't be blanks. Don't worry about find a lawyer who'll do it. (Like who would be that stupid and self destructive/defeating?) Look under any rock, behind any ambulance or in the bark of dying trees. There's sure to be some form of slug or parasite. I know plenty of lawyers. Some of my most worthless relatives are pond scum, uh, lawyers.
Lawyers are ALL that stupid. When the achieve brain death, they run for office so they can pass more laws "for other people."
Hmm. I wonder what made him think that up? This sounds like getting on a buzzword bandwagon.
While its a fine concept, letting the viewer have some control, its only control over some of the parameters of the show not really its content and those parameters are narowly defined by the show's producers.
There's really very little that can be done with raw footage. The creative control comes with the direction and that happens before the cameras are rolling.
It would be more useful to be in on the writer's metings or the story/editorial selection.
Raw footage would only be good for people with access to the technology to cut and splice and produce a segment. (Oh wait. that's anybody with a Mac and iMovie.:-)
Bottom line is, if you don't get to pick WHERE to aim the cam, you don't have much control over the content. If you don't get to pick HOW you aim the cam, you don't have much creative control either.
If you do a good enough job, you'll get the money from people who want to use YOUR code and not write their own. That's a fact jack.
This is the ONLY profession that steadfastly refuses to understand the scientific method and the principles voiced by Newton; "I see far because I stand on the shoulders of giants." Scientific progress is about an upward spiral.
Instead we have midgets grubbing around in flat little circles trying to use "clean room" techniques to reinvent the wheel so some ass-hole won't try to sue them for having used some fuckin' common sense.
You have NO progress that way. You have no Linux, No GNU, no standards. You have the victory, and a mighty small one it has to be, going to who is already the winner. That does you dick all good in both the short and the long term.
If you're missing a feature now, its "tough tits!" because the code is locked up. If Word doesn't do something you want now, you're totally fucked until M$ wakes up and sees some competitive advantage in doing something like it but you know it will be done to their advantage not yours. Otherwise, you're sucking bus exhaust.
When software is free ("Free" as in "libre" a great concept I do wish the English language had a word for so I wouldn't be putting a French word in quotation marks [1],) then you can add it, test it, use it and toss it back to the developper for inclusion into the product and further refinement by the community of other people who would be interested in the feature.
Most people will yawn. That's not value added to them. Lets face it how many of you can even put a scalar on the number features in the average software package.
The days of trying to sell software made by the creeping feature creature are over. Its not about standards, interoperability, colaborative software, APIs.
If you software can't communicate with mine, then I don't want to know about it. I have no possible use for it because you've witten software I can't possibly use.
He just happened to have shot his country's best hope for a medal in the marathon that time.
Ther black man was training in the streets of Pretoria. Of course being black in South Africa, he couldn't afford treadmills and other equipment which would have kept him off the streets and away from attracting the wrong kind of attention.
The cop's justification: "He was running. He had to be running from something."
NOTHING was ever done about the cop or the situation that cost the country a possible Olympic medal, never minbd that somebody DIED for NOTHING!
Steve Mann is lucky that they didn't try high-voltage electrocution to see if the implants were really in there deep.
There is nothing as stupid and as dangerous as an armed petty-bureaucrat. They are our version of officious tyrany (Pol Pot, Bin Laden, Hitler, Stalin, Hussein, [your favorite despot here,]) but without money, opportunity or charisma. But they share the motivation.
The amount being contemplated to let a bunch of fossil non-producers (Has the RIAA EVER produced an album? Has the MPAA EVER made a movie?) protect their turf is insane.
There must be terabytes if not petabytes backed up everyday. Every fucking day. All to CD-ROMs because that's cheaper and much faster than mag tape. What do you think banks and insurance companies and large (>500 employes,) corporations use?
That's is going to send the xxAA's revenues sky rocketing. They'l get more money in a year that they have earned, EVER.
Then there'll be congressional investigations. And I wouldn't want to be Valenti after his HMO jacks up ALL our rates to pay for the back up mnedia.
The military doesn't take crap from anybody and they have all the guns.
You start selling shoddy goods to your defendors and you may find out what the Romans found out about their Preatorian guards. And find it out in the same way too. St the point of a "glaive."
Bwahahaha! M$ just doesn't GET IT! Apart from being a waste of CPU (Shit, running Windows is a waste of CPU to start with.)
Having it turned on and listening, even if you dont have a microphone would be as annoying as having a little kid in a car with you going "Are we there yet?" All fuckin' day long man.
I'm sorry but either I'd sling one of suckers round my neck as a joke (and they cost more than a joke.)
Or it would be an admission that I had never crawled out of my parents basement den and had no life (which would make anything I'd play into a joke 'cause I'd have nothing to put into it.) Some ideas are stoo-pud. This is one of 'em.
Security schemes based on what you know (passwords) or what you can calculate (public/private key encryption) are fundamentally flawed.
Security based on what you are (biometrics) is much more reliable and can range from voice recognition over a 3kHz phone line to DNA scans. The more you need to KNOW, the deeper (but not necessarily the more invasive,) the source. The more you need to be sure, the more biometric signatures you can use to corroberate a message.
Use a pair of biometric keys to encrypt/decrypt using the same algorithms as public key and you've got some underivable security. (The keys don't have to be primes.)
As the Beatles sang all those years ago "There's nothing you know that can't be known." So much for passwords.
And remember, encryption calculations are cumulative. Once you've worked out all 128-bit factors, cracking a code you've never seen before just becomes a table look up. (First rule of performance optimization: NEVER do anything TWICE. You can't buy a second but you can rent one if you use cold hard cache.)
And the price of storage falls every month and the number of factors calculated grows every second. (Don't think the NSA hasn't figured that out yet.)
MPEG-4 We never knew ya. Nipped in the bud.
on
More on MPEG4
·
· Score: 2
Another fair idea killed by greedy, stupid suits.
No biggie. The available bandwidth maked the need for it moot anyway.
Its been that way since the depression. People who couldn't afford a loaf of bread could afford to spend a few hours in a darkened room forgetting about their troubles.
One more thing that moron Valenti's wrong about. Gad. Can how can you be that full of shit and live?
Eisner and that Luddites of the --AAs (who don't make a thing for me to buy anyway,) can kiss my wallet good bye.
They have fought EVERY technology from and since the player piano roll. They have ALWAYS lost. Not ONCE have they been able to sit on the beach and hold back the tide. But they lose only after costing their members incalculable potential revenue.
The ONLY reason I can think of why anybody in their right minds would pay this bunch of losers a dime is threat of physical violence. But then again, I am honest and have limited guile.
If you can tell me what they have actually done FOR (as opposed to TO,) their membership, please post it. I need a good laugh.
So what's this going to do to the content PRODUCER
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2
Its all very fine for Jack Valenti to claim he's being ripped off (we'll see about that. I really DONT like people assuming that I'm a criminal. I think that "presumption of innocence" is written into the constitution, am I right?)
Besides, what's that going to do to the content producers. You won't be able to CREATE an MP3 file on your CD-R or CD-RW burner or be able to create a dvd from your home movies because you don't have some stupid copy protection dongle or other annointment from some --AA (and paid for at extortionist prices.)
Give me a fucking break. the RIAA and the MPAA won't be happy until we're paying through the nose to watch the same three reruns of my "My Mother the Car."
I'm now cutting out all media that I can't access from my TiBook. Simply because that's the ONLY piece of access I want to have.
I don't have a DVD player. I don't have a CD player. I don't have a TV and I barely listen to NPR.
Where do the idiots think I watch DVDS or listen to my CDs or get my information? I do it all on my TiBook.
If they want to force me to buy their toys to watch or listen to their crap, they can kiss my mother fucking ass.
The content nowadays ain't worth bothering with. Its vetter to sit at Starbucks logging on over the wireless DHCP connection and posting replies to/.
There IS a market but there is only ONE force. Security and safety isn't its concern.
Pushing more features is what sells software and brings in the bucks. Feature lists the size of an encyclopeadia is a software vendor's wet dream.
As for the bugs, security holes and the very desirability or usefulness of those features, the rule in law is "Caveat Emptor."
Up until people start getting killed, you can forget about legislation to address the problem. If the flaws are systemic and there is nothing that can be done by the consumer. Collapsible steering columns were not required until legislators got tired of losing voters to impalement at low speeds.
Even WHEN people are being killed, as with cigatettes, (or cheap hand guns though its not the purchaser who gets killed then,) the rule of law is still "Caveat Emptor."
The average co-optable "attack" PC running windows is running in somebody's den or in a small office. Big firms have guidelines on installing software on their PCs and usually have virus detection systems that are updated from a central server.
Home systems are privately owned and are never patched knowingly. Likewise, virus detection is usually seen as a one-time purchase and installed from a CD-ROM that was obsolete before it came off the truck.
The steering column parallel is a better one for the situation since the average system owner is about as capable of fixing the problem as the average car buyer was of replacing his steering column shaft.
I'd like to hammer script kiddies who tie up my connection by hitting it with a DOS attack and teach them some civility. Its a form of violent behavios that must NOT be tolerated anymore than shooting bullets into the air. They land somewhwere and in urban areas that means somebody bleeds.
Actually, Cringely is relying on a web of trust ..
on
HTTP's Days Numbered
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
that may or may not exist.
Just because I get an email from some machine, doesn't mean that it really originated there or that it wasn't maliciously crafted or altered by some sleeper virus.
You know why M$ wants to get rid of the TCP/IP stack don't you. They didn't write it, and it works. It replaced their own, which didn't work.
They want to stamp out any trace of non M$ code in their OS.
Maybe BelCore or Multics organization, or even IBM should sue them for copyright or patent violation on the use of recursive structures like sub-directories.
If they rip out the stack, I predict a wave of new virus exploits the likes of which hasn't been seen yet.
Do the Ricco act enforcers (our 'give'rnment at work,) have a clue about what these guys are planning?
You'll be shelling out money to the RIAA and the MPAA (who actually produce no music, no movies no creative thing what-so-ever,) with every CD-R, CD-RW or DVD-R, DVD-RW drive you buy, with every blank platter that's sold.
They'll even buy the screwing up of the OS (give Bill Gates a billion bucks and you'll see just how much he cares about Windows, [that's why they hate Linux, no discernable income stream,]) so that Joe Average can't back up anything.
Greed by people who already have too much money and nothing to do but screw you ouf of more is messing with the ISPs, the hardware and the software until nothing new can be produced and when we all have to shell out by the second for re(re-re-re)runs of Gilligan's Island. That's when the --AA's'll be happy.
Of course, that's totally bogus. Any cracker worth his salt can do bit perfect copies and sell the product, FBI warning and all.
The "Bigger Picture" is they WANT you blind.
on
Do You Like Your Job?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Part of of the philosophy if (mis-)management is to ONLY give you as much information as some ignorant fool thinks you need to do your job.
Since they don't have to do it, they feel that things like knowing WTF you're supposed to be doing and how you're supposed to be doing it is not important. You don't need to know that.
Of course they then get pissed off that you couldn't read their minds afterwards.
But NEVER quit! NEVER! Even if they offer to let you or get really disagreeable at a meeting.
Quit and you're kissing your unemployment cheques goodbye. That's something they DON'T tell you while they're berating you. That's a lesson for experience. And a fuckin' bitter one at that.
Get nasty. Go Postal on their asses. Get fired for being a total prick but DON'T EFFIN' QUIT.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if this piece of but wad passes, I'm leaving the country for somewhere where the Luddites didn't win.
I'll do something else with my life, like fish or lie on a beach and masturbate or something.
Bin Laden didn't have to try to kill me, succeed with about 3000 people and and destroy my work place (yeah, I lived next door and I worked there,) because he was just a little impatient.
This piece of crap on a writ insures the destruction of America as a viable entity. (I am SO outta here.) The lawyers will choke you to death.
You'll be reduced to watching the same old crap on TV. They already OWN that. And you can bet your ass (which they will also own) that they won't be paying for anything new. Costs money.
By the way, updates from M$? Fuggedaboudid. That would violate the sacred covenant between the brown lipstick wearing media corporations and the equally brown lipstick wearing puppet politicians.
And the computer industry will be a fading memory.
Shit. What a bunch of whores. All of 'em.
The only way to get Congress' attention is either buy buying some attention (beaucoup bucks, [don't worry about soft money bans. They'll find someother loophole. After all they wrote the damn legislation,]) or stating a patent on something they might actually CARE about. (That leaves YOU out, that's for sure.)
Like the patenting ability to use the words "Yea" and "Nay" to record assent or dissent with a statement or perhaps the the passing of legislation for the purposes of levying taxes to pay for expernses without visibly providing any actual services...
Then you should duck real quick because the military will be shooting and they won't be blanks.
Don't worry about find a lawyer who'll do it. (Like who would be that stupid and self destructive/defeating?) Look under any rock, behind any ambulance or in the bark of dying trees. There's sure to be some form of slug or parasite. I know plenty of lawyers. Some of my most worthless relatives are pond scum, uh, lawyers.
Lawyers are ALL that stupid. When the achieve brain death, they run for office so they can pass more laws "for other people."
Hmm. I wonder what made him think that up? This sounds like getting on a buzzword bandwagon.
:-)
While its a fine concept, letting the viewer have some control, its only control over some of the parameters of the show not really its content and those parameters are narowly defined by the show's producers.
There's really very little that can be done with raw footage. The creative control comes with the direction and that happens before the cameras are rolling.
It would be more useful to be in on the writer's metings or the story/editorial selection.
Raw footage would only be good for people with access to the technology to cut and splice and produce a segment. (Oh wait. that's anybody with a Mac and iMovie.
Bottom line is, if you don't get to pick WHERE to aim the cam, you don't have much control over the content. If you don't get to pick HOW you aim the cam, you don't have much creative control either.
Try it again cringely.
Its about freeing the code.
If you do a good enough job, you'll get the money from people who want to use YOUR code and not write their own. That's a fact jack.
This is the ONLY profession that steadfastly refuses to understand the scientific method and the principles voiced by Newton; "I see far because I stand on the shoulders of giants." Scientific progress is about an upward spiral.
Instead we have midgets grubbing around in flat little circles trying to use "clean room" techniques to reinvent the wheel so some ass-hole won't try to sue them for having used some fuckin' common sense.
You have NO progress that way. You have no Linux, No GNU, no standards. You have the victory, and a mighty small one it has to be, going to who is already the winner. That does you dick all good in both the short and the long term.
If you're missing a feature now, its "tough tits!" because the code is locked up. If Word doesn't do something you want now, you're totally fucked until M$ wakes up and sees some competitive advantage in doing something like it but you know it will be done to their advantage not yours. Otherwise, you're sucking bus exhaust.
When software is free ("Free" as in "libre" a great concept I do wish the English language had a word for so I wouldn't be putting a French word in quotation marks [1],) then you can add it, test it, use it and toss it back to the developper for inclusion into the product and further refinement by the community of other people who would be interested in the feature.
Most people will yawn. That's not value added to them. Lets face it how many of you can even put a scalar on the number features in the average software package.
The days of trying to sell software made by the creeping feature creature are over. Its not about standards, interoperability, colaborative software, APIs.
If you software can't communicate with mine, then I don't want to know about it. I have no possible use for it because you've witten software I can't possibly use.
Just think, Next time your computer crashes, you take a rifle to the computer store or the software house.
I think we'll sick the lawyers on 'em instead, shall we?
Litigation's a pain in the membrane but its better than hacking off the limbs of the infidels.
Yup, the DMCA was designed to prevcent EXACTLY this kind of abuse. But I don't see the Fox network being pullled off the air do I?
Instead its being used against YOU so you can't make a backup.
Bwahahaha. If you have enough money, you can go offshore, reverse engineer all you want, destroy the competition and laugh at the law.
He just happened to have shot his country's best hope for a medal in the marathon that time.
Ther black man was training in the streets of Pretoria. Of course being black in South Africa, he couldn't afford treadmills and other equipment which would have kept him off the streets and away from attracting the wrong kind of attention.
The cop's justification: "He was running. He had to be running from something."
NOTHING was ever done about the cop or the situation that cost the country a possible Olympic medal, never minbd that somebody DIED for NOTHING!
Steve Mann is lucky that they didn't try high-voltage electrocution to see if the implants were really in there deep.
There is nothing as stupid and as dangerous as an armed petty-bureaucrat. They are our version of officious tyrany (Pol Pot, Bin Laden, Hitler, Stalin, Hussein, [your favorite despot here,]) but without money, opportunity or charisma. But they share the motivation.
Is there intelligent life on earth?
... every day?
The amount being contemplated to let a bunch of fossil non-producers (Has the RIAA EVER produced an album? Has the MPAA EVER made a movie?) protect their turf is insane.
There must be terabytes if not petabytes backed up everyday. Every fucking day. All to CD-ROMs because that's cheaper and much faster than mag tape. What do you think banks and insurance companies and large (>500 employes,) corporations use?
That's is going to send the xxAA's revenues sky rocketing. They'l get more money in a year that they have earned, EVER.
Then there'll be congressional investigations. And I wouldn't want to be Valenti after his HMO jacks up ALL our rates to pay for the back up mnedia.
The military doesn't take crap from anybody and they have all the guns.
You start selling shoddy goods to your defendors and you may find out what the Romans found out about their Preatorian guards. And find it out in the same way too. St the point of a "glaive."
Bwahahaha! M$ just doesn't GET IT! Apart from being a waste of CPU (Shit, running Windows is a waste of CPU to start with.)
Having it turned on and listening, even if you dont have a microphone would be as annoying as having a little kid in a car with you going "Are we there yet?" All fuckin' day long man.
Who's the genius who cooked that one up?
I'm sorry but either I'd sling one of suckers round my neck as a joke (and they cost more than a joke.)
Or it would be an admission that I had never crawled out of my parents basement den and had no life (which would make anything I'd play into a joke 'cause I'd have nothing to put into it.)
Some ideas are stoo-pud. This is one of 'em.
Security schemes based on what you know (passwords) or what you can calculate (public/private key encryption) are fundamentally flawed.
Security based on what you are (biometrics) is much more reliable and can range from voice recognition over a 3kHz phone line to DNA scans. The more you need to KNOW, the deeper (but not necessarily the more invasive,) the source. The more you need to be sure, the more biometric signatures you can use to corroberate a message.
Use a pair of biometric keys to encrypt/decrypt using the same algorithms as public key and you've got some underivable security. (The keys don't have to be primes.)
As the Beatles sang all those years ago "There's nothing you know that can't be known." So much for passwords.
And remember, encryption calculations are cumulative. Once you've worked out all 128-bit factors, cracking a code you've never seen before just becomes a table look up. (First rule of performance optimization: NEVER do anything TWICE. You can't buy a second but you can rent one if you use cold hard cache.)
And the price of storage falls every month and the number of factors calculated grows every second. (Don't think the NSA hasn't figured that out yet.)
Another fair idea killed by greedy, stupid suits.
No biggie. The available bandwidth maked the need for it moot anyway.
Its been that way since the depression. People who couldn't afford a loaf of bread could afford to spend a few hours in a darkened room forgetting about their troubles.
One more thing that moron Valenti's wrong about. Gad. Can how can you be that full of shit and live?
And Bush is an absoloute lackey.
The IRS is only too ghlad to make him out to be liar.
Nuff sed
take a look at look at THIS for the next target for Valenti and the other useless drones.
"How DARE anyone establish a network where people can share anything without our getting our tithe."
that he and the other fascists, uh, "Sons of Bitch, uh, Allah," can have a thermonuclear bomb on a table top.
He'll just go ape-shit (like he isn't already?)
Imagine what they'll do with this on the West Bank..
"Too much God. Too few brain cells."
Eisner and that Luddites of the --AAs (who don't make a thing for me to buy anyway,) can kiss my wallet good bye.
They have fought EVERY technology from and since the player piano roll. They have ALWAYS lost. Not ONCE have they been able to sit on the beach and hold back the tide. But they lose only after costing their members incalculable potential revenue.
The ONLY reason I can think of why anybody in their right minds would pay this bunch of losers a dime is threat of physical violence. But then again, I am honest and have limited guile.
If you can tell me what they have actually done FOR (as opposed to TO,) their membership, please post it. I need a good laugh.
Its all very fine for Jack Valenti to claim he's being ripped off (we'll see about that. I really DONT like people assuming that I'm a criminal. I think that "presumption of innocence" is written into the constitution, am I right?)
/.
Besides, what's that going to do to the content producers. You won't be able to CREATE an MP3 file on your CD-R or CD-RW burner or be able to create a dvd from your home movies because you don't have some stupid copy protection dongle or other annointment from some --AA (and paid for at extortionist prices.)
Give me a fucking break. the RIAA and the MPAA won't be happy until we're paying through the nose to watch the same three reruns of my "My Mother the Car."
I'm now cutting out all media that I can't access from my TiBook. Simply because that's the ONLY piece of access I want to have.
I don't have a DVD player. I don't have a CD player. I don't have a TV and I barely listen to NPR.
Where do the idiots think I watch DVDS or listen to my CDs or get my information? I do it all on my TiBook.
If they want to force me to buy their toys to watch or listen to their crap, they can kiss my mother fucking ass.
The content nowadays ain't worth bothering with. Its vetter to sit at Starbucks logging on over the wireless DHCP connection and posting replies to
And that's the truth.
I imagine I'd have to upgrade the firmware again.
While my Linux box is configurable and my OS X box is probably configurable, I've got two OS9 boxes that I'll have to wait on Apple to convert.
But I agree, IPv6 is the way to go.
There IS a market but there is only ONE force. Security and safety isn't its concern.
Pushing more features is what sells software and brings in the bucks. Feature lists the size of an encyclopeadia is a software vendor's wet dream.
As for the bugs, security holes and the very desirability or usefulness of those features, the rule in law is "Caveat Emptor."
Up until people start getting killed, you can forget about legislation to address the problem. If the flaws are systemic and there is nothing that can be done by the consumer. Collapsible steering columns were not required until legislators got tired of losing voters to impalement at low speeds.
Even WHEN people are being killed, as with cigatettes, (or cheap hand guns though its not the purchaser who gets killed then,) the rule of law is still "Caveat Emptor."
The average co-optable "attack" PC running windows is running in somebody's den or in a small office. Big firms have guidelines on installing software on their PCs and usually have virus detection systems that are updated from a central server.
Home systems are privately owned and are never patched knowingly. Likewise, virus detection is usually seen as a one-time purchase and installed from a CD-ROM that was obsolete before it came off the truck.
The steering column parallel is a better one for the situation since the average system owner is about as capable of fixing the problem as the average car buyer was of replacing his steering column shaft.
I'd like to hammer script kiddies who tie up my connection by hitting it with a DOS attack and teach them some civility. Its a form of violent behavios that must NOT be tolerated anymore than shooting bullets into the air. They land somewhwere and in urban areas that means somebody bleeds.
that may or may not exist.
Just because I get an email from some machine, doesn't mean that it really originated there or that it wasn't maliciously crafted or altered by some sleeper virus.
You know why M$ wants to get rid of the TCP/IP stack don't you. They didn't write it, and it works. It replaced their own, which didn't work.
They want to stamp out any trace of non M$ code in their OS.
Maybe BelCore or Multics organization, or even IBM should sue them for copyright or patent violation on the use of recursive structures like sub-directories.
If they rip out the stack, I predict a wave of new virus exploits the likes of which hasn't been seen yet.
Do the Ricco act enforcers (our 'give'rnment at work,) have a clue about what these guys are planning?
You'll be shelling out money to the RIAA and the MPAA (who actually produce no music, no movies no creative thing what-so-ever,) with every CD-R, CD-RW or DVD-R, DVD-RW drive you buy, with every blank platter that's sold.
They'll even buy the screwing up of the OS (give Bill Gates a billion bucks and you'll see just how much he cares about Windows, [that's why they hate Linux, no discernable income stream,]) so that Joe Average can't back up anything.
Greed by people who already have too much money and nothing to do but screw you ouf of more is messing with the ISPs, the hardware and the software until nothing new can be produced and when we all have to shell out by the second for re(re-re-re)runs of Gilligan's Island. That's when the --AA's'll be happy.
Of course, that's totally bogus. Any cracker worth his salt can do bit perfect copies and sell the product, FBI warning and all.
Part of of the philosophy if (mis-)management is to ONLY give you as much information as some ignorant fool thinks you need to do your job.
Since they don't have to do it, they feel that things like knowing WTF you're supposed to be doing and how you're supposed to be doing it is not important. You don't need to know that.
Of course they then get pissed off that you couldn't read their minds afterwards.
But NEVER quit! NEVER! Even if they offer to let you or get really disagreeable at a meeting.
Quit and you're kissing your unemployment cheques goodbye. That's something they DON'T tell you while they're berating you. That's a lesson for experience. And a fuckin' bitter one at that.
Get nasty. Go Postal on their asses. Get fired for being a total prick but DON'T EFFIN' QUIT.