Doesn't sound much different from what Wal-Mart has been trying to do in recent years. And Microsoft actually looks small compared to them.
Both companies have market capitalizations of about $250 billion. Walmart, Microsoft. The microsoft article also shows that IBM has a market capitalization of about $60 billion. Realize, however, that market capitalization is only a measure of estimated company earning power not actual worth. People have insane expectations for Microsoft's continued earning power in a competitive market that contains zero cost competitors, so their small propaganda might work out soon.
Yeah, can you believe someone would sign up for a harassment site with their real name? The pieces fit:
You AC morons have pointed out Twitter's listing there. Only someone involved with the site would bother to read it and act on it.
Anti-Slash was set up on the same hosting provider as it's proported owner's public blog. The other blog contains similar language.
The proported owner's IT career is not going so well, exactly what you'd expect from the kinds of morons who'd waste their time making a site like Anti-Slash to harass strangers.
Too bad kget is one of those godawful KDE apps that are somehow included in the main KDE packages for some reason (other such attrocities include kuickshow and ark).
Kuickshow is not too bad a viewer and it's nice to have something to call from email programs that KDE controls. It's going to be better with the inclusion of the cropping tools seen in programs like kooka and digikam. I don't know much about ark, but Konqueror's ability to manipulate archives far exceeds dinky programs like winzip which most people can't live without.
BTW there's an in-progress KDE BitTorrent client that's getting pretty good (but isn't quite there IMHO): KTorrent
Yeah, KDE 4.0 will be very nice. They already rock and where there are shortfalls Gnome picks up.
Most of the time I want something, I ssh into my cable box and use btdownloadcurses to get things. It maxes out my uplaod but enough traffic still gets through enough to ssh in again or surf from inside.
An AC, and there seem to be so many of them, taunts:
Show us your work. Your home page, project page, etc. Whatever. Let's see it.
Sorry, AC, I'd rather not tell you who Twitter is. I use this account to complain about IT practices at places I work. Telling you who I am would embarrass more than myself. Unlike you, I'm looking out for my friends. You and other losers who hang out here harassing people need to do something more constructive with your lives.
My friends know where I put my work and you might if you had any interest in anything I do.
so you get home from whatever job you "work" at, find your check in the mail, and go and share it with all your friends huh? what a nice guy you are! and yes, i do fail to see the difference.
I'm not responsible for your personality problems or your failure to reason but I can explain myself.
In general, I do share my things with my friends. My computer is mostly useful for sharing ideas with others. My house, beyond keeping me warm and dry, is mostly good for entertaining others. There are, in fact, very few things that I own that are not made to do something useful for or with other people. I do, of course, get to set the rules for my own toys and that's an advantage of working.
As for software, I'm as happy to share my source code with the rest of the world as I am to share a recipe or grilling tip. There's much more in common between that kind of sharing than there is between sharing media and giving all your money away. Software is nothing but a description of a process. It's amazing that greedheads have made so much money concealing it's inner workings and pretending binaries are some kind of valuable voodoo requiring cross licensing, twelve story buildings, advertising, Armani clad heros and lawsuits.
If I can't share it with my friends, it's not free.
If it's the latter, it's copyright infringement - meaning taht, yes, "Sharing with your friends" is, indeed, "dirty."
You asking me not to share with my friends is the dirty part and a good enough reason to avoid your work. A library is not dirty. A few copies are not a republication. The end of physical media is going to be difficult for people who think they own ideas because they put them on dead trees. Copyright has gone far beyond it's original intention and purpose of promoting the sciences and useful arts. People who insist that sharing is dirty should be shunned.
I've also had trouble getting the desktop to refresh when unlocking the computer after it's been locked for anything over a few hours. This only happens when Azureus has been running.
Sounds like a Windows problem. Power management problems are notorious there. The version that comes with Mepis seems to work just fine if you can see out of your NAT.
The only problems I have with it are how Windozy it is. Using Java might make upgrades a pain. The program has a nice looking integrated upgrade module, complete with annoying bottom right screen pop ups, yuck! Will it work with apt? I don't know yet. If it goes away, I'll drop back down to btdownloadcurses until it works or I get another Mepis CD.
Overall, I have to agree that Azureus is a very nice program as are most things distributed with Mepis.
The author, stuck in the non free world of Windoze, feels compelled to tell us:
Once again, using BitTorrent in and of itself is not in the least bit illegal. Of course, neither is using a VCR to tape a television show. However, a huge number of people use BitTorrent to share materials that are copyrighted. The array is vast, from MP3s to first-run movies, and even entire seasons of TV shows zipped up into a single large file. And once again (say it with us), downloading copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder is illegal.
Replace BitTorrent with http, ftp or the web and you see how tiresome this kind of comment is. A huge number of people die driving. A huge number of people are murdered with pointy pieces of steel. A large number of people might not give the world's big publishers their money, with or without another internet protocol. The vast majority of musicians get ripped off.
Let me see if I can say it clearly. Sharing with your friends is not dirty. Cooperative systems add value.
People in the non free world just don't get it and covet all the wrong things. The value of source code is much greater than that of a binary file. The value of a live performance is much greater than a recording. A movie is worth about four dollars. What he values is something that's dead, things with greedy owners. The value of the internet is the exchange of free information, not dead stuff.
I've got a closet full of old crap he might consider valuable. I've got CDs, albums and tapes, which were worthless to me until I ripped them and stuck them on an sftp server. I've got shelves of DOS, Win3.1, Win95 and Windoze 98 software, all good for painful installations on obsolete hardware. The actual content made has been moved to free software systems when I was no longer able to access it with non free software. I keep it, some old books and even a working system or two around like museum pieces. The cost of replacement for my non free software is about 1 hour of install and download time, or a $500 trip to CompUSA. Mobility adds value to information and exposes the true value of non free information.
Will I use bt to share music and movies? Sure, if they are free. Those that are free are worth much more than those I can't share.
There's a raft of secrets and patents between you and free movie editing that you can share with your family and friends.
Give it 20 years, or use Theora.
Who wants to wait 20 years to share pictures of their baby?
I'll use Theora but judging from other formats, it will be a long time before I can share with friends and family that way. Microsoft, in it's infinite hatred of all things free, has yet to properly support transparency for png in their browser. Any music player that "works for sure" is sure to not play ogg. It will be forever before makers of DVD and other set top boxes support Theora or any other free format. The quickest way to share with my family is to move them to free software.
How can RIAA/MPAA have any say in how electronic devices are made, and what they can support and can't?
By using their library of works and by the stupid laws they purchase.
You have already seen the first in action. Would you buy a device that does not work with "industry standard" formats? A music player that only does ogg? A DVD that does not know DeCSS? Media companies, and there are only a handfull, decide what formats they will publish to and device makers must comply.
The second, you have also seen and it's getting worse. The DMCA has been used to keep you from viewing DVDs legally on a free system. You have to jump through various hoops that most people won't bother with. The proposed legislation will do the same for all media devices sold in the US. It will eliminate competition in the industry and maintain the current big publishers.
Anything that cuts off recording when it senses a DRM "violation" won't be accepted for very long if it's a recording device. Why? Here's WHY. You record your nephew's singing a song for his Grandfather who's dying so he can hear it.
Poor quality due to DRM is why people hate WMP. That has not kept it from being the dominant media player and most computer media from being sub par.
People will be thrown other sub par bones to cover situations like the above. Your crappy "Works for Sure" voice recorder will deliver your nephew's song to your gradfather in WMA format. The song itself will go away with the computer it was first transfered to but people will be conditioned to think that's just the way things are. They will long have forgotten that $5 worth of chips that fit in your pocket can record CD quality. As such devices are so rare today, they might never have known.
Since it needs to be made into an analog signal, somewhere along the line it needs to be put to a speaker. From there, it can be tapped off the speaker or recorded with a microphone.
Woot, then you have a crappy analog copy of commercial shit. Nicer than nothing, but that commercial shit is going to get worse and worse as the world's big publishers use this legislation to eliminate their competitors. Moreover, I don't even think you will be able to make that crappy copy for yourself long if the RIAA gets it's way. The analog plug will work to drive up your costs and prevent you from co-operating legally to get around the obstacles thrown in your way.
Don't you think the RIAA would love to return to the days when only experts with expensive equipment could make recordings? That's what this is really about. The proposed legislation would ban recording devices that don't respect the broadcast flag. This essentially bans general purpose recording devices.
If you think you can get around it with all the cheap, high quality sound cards you have today and free software, forget it. Sure, you will be able to do what you do as long as your equipment works but that's not forever. Consider DeCSS and what will happen to distribution of free recording software if it is similarly outlawed. Overnight, Windoze and Apple update "their" software to outlaws general recording and all you are left with is a few "experts" who are able to do it. It will be very difficult for you to to compete because your software and hardware will remain frozen in time, while the "official" studios will get the latest and greatest for their royalties and obedience. "Consumers" like you and me will be able to edit quarter vga movies with 8 bit mono sound on non free platforms with more bugs than South Florida.
On the customer side, your stuff won't play. That's the other half of the lockdown. The vast majority of future audio equipment will refuse to listen to anything but "authorized" content. While there are easy ways around that, few people will bother because most just want their device to turn on and "work". Every playback device will be like a record store is today: All RIAA or nothing.
The industry thought long and hard about this and their proposed legislation will give them what they want. That's to extend their early 20th century domination of popular culture forever.
All of the above applies the same way for video as well. The only difference between the two is that video is already horribly locked down and may never be liberated. The primary difficulty in making a free movie editor is not that video is hard to do, it's that non-free containers dominate. There's a raft of secrets and patents between you and free movie editing that you can share with your family and friends. The same tricks and more can be applied to audio.
The site is nothing like I thought it would be. Professors are mocked for their beliefs in long rants that do little to prove abuse of students. While I have no doubt that some of the characters listed are abusive and self righteous, the site's rants are no better. Far from it's stated goals of restoring professionalism, the site is little more than one side of a pissing match.
When the majority of the best and brightest in the country all lean towards a particular political philosophy, what should that tell you? (Hint: It's not that they were brainwashed and indoctrinated...)
It tells me you don't know what "best and brightest" means other than "agrees with you". There are as many opinions at Universities as there are tenured professors. It's the ones who do not treat their students with respect that are the problem. Publishing their abuse will curb the problem.
It may not be illegal, but its likewise not a development that has any real positive connotations for the education process (unless we're viewing intimidating people with different ideas than out own as a "positive" now).
There's nothing more "positive now" than the average modern history course and the balance of power is way out of balance. A friend of mine once made the mistake of giving a positive opinion on property qualifications for voting. He got mauled, for the rest of the semester, by the teacher and half a dozen suck ups for his trouble and ended up with a bad grade. Campus administrators often feel their mission is something "more" than research and critical thinking and would make a propaganda camp Stalin would like if they could.
Avoiding intimidation is what this is all about. Education is about presenting things and letting the student make up their minds. As long as they can present their ideas reasonably with complete factual recall, they deserve an A. Indoctrination is when the teacher presents "the truth" and everyone agrees or fails. There are some teachers out there who provide more indoctrination than education and there is NOTHING students can do but drop the course. If it's a required course and there are no others, things really suck. A smart student keeps their mouth shut and regurgitates whatever stupid stuff the teacher demands. An anonymous fink system restores some balance to the situation and will curb a lot of abuse. You would think that people would present recordings free of charge.
Sure, teachers will have to be careful but that's life. There's nothing a teacher should say in a classroom that they would be afraid publish. The antidote to unfair treatment is your own recording, so you can present out of context statements in context. Really unfair treatment ends in a libel suit.
If you're on DSL or cable, you may also want to use a router that does NAT.
That's a good idea. It will prevent many of the drive by attacks that give Windoze a half life of 12 minutes and it's much easier than trying to keep up with Windoze patches. With a nice little router, you might even be able to download all of those patches before you get 0wned. It won't, of course, keep your Windoze machine safe from WMF type problems, which can even get through wget.
There's a small downside to the above compared to hooking up a PC with Mepis and configuring things yourself with Guarddog and Guidedog, the KDE firewall and NAT configuration utilities. The most obvious one is that it's hard to keep up with security patches for the embedded router. It's running some kind of BSD or Linux, but you are at the mercy of it's maker for updates.
there's no additional security to be gained by dialup.
True, and there's the additional risk of porn dialers. There are few web sites that can suck your money because you look at them but there are many long distance scams where Windoze viruses are used to call home and run up charges.
A dial up connection is useful to the kinds of people who do DDoS and other net nasties. Ten times faster does not really matter to people who control 100,000 machines.
As others have pointed out, they'll try again and again, and they only have to win once. We have to win every time.
They don't have to win and you need to fight the bastards. There are three ways they can lose but all of them are the same: get the message out. This can generate shareholder and customer backlashes.
Shareholder backlash comes from the unpopular nature of software patents. They have to pay for it every time. Do you think that shareholders will forever fund unpopular attempts to create laws that most people hate?
Customer backlash comes from identifying the bad guys and understanding the cost of unreasonable government granted monopolies. Voting with your wallet is very effective. Take your money somewhere else while you still can.
The "inevitable" argument can be made for anything powerful companies want but it's always bogus. As long as people keep rolling over, the greedheads will figure new ways to screw them. Everytime you roll over, they have more money to do what they want next. It's better to take the fight onto their territory and make them use their resources defending what they have than it is to defend what you have. The battle really is won by convincing one person at a time.
In the mean time, everyone can avoid giving their money to members of the BSA and other greed heads. Free software makes it so you don't have to every buy another thing from Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and others actively working on DRM and the next big nasties. You can and should avoid the Baby Bells. In general, you get better service and put your money where it belongs. Send some of the money you save to the FSF, EFF and other good organizations.
If you want to spin things, you might say that MSN, AOL and Yahoo all lost value because they lost customer trust by selling them out. Well, look at this, I'm not the only person who thinks that way. If Google fails to keep their customer data confidential, all tech firms will suffer.
As for the crosshairs of the DOJ, has the reporter forgoten about the big M$ anti-trust case and continued monitoring? Microsoft is not in the crosshairs, they are in the jaws of the DOJ vice and can be squeezed at will. Any change in Washington's mood can have M$ paying fines or split into companies the size of a fruit stand.
Given that the establishment clause is the clause that prohibits the government from establishing a religion, could you explain precisely how it's given us eternal copyright, etc.? I'm especially interested in how it compares with the copyright and patent clause.
Oh, picky, picky. I've heard Article One, section 8, of the United States Constitution described as the "Copyright Establishment Clause" which is very different from the Bill of Rights prohibition of a state religion. Perhaps I heard wrong and that section should be called a patent and copyright clause, though neither of those terms is employed. It reads:
The Congress shall have Power... 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.
You might note that the motivation is the promotion of useful arts and that a monopoly on an expression is anything but a promotion. How copyright grew from 14 years to 75 is an inexcusable tale of greed. Surely, the useful arts are not promoted if publication is limited beyond the lifetime of the author and the cultural currency of the work.
Slashdot Mirror
Both companies have market capitalizations of about $250 billion. Walmart, Microsoft. The microsoft article also shows that IBM has a market capitalization of about $60 billion. Realize, however, that market capitalization is only a measure of estimated company earning power not actual worth. People have insane expectations for Microsoft's continued earning power in a competitive market that contains zero cost competitors, so their small propaganda might work out soon.
Yeah, can you believe someone would sign up for a harassment site with their real name? The pieces fit:
I doubt there are more than two or three of you assholes. It would be nice to know who you are.
I have some ideas that are easy enough to follow up on.
Go get a life, troll.
Kuickshow is not too bad a viewer and it's nice to have something to call from email programs that KDE controls. It's going to be better with the inclusion of the cropping tools seen in programs like kooka and digikam. I don't know much about ark, but Konqueror's ability to manipulate archives far exceeds dinky programs like winzip which most people can't live without.
BTW there's an in-progress KDE BitTorrent client that's getting pretty good (but isn't quite there IMHO): KTorrent
Yeah, KDE 4.0 will be very nice. They already rock and where there are shortfalls Gnome picks up.
Most of the time I want something, I ssh into my cable box and use btdownloadcurses to get things. It maxes out my uplaod but enough traffic still gets through enough to ssh in again or surf from inside.
Hmmmm, Thank you, thank you very much.
Show us your work. Your home page, project page, etc. Whatever. Let's see it.
Sorry, AC, I'd rather not tell you who Twitter is. I use this account to complain about IT practices at places I work. Telling you who I am would embarrass more than myself. Unlike you, I'm looking out for my friends. You and other losers who hang out here harassing people need to do something more constructive with your lives.
My friends know where I put my work and you might if you had any interest in anything I do.
so you get home from whatever job you "work" at, find your check in the mail, and go and share it with all your friends huh? what a nice guy you are! and yes, i do fail to see the difference.
I'm not responsible for your personality problems or your failure to reason but I can explain myself.
In general, I do share my things with my friends. My computer is mostly useful for sharing ideas with others. My house, beyond keeping me warm and dry, is mostly good for entertaining others. There are, in fact, very few things that I own that are not made to do something useful for or with other people. I do, of course, get to set the rules for my own toys and that's an advantage of working.
As for software, I'm as happy to share my source code with the rest of the world as I am to share a recipe or grilling tip. There's much more in common between that kind of sharing than there is between sharing media and giving all your money away. Software is nothing but a description of a process. It's amazing that greedheads have made so much money concealing it's inner workings and pretending binaries are some kind of valuable voodoo requiring cross licensing, twelve story buildings, advertising, Armani clad heros and lawsuits.
If I can't share it with my friends, it's not free.
If it's the latter, it's copyright infringement - meaning taht, yes, "Sharing with your friends" is, indeed, "dirty."
You asking me not to share with my friends is the dirty part and a good enough reason to avoid your work. A library is not dirty. A few copies are not a republication. The end of physical media is going to be difficult for people who think they own ideas because they put them on dead trees. Copyright has gone far beyond it's original intention and purpose of promoting the sciences and useful arts. People who insist that sharing is dirty should be shunned.
Sounds like a Windows problem. Power management problems are notorious there. The version that comes with Mepis seems to work just fine if you can see out of your NAT.
The only problems I have with it are how Windozy it is. Using Java might make upgrades a pain. The program has a nice looking integrated upgrade module, complete with annoying bottom right screen pop ups, yuck! Will it work with apt? I don't know yet. If it goes away, I'll drop back down to btdownloadcurses until it works or I get another Mepis CD.
Overall, I have to agree that Azureus is a very nice program as are most things distributed with Mepis.
Once again, using BitTorrent in and of itself is not in the least bit illegal. Of course, neither is using a VCR to tape a television show. However, a huge number of people use BitTorrent to share materials that are copyrighted. The array is vast, from MP3s to first-run movies, and even entire seasons of TV shows zipped up into a single large file. And once again (say it with us), downloading copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder is illegal.
Replace BitTorrent with http, ftp or the web and you see how tiresome this kind of comment is. A huge number of people die driving. A huge number of people are murdered with pointy pieces of steel. A large number of people might not give the world's big publishers their money, with or without another internet protocol. The vast majority of musicians get ripped off.
Let me see if I can say it clearly. Sharing with your friends is not dirty. Cooperative systems add value.
People in the non free world just don't get it and covet all the wrong things. The value of source code is much greater than that of a binary file. The value of a live performance is much greater than a recording. A movie is worth about four dollars. What he values is something that's dead, things with greedy owners. The value of the internet is the exchange of free information, not dead stuff.
I've got a closet full of old crap he might consider valuable. I've got CDs, albums and tapes, which were worthless to me until I ripped them and stuck them on an sftp server. I've got shelves of DOS, Win3.1, Win95 and Windoze 98 software, all good for painful installations on obsolete hardware. The actual content made has been moved to free software systems when I was no longer able to access it with non free software. I keep it, some old books and even a working system or two around like museum pieces. The cost of replacement for my non free software is about 1 hour of install and download time, or a $500 trip to CompUSA. Mobility adds value to information and exposes the true value of non free information.
Will I use bt to share music and movies? Sure, if they are free. Those that are free are worth much more than those I can't share.
Do I share my own work? You bet I do.
Give it 20 years, or use Theora.
Who wants to wait 20 years to share pictures of their baby?
I'll use Theora but judging from other formats, it will be a long time before I can share with friends and family that way. Microsoft, in it's infinite hatred of all things free, has yet to properly support transparency for png in their browser. Any music player that "works for sure" is sure to not play ogg. It will be forever before makers of DVD and other set top boxes support Theora or any other free format. The quickest way to share with my family is to move them to free software.
By using their library of works and by the stupid laws they purchase.
You have already seen the first in action. Would you buy a device that does not work with "industry standard" formats? A music player that only does ogg? A DVD that does not know DeCSS? Media companies, and there are only a handfull, decide what formats they will publish to and device makers must comply.
The second, you have also seen and it's getting worse. The DMCA has been used to keep you from viewing DVDs legally on a free system. You have to jump through various hoops that most people won't bother with. The proposed legislation will do the same for all media devices sold in the US. It will eliminate competition in the industry and maintain the current big publishers.
Poor quality due to DRM is why people hate WMP. That has not kept it from being the dominant media player and most computer media from being sub par.
People will be thrown other sub par bones to cover situations like the above. Your crappy "Works for Sure" voice recorder will deliver your nephew's song to your gradfather in WMA format. The song itself will go away with the computer it was first transfered to but people will be conditioned to think that's just the way things are. They will long have forgotten that $5 worth of chips that fit in your pocket can record CD quality. As such devices are so rare today, they might never have known.
Woot, then you have a crappy analog copy of commercial shit. Nicer than nothing, but that commercial shit is going to get worse and worse as the world's big publishers use this legislation to eliminate their competitors. Moreover, I don't even think you will be able to make that crappy copy for yourself long if the RIAA gets it's way. The analog plug will work to drive up your costs and prevent you from co-operating legally to get around the obstacles thrown in your way.
Don't you think the RIAA would love to return to the days when only experts with expensive equipment could make recordings? That's what this is really about. The proposed legislation would ban recording devices that don't respect the broadcast flag. This essentially bans general purpose recording devices.
If you think you can get around it with all the cheap, high quality sound cards you have today and free software, forget it. Sure, you will be able to do what you do as long as your equipment works but that's not forever. Consider DeCSS and what will happen to distribution of free recording software if it is similarly outlawed. Overnight, Windoze and Apple update "their" software to outlaws general recording and all you are left with is a few "experts" who are able to do it. It will be very difficult for you to to compete because your software and hardware will remain frozen in time, while the "official" studios will get the latest and greatest for their royalties and obedience. "Consumers" like you and me will be able to edit quarter vga movies with 8 bit mono sound on non free platforms with more bugs than South Florida.
On the customer side, your stuff won't play. That's the other half of the lockdown. The vast majority of future audio equipment will refuse to listen to anything but "authorized" content. While there are easy ways around that, few people will bother because most just want their device to turn on and "work". Every playback device will be like a record store is today: All RIAA or nothing.
The industry thought long and hard about this and their proposed legislation will give them what they want. That's to extend their early 20th century domination of popular culture forever.
All of the above applies the same way for video as well. The only difference between the two is that video is already horribly locked down and may never be liberated. The primary difficulty in making a free movie editor is not that video is hard to do, it's that non-free containers dominate. There's a raft of secrets and patents between you and free movie editing that you can share with your family and friends. The same tricks and more can be applied to audio.
It tells me you don't know what "best and brightest" means other than "agrees with you". There are as many opinions at Universities as there are tenured professors. It's the ones who do not treat their students with respect that are the problem. Publishing their abuse will curb the problem.
There's nothing more "positive now" than the average modern history course and the balance of power is way out of balance. A friend of mine once made the mistake of giving a positive opinion on property qualifications for voting. He got mauled, for the rest of the semester, by the teacher and half a dozen suck ups for his trouble and ended up with a bad grade. Campus administrators often feel their mission is something "more" than research and critical thinking and would make a propaganda camp Stalin would like if they could.
Avoiding intimidation is what this is all about. Education is about presenting things and letting the student make up their minds. As long as they can present their ideas reasonably with complete factual recall, they deserve an A. Indoctrination is when the teacher presents "the truth" and everyone agrees or fails. There are some teachers out there who provide more indoctrination than education and there is NOTHING students can do but drop the course. If it's a required course and there are no others, things really suck. A smart student keeps their mouth shut and regurgitates whatever stupid stuff the teacher demands. An anonymous fink system restores some balance to the situation and will curb a lot of abuse. You would think that people would present recordings free of charge.
Sure, teachers will have to be careful but that's life. There's nothing a teacher should say in a classroom that they would be afraid publish. The antidote to unfair treatment is your own recording, so you can present out of context statements in context. Really unfair treatment ends in a libel suit.
That's a good idea. It will prevent many of the drive by attacks that give Windoze a half life of 12 minutes and it's much easier than trying to keep up with Windoze patches. With a nice little router, you might even be able to download all of those patches before you get 0wned. It won't, of course, keep your Windoze machine safe from WMF type problems, which can even get through wget.
There's a small downside to the above compared to hooking up a PC with Mepis and configuring things yourself with Guarddog and Guidedog, the KDE firewall and NAT configuration utilities. The most obvious one is that it's hard to keep up with security patches for the embedded router. It's running some kind of BSD or Linux, but you are at the mercy of it's maker for updates.
The best solution is to dump windows.
True, and there's the additional risk of porn dialers. There are few web sites that can suck your money because you look at them but there are many long distance scams where Windoze viruses are used to call home and run up charges.
A dial up connection is useful to the kinds of people who do DDoS and other net nasties. Ten times faster does not really matter to people who control 100,000 machines.
They don't have to win and you need to fight the bastards. There are three ways they can lose but all of them are the same: get the message out. This can generate shareholder and customer backlashes.
Shareholder backlash comes from the unpopular nature of software patents. They have to pay for it every time. Do you think that shareholders will forever fund unpopular attempts to create laws that most people hate?
Customer backlash comes from identifying the bad guys and understanding the cost of unreasonable government granted monopolies. Voting with your wallet is very effective. Take your money somewhere else while you still can.
The "inevitable" argument can be made for anything powerful companies want but it's always bogus. As long as people keep rolling over, the greedheads will figure new ways to screw them. Everytime you roll over, they have more money to do what they want next. It's better to take the fight onto their territory and make them use their resources defending what they have than it is to defend what you have. The battle really is won by convincing one person at a time.
In the mean time, everyone can avoid giving their money to members of the BSA and other greed heads. Free software makes it so you don't have to every buy another thing from Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and others actively working on DRM and the next big nasties. You can and should avoid the Baby Bells. In general, you get better service and put your money where it belongs. Send some of the money you save to the FSF, EFF and other good organizations.
The other 90% will have to wait.
If you want to spin things, you might say that MSN, AOL and Yahoo all lost value because they lost customer trust by selling them out. Well, look at this, I'm not the only person who thinks that way. If Google fails to keep their customer data confidential, all tech firms will suffer.
As for the crosshairs of the DOJ, has the reporter forgoten about the big M$ anti-trust case and continued monitoring? Microsoft is not in the crosshairs, they are in the jaws of the DOJ vice and can be squeezed at will. Any change in Washington's mood can have M$ paying fines or split into companies the size of a fruit stand.
Oh, picky, picky. I've heard Article One, section 8, of the United States Constitution described as the "Copyright Establishment Clause" which is very different from the Bill of Rights prohibition of a state religion. Perhaps I heard wrong and that section should be called a patent and copyright clause, though neither of those terms is employed. It reads:
The Congress shall have Power... 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.
You might note that the motivation is the promotion of useful arts and that a monopoly on an expression is anything but a promotion. How copyright grew from 14 years to 75 is an inexcusable tale of greed. Surely, the useful arts are not promoted if publication is limited beyond the lifetime of the author and the cultural currency of the work.