The point to all this is: Don't employ 400 people unless you are generating huge amounts of cash.
That's nice. I thought that MP3.com was put out of business by a big fat lawsuit brought on by big fat music publishers who did not like the mymp3.com service. They said it was republishing, then took every cent MP3.com ever owned and then some. Silly me, now I know it was because they put people to work. What was I ever thinking?
The only way to legitmately make money with music is to sue 12 year olds and steal whole pension plans when anyone tries to - gasp - share a song they enjoy. The fundamental tasks of a publisher, selecting the best material, marketing and distributing it, has nothing to do with the RIAA.
Not a bad sum up. You noticed that ogg has hardware support. You notice that ogg can be abused by greedy publishers like the inferior formats. You noticed that ogg is superior and you noticed that it's not easy to convert from one compressed format to another. All of that is good, but it's not what convinced me.
The fact that ogg is free is what convinced me to encode my music that way. I don't have to pay for an encoder. I don't have to compile LAME. I don't have to worry about DRM screwing me out of my music in a way that media changes can only dream of. All I have to do is have a free OS on my device of choice and my music will not just sound better and take up less space, it will be mine on any media as long as I continue to transfer it with other free software. When MP3 and WMA change because the RIAA wants to sell it's music again and Microsoft has to force sales of their newly patched OS, OGG will be OGG. When there's no Windoze driver for your RIO, USB thingy, my Open Zaurus will still rock. Free is like that.
Your sig, In God we trust. Everyone else keep your hands where I can see 'em., has two levels of irony. First, WMA and MP3 are non free, closed and hidden. Second, I interpret it as the bandit's famous "Get your hands up!". You violate the first meaning and advocate the second. While obsensibly professing trust and openness you are deeply dishonest.
JoeLinus, I hope you waste loads of money and months of your life on WMA.
What is the main obstacle to building a craft that uses its engines to reduce its speed to well below orbital velocity while "hovering" outside the atmosphere in a non-sustainable orbital path until it's slow enough to reduce stress from air resistance and heat?
This question was well answered above, but here's another way of looking at it.
The Saturn booster is what it takes to get a few thousand pounds into orbit. If you were to land by using such a rocket and no air braking, it would have to be the same size. Want to imagine what it would take to get a loaded Saturn booster to orbit? A very, very big rocket. Remember, if you screw up and run out of fuel 25 feet in the air, you are dead. The adopted solution, parachutes, are much smaller, lighter, less expensive and more reliable.
Go get yourself a nice big source. Expose yourself, your wife and kids to about 100 rads then break it open and sprinkle it on yourselves. Then go drive off to the woods where and throw the remainder in your water supply. Light the forest on fire. Now sit there for a few weeks until you all die. It looks like this, only new weapons are orders of magnitudes worse and there are thousands more of them.
Only a sick fucker would will that on people. An exchange between India and Packistan would make the entire second world war look trivial. The people who actually suffer would be the innocent who could not afford to run away from their insane rulers. The only good thing about nukes is that they make a ground assault highly unlikely. The bad thing is that people are dumb enough to think a pre-emptive strike would work.
That's another issue. When I drank coke all the time I thought Gatorade was too bland and didn't have any flavor. After a few months of dedicating myself to water a glass of gatorade tastes like pure sugar to me.... Everybody was stunned when I first went to a restaurant and ordered water.
Too bad you can't enjoy a coke from time to time. It's not bad before dinner or as a treat. It's not really good with anything but the nastiest of food like ground up downer cows in hot-dog or hamburger shape.
Now that you can taste things again, you might enjoy tea, wine and other nice stuff.
Most headaches are caused by dehydration. If you don't substitute something from the watter you were getting from the coffee and soft drinks, you will indeed get a headache. This is not a sign of addiction. Stick one of those two or three gallon water bottles from the grocery store in your cubicle and drink it like coffee and you won't have headaches.
Coffee and soda are nasty stuff, but there is nothing wrong with caffeine. You will feel coffee on a good long bike ride. Don't even try to slake your thirst with carbonated corn syrup. So the toxcity of these things is demonstrated. While you might not want a Penguin mint on a bike ride, it won't hurt your stomach or make you sick. I'm not sure why people villify caffeine. A search of JAMA articles turns up nothing harmful and the AMA family medicine guide only cautions against drinking multiple pots of coffee a day without saying why.
If you are using IE, you are running Mozilla on the wrong OS. What else do you expect from Microsoft? The latest and greatest Mozilla seems to run slow on XP and 2000. Older versions, like 1.3 or so run well on 2000, though the same is slowed on XP with all the updates. None of them run as well as Mozilla on a free OS. Even Konqueror does better than things crippled by Microsoft, though the version I use does not have tabs or many of the other great features of Mozilla.
I'm using Mozilla 1.0 on Debian stable at home. It works much better than Windoze 2000 on the superior hardware I use at work. At home, when I just HAVE to see some nasty Flashed up junk, I pull out Netscape 4.7, which works just fine. At work, I don't bother because I want to keep my job. The last thing I need is to have the kind of problems IE gives you with Gator and other infections. I've got two apps to replace, then me and the company I work for will say good bye to Microsoft on the desktop. One good database can replace both of those aps and I predict it will take less than a year to provide it.
With appologies to National Lampoon, the settlement for SCO will be something like this:
Dayrl and a few other SCO people are taken out back. They give IBM all of their money and IBM gives them all a swift kick in the balls and they call it even. It's faster, less humiliating and achieves the same result as the drawn out charade that the court case will become. I doubt SCO will have the balls or brains to accept such a kind offer.
Come on, magazines like Forbes are just low-level MBA entertainment.
True, competent executives concentrate on specific trade magazines. Unfortunately, Forbes is a trade mag for the truely huge and for people responsible for investing company money and retirement plans.
Forbes is poor quality next to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Economist and all, but it's still read. The dumbass who's dumping your 401k money into Microsoft gets the idea from places like Forbes. That Microsoft desktop at the big dumb company is a key component of the Microsoft pyramid scheme. The dissapearance of that desktop at savy and nible companies is deeply disturbing to many fat happy drones.
One of the biggest tech bubbles ever is about to burst. Microsoft has $40,000,000,000 or so of these people's money in the bank. Microsoft gave the stocks and software that no longer works in exchange for that money. It's no more likely for that stock to keep on working than it is for Microsoft to produce a secure desktop. Microsoft must either make software that does not have to be "upgraded" or they will be defeated by free software that works better. In either case, Microsoft's revenues are going to fall. Because Microsoft's stock value, like all Ponzi schemes, is based on perpetual growth, the value will colapse when the revenue declines. This will destroy the incentive companies have for buying expensive new Dells every three years and Microsoft will dry up and blow away.
I think that the best remedy for scum like this would be to actually give them the job of ceo of some tech company and see how long it takes them to run it into the ground.
Representatives of the collective slime known as "Wall Street" are indeed running many large companies into the ground. Large investors do show up at board meetings and, worse, private meetings, to offer detailed advice on how to run the business. At the big dog level, some of it sounds reasonable and all of it is taken seriously because the big dogs don't want their large stock holdings to lose all of its value.
Of course this kind of micromanagement is a dissaster. The investors don't know what they are doing. They are bean counters or lawyers without a shred of technical knowledge. They can barely predict things in thier own specialty. It's fools like this that are responsible for the continued dominance of Dell/Microsoft on the corporate desktop, offshoring, and all the other stupid "cost cutting" measures you have to put up with. While people in the cubes and in the field are crying out for more hires to get the job done, these weenies are throwing new versions of M$ Word at them and telling them to make power point presentations to prove what they will turn down.
You wonder where big dumb projects come from? Wonder no more. Your company is fucked from the top down.
His last article made him look like a shill, but it also sheds light on his world view. He tried to scare the business community with an image of FSF lawyers enforcing the terms of the GPL. That businesses, school districts and individuals have much more to fear from Microsoft's invasively restrictive EULA and the BSA, seems imposible for him to realize. He must not know that Microsoft demands read access to his PC or realize the business implications of that. He must also think that people don't really want to violate M$'s license but that they do want to hoard their source code and try to sell it. The continuous stream of $100,000 to quarter million dollar lawsuits from the BSA proves that people really do want to use the same software on more than one computer and do have the natural impulse to share things they like with their friends. The inablity of Lotus, Netscape and Word Perfect to make a buck off their software should prove to 99.99% of all computer users that the Microsoft way of making money off source code is a lie. The continued rise of free software proves that most people understand that the best thing they can do with their software is share it. The glaring differences between David's world view and the world itself don't take much effort to see. Either David is too busy floating around in NET buzzwords or he is bought.
The rest of us have seen that free is the fastest way to solve IT problems. If the solution is not free, the parts are. Everyone wins but dummies sitting on 20 year old source code they never shared.
The failure of SCO to make a buck is not going to keep me from sharing my software. I understand that I can make much more money selling hardware and my time to set it up than I ever can trying to compete in a market crowded with solutions that are superior to what the largest of firms can slap together. Hoarding may still be profitable for a few huge incumbents, but it's no longer functional for the rest of us. It's rare that I think of something that has not already been done. When I do, it would be suicide for me to turn away from the ready made parts that are free.
X-Ray, turn of the 19th century. X used as a marker for experimental craft, 50 years ago? X Windowing system, 1993, thank you MIT Athena. There was plenty of room in the Xs.
Then came Microsoft, with billions of dollars in advertising money. ActiveX, Xbox, the whole fucking eXPerience, blasted at giga dolar levels. They plastered it everywhere, in the Wintel pulp pages, on TV, on billboards even four page fold outs in National Geographic next to bullshit about "green" enviornmentally friendly NiCad batteries. It gets anoying as any heavy rotation crap will. You can add NET to the same list. You told me about it a hundred times Bill, and I still think it sucks. Go away.
I thought the top seach was for Kazaa. Yep, it's number one.
Nice work RIAA. By threatening 12 year old girls in housing projects, granmothers and other people who had no clue, you have spread the good news of music sharing far and wide. Only a such a large and well funded organization could create such great advertising. Keep it up.
Public sanitation is hard enough without people leaving pubes, ass sweat and other drippings in public places. If everyone trotted around nude, places would look much like public restrooms do. They might even look worse because there's not enough people to clean up the much larger area outside the bathroom. People don't just look bad, they smell bad and have diseases. Can you hear me? I'm going to be honest with you. I hate this place, this zoo, this prison, this reality, whatever you want to call it where people are naked. I can't stand it any longer. It's the smell. If there is such a thing. I feel.. saturated by it. I can taste your stink. And every time I do I feel I have somehow been infected by it, it's repulsive. I must get out of here.
533 FSB - not as nice as 800 and can't do dual channel DDR 400. Chances are the RAM is 333 or worse. Oh well, at least it's not a Celery.
40GB? Can you get one smaller than that anymore?
If you have $500 burning a hole in your pocket, throw some cold water on it and save up a few more buck. These systems are not bad, but they are old stuff on fire sale. With 64 bit systems in the pipeline, you should at least hold out for an 800 FSB.
If you want cheaper, go find a fire sale on AMD 2500+ systems or build one yourself. The only thing that Dell can wave in your face is a nice monitor, for those of you who actually need one, and crappy Microsft software. If you use X and OpenSSH X forwarding like I do, you don't need more than one or two monitors for all the computers you can stack on a shelf.
when I read three stories, all in reputable news outlets, well, that's a trend.
This reminds me of the shark attack reputable news outlets suffered a few years ago. Nothing much was happening, so they covered the ongoing tragedy of swimmers who are attacked by sharks. Yes, this may happen but I'm no more worried about my cell phone or laptop exploding than I am about being eaten by a shark.
However, people (going back to the grandparent's point) shouldn't be thinking in terms of text being bold or italic.
Yeah, they should be thinking what they feel. I'm waiting for real emotion based tags like, "angry" or "loud" and "screaming at the top of my lungs" or "bloody murder".
Three cheers for Sir Tim. The squables petty people have over the details of his work don't bother him at all. He's happy that people are using the web the way he intended:
The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information. The idea was that by writing something together, and as people worked on it, they could iron out misunderstanding.
How your browser interprets the big thought above is mostly a function of how your brain works.
What good is an address that I can't publish openly? How are friends and honest people interested in what I do supposed to find me if I have to hide my email from everyone because I'm afraid of far more dilligent criminals? Only dirtbags want to live like that.
Lies, deception, and fraud are what happens when capitalism is not sufficiently regulated by the government.
Your concept of "regulation" is unAmerican. People will always lie and cheat. Free people make laws to punish liars and cheats. Liers and cheats make regulations that screw everyone else. Thomas Jefferson contrasted the condition of Native Americans, who he thought had too few laws, with the condition of French nationals, who he though had too many laws and decided that the Indians were better off.
Anne Rynd did a nice job of Americanizing the concept of "capitalism", a British term from 1877. Her greatest fear was "altruism" defined as you and me helping ourselves to someone else's wealth on behalf of ourselves, others, or some larger social good. "Regulations" frequently have this goal.
In any case, there's nothing wrong with either your or the previous poster's aversion to fraud. You suggesting that fraud is compatible with freedom, however, is misguided. When you feel like bowing to someone else, ask yourself who's gaurding the gaurds.
Really, garbage bags. Kite photography does not have to cost lots of money.
You can make great kites from bamboo, garbage bags and duct tape. The cheap-o rogalo wings scale up just as well as they scaled down to begin with. A large garbage bag or two, with carefully placed duct tape reinforement makes a very large kite, 6 to 9 foot wingspan.
A $100 camera can take good pictures. I've got a nasty old sipix with 1200x1600 resolution that works well. All you really need to worry about is protecting it from the inevitable fall and making a good trigger.
My triggers have used christmas tree lights for a timer. They are light, rugged, cheap and easy. I've used them to fire a solenoid that drew music wire down on the button and to close a relay that did the same thing electronically. This eliminates the need for figuring out how to do things via USB and you get about one picture per second of flight. All you need to worry about is having lots of memory. A 64 MB CF card did well enough for me and a 256 MB would be excellent.
The only thing I've really lacked is time when the wind is blowing. You can see some of this fun and the results here.
When it's all said and done, chances are that you have everything you need to do this already. Go get it! It's lots of fun.
It doesn't matter what the CD includes, only the number of CDs decides over the price. For example packages like Microsoft Office, cost slightly more as they come on multiple CDs; the price might go up to $10.
So Knoppix, a single CD with KDE and whatever else you want to put on it that just works when you boot it, should sell better than the half a dozen Microsoft CDs that would do the same thing with much more effort.
Now show me the software/hardware that meets these requirements.
I use Balsa on Debian stable. The interface is as easy as it comes, graphical with spell checking and address storage. Had it been set up for me, It would be a complete clikck and drool experience. But don't confuse the issue, Microsoft's crummy information hiding interface is not the main reason people are abandoning email. Balsa does not do dumb things, like load images and other files from internet sites as root, so it does not get rooted as easy as Microsoft mail clients. Debian stable is what it says it is, so I don't have to turn my computer (comodity x86) off unless the power fails. Balsa stores mail in nomal text based mail files, where Microsoft email clients use a database that fails when too much mail is put into it.
There are other mail clients that do as well. Balsa is based on the Mozilla mail client and that program has different and sometimes better features, such as spam filtering. KDE also makes an excellent client that is -buzzword- integrated into their desktop which has a good address book, calender programs and all that.
So there you have it. Other people can and do make email that's reliable and easy to use. Microsoft's email clients suffer from bad design decicions that Microsoft made for reasons that have nothing to do with software design. It's doubtful they will be able or even want to fix these problems.
Your computer should be just as always on, idiot proof, easy to use and legal as a fax machine. If you, like fax machine makers, were using the right software it would be true.
When is the last time you just typed up an email address on the computer, slapped your document on the scanner, pushed a button, and everything worked flawlessly without any intervention.
That would be the last time I had to print something out for some retard who refused to join the 21st century. Lacking a fax machine, I generally have to snail mail it, or drive to some place that charges to send faxes.
In an excellent troll you tell us fax machines are wonderful:... soo easy to use. They don't have operating systems... idiot proof, cheap, and portable....hey [sic] do one thing and do it well.
The easiest to dispell things you say are:
faxes have operating systems. They don't say Microsoft so they work but they are opeerating systems that can image, store and dial repeatedly.
faxes are not portable. Have you ever seen anyone carry a fax around? Did they also forward the land line that they were using? The mind boggles at that kind of "portability" compared to a laptop computer SSH and email.
The continued existance of fax machines is a condemnation of the world's most prevalent computer software, Microsoft. That people would continue to pay per minute long distance bills to transmit grainy images makes no sense in any culture that uses roman characters, and many that don't especially those that have made the effort to use free software to reflect their character set. Besides greater cost, fax machines have no standard interface, are not reliable and require redigitization of records. Microsoft has managed to level the playing field. Some people never figured out the email thing because Microsoft's supposely easy software is not. The added complications of "don't click this or that attachment, exe, scr, pif, bat, etc, because it will destroy your computer" has added to user frustration and consusion. Because Microsoft email clients are insecure, people are using virus and spam filters that destroy useful content. Email should be cheaper, more reliable and easier to use than any damn black box fax with machanical paper feed, crappy 10 keys and lcd for control. Only Microsoft could screw it up.
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That's nice. I thought that MP3.com was put out of business by a big fat lawsuit brought on by big fat music publishers who did not like the mymp3.com service. They said it was republishing, then took every cent MP3.com ever owned and then some. Silly me, now I know it was because they put people to work. What was I ever thinking?
The only way to legitmately make money with music is to sue 12 year olds and steal whole pension plans when anyone tries to - gasp - share a song they enjoy. The fundamental tasks of a publisher, selecting the best material, marketing and distributing it, has nothing to do with the RIAA.
The fact that ogg is free is what convinced me to encode my music that way. I don't have to pay for an encoder. I don't have to compile LAME. I don't have to worry about DRM screwing me out of my music in a way that media changes can only dream of. All I have to do is have a free OS on my device of choice and my music will not just sound better and take up less space, it will be mine on any media as long as I continue to transfer it with other free software. When MP3 and WMA change because the RIAA wants to sell it's music again and Microsoft has to force sales of their newly patched OS, OGG will be OGG. When there's no Windoze driver for your RIO, USB thingy, my Open Zaurus will still rock. Free is like that.
Your sig, In God we trust. Everyone else keep your hands where I can see 'em., has two levels of irony. First, WMA and MP3 are non free, closed and hidden. Second, I interpret it as the bandit's famous "Get your hands up!". You violate the first meaning and advocate the second. While obsensibly professing trust and openness you are deeply dishonest.
JoeLinus, I hope you waste loads of money and months of your life on WMA.
This question was well answered above, but here's another way of looking at it.
The Saturn booster is what it takes to get a few thousand pounds into orbit. If you were to land by using such a rocket and no air braking, it would have to be the same size. Want to imagine what it would take to get a loaded Saturn booster to orbit? A very, very big rocket. Remember, if you screw up and run out of fuel 25 feet in the air, you are dead. The adopted solution, parachutes, are much smaller, lighter, less expensive and more reliable.
Go get yourself a nice big source. Expose yourself, your wife and kids to about 100 rads then break it open and sprinkle it on yourselves. Then go drive off to the woods where and throw the remainder in your water supply. Light the forest on fire. Now sit there for a few weeks until you all die. It looks like this, only new weapons are orders of magnitudes worse and there are thousands more of them.
Only a sick fucker would will that on people. An exchange between India and Packistan would make the entire second world war look trivial. The people who actually suffer would be the innocent who could not afford to run away from their insane rulers. The only good thing about nukes is that they make a ground assault highly unlikely. The bad thing is that people are dumb enough to think a pre-emptive strike would work.
Too bad you can't enjoy a coke from time to time. It's not bad before dinner or as a treat. It's not really good with anything but the nastiest of food like ground up downer cows in hot-dog or hamburger shape.
Now that you can taste things again, you might enjoy tea, wine and other nice stuff.
Coffee and soda are nasty stuff, but there is nothing wrong with caffeine. You will feel coffee on a good long bike ride. Don't even try to slake your thirst with carbonated corn syrup. So the toxcity of these things is demonstrated. While you might not want a Penguin mint on a bike ride, it won't hurt your stomach or make you sick. I'm not sure why people villify caffeine. A search of JAMA articles turns up nothing harmful and the AMA family medicine guide only cautions against drinking multiple pots of coffee a day without saying why.
I'm using Mozilla 1.0 on Debian stable at home. It works much better than Windoze 2000 on the superior hardware I use at work. At home, when I just HAVE to see some nasty Flashed up junk, I pull out Netscape 4.7, which works just fine. At work, I don't bother because I want to keep my job. The last thing I need is to have the kind of problems IE gives you with Gator and other infections. I've got two apps to replace, then me and the company I work for will say good bye to Microsoft on the desktop. One good database can replace both of those aps and I predict it will take less than a year to provide it.
Dayrl and a few other SCO people are taken out back. They give IBM all of their money and IBM gives them all a swift kick in the balls and they call it even. It's faster, less humiliating and achieves the same result as the drawn out charade that the court case will become. I doubt SCO will have the balls or brains to accept such a kind offer.
True, competent executives concentrate on specific trade magazines. Unfortunately, Forbes is a trade mag for the truely huge and for people responsible for investing company money and retirement plans.
Forbes is poor quality next to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Economist and all, but it's still read. The dumbass who's dumping your 401k money into Microsoft gets the idea from places like Forbes. That Microsoft desktop at the big dumb company is a key component of the Microsoft pyramid scheme. The dissapearance of that desktop at savy and nible companies is deeply disturbing to many fat happy drones.
One of the biggest tech bubbles ever is about to burst. Microsoft has $40,000,000,000 or so of these people's money in the bank. Microsoft gave the stocks and software that no longer works in exchange for that money. It's no more likely for that stock to keep on working than it is for Microsoft to produce a secure desktop. Microsoft must either make software that does not have to be "upgraded" or they will be defeated by free software that works better. In either case, Microsoft's revenues are going to fall. Because Microsoft's stock value, like all Ponzi schemes, is based on perpetual growth, the value will colapse when the revenue declines. This will destroy the incentive companies have for buying expensive new Dells every three years and Microsoft will dry up and blow away.
Representatives of the collective slime known as "Wall Street" are indeed running many large companies into the ground. Large investors do show up at board meetings and, worse, private meetings, to offer detailed advice on how to run the business. At the big dog level, some of it sounds reasonable and all of it is taken seriously because the big dogs don't want their large stock holdings to lose all of its value.
Of course this kind of micromanagement is a dissaster. The investors don't know what they are doing. They are bean counters or lawyers without a shred of technical knowledge. They can barely predict things in thier own specialty. It's fools like this that are responsible for the continued dominance of Dell/Microsoft on the corporate desktop, offshoring, and all the other stupid "cost cutting" measures you have to put up with. While people in the cubes and in the field are crying out for more hires to get the job done, these weenies are throwing new versions of M$ Word at them and telling them to make power point presentations to prove what they will turn down. You wonder where big dumb projects come from? Wonder no more. Your company is fucked from the top down.
The rest of us have seen that free is the fastest way to solve IT problems. If the solution is not free, the parts are. Everyone wins but dummies sitting on 20 year old source code they never shared.
The failure of SCO to make a buck is not going to keep me from sharing my software. I understand that I can make much more money selling hardware and my time to set it up than I ever can trying to compete in a market crowded with solutions that are superior to what the largest of firms can slap together. Hoarding may still be profitable for a few huge incumbents, but it's no longer functional for the rest of us. It's rare that I think of something that has not already been done. When I do, it would be suicide for me to turn away from the ready made parts that are free.
Then came Microsoft, with billions of dollars in advertising money. ActiveX, Xbox, the whole fucking eXPerience, blasted at giga dolar levels. They plastered it everywhere, in the Wintel pulp pages, on TV, on billboards even four page fold outs in National Geographic next to bullshit about "green" enviornmentally friendly NiCad batteries. It gets anoying as any heavy rotation crap will. You can add NET to the same list. You told me about it a hundred times Bill, and I still think it sucks. Go away.
Nice work RIAA. By threatening 12 year old girls in housing projects, granmothers and other people who had no clue, you have spread the good news of music sharing far and wide. Only a such a large and well funded organization could create such great advertising. Keep it up.
40GB? Can you get one smaller than that anymore?
If you have $500 burning a hole in your pocket, throw some cold water on it and save up a few more buck. These systems are not bad, but they are old stuff on fire sale. With 64 bit systems in the pipeline, you should at least hold out for an 800 FSB.
If you want cheaper, go find a fire sale on AMD 2500+ systems or build one yourself. The only thing that Dell can wave in your face is a nice monitor, for those of you who actually need one, and crappy Microsft software. If you use X and OpenSSH X forwarding like I do, you don't need more than one or two monitors for all the computers you can stack on a shelf.
when I read three stories, all in reputable news outlets, well, that's a trend.
This reminds me of the shark attack reputable news outlets suffered a few years ago. Nothing much was happening, so they covered the ongoing tragedy of swimmers who are attacked by sharks. Yes, this may happen but I'm no more worried about my cell phone or laptop exploding than I am about being eaten by a shark.
Yeah, they should be thinking what they feel. I'm waiting for real emotion based tags like, "angry" or "loud" and "screaming at the top of my lungs" or "bloody murder".
Three cheers for Sir Tim. The squables petty people have over the details of his work don't bother him at all. He's happy that people are using the web the way he intended:
The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information. The idea was that by writing something together, and as people worked on it, they could iron out misunderstanding.
How your browser interprets the big thought above is mostly a function of how your brain works.
Your concept of "regulation" is unAmerican. People will always lie and cheat. Free people make laws to punish liars and cheats. Liers and cheats make regulations that screw everyone else. Thomas Jefferson contrasted the condition of Native Americans, who he thought had too few laws, with the condition of French nationals, who he though had too many laws and decided that the Indians were better off.
Anne Rynd did a nice job of Americanizing the concept of "capitalism", a British term from 1877. Her greatest fear was "altruism" defined as you and me helping ourselves to someone else's wealth on behalf of ourselves, others, or some larger social good. "Regulations" frequently have this goal.
In any case, there's nothing wrong with either your or the previous poster's aversion to fraud. You suggesting that fraud is compatible with freedom, however, is misguided. When you feel like bowing to someone else, ask yourself who's gaurding the gaurds.
You can make great kites from bamboo, garbage bags and duct tape. The cheap-o rogalo wings scale up just as well as they scaled down to begin with. A large garbage bag or two, with carefully placed duct tape reinforement makes a very large kite, 6 to 9 foot wingspan.
A $100 camera can take good pictures. I've got a nasty old sipix with 1200x1600 resolution that works well. All you really need to worry about is protecting it from the inevitable fall and making a good trigger.
My triggers have used christmas tree lights for a timer. They are light, rugged, cheap and easy. I've used them to fire a solenoid that drew music wire down on the button and to close a relay that did the same thing electronically. This eliminates the need for figuring out how to do things via USB and you get about one picture per second of flight. All you need to worry about is having lots of memory. A 64 MB CF card did well enough for me and a 256 MB would be excellent.
The only thing I've really lacked is time when the wind is blowing. You can see some of this fun and the results here.
When it's all said and done, chances are that you have everything you need to do this already. Go get it! It's lots of fun.
So Knoppix, a single CD with KDE and whatever else you want to put on it that just works when you boot it, should sell better than the half a dozen Microsoft CDs that would do the same thing with much more effort.
I use Balsa on Debian stable. The interface is as easy as it comes, graphical with spell checking and address storage. Had it been set up for me, It would be a complete clikck and drool experience. But don't confuse the issue, Microsoft's crummy information hiding interface is not the main reason people are abandoning email. Balsa does not do dumb things, like load images and other files from internet sites as root, so it does not get rooted as easy as Microsoft mail clients. Debian stable is what it says it is, so I don't have to turn my computer (comodity x86) off unless the power fails. Balsa stores mail in nomal text based mail files, where Microsoft email clients use a database that fails when too much mail is put into it.
There are other mail clients that do as well. Balsa is based on the Mozilla mail client and that program has different and sometimes better features, such as spam filtering. KDE also makes an excellent client that is -buzzword- integrated into their desktop which has a good address book, calender programs and all that.
So there you have it. Other people can and do make email that's reliable and easy to use. Microsoft's email clients suffer from bad design decicions that Microsoft made for reasons that have nothing to do with software design. It's doubtful they will be able or even want to fix these problems.
That would be the last time I had to print something out for some retard who refused to join the 21st century. Lacking a fax machine, I generally have to snail mail it, or drive to some place that charges to send faxes.
The easiest to dispell things you say are:
The continued existance of fax machines is a condemnation of the world's most prevalent computer software, Microsoft. That people would continue to pay per minute long distance bills to transmit grainy images makes no sense in any culture that uses roman characters, and many that don't especially those that have made the effort to use free software to reflect their character set. Besides greater cost, fax machines have no standard interface, are not reliable and require redigitization of records. Microsoft has managed to level the playing field. Some people never figured out the email thing because Microsoft's supposely easy software is not. The added complications of "don't click this or that attachment, exe, scr, pif, bat, etc, because it will destroy your computer" has added to user frustration and consusion. Because Microsoft email clients are insecure, people are using virus and spam filters that destroy useful content. Email should be cheaper, more reliable and easier to use than any damn black box fax with machanical paper feed, crappy 10 keys and lcd for control. Only Microsoft could screw it up.