And now they made a compatability layer so their OS can run software written for their competitors' API. This is a change of heart how?
A compatibility layer with something that they claimed was a national security risk? Call the unAmerican Activities Committee, Batman! They must hate their customers to so blatantly risk their security like that. Did they figure all was lost when Microsoft sold their source code to China and the KGB? Or did Green Hills see their market share eroding. Sound like they were full of bull all along. Oh yeah,
They've been vocally anti-Linux-in-safety-critical-embedded-systems because Linux is a competitor (nothing particularly nefarious, just a company trying to make a case that their product has advantages over a competitor).
Some people think it's OK to lie. No change of heart there afterall, is there?
There are few things you said that I can agree with, except your call for a method of release and those already exist. Organizations like Debian and Red Hat have well defined means of deciding what software will be recommended as default and those recommendations don't get in the way of including other free sotware projects. That process itself is a reasonable standard that is not destructive.
Certifications like this are often welcome in corporate environments where names and packaging often matter as much or more than the product.
In a rational organization, the name means something because everyone knows that stuff from that company always rocks.
Debian is a good name and they have documentation to back up their processes. It should not be hard to turn that documentation into sound QC. The process already works and any rational organization should be able to point to it and say, "those guys who know what they are talking about says so, as you can see for yourself."
Software currently used has far less to offer. What kind of QC does M$ hold itself to? What do you get out of that besides a restrictive EULA that wastes your resources in a fruitless effort to avoid being sued by the BSA (essentially M$ suing their customers)?
The credibility is there, you just have to present it correctly. Good luck with it.
I'll wager that, if not for the FUD that came of this lawsuit, BSD would be the OS of choice for geeks today. ,
implying the lawsuit made a difference in adaptation. On the other hand you say:
More people were using BSD because Linux barely existed. and we figured that BSD might go away (whatever that would constitute), so why bet on a losing horse?
as if the lawsuit made no difference. Which is it?
Now I'll clarify what I mean by abusers. The people at USL tried to gain exclusive use of code that had been written by others in honest and open manner. They not only tried to lock the authors out of their work, they tried to block alternate and original implementations of the same work by the same people, which sort of proves who was responsible for that code in the first place. In effect, they wanted to own the functionality of the code. It was wrong and they were defeated in court, after wasting lots of other people's time and money. That's what I consider abusive.
That kind of abuse continues to this day and has been taken to new levels. Few will fall for the "don't worry about this NDA, it's just a formality" line anymore. The kinds of people who created the closed source development model are still pushing it and still trying to shut down everyone else. They buy other people's code, slap a brand name on it and seek to destroy other code that does the same thing. Microsoft and SCO have taken the abuse to new levels of absurdity by trying to revive the USL BSD controversy in connection with code that has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's an anti-competitive take down at it's worst.
those of us who read Boardwatch and kept up with the choice few Usenet groups knew only that there was some kind of a BSD lawsuit that made it bad to use. The details were fuzzy, but we thought that BSD would be a dead end.... Instead, we used Linux. It was much less popular, and way underpowered (compared to BSD), but it was unencumbered by lawsuits... I'll wager that, if not for the FUD that came of this lawsuit, BSD would be the OS of choice for geeks today.
By what you say, that would be a bad wager. According to you, more people were using BSD despite the lawsuit. Moreover, you do not consider the very real philosophical difference between the BSD and GNU people. Many, such as myself, would rather GPL software than hand their work over to the likes of M$, Sun and SCO for commercial exploitation. They have all shown animosity towards those who have helped them. I'm grateful for all the GPL work that's out there and willingly make my small contribution, such is the nature of all science. I'll wager that many of your peers made the choice based on the philisophical grounds. But you were the man on the spot, you tell me, was it impending abuse and the desire to not aid the abusers as obvious then as it is now?
I wonder to what degree the SCO FUD is similarly affecting the choice of Linux today?
I can answer that as a relatively new Linux user and someone who teaches newbie classes. Zero. SCO is full of shit and anyone with one or two brain cells more than Laura Diddio knows it. More importantly, if M$ can use SCO to steal Linux, it can steal anything, especially BSD. If Linux is somehow hexed by US law, all free software will fall, in the US at least. High school kids could care less. They want the most and coolest features and they find it in Linux. They are out there compiling on any equipment they can get their hands on and nothing has really changed.
Thankfully, you the technology represented by Unix has made information more widely available today. Thanks to the modern web with great and obvious sites like Slashdot and Groklaw we know all the details, so the dorks can't hide behind a cloud of fog to make their FUD work. Thanks to Google, which is universally used, the correct information is the first thing that comes up. All this talk about "echo boxes" is just bullshit. Today information is much easier to find and you can get it from a much greater number of sources. Echo box is something that more describes a world dominated by one news agency, API, and three broadcast networks, because they all said the same thing and there were no alternate sources, much less first hand accounts, to be had.
does any of this in any way impact the slew of child BSD's out there?
The answer is no. Nobody but SCO has anything to worry about. As Grocklaw astutely notes:
Now we know why SCO keeps telling us the case is "just a contract" case, why it has a penchant for suing only those who are, or were, their licensees, and why it sued IBM instead of Red Hat. USL preserves its rights against licensees under the license agreements. I see no expanded rights against third parties who are not licensees, just the preexisting right to try to sue them, with the same likely outcome that USL experienced when it tried to sue the University and BSDi, using the same lame copyright claims that the judge back then found so unconvincing.
SCO owns nothing useful and never has. They have yet to show any infringement by IBM nor will they ever. The whole thing is FUD, funded by your friends at M$ and a pump and dump scheme, in short fraud and anti-competitive fraud. I hope someone goes to jail for it.
Well, it should be obvious to even the most dim-witted individual who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology, that you're full of shit. - Prof. Frink
Good Doctor Frink, I'm interested in your advanced hyperbolic topology degrees. Do you sell those in Redmond?
The new method involves running electricity through water that has a high temperature. As the water molecule breaks up, a ceramic sieve separates the oxygen from the hydrogen.
I thought of this when someone first told me about fuel cells. To anyone familiar with conventional thermal cycles and the basics of thermodynamics, the approach is obvious. Thermal cycles take advantage of thermal energy gradients. That such a potential could be exploited with fuel cells seems to be an obvious extention. Hot water is easier to separate than cold water, duh! So you heat the water up, separate it and then combine it in a cold fuel cell. The difference is energy you can use but the devil is in the details. It seems easier than using a turbine but you'd want one of those too if you can't extract all of the heat in electrolysis.
I'm glad someone is finally working on it. People are so slow. I expect the petroleum and coal industries to step in and kill it before anyone can use it.
Why go there just for the bandwidth, when they can locate their factory in mainland China and enjoy the benefits of genuine slave labor.
I can get the benefits of genuine slave labor at Walmart.
Is it a surprise that Hong Kong would have trouble "keeping up" with anyone in China? The one thing you can count on with a Communist government is that "what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine." Any factory run by any party boss is going to have everything anyone in Hong Kong has and resources no one in Hong Kong can touch. That more people are getting a taste of the fruits of their labors in China in no way makes them free or the government any less corrupt.
Hong Kong, under the UK, was a showcase of unregulated capitalism. That's amazing, when you consider the nasty way the UK taxes it's own citizens to death and beyond. It's demise under the Chinese is as inevitable as it's wealth and prowess was under the UK.
As long as an operating system has "Microsoft Windows" in the name, people will believe that they have to run it
My impression is that fewer and fewer people have been lining up at the stores to buy the newest M$ junk, despite exponentially increased advertising and hype. People did line up for Windoze 95. Fewer for 98 and fewer for XP because there were more people who'd actually been through the "upgrade" and been dissappointed. Bill Gates can hand deliver the new junk on top of a building in person, he can hire an RIAA whore to sing for him and he can gush about your "potential" but he can't restore faith in software that's essentially the same thing it was ten years ago. Besides a dreadful lack of real new features, the user typically loses ability when some favorite piece of software or hardware does not work with the new OS. He's pulled the same trick four or five times now and people just don't buy it anymore. The best example of this loss of faith is in the move away from IE, the most important piece of M$'s strategy to expand into new markets.
The real push for M$ junk is coming from the top down. Government agencies, the military and large companies are an ideal place for such a stupid deal. Anyplace M$ can lobby a few individuals with more money than sense, you will have dumb deals like this pushed down on thousands of people who either don't care or know better.
Cheap distributed publishing makes brings us closer to the truth than expensive publishing. You get uniterested third parties to visit and report. An editor can sort fact from from opinion even when the logical collector of facts, the state, is lying. It's that easy. The alternative is to go back to expensive and state controlled publishing, something that's sure to have less information for everyone.
The quantity of excellent articles piling up at places like Wiki is clear proof that there are more disinterested and knowledgable people than there are interested and malicious people in the world. It's that information revolution thing you have heard about.
National governments are afraid of the loss of their former propaganda advantage. Too bad for them. They are going to have to do things right. Putting people in jail for editing articles is very wrong.
If the US is living up to it's rhetoric, the editor has a clear pass at US citizenship. It is clear that he's committed no real crime, and is in danger of real physical harm for political reasons. Turkish prisons are supposed to be very bad and lots of things can happen in 10 months. Unfortunately, the US is busy putting people on trial here for providing technical services to terrorists, by running web sites. Nasty! We shall see where this goes.
The world's most expensive fire works.
on
NASA's Deep Impact
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
The lump of copper is 820 pounds, and will be equivalent to 5 tons of TNT. If you sent an 820-pound lump of TNT, you would get an explosion of about 5.4 tons of TNT. An extra.4 tons-TNT increase, in exchange for a vastly more dangerous mission and chemical contamination is not a good trade.
True, but if you send up an 820lb nuclear warhead you will get a much better fire cracker. Megatons baby, that's what I'm talking about, thousands of your piddly little copper lumps have I in a few pounds of Pu and hydrogen.
So you have to wonder when nations will start nuclear fireworks displays. People want bread, wine and circus. Science has to have it's element of circus to be funded. I hate myself for realizing that. Nations like to intimidate, and traditional fireworks displays included cannons and other military devices. Ah to be entertained by brute intimidation. When it happens, you know that the world is drifting back to feudalism.
Number two says, "There are no Nations anymore. There's only coporations." I suppose that means that the parks would be owned by MickeySoft, General Products and Lockheed Transnational. "Mars deserves a break today. No exploration will be allowed to interfere with our relative advantage over our fellow men."
How about we actually get there and figure out what is there first.
I don't think the authors have a reasonable appreciation of the size of plannets or explorational navigation. The chances are that a human eye would not be able to see "the eyesore of pieces of crashed spacecraft" when they "stare across the beautiful barrenness and desolation of the Martian surface." Planets are big places and well meaning exploration craft are both expensive and tiny. Also, a space craft that is "crashing" has little choice of where it is putting itself down.
It would be stupid to the point of criminality to ignorantly place the burdens on future generations that this proposed "National Parks" could generate. How, pray tell, are we to learn what's useful under that barren surface if we can't land space craft on it? How stupid would it be if future colonists had to modify flight plans around areas that people looking though telescopes thought were beautiful? No, we need to learn what we can now and get there. It won't be too hard for people there to clean up real eyesores.
Mars will no more ruined by the remains of exploratory vehicles than the Grand Canyon is by one or two wrecked cars. If they are even visible, you can pick them up without much trouble.
I'm thinking a LOT of slashdotters would be wary about giving up their names and addresses to this sort of program, regardless of the promises of Microsoft.
Dude, I'm turning myself in. I've got 7 computers running and I did not pay a dime for the software on them. I've even been giving it away to friends, neighbors and other people.
What? They won't give me and everyone one else of those fancy XP CDs for turning ourselves in? What on earth are we going to do without a great deal like that?
I would not install XP if came with a letter from Bill Gates himself. It's worth about as much to me as an AOL CD.
Another thing, to drive the local competition out of business go buy a few machines from them with a pirated version and then graciously line up for your free legit copies then drop their names and then profit.
Better yet, get your friends to install pirated garbage and then report your competition. M$ does not care, it's just another stinking cash grab in the best tradition of the BSA and non free software. It's just another cost of doing that kind of business.
End users are not going to be able to tell the difference. Legitimate businesses can't tell either. I know, I worked for one. That guy would never in a million years do that on purpose.
I've got a better idea for you backyard builders Simply Mepis. Most users won't know the difference. Those that notice will have good things to say.
You still have to shop the guys who you bought your unlicensed copy of the OS from. And that includes signing a sworn statement to the fact.
From the people who brought you the BSA's bring an audit down on the company that fired you, comes a program to bring down lawsuits on your competitors. It's just another move to put the squeeze on small shops.
Here's some good advice to small shops: quit selling Windoze pronto. Really. Free software does what you need it to and M$ does not care what you've done for them in the past. They are going to squeeze you for every dollar they can, then sue you to kingdom come as their sales revenues go down.
Last year I worked for a good sized store that got burnt by their vendor. The guy was one of MickySoft's best customers, and must have made at least one M$ millionare. His vendors sold him coppies of Windoze that M$ said were pirated. They had all the little stickers and it was impossible to tell the difference. M$ did not care, they took him to court and that cost him years and plenty of money to win.
Now comes this program. Stores can't tell the difference, how on Earth are customers going to know?
Can we just say that this will always be a complaint of X amount of people and move on? Does it really need to be said for every topic of government activity?
No and no. We should not roll over when our government abuses us against the principles it stands for. Domestic spying is not a routine government activity, such as schools roads or incarceration of felons, and should be censored.
The more I read/. The more I hope that the tin foil hat brigade is right in their fears. That way it wont be long until they are rounded up then I won't have to hear them yell "Big Brother" this and "1984" that.
How do you know that I won't be the one sending you to the camp? That way, I won't have to listen to trolls like you telling me to shut up and take it.
If you don't believe in the things you read here, why don't you go start your own conversation site and leave this one alone?
I don't see how people can be upset about monitoring chatrooms, unless they were actually doing something questionable with that data. As most of IRC is a completely public network by design, there is no expectation of privacy.
It's easy to understand why I'm upset. You might understand the next time you pay your taxes. Remember that a fraction of your hard work is going to pay for your government to listen in on your conversations. Many people are making a living at it. I think they and my government have better uses for my money. I did not ask for it, I don't like it and I don't want to pay for it.
it's also well-known that your IP address is exposed to all those on the server.
If you don't mind that kind of thing, perhaps I can interest you in a few personal services. For the low price of $50/hr, I'll log all of the communications from your "exposed" IP address, cull what I want, damage your reputation by questioning your peers if I note anything suspicious and even charge you with crimes if you happen to say the wrong thing. Most of the work will be automated but I take no responsibility for the information being stolen by insurance companies, employers and other organizations that have a direct impact on your quality of life. By freedom of information, I'll be sure to let people know that I'm investigating you but I'll tell them that I'm an official government agency, so they won't question my motives and will instead turn their suspicions onto you. Sound like a good deal?
Slashdot Mirror
A compatibility layer with something that they claimed was a national security risk? Call the unAmerican Activities Committee, Batman! They must hate their customers to so blatantly risk their security like that. Did they figure all was lost when Microsoft sold their source code to China and the KGB? Or did Green Hills see their market share eroding. Sound like they were full of bull all along. Oh yeah,
They've been vocally anti-Linux-in-safety-critical-embedded-systems because Linux is a competitor (nothing particularly nefarious, just a company trying to make a case that their product has advantages over a competitor).
Some people think it's OK to lie. No change of heart there afterall, is there?
In a rational organization, the name means something because everyone knows that stuff from that company always rocks.
Debian is a good name and they have documentation to back up their processes. It should not be hard to turn that documentation into sound QC. The process already works and any rational organization should be able to point to it and say, "those guys who know what they are talking about says so, as you can see for yourself."
Software currently used has far less to offer. What kind of QC does M$ hold itself to? What do you get out of that besides a restrictive EULA that wastes your resources in a fruitless effort to avoid being sued by the BSA (essentially M$ suing their customers)?
The credibility is there, you just have to present it correctly. Good luck with it.
and are 0wned in turn. Want to ask them if they prefer revenue from their "products" or bitch money from M$?
I'll wager that, if not for the FUD that came of this lawsuit, BSD would be the OS of choice for geeks today. ,
implying the lawsuit made a difference in adaptation. On the other hand you say:
More people were using BSD because Linux barely existed. and we figured that BSD might go away (whatever that would constitute), so why bet on a losing horse?
as if the lawsuit made no difference. Which is it?
Now I'll clarify what I mean by abusers. The people at USL tried to gain exclusive use of code that had been written by others in honest and open manner. They not only tried to lock the authors out of their work, they tried to block alternate and original implementations of the same work by the same people, which sort of proves who was responsible for that code in the first place. In effect, they wanted to own the functionality of the code. It was wrong and they were defeated in court, after wasting lots of other people's time and money. That's what I consider abusive.
That kind of abuse continues to this day and has been taken to new levels. Few will fall for the "don't worry about this NDA, it's just a formality" line anymore. The kinds of people who created the closed source development model are still pushing it and still trying to shut down everyone else. They buy other people's code, slap a brand name on it and seek to destroy other code that does the same thing. Microsoft and SCO have taken the abuse to new levels of absurdity by trying to revive the USL BSD controversy in connection with code that has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's an anti-competitive take down at it's worst.
By what you say, that would be a bad wager. According to you, more people were using BSD despite the lawsuit. Moreover, you do not consider the very real philosophical difference between the BSD and GNU people. Many, such as myself, would rather GPL software than hand their work over to the likes of M$, Sun and SCO for commercial exploitation. They have all shown animosity towards those who have helped them. I'm grateful for all the GPL work that's out there and willingly make my small contribution, such is the nature of all science. I'll wager that many of your peers made the choice based on the philisophical grounds. But you were the man on the spot, you tell me, was it impending abuse and the desire to not aid the abusers as obvious then as it is now?
I wonder to what degree the SCO FUD is similarly affecting the choice of Linux today?
I can answer that as a relatively new Linux user and someone who teaches newbie classes. Zero. SCO is full of shit and anyone with one or two brain cells more than Laura Diddio knows it. More importantly, if M$ can use SCO to steal Linux, it can steal anything, especially BSD. If Linux is somehow hexed by US law, all free software will fall, in the US at least. High school kids could care less. They want the most and coolest features and they find it in Linux. They are out there compiling on any equipment they can get their hands on and nothing has really changed.
Thankfully, you the technology represented by Unix has made information more widely available today. Thanks to the modern web with great and obvious sites like Slashdot and Groklaw we know all the details, so the dorks can't hide behind a cloud of fog to make their FUD work. Thanks to Google, which is universally used, the correct information is the first thing that comes up. All this talk about "echo boxes" is just bullshit. Today information is much easier to find and you can get it from a much greater number of sources. Echo box is something that more describes a world dominated by one news agency, API, and three broadcast networks, because they all said the same thing and there were no alternate sources, much less first hand accounts, to be had.
does any of this in any way impact the slew of child BSD's out there?
The answer is no. Nobody but SCO has anything to worry about. As Grocklaw astutely notes:
Now we know why SCO keeps telling us the case is "just a contract" case, why it has a penchant for suing only those who are, or were, their licensees, and why it sued IBM instead of Red Hat. USL preserves its rights against licensees under the license agreements. I see no expanded rights against third parties who are not licensees, just the preexisting right to try to sue them, with the same likely outcome that USL experienced when it tried to sue the University and BSDi, using the same lame copyright claims that the judge back then found so unconvincing.
SCO owns nothing useful and never has. They have yet to show any infringement by IBM nor will they ever. The whole thing is FUD, funded by your friends at M$ and a pump and dump scheme, in short fraud and anti-competitive fraud. I hope someone goes to jail for it.
Good Doctor Frink, I'm interested in your advanced hyperbolic topology degrees. Do you sell those in Redmond?
I thought of this when someone first told me about fuel cells. To anyone familiar with conventional thermal cycles and the basics of thermodynamics, the approach is obvious. Thermal cycles take advantage of thermal energy gradients. That such a potential could be exploited with fuel cells seems to be an obvious extention. Hot water is easier to separate than cold water, duh! So you heat the water up, separate it and then combine it in a cold fuel cell. The difference is energy you can use but the devil is in the details. It seems easier than using a turbine but you'd want one of those too if you can't extract all of the heat in electrolysis.
I'm glad someone is finally working on it. People are so slow. I expect the petroleum and coal industries to step in and kill it before anyone can use it.
I can get the benefits of genuine slave labor at Walmart.
Is it a surprise that Hong Kong would have trouble "keeping up" with anyone in China? The one thing you can count on with a Communist government is that "what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine." Any factory run by any party boss is going to have everything anyone in Hong Kong has and resources no one in Hong Kong can touch. That more people are getting a taste of the fruits of their labors in China in no way makes them free or the government any less corrupt.
Hong Kong, under the UK, was a showcase of unregulated capitalism. That's amazing, when you consider the nasty way the UK taxes it's own citizens to death and beyond. It's demise under the Chinese is as inevitable as it's wealth and prowess was under the UK.
My impression is that fewer and fewer people have been lining up at the stores to buy the newest M$ junk, despite exponentially increased advertising and hype. People did line up for Windoze 95. Fewer for 98 and fewer for XP because there were more people who'd actually been through the "upgrade" and been dissappointed. Bill Gates can hand deliver the new junk on top of a building in person, he can hire an RIAA whore to sing for him and he can gush about your "potential" but he can't restore faith in software that's essentially the same thing it was ten years ago. Besides a dreadful lack of real new features, the user typically loses ability when some favorite piece of software or hardware does not work with the new OS. He's pulled the same trick four or five times now and people just don't buy it anymore. The best example of this loss of faith is in the move away from IE, the most important piece of M$'s strategy to expand into new markets.
The real push for M$ junk is coming from the top down. Government agencies, the military and large companies are an ideal place for such a stupid deal. Anyplace M$ can lobby a few individuals with more money than sense, you will have dumb deals like this pushed down on thousands of people who either don't care or know better.
Cheap distributed publishing makes brings us closer to the truth than expensive publishing. You get uniterested third parties to visit and report. An editor can sort fact from from opinion even when the logical collector of facts, the state, is lying. It's that easy. The alternative is to go back to expensive and state controlled publishing, something that's sure to have less information for everyone.
The quantity of excellent articles piling up at places like Wiki is clear proof that there are more disinterested and knowledgable people than there are interested and malicious people in the world. It's that information revolution thing you have heard about.
National governments are afraid of the loss of their former propaganda advantage. Too bad for them. They are going to have to do things right. Putting people in jail for editing articles is very wrong.
If the US is living up to it's rhetoric, the editor has a clear pass at US citizenship. It is clear that he's committed no real crime, and is in danger of real physical harm for political reasons. Turkish prisons are supposed to be very bad and lots of things can happen in 10 months. Unfortunately, the US is busy putting people on trial here for providing technical services to terrorists, by running web sites. Nasty! We shall see where this goes.
True, but if you send up an 820lb nuclear warhead you will get a much better fire cracker. Megatons baby, that's what I'm talking about, thousands of your piddly little copper lumps have I in a few pounds of Pu and hydrogen.
So you have to wonder when nations will start nuclear fireworks displays. People want bread, wine and circus. Science has to have it's element of circus to be funded. I hate myself for realizing that. Nations like to intimidate, and traditional fireworks displays included cannons and other military devices. Ah to be entertained by brute intimidation. When it happens, you know that the world is drifting back to feudalism.
Wow, I thought he was dead, but he's not!. Can you point to the slam? The article you pointed to (my link works, yours had an extro /) was mostly positive about the road.
Number two says, "There are no Nations anymore. There's only coporations." I suppose that means that the parks would be owned by MickeySoft, General Products and Lockheed Transnational. "Mars deserves a break today. No exploration will be allowed to interfere with our relative advantage over our fellow men."
I don't think the authors have a reasonable appreciation of the size of plannets or explorational navigation. The chances are that a human eye would not be able to see "the eyesore of pieces of crashed spacecraft" when they "stare across the beautiful barrenness and desolation of the Martian surface." Planets are big places and well meaning exploration craft are both expensive and tiny. Also, a space craft that is "crashing" has little choice of where it is putting itself down.
It would be stupid to the point of criminality to ignorantly place the burdens on future generations that this proposed "National Parks" could generate. How, pray tell, are we to learn what's useful under that barren surface if we can't land space craft on it? How stupid would it be if future colonists had to modify flight plans around areas that people looking though telescopes thought were beautiful? No, we need to learn what we can now and get there. It won't be too hard for people there to clean up real eyesores.
Mars will no more ruined by the remains of exploratory vehicles than the Grand Canyon is by one or two wrecked cars. If they are even visible, you can pick them up without much trouble.
Dude, I'm turning myself in. I've got 7 computers running and I did not pay a dime for the software on them. I've even been giving it away to friends, neighbors and other people.
What? They won't give me and everyone one else of those fancy XP CDs for turning ourselves in? What on earth are we going to do without a great deal like that?
I would not install XP if came with a letter from Bill Gates himself. It's worth about as much to me as an AOL CD.
Better yet, get your friends to install pirated garbage and then report your competition. M$ does not care, it's just another stinking cash grab in the best tradition of the BSA and non free software. It's just another cost of doing that kind of business.
End users are not going to be able to tell the difference. Legitimate businesses can't tell either. I know, I worked for one. That guy would never in a million years do that on purpose.
I've got a better idea for you backyard builders Simply Mepis. Most users won't know the difference. Those that notice will have good things to say.
From the people who brought you the BSA's bring an audit down on the company that fired you, comes a program to bring down lawsuits on your competitors. It's just another move to put the squeeze on small shops.
Here's some good advice to small shops: quit selling Windoze pronto. Really. Free software does what you need it to and M$ does not care what you've done for them in the past. They are going to squeeze you for every dollar they can, then sue you to kingdom come as their sales revenues go down.
Last year I worked for a good sized store that got burnt by their vendor. The guy was one of MickySoft's best customers, and must have made at least one M$ millionare. His vendors sold him coppies of Windoze that M$ said were pirated. They had all the little stickers and it was impossible to tell the difference. M$ did not care, they took him to court and that cost him years and plenty of money to win.
Now comes this program. Stores can't tell the difference, how on Earth are customers going to know?
No and no. We should not roll over when our government abuses us against the principles it stands for. Domestic spying is not a routine government activity, such as schools roads or incarceration of felons, and should be censored.
The more I read /. The more I hope that the tin foil hat brigade is right in their fears. That way it wont be long until they are rounded up then I won't have to hear them yell "Big Brother" this and "1984" that.
How do you know that I won't be the one sending you to the camp? That way, I won't have to listen to trolls like you telling me to shut up and take it.
If you don't believe in the things you read here, why don't you go start your own conversation site and leave this one alone?
I don't and I've got lots of better thing to do with $150,000.
It's easy to understand why I'm upset. You might understand the next time you pay your taxes. Remember that a fraction of your hard work is going to pay for your government to listen in on your conversations. Many people are making a living at it. I think they and my government have better uses for my money. I did not ask for it, I don't like it and I don't want to pay for it. it's also well-known that your IP address is exposed to all those on the server.
If you don't mind that kind of thing, perhaps I can interest you in a few personal services. For the low price of $50/hr, I'll log all of the communications from your "exposed" IP address, cull what I want, damage your reputation by questioning your peers if I note anything suspicious and even charge you with crimes if you happen to say the wrong thing. Most of the work will be automated but I take no responsibility for the information being stolen by insurance companies, employers and other organizations that have a direct impact on your quality of life. By freedom of information, I'll be sure to let people know that I'm investigating you but I'll tell them that I'm an official government agency, so they won't question my motives and will instead turn their suspicions onto you. Sound like a good deal?
Pay up!
Unless you decide to buy a book when you are not at a book store. You might want to buy a book your friend owns, or one you found in the library.
We'd probably all be hurding and it would be the most advanced kernel on the planet.
In free software it does not matter, does it? What gets implemented one place is free to move around.