The reason that P2P networks are useful is because the speeds are fast and there is a TON of material out there. I'm sorry but a private network that is invite only just won't cut it.... Maybe if it was created 5 or 6 years ago.
Ah, but sharing through a regular p2p or http server is essentially a republication and a direct copyright violation as copyright laws are written. Sharing files with your friends may not be and should not be any more than sharing a book or tape is. Five or six coppies does not make a republication.
The copyright warriors may claim otherwise, but they are clearly in the wrong and will be seen as the extremists that they are on this one. The current wave of lawsuits are that strip 12 year olds and grandparents out of their life savings are bad, but the asswipes can say, "they made tens of thousands thousands of coppies and cost us lots of money." Imagine how that would sound if it were, "he gave his mom a copy of his favorite song and derived us of income! We demand compensation!" The jerks already have egg on their face for placing huge burdens on people who did not know better, have nothing or did not even know what was going on in their house. This, we can hope, will finally kill them off and let the rest of us do what we want to do, share things we enjoy with our friends and family.
However, to outsiders (RIAA/MPAA) encryption means hiding data that doesn't belong to you. They will counter any argument with that statement.
Fuck them. I already share things with myself and friends via Openssh. What I have password protected on my machines is none of their business. Those things I created and own are shared by a http server on the same machine and anyone, including the RIAA is welcome to it.
I'm sorry but I just don't think this program is going anywhere. Maybe if it was created 5 or 6 years ago.
Ha! My windoze using peers would love to do the things I do with Konqueror. You know, drag and drop encrypted file transfer so that I can get at, use and edit my stuff from anywhere in the world. This is a step in that direction for those too timid to leave winblows. Such thoughts populate the reviews the Grouper people are displaying from such mainstream sources as PCMagazine and the Wall Street Journal. I'd rather these people stepped up to free software, but this kind of program is going to take off big time.
When that happens, it will change the way people think of publication in general. That will spell the end for the copyright warriors.
If the waste is radioactive, it is inherently releasing energy
Decay heat can account for a significant amount of your actual heat at the end of a fuel cycle, up to half. That heat quickly goes away after you shut down the reactor as all of the short lived isotopes decay away.
The amount of heat that's produced after time is not much at all. Not one single load of fuel has ever been sent to a fuel dump and almost all of it sits in spent fuel pools on site at power plants. Twenty years worth of fuel, amazingly, does not take much cooling and does not boil water. No boil, no power.
That does not mean it's not dangerous. The dose needed to kill you is only a few joules per kilogram, which would raise your temperature a fraction of a degree if your body were unable to compensate. That such a small energy so distributed can kill is devilish.
It's only in the most densely populated places (New York, Tokyo, London, Paris) where trains make economic sense.
This, for the most part is true, but clever people can prove you wrong. New Orleans, has a medium population density at best.
A good example of a light rail that makes money, is self sustaining, beautiful and good transportation is the New Orleans street car run by the good people of the New Orleans RTA. The street cars are low tech and made, entirely, of parts cast and machined by the RTA themselves. That translates to low cost. The result is beautiful enough to be a tourist attraction. The lines had a politically caused low point but never stopped making money and are used by locals as much or more than by tourists.
The low point came in the 1960s when people demanded air conditioned busses as a replacement. Lines were torn out until there was only one left in the late 1980s. The busses turned out to be ugly, dirty and a big money loser.
The comeback has been fantastic and is a great asset to the city. One of the nicest lines put back in takes people from the residential lakefront to work at the CBD. Others have been put in to shuffle tourists from the French Quarter to the Convention Center. The ride never takes more than half an hour and is comfortable, even in business clothes on hot summer days thanks to beautiful oak trees.
Wanna trade that for breathing automobile exhaust on a jammed highway with 360 degrees of concrete, glass and steel radiating heat onto your face? Everytime I have to drive to work, I know that I do. All it takes is a little planning to make through roads wide enough for a grass covered median. That median takes up about 1.5 normal traffic lanes. New Orleans built a street grid system around the curving of the Mississippi river, so anyone can.
Before people hooked up M$ broken PCs that spam everyone, there must have been much less spam. It is good to know that the man responsible for 80% of the world's spam is also unable to use email for real communications.
Mr. Gates is the most spammed man in the world. Sometimes, there is justice.
Is there anyway Mr. Gates could receive fewer than 46 spams per second? No, it makes perfect sense. At any time, one or two compromised desktops would do it.
The amount of energy needed to climb all the way to space is so huge that either a highly energy dense storage medium not yet available, wireless power transmission, or transmitting power on the ribbons themselves if that turns out to be possible, are the only viable options to power a space elevator.
Let's see, we can get to space by punching a hole in the atmosphere at multiples of the speed of sound, but we can't figure out how to do it slowly? That does not pass the smell test. Less energy is wasted by a slower moving object than a fast one. That, and not needing to throw away tons of structures every time you hoist a few pounds, are the whole reason to do this.
A real concern is protecting people against solar flares. At 80,000 feet, you can get up to 10 R / hr. That's not a nice field to hang around in without good shielding.
Every little piece of the puzzle will be solved one little dream and project at a time. You don't learn anything without thinking about the problem and doing things about it.
If you like doing those things, consulting is fine, but it's a really different lifestyle and business than selling a product [a software package... targeted for home users/SOHO].
A lifesytle, like earning a living at all. Show me something that's actually selling that does not have hoards of nasty competition from garbageware in Tiger direct. With all the junk that's bundled with a Dell and the drek that's promoted to high stink on magazines, all of which has a free software replacement that works just fine, AND the demise of tremendous software firms that had all the support trimmings, what chance does a lone programmer have to sell anything but custom business software to a firm that knows and trusts you?
your income is not limited by the number of hours you put in.
He's laughing at your non free software cellphone with a camera on it.
He's also predicting convergence of law and technology: the home entertainment center which combines a VoIP video camera and TiVo like DVR. The center will not be able to skip the two minutes hate and, due to a bandwith shortage, the video phone will be reduced to security monitoring by authorized persons only. You will have one free of charge brought to you on behalf of our sponsors. Who needs laws when you have the party? Double plus good, comrade!
The ?intolerable? prices that Angell writes about are confined to the brand-name sector of the American drug marketplace. As the economists Patricia Danzon and Michael Furukawa recently pointed out in the journal Health Affairs, drugs still under patent protection are anywhere from twenty-five to forty per cent more expensive in the United States than in places like England, France, and Canada. Generic drugs are another story. Because there are so many companies in the United States that step in to make drugs once their patents expire, and because the price competition among those firms is so fierce, generic drugs here are among the cheapest in the world. And, according to Danzon and Furukawa?s analysis, when prescription drugs are converted to over-the-counter status no other country even comes close to having prices as low as the United States.
They also complain, rightly, about $500,000,000 advertising campaigns designed to lie to doctors and patients. This and other monkey shines, like lobbying for expensive equipment that gets around state laws, is the fault of drug companies and they deserve their criticism.
The problem is that drug companies that are run by patent jokers of the "shark fin" variety in your linked article. They are scummy enough to lie to their customers, and abuse the patent office. They now seem to be moving ahead to eliminate their cheaper competition by requiring expensive equipment supposedly aimed at stopping a non exitstent problem. This bill will suit them well by raising the costs overall and eliminating the threat of reimportation.
In any industry a firm with only one competitor is still an oligopoly, not a monopoly, which seems to imply that the U.S. economy contains no significant "monopoly industries."
Works the same way. What good is an improvement to a cracker bed, for example, if you can't afford to build a petrochemical plant of your own? A "use it or lose it" law would speed the "technology transfer" from you to someone who will use it without paying you. All this does is keep people from working on the problem because they won't see any reward. That's fine for the petrochemical company because it makes it that much less likely a competitor will arise.
They have been talking about RFID for a long time in the context of mistaken subscriptions, where patients get the wrong dose or the wrong drug.
That would make sense if the perscription were transmitted properly from the doctor to begin with. If the computer is wrong because someone misskeyed RFIDs will do nothing but enforce the mistake and build a false sense of security.
So you intentionally skimmed over "drugs" because you don't think teenagers should be doing them...but you think alcohol is ok. I'm not entirely certain you understand the concept of a "drug".
I don't think you understand the QC implications of illegal.
because noone would ever tamper with the contents...
The only thing that makes sense is that drug companies are looking for a way to restrict sales of re imported drugs. It's not going to stop tampering and we can be sure that counterfeiters will be able to fake the RFIDs no matter what the drug companies do. If you can make one, someone can make one just like it. The only thing I can think of that works is computer enforced regional cost discrimination.
What this system will do is burn a pharmacy that's sold drugs that were bought on the cheap from Canada or South Africa. They own the database that says "counterfeit" and are forcing the pharmacy to buy equipment that respects that database. This will keep drug prices right where the companies want them by giving them a point of sale veto.
Welcome to the wonderful world of computer code law. The drug companies seem to have taken a hint from Holywood pimps and are designing cumbersome and error prone systems to stop anyone who'd try to get around their price structure. They don't care about your privacy or convenience, they just want your money. I'll bet that they even charge the pharmacy a fee for this wonderful new equipment on top of the equipment costs. They were unable to bribe enough state legislatures and get the crazy laws they want. Like DVD players, closed source software and video games, this new equipment will enforce laws that were never written.
Then WTF are we doing this? 20 cases of counterfeit drugs yet we have to spend thousands and thousands and pass that on to the consumer.
So that drug companies can keep people from importing drugs from Canada? Same drug, same label, different cost due to state controls. I'm sure the drug companies would consider their own pill a counterfeit under those circumstances. Drug companies could even demand special cash registers to deny sales, and I'm sure that's part of the thousands of dollars worth of cost and the "online" database. Welcome to entertainment style DRM for medicine.
if you aren't actually using the invention and don't have any plans to do so within a reasonable timeframe, you automatically lose the patent rights
Is seventeen years "reasonable" to you?
Even if patents worked as they should and were only granted to worthy inventors for new and non obvious inventions, your idea would still be a bad one. Think of all the cases where your invention is useless outside of a monopoly industry. As it is, the monopoly player waits 17 years for your patent to expire, knowing that you are not a credible threat to them. If you have your way, the monopoly player will not have to wait as long before they take your idea. As more industries are consolidated to a small number of players, what I say is more true.
In a competitive market, no good idea goes to waste. It gets licensed for something close to it's real market value. Many things need to be fixed before inventions stop going to waste, but giving monopoly players free reign to steal is not a good first step.
one of the biggest threats to the open source movement. Some of the patents are so oddball or general that anyone can use them to hammer away at some underfunded Sourceforge group to keep them from developing anything that can be used as a competitive product.
Or a well funded venture like Lindows. A broke legal system bites everyone eventually. When nothing gets done, no one has anything. Where would M$ have been without IBM and thousands of x86 and DOS developers who were free back in the early 80s? Don't think this is limited to software either. What will the scum suckers feed off when no one can do anything? Nothing, but the dummies think they can get rich and retire well off before that happens. It won't work, because no one works without real rewards.
I wonder how well the patents will hold up in other software-rich countries, like India, Russia, Croatia and Serbia.
Or Germany, France, Spain, GB, the rest of Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa and the Americas? Hopefully, they will ignore the demands for tribute these asses will level at them, just as they have ignored the fiaSCO.
The only special problem free software has is that it can not hide it's internal workings. Closed source software can, but it won't really mater. The new business method patents are general and encompass all methods used. They too will be burnt if these patent hoarding morons have their way. We can be sure that your sourceforge nightmare will happen first and much FUD will be slung around, continuing the now very boring M$ line of questioning free software's legitimacy. They will strike weak members, just like other IP pirates struck porn operators to build precedents. But just like the first wave of pirates, it won't end with small players.
Broken, broken, broken. I'm ashamed of my government.
You just need one computer on there internet that's connected to one computer on "our" Internet, then it's one network; i.e. the Internet!
True, and with all of those big dumb companies on the list, especially M$, you can expect the same old M$ on the desktop and the same old nightmare on the network. The thing will quickly be filled with all the worms and bot nets that infect the public network the rest of us use. Indeed, because most of those companies are slow, dumb and targeted by worm makers as repositories for reinfection, we can imagine that this big dumb network will will serve to infect the rest of us who are quickly moving away from that kind of thing.
Early Windows quality problems are both specious and irrelevant.
I can vouch for Word Perfect. I used the very first version of Word Perfect for Windows, WP5.2 and thought it was just fine. Like you, I've seen whole office buildings switched by force by the same clueless logic and with the same results. The formating of printed documents was hoplessly screwed and efficiency too a nose dive. I've also worked companies that were Word from the get go. They had the same formatting problems, but had them for much longer. The quality difference was extreme to anyone who ever used a word processor to type anything with so much as a table in it. Word still sucks at this. Word still screws formating and Word still won't let you see the codes to correct the stupid automagic errors Word puts into your stuff for you.
Even if all of the secretaries I know are wrong and Word is "better", the fines should be heavy. The best program in the world was unable to stand on a M$ platform with M$ against it. Microsoft should be fined for their intent and punished in a way that makes people think twice about doing the same thing. The damages should be maximal.
If I was really concerned with privacy, I doubt I'd be using a computer, much less connecting it to the Internet.
I'm concerned with privacy, so I use free software. Sure, my ISP can log my web habits but I don't have to worry about them selling information about what I do inside my own network to spammers. Nor do I have to worry about being compromised by some kind of email worm or malicious web site, which are just as large a threat to privacy.
You might be a little more concerned if you think about how any business can function without internet connected computers and what information your company might want to protect. All of that gets thrown out the window with M$ junk.
So what do you do when the binary uses an IP address instead? I use CUPS on Debian and don't have to worry about what some dumb ass at Lexmark wants to know about my printing. I get nice quality prints too.
My point: tell people it doesn't affect Service Pack 2
My point is that it does not matter. SP2 might protect you against one little hole, but the rest of the structure is a sieve. I asked you to put up, and you did. So what, here are More holes. I don't use that crap and I'm not going to get into silly details when I talk to people. The big M$ picture is a dismal failure and a mean time to 0wnership of less than 20 minutes.
Stop trying to convert me, I don't like your religion. I know what Linux and Firefox are already, please stop babbling from your Linux bible and shut up for one second.
Thanks for more insults but it's not going to work for you. I'm not going to shut up any more than I'm going to carry the M$ word for you. I'm not going to think I'm an extremist either. I'll simply call things as I see them.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but sharing through a regular p2p or http server is essentially a republication and a direct copyright violation as copyright laws are written. Sharing files with your friends may not be and should not be any more than sharing a book or tape is. Five or six coppies does not make a republication.
The copyright warriors may claim otherwise, but they are clearly in the wrong and will be seen as the extremists that they are on this one. The current wave of lawsuits are that strip 12 year olds and grandparents out of their life savings are bad, but the asswipes can say, "they made tens of thousands thousands of coppies and cost us lots of money." Imagine how that would sound if it were, "he gave his mom a copy of his favorite song and derived us of income! We demand compensation!" The jerks already have egg on their face for placing huge burdens on people who did not know better, have nothing or did not even know what was going on in their house. This, we can hope, will finally kill them off and let the rest of us do what we want to do, share things we enjoy with our friends and family.
However, to outsiders (RIAA/MPAA) encryption means hiding data that doesn't belong to you. They will counter any argument with that statement.
Fuck them. I already share things with myself and friends via Openssh. What I have password protected on my machines is none of their business. Those things I created and own are shared by a http server on the same machine and anyone, including the RIAA is welcome to it.
I'm sorry but I just don't think this program is going anywhere. Maybe if it was created 5 or 6 years ago.
Ha! My windoze using peers would love to do the things I do with Konqueror. You know, drag and drop encrypted file transfer so that I can get at, use and edit my stuff from anywhere in the world. This is a step in that direction for those too timid to leave winblows. Such thoughts populate the reviews the Grouper people are displaying from such mainstream sources as PCMagazine and the Wall Street Journal. I'd rather these people stepped up to free software, but this kind of program is going to take off big time.
When that happens, it will change the way people think of publication in general. That will spell the end for the copyright warriors.
Decay heat can account for a significant amount of your actual heat at the end of a fuel cycle, up to half. That heat quickly goes away after you shut down the reactor as all of the short lived isotopes decay away.
The amount of heat that's produced after time is not much at all. Not one single load of fuel has ever been sent to a fuel dump and almost all of it sits in spent fuel pools on site at power plants. Twenty years worth of fuel, amazingly, does not take much cooling and does not boil water. No boil, no power.
That does not mean it's not dangerous. The dose needed to kill you is only a few joules per kilogram, which would raise your temperature a fraction of a degree if your body were unable to compensate. That such a small energy so distributed can kill is devilish.
This, for the most part is true, but clever people can prove you wrong. New Orleans, has a medium population density at best.
A good example of a light rail that makes money, is self sustaining, beautiful and good transportation is the New Orleans street car run by the good people of the New Orleans RTA. The street cars are low tech and made, entirely, of parts cast and machined by the RTA themselves. That translates to low cost. The result is beautiful enough to be a tourist attraction. The lines had a politically caused low point but never stopped making money and are used by locals as much or more than by tourists.
The low point came in the 1960s when people demanded air conditioned busses as a replacement. Lines were torn out until there was only one left in the late 1980s. The busses turned out to be ugly, dirty and a big money loser.
The comeback has been fantastic and is a great asset to the city. One of the nicest lines put back in takes people from the residential lakefront to work at the CBD. Others have been put in to shuffle tourists from the French Quarter to the Convention Center. The ride never takes more than half an hour and is comfortable, even in business clothes on hot summer days thanks to beautiful oak trees.
Wanna trade that for breathing automobile exhaust on a jammed highway with 360 degrees of concrete, glass and steel radiating heat onto your face? Everytime I have to drive to work, I know that I do. All it takes is a little planning to make through roads wide enough for a grass covered median. That median takes up about 1.5 normal traffic lanes. New Orleans built a street grid system around the curving of the Mississippi river, so anyone can.
Is there anyway Mr. Gates could receive fewer than 46 spams per second? No, it makes perfect sense. At any time, one or two compromised desktops would do it.
Let's see, we can get to space by punching a hole in the atmosphere at multiples of the speed of sound, but we can't figure out how to do it slowly? That does not pass the smell test. Less energy is wasted by a slower moving object than a fast one. That, and not needing to throw away tons of structures every time you hoist a few pounds, are the whole reason to do this.
A real concern is protecting people against solar flares. At 80,000 feet, you can get up to 10 R / hr. That's not a nice field to hang around in without good shielding.
Every little piece of the puzzle will be solved one little dream and project at a time. You don't learn anything without thinking about the problem and doing things about it.
A lifesytle, like earning a living at all. Show me something that's actually selling that does not have hoards of nasty competition from garbageware in Tiger direct. With all the junk that's bundled with a Dell and the drek that's promoted to high stink on magazines, all of which has a free software replacement that works just fine, AND the demise of tremendous software firms that had all the support trimmings, what chance does a lone programmer have to sell anything but custom business software to a firm that knows and trusts you?
your income is not limited by the number of hours you put in.
Nor, do I believe, is it augmented.
He's laughing at your non free software cellphone with a camera on it.
He's also predicting convergence of law and technology: the home entertainment center which combines a VoIP video camera and TiVo like DVR. The center will not be able to skip the two minutes hate and, due to a bandwith shortage, the video phone will be reduced to security monitoring by authorized persons only. You will have one free of charge brought to you on behalf of our sponsors. Who needs laws when you have the party? Double plus good, comrade!
Up front!
Except that he lied about the amounts.
Except that Microsoft lied about their involvement with Baystar.
Except that SCO has yet to produce a single line of infringing code.
Nothing about the fiaSCO has been up front.
Fact and Fiction, eh? Looks like CNet got the facts! M$ facts.
The ?intolerable? prices that Angell writes about are confined to the brand-name sector of the American drug marketplace. As the economists Patricia Danzon and Michael Furukawa recently pointed out in the journal Health Affairs, drugs still under patent protection are anywhere from twenty-five to forty per cent more expensive in the United States than in places like England, France, and Canada. Generic drugs are another story. Because there are so many companies in the United States that step in to make drugs once their patents expire, and because the price competition among those firms is so fierce, generic drugs here are among the cheapest in the world. And, according to Danzon and Furukawa?s analysis, when prescription drugs are converted to over-the-counter status no other country even comes close to having prices as low as the United States.
They also complain, rightly, about $500,000,000 advertising campaigns designed to lie to doctors and patients. This and other monkey shines, like lobbying for expensive equipment that gets around state laws, is the fault of drug companies and they deserve their criticism.
The problem is that drug companies that are run by patent jokers of the "shark fin" variety in your linked article. They are scummy enough to lie to their customers, and abuse the patent office. They now seem to be moving ahead to eliminate their cheaper competition by requiring expensive equipment supposedly aimed at stopping a non exitstent problem. This bill will suit them well by raising the costs overall and eliminating the threat of reimportation.
Works the same way. What good is an improvement to a cracker bed, for example, if you can't afford to build a petrochemical plant of your own? A "use it or lose it" law would speed the "technology transfer" from you to someone who will use it without paying you. All this does is keep people from working on the problem because they won't see any reward. That's fine for the petrochemical company because it makes it that much less likely a competitor will arise.
That would make sense if the perscription were transmitted properly from the doctor to begin with. If the computer is wrong because someone misskeyed RFIDs will do nothing but enforce the mistake and build a false sense of security.
I don't think you understand the QC implications of illegal.
The only thing that makes sense is that drug companies are looking for a way to restrict sales of re imported drugs. It's not going to stop tampering and we can be sure that counterfeiters will be able to fake the RFIDs no matter what the drug companies do. If you can make one, someone can make one just like it. The only thing I can think of that works is computer enforced regional cost discrimination.
What this system will do is burn a pharmacy that's sold drugs that were bought on the cheap from Canada or South Africa. They own the database that says "counterfeit" and are forcing the pharmacy to buy equipment that respects that database. This will keep drug prices right where the companies want them by giving them a point of sale veto.
Welcome to the wonderful world of computer code law. The drug companies seem to have taken a hint from Holywood pimps and are designing cumbersome and error prone systems to stop anyone who'd try to get around their price structure. They don't care about your privacy or convenience, they just want your money. I'll bet that they even charge the pharmacy a fee for this wonderful new equipment on top of the equipment costs. They were unable to bribe enough state legislatures and get the crazy laws they want. Like DVD players, closed source software and video games, this new equipment will enforce laws that were never written.
So that drug companies can keep people from importing drugs from Canada? Same drug, same label, different cost due to state controls. I'm sure the drug companies would consider their own pill a counterfeit under those circumstances. Drug companies could even demand special cash registers to deny sales, and I'm sure that's part of the thousands of dollars worth of cost and the "online" database. Welcome to entertainment style DRM for medicine.
I think I'm going to be sick.
Paying protection money is evil. It strengthens and encourages the extortionist. It is better to fight.
Is seventeen years "reasonable" to you?
Even if patents worked as they should and were only granted to worthy inventors for new and non obvious inventions, your idea would still be a bad one. Think of all the cases where your invention is useless outside of a monopoly industry. As it is, the monopoly player waits 17 years for your patent to expire, knowing that you are not a credible threat to them. If you have your way, the monopoly player will not have to wait as long before they take your idea. As more industries are consolidated to a small number of players, what I say is more true.
In a competitive market, no good idea goes to waste. It gets licensed for something close to it's real market value. Many things need to be fixed before inventions stop going to waste, but giving monopoly players free reign to steal is not a good first step.
Or a well funded venture like Lindows. A broke legal system bites everyone eventually. When nothing gets done, no one has anything. Where would M$ have been without IBM and thousands of x86 and DOS developers who were free back in the early 80s? Don't think this is limited to software either. What will the scum suckers feed off when no one can do anything? Nothing, but the dummies think they can get rich and retire well off before that happens. It won't work, because no one works without real rewards.
I wonder how well the patents will hold up in other software-rich countries, like India, Russia, Croatia and Serbia.
Or Germany, France, Spain, GB, the rest of Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa and the Americas? Hopefully, they will ignore the demands for tribute these asses will level at them, just as they have ignored the fiaSCO.
The only special problem free software has is that it can not hide it's internal workings. Closed source software can, but it won't really mater. The new business method patents are general and encompass all methods used. They too will be burnt if these patent hoarding morons have their way. We can be sure that your sourceforge nightmare will happen first and much FUD will be slung around, continuing the now very boring M$ line of questioning free software's legitimacy. They will strike weak members, just like other IP pirates struck porn operators to build precedents. But just like the first wave of pirates, it won't end with small players.
Broken, broken, broken. I'm ashamed of my government.
The machine on both networks won't know the difference.
It's virtually impossible to make a separate network, especially a large one. Someone, somewhere will inadvertently bridge the two.
True, and with all of those big dumb companies on the list, especially M$, you can expect the same old M$ on the desktop and the same old nightmare on the network. The thing will quickly be filled with all the worms and bot nets that infect the public network the rest of us use. Indeed, because most of those companies are slow, dumb and targeted by worm makers as repositories for reinfection, we can imagine that this big dumb network will will serve to infect the rest of us who are quickly moving away from that kind of thing.
I can vouch for Word Perfect. I used the very first version of Word Perfect for Windows, WP5.2 and thought it was just fine. Like you, I've seen whole office buildings switched by force by the same clueless logic and with the same results. The formating of printed documents was hoplessly screwed and efficiency too a nose dive. I've also worked companies that were Word from the get go. They had the same formatting problems, but had them for much longer. The quality difference was extreme to anyone who ever used a word processor to type anything with so much as a table in it. Word still sucks at this. Word still screws formating and Word still won't let you see the codes to correct the stupid automagic errors Word puts into your stuff for you.
Even if all of the secretaries I know are wrong and Word is "better", the fines should be heavy. The best program in the world was unable to stand on a M$ platform with M$ against it. Microsoft should be fined for their intent and punished in a way that makes people think twice about doing the same thing. The damages should be maximal.
Skinfitz says "Er" as information about his print jobs roll happily along to Lexmark. I suppose that's what most users of closed source software do.
I'm concerned with privacy, so I use free software. Sure, my ISP can log my web habits but I don't have to worry about them selling information about what I do inside my own network to spammers. Nor do I have to worry about being compromised by some kind of email worm or malicious web site, which are just as large a threat to privacy.
You might be a little more concerned if you think about how any business can function without internet connected computers and what information your company might want to protect. All of that gets thrown out the window with M$ junk.
My point is that it does not matter. SP2 might protect you against one little hole, but the rest of the structure is a sieve. I asked you to put up, and you did. So what, here are More holes. I don't use that crap and I'm not going to get into silly details when I talk to people. The big M$ picture is a dismal failure and a mean time to 0wnership of less than 20 minutes.
Stop trying to convert me, I don't like your religion. I know what Linux and Firefox are already, please stop babbling from your Linux bible and shut up for one second.
Thanks for more insults but it's not going to work for you. I'm not going to shut up any more than I'm going to carry the M$ word for you. I'm not going to think I'm an extremist either. I'll simply call things as I see them.