If power usage is not an issue, and you are already in a vacuum, you could deliver more than a shock to things in your filed. Ever seen pictures of people who come into contact with 100,000 V lines? The energy dissipated is real.
A simple minded aproach would have a ship inside a big bug zapper. Enough juice might be able to vaporize micro meteors. It would be more interesting to create magnetic fields with current flow and so reduce ionic bombardment from solar flares.
... IE will display pngs fine as long as they don't use alpha-channel. And in fact IE will display even that subset of pngs fine if QT is installed and set as the default plugin for.pngs, which should be the case.
Good luck setting and keeping QT as a default type for IE. w2k asks you a zillion times if you really want to do that, then it does not do it right. Microsoft is agressively pushing it's inferior Windows Media Player with all the usual dirty tricks like that. This not only makes viewing PNG difficult or impossible, it also interfers with viewing the M$ avi file format which Windows Media Player treats as audio, displaying an "ambience" instead of your digicam's movie. Mozilla on the same computer works faster and better, in part because it respects you choice of plugins.
IE suffers from other technical problems due to the underlying OS. Long filenames with multiple endings confuse it, and there are other problems that a free software box would never have.
What you are really seeing here is the result of a long string of Marketing over Technology decisions at M$. Their technology gap is real and hoplessly large. Their ignoring PNG is just one more small reason to abandon the platform. The larger reason to abandon the platform is their root cause and their licensing terms. M$ just won't play nice.
First we have to ask what do you want to use the device for? If you want to bang out lots of text, forget this and get a desktop with a good keyboard. If you want to do quick email and web browse, graphiti is all you need. I've used graphiti for data logging in a plant, and it worked well with templates. If you want a little more text in your email or want to take notes, go for speach recognition. Record, ogg, recognize at your later. I'm not very impressed by programs that take many letters at a time in a drawing and process them by graphiti, so that all the errors are left embeded.
Open Zaurus has handwriting recongition, though I like the keyboard. Qt/Embeded is GPL. The picture on the front page shows GIMP clearly taking input from the stylus, so it would not be too much to imagine the rest coming along quickly. Any nifty features ink has will come, unless they have patents.
The combination of X and ordinary free software on this platform blows away M$ offerings which restrict you to one user one computer one program, DOS days limits. Find and grep are powerful search tools and not that difficult to learn or use. KDE's embeded konsol has stylus buttons that make using the command line easy: shortcuts to history, enter and commands from a pull down menue that remembers your most common commands. Of course, for note taking, it would be much easier to simply record the conversation as ogg files and then use speach recognition to convert it, how's that for "intuitive"?. At 800 MHz, you should be able to do that, recoginize your hadwriting and serve it all out with apatche dynamically at the same time. Try that with eXPensive software.
However, very few people in business are going to understand this. Management are scared idiots, American management doubly so. They're going to stay away from Linux in droves....
What wishful thinking! All the FUD in the world won't save an obsolete business model.
It's natural for them to take this view so easily because they've been conditioned all their lives to believe that "there's no such thing as a free lunch"
Go back to arguing that the TCO of free software is greater than that of Microsoft crap, it's more convincing though no less honest or correct. There is no such thing as a free lunch but there is such a thing as not getting ripped off all day long. I don't pay an anual fee for the IP involved in manila folders, yet I use them every day. OS theory and software concepts are as well knows, get used to it. People have co-operated for their mutual benifit to make software. It works better and it's available for close to it's true market value. It's not free and it will always take effort to get any use of it, but it now the effort required is approaching that of M$ junk. Nothing magic here, just good hard work paying off. Management understands that and this FUD campaign is going to backfire in the worst of ways on M$.
SCO seems to think they'll either be able to make Linux go away or force everyone using Linux to buy an SCO license. They might succeed in the former, at least as far as corporate support and adoption, but the latter will never happen.
Do you pay a license to ATT? You won't pay a license to SCO either. In the highly unlikely case SCO proves someone missapropriated 80 lines of kernel code, those lines will be replaced overnight. SCO can fold those 80 lines till they're nothing but sharp corners and shove them up their collective assholes. The rest of the kernel is free, GPL and no one need pay anything but shipping charges to the source which they can then turn around and serve out all day long gratis.
Linux won't go away, it will always be legal and corporate users are going to use it for the same reasons the rest of us will.
The law (at least around here) does not state that the machine has to be truly random. The law merely specifies a minimum average payout.
Well, duh. The problem is that a sequence that gives the same average "payout" may also be aranged to strip money from people the fastest way possible. Enticements that would not come naturally can be used to get the suckers to dump their money in at unatural rates. The results are not the same in that money comes at a faster rate per time.
The real cheat, of course, is using fictional income to cover illegal earnings. Trust small minded crooks to want to maximize their haul and cheat each other, but there's no such thing as a profitable gambling house. If the place ever made a profit, it would be taxed! So you have to spend all that money from your drug sales and pimping and God only knows on your friends. Pity isn't it? At the same time, why not cheat your customers at the arm?
This is not acceptable and the acronym WARTA, Wireless Authentication, Routing, Traffic control, Accounting was thought up to cover the things that we needed to do.
Fine for you. The rest of us are setting up mesh nodes so we don't need to pay a monthly fee to anyone. Good luck, but don't cry when people get around you with their own equipment.
Would play fair in this case mean be late with a bloated version for MS Windows, and overpriced?
No, "Play fair" means not dumping your inferior word processor, manipulating vendors and breaking your competitor's code on your OS. It would also mean not buying 10% of your competitor so you can keep it off alternate platforms, like Microsoft did right after Corel made Linux binaries.
Because that was the case. The first versions of Satellite Software WordPerfect for MS Windows were confusing and bloated. There was one version requiring 6 MB RAM when the norm was 4 MB; MS WinWord at the time asked for only 2 MB. And MS WinWord was cheaper, especially if acquired in MS Office, which was also better integrated.
Put down the crackpipe, please. Every version of Word Perfect has worked faster and easier then the concurent Word version. Word Perfect 4.x was much better then the equivalent DOS Word. Word Perfect 5.1 was much better than the equvalent DOS or Windoze Word and secritaries continued to use it long after newer versions were introduced. Word Perfect 5.2, the first windoze version, is still a fine word processor on Win9x computers, and it's still easier to use than any Word since. Word Perfect 6.0 took up lots of space but was still easier to use and had more useful features than Word. The Linux native Word Perfect worked well on 150 MHz machines, can you say that for Word XP? It offered nice X integration and was a truely useful program. I wish they had continued it and hope to see these Vector Capitol people put one out.
There are plenty of law firms out there ready to have Word Perfect back on a stable platform. They are enough to make it happen too.
Verizon is a public corporation. It answers to its shareholders, who's only concern is profit.
That's a poor excuse for unethical behavior and it does not lead to profits. When you see reasoning like that, sell out, quit and don't buy what they are selling. Someone else will do it better eventually.
A company has obligations to it's shareholders, it's customers and it's employees. Any company that decides to screw one of those three interests for the others will get around to screwing everyone. When you think it's OK to screw people, you screw everyone.
Anti competitive behavior screws all three interests at the same time. It screws the share holder by driving out other legitimate investments. It screws the customer by monopoly rents. It screws the employees by destroying competitive employers. Anti competitive behavior also leads to stagnation, which screws all three intersts again by blocking legitimate industry growth.
Give it back to the public for them to use as they see fit
Good. Use it for 802.11 style community based internet service. It would revolutionize telom and all information services. The internet was designed to be free, this specturm in the hads of the people could make it so. Imagine being able to host your own content with your own equipment without paying a fee for anything but electicity.
I think The Goatse.cx Channel would get quite a following
What you chose to look at and point to is your business. I don't visit your "dump" very often, nor would I recomend it to others, though it's really no worse that broadcast TV. No big deal, someone else might like what you do. (the fly is funny, To get closeups of a fly, use the eyepiece from a set of binoculars or a telescope) Dump or flowers the user can chose. One day everyone might be able to serve as well and there will be more intersting stuff in the world than a few dozen TV executives could ever imagine anyone would be interested in.
Buisness week caters to people who wish they were the boss. Actual leaders know to trust people who know better for technical decisions. Places where the big dogs reach down to make other people's decisions based on tripe like that don't last long.
She's the one who ordered her slaves to burn her alive on a funeral pire as a signal of spite and hatred to her former lover Uni^H^H^H Ulyses? Or was that SCO? Oh well, so much for her reputation. I suppose she'll just ride that M$ desktop down the rest of her career.
One would think only a moron would sign an NDA that didn't guarantee access to ALL information relevant to these issues.
Moron or a shill. They want to be able to discredit anyone who would say they are full of shit. "They don't have all the information." they can say. So what exactly are they showing? What's the point? Their shills can say, "I've seen the code and SCO is dead to rights." without having to prove a thing.
It's SCO precictable. Expect loads more BS to flow before these morons go away.
The experts must know the evidence and be unrestrained in what they say.
The courts will provide the evidence to the experts so that the above condition is met.
SCO just wants to make trouble and this whole case is propaganda?
That the NDA would be unacceptable was so predictable it's not even funny. Only M$ and SCO shills would sign that thing and SCO is going to say stupid things about free software advocates who refuse to put themselves at the mercy of the state of Utah. Next, they will plant chunks of code someplace and say the anarchists put it there.
So you can't very well expect them to use them as xterminals for their better system, when what they don't have is the better system.
You can already find P150's in the trash. Soon enough, 400 MHz and better machines will be there. If not, they are available cheaply through coprorate "asset recovery" schemes which do very well.
No, Microsoft doesn't create software. It just borrows, enhances and markets better. That memo Ballmer sent means "guys, it's time to look out there again and see what we can copy/purchase and claim our own innovation".
The "enhancements" are dubious and often come before a purchase. No, M$ coders don't sit around playing solitare, but they are instructed to make error messages for competitor's programs. Outside DRM, new widgets for XP and futile ventures into TV, cell phones, and tablet PCs, I'm not sure what M$ has been doing. Only they can tell.
In any case, there's not much out there to buy. M$ so squashed all the software firms that bought into the M$ way, that there have been few dumb enough to follow in their footsteps. As Lotus, Corel and other huge firms failed, VC went to zero and developers exited to free software. They won't buy GPL, what's left to them?
They have borged themseves into so much software they can't keep half of it competitive. IE can not keep up with Mozilla. Word never was as good as Word Perfect and now a slew of superior editors are rising. Their email client is a hopless security nighmare. Their aging GUI is hoplessly outclassed by modern well thought out windowing systems like X. Their kenrel still lacks fundamental archetecture to keep track of running processes and users. Their inability to see various file systems is also a liability. Most of the problems they foist onto their users in a vain attempt to lock them in. Free software is, for that reason, eminsly easier to use and maintain. The differnce between the two systems is so huge now that people are realizing that they not only don't need Microsft, they are better off without them. That's what Steve's complaint is all about. This is just the start of their flailing.
You are one of the few people still buying the M$ development model. Everyone else has figured out how to make money with free software because the M$ way was a rip off. It's tempting to sell out your employees for that $500,000 offer M$ would make for your and their life's work. Good luck getting anyone to invest in such a stert up when that's the final reward. Good luck getting anyone who got burnt like that before to work for you and good luck trying to keep up with the world of free software. There's nothing free software can't do that you can think up and comercial software can't keep up with free software and remain economically viable. They have to restrict their users in ways that make the software less useful. It's a failed model, don't count on Microsoft to be able to keep using it. This is the end game and Microsoft is losing.
It's going to hurt in the short term, but Microsft's elimination will be better for everyone. Free software answers people's needs more directly and efficently. The difference will be kept by consultants, programers and the compaines being served. All your base is free, get you some!
He identifies a technology gap - free software does more for people than his companies restrictive garbage. Contrast the flexibility of X forwarding through secure shell or VPN to Microsoft's insitence that Word be used by one person at a time. Contrast the cost differences. Star Office is about $75/seat and can be set up for dozens of people on one central computer with Office that costs hundreds per seat and must be maintained on each and every computer with painful tools. Contrast the power of GNU to DOS or any of the other malformed M$ "Unix ports". All of this adds up to a huge difference in hardware and software costs for much less funcitonality and far greater pain.
The solutions? More adverts and a continued effort of dominate every facet of computing. It's stupid because they can't maintain what the've already got. Though hoplessly outnumbered, they continue to try to take on new projects, X-Box, moble phones, servers, handhelds. Nuts, their greed is their undoing.
It's only going to get worse for them. They have entered the typical downward cycle of a failing company. Their basic model of software development through aquisition and minimal maintenence was never nice but is now dysfuncitonal as fewer people take the bait and develop for M$ platforms. Look for them to become ever less capable of making decisions and more erratic. They will concentrate on silly things like tablet PCs and bet the company multiple times on hardware their software can't support in a competitive way. At some point their declining stock price will trigger panics and layoffs. In the end they will engage in more silly SCO type lawsuits because that's all they will have left.
Oh, that's true. Microsoft has bought many software companies and stagnated all the code. I could care less what they do outside unAmerican lobby efforts. They can't stagnate free code without bad laws to back them up any more than they can win developers back. It was over about 4 years ago when all of the developers left the M$ community. The result is what you see. Microsoft's employees can only do so much. The free software world is doing much more.
My laptop is a P90. It makes a very good X terminal to my "real" machines, all running Debian. A 400 MHz K6/2 provides adequate response from Star Office 5.2 or 6.0. I can't vouch for Open Office. So yes, your old P90 is still useful and you don't need to go buy an expenxive new computer just to buy eXPensive new software. Microsoft's technology gaps are based on obsolete software production and marketing models that they can not reconcile.
Any teacher that demands my little girl uses some crappy vendor lock in format like Word, is going to get lots of help from me. I'll bring them over and show them how to be free and make better use of scarce resources.
Good. The more such hacking and virus writing schools will be around the world the less chances Windows will have to survive on the market.
That's true, but not for the reasons you put forth.
So, until the law will work we have to live in the anarchy and chaos of hackers, virus writers and, of course, spammers (BTW, not spammer courses around yet?).
The law will no more catch up to cracking than it will catch up to murder. It will always be possible.
The more bad guys the less Windows market share.
That does not follow. It only takes a few malicious people to screw the M$ monoculture. The more knowledgable people there are, the fewer people will use M$. I don't see this place creating bad guys, I see it teaching people skills they can use one way or another.
A security plan involves the follwoing things:
Know your assets, what you want to protect.
Know what you consider damage to your assets.
Know how people might cause that damage.
Know how to prevent, mitigate and track the damage.
While other schools are teaching dummies how to use VB script, this one will learn why they should not.
A simple minded aproach would have a ship inside a big bug zapper. Enough juice might be able to vaporize micro meteors. It would be more interesting to create magnetic fields with current flow and so reduce ionic bombardment from solar flares.
Good luck setting and keeping QT as a default type for IE. w2k asks you a zillion times if you really want to do that, then it does not do it right. Microsoft is agressively pushing it's inferior Windows Media Player with all the usual dirty tricks like that. This not only makes viewing PNG difficult or impossible, it also interfers with viewing the M$ avi file format which Windows Media Player treats as audio, displaying an "ambience" instead of your digicam's movie. Mozilla on the same computer works faster and better, in part because it respects you choice of plugins.
IE suffers from other technical problems due to the underlying OS. Long filenames with multiple endings confuse it, and there are other problems that a free software box would never have.
What you are really seeing here is the result of a long string of Marketing over Technology decisions at M$. Their technology gap is real and hoplessly large. Their ignoring PNG is just one more small reason to abandon the platform. The larger reason to abandon the platform is their root cause and their licensing terms. M$ just won't play nice.
Nah, just lazy. I hate to write the same thing twice in one thread.
I looked up speech recoginition too. There you go.
First we have to ask what do you want to use the device for? If you want to bang out lots of text, forget this and get a desktop with a good keyboard. If you want to do quick email and web browse, graphiti is all you need. I've used graphiti for data logging in a plant, and it worked well with templates. If you want a little more text in your email or want to take notes, go for speach recognition. Record, ogg, recognize at your later. I'm not very impressed by programs that take many letters at a time in a drawing and process them by graphiti, so that all the errors are left embeded.
Low sales = low prices. I imagine sales are down because M$'s eXPensive software blows.
The combination of X and ordinary free software on this platform blows away M$ offerings which restrict you to one user one computer one program, DOS days limits. Find and grep are powerful search tools and not that difficult to learn or use. KDE's embeded konsol has stylus buttons that make using the command line easy: shortcuts to history, enter and commands from a pull down menue that remembers your most common commands. Of course, for note taking, it would be much easier to simply record the conversation as ogg files and then use speach recognition to convert it, how's that for "intuitive"?. At 800 MHz, you should be able to do that, recoginize your hadwriting and serve it all out with apatche dynamically at the same time. Try that with eXPensive software.
What wishful thinking! All the FUD in the world won't save an obsolete business model.
It's natural for them to take this view so easily because they've been conditioned all their lives to believe that "there's no such thing as a free lunch"
Go back to arguing that the TCO of free software is greater than that of Microsoft crap, it's more convincing though no less honest or correct. There is no such thing as a free lunch but there is such a thing as not getting ripped off all day long. I don't pay an anual fee for the IP involved in manila folders, yet I use them every day. OS theory and software concepts are as well knows, get used to it. People have co-operated for their mutual benifit to make software. It works better and it's available for close to it's true market value. It's not free and it will always take effort to get any use of it, but it now the effort required is approaching that of M$ junk. Nothing magic here, just good hard work paying off. Management understands that and this FUD campaign is going to backfire in the worst of ways on M$.
Do you pay a license to ATT? You won't pay a license to SCO either. In the highly unlikely case SCO proves someone missapropriated 80 lines of kernel code, those lines will be replaced overnight. SCO can fold those 80 lines till they're nothing but sharp corners and shove them up their collective assholes. The rest of the kernel is free, GPL and no one need pay anything but shipping charges to the source which they can then turn around and serve out all day long gratis.
Linux won't go away, it will always be legal and corporate users are going to use it for the same reasons the rest of us will.
Well, duh. The problem is that a sequence that gives the same average "payout" may also be aranged to strip money from people the fastest way possible. Enticements that would not come naturally can be used to get the suckers to dump their money in at unatural rates. The results are not the same in that money comes at a faster rate per time.
The real cheat, of course, is using fictional income to cover illegal earnings. Trust small minded crooks to want to maximize their haul and cheat each other, but there's no such thing as a profitable gambling house. If the place ever made a profit, it would be taxed! So you have to spend all that money from your drug sales and pimping and God only knows on your friends. Pity isn't it? At the same time, why not cheat your customers at the arm?
Fine for you. The rest of us are setting up mesh nodes so we don't need to pay a monthly fee to anyone. Good luck, but don't cry when people get around you with their own equipment.
Would play fair in this case mean be late with a bloated version for MS Windows, and overpriced?
No, "Play fair" means not dumping your inferior word processor, manipulating vendors and breaking your competitor's code on your OS. It would also mean not buying 10% of your competitor so you can keep it off alternate platforms, like Microsoft did right after Corel made Linux binaries.
Because that was the case. The first versions of Satellite Software WordPerfect for MS Windows were confusing and bloated. There was one version requiring 6 MB RAM when the norm was 4 MB; MS WinWord at the time asked for only 2 MB. And MS WinWord was cheaper, especially if acquired in MS Office, which was also better integrated.
Put down the crackpipe, please. Every version of Word Perfect has worked faster and easier then the concurent Word version. Word Perfect 4.x was much better then the equivalent DOS Word. Word Perfect 5.1 was much better than the equvalent DOS or Windoze Word and secritaries continued to use it long after newer versions were introduced. Word Perfect 5.2, the first windoze version, is still a fine word processor on Win9x computers, and it's still easier to use than any Word since. Word Perfect 6.0 took up lots of space but was still easier to use and had more useful features than Word. The Linux native Word Perfect worked well on 150 MHz machines, can you say that for Word XP? It offered nice X integration and was a truely useful program. I wish they had continued it and hope to see these Vector Capitol people put one out.
There are plenty of law firms out there ready to have Word Perfect back on a stable platform. They are enough to make it happen too.
That's a poor excuse for unethical behavior and it does not lead to profits. When you see reasoning like that, sell out, quit and don't buy what they are selling. Someone else will do it better eventually.
A company has obligations to it's shareholders, it's customers and it's employees. Any company that decides to screw one of those three interests for the others will get around to screwing everyone. When you think it's OK to screw people, you screw everyone.
Anti competitive behavior screws all three interests at the same time. It screws the share holder by driving out other legitimate investments. It screws the customer by monopoly rents. It screws the employees by destroying competitive employers. Anti competitive behavior also leads to stagnation, which screws all three intersts again by blocking legitimate industry growth.
Good. Use it for 802.11 style community based internet service. It would revolutionize telom and all information services. The internet was designed to be free, this specturm in the hads of the people could make it so. Imagine being able to host your own content with your own equipment without paying a fee for anything but electicity.
I think The Goatse.cx Channel would get quite a following
What you chose to look at and point to is your business. I don't visit your "dump" very often, nor would I recomend it to others, though it's really no worse that broadcast TV. No big deal, someone else might like what you do. (the fly is funny, To get closeups of a fly, use the eyepiece from a set of binoculars or a telescope) Dump or flowers the user can chose. One day everyone might be able to serve as well and there will be more intersting stuff in the world than a few dozen TV executives could ever imagine anyone would be interested in.
Buisness week caters to people who wish they were the boss. Actual leaders know to trust people who know better for technical decisions. Places where the big dogs reach down to make other people's decisions based on tripe like that don't last long.
She's the one who ordered her slaves to burn her alive on a funeral pire as a signal of spite and hatred to her former lover Uni^H^H^H Ulyses? Or was that SCO? Oh well, so much for her reputation. I suppose she'll just ride that M$ desktop down the rest of her career.
Moron or a shill. They want to be able to discredit anyone who would say they are full of shit. "They don't have all the information." they can say. So what exactly are they showing? What's the point? Their shills can say, "I've seen the code and SCO is dead to rights." without having to prove a thing.
It's SCO precictable. Expect loads more BS to flow before these morons go away.
That the NDA would be unacceptable was so predictable it's not even funny. Only M$ and SCO shills would sign that thing and SCO is going to say stupid things about free software advocates who refuse to put themselves at the mercy of the state of Utah. Next, they will plant chunks of code someplace and say the anarchists put it there.
Fuck you SCO.
Lex Luthor, eat your heart out.
You can already find P150's in the trash. Soon enough, 400 MHz and better machines will be there. If not, they are available cheaply through coprorate "asset recovery" schemes which do very well.
The "enhancements" are dubious and often come before a purchase. No, M$ coders don't sit around playing solitare, but they are instructed to make error messages for competitor's programs. Outside DRM, new widgets for XP and futile ventures into TV, cell phones, and tablet PCs, I'm not sure what M$ has been doing. Only they can tell.
In any case, there's not much out there to buy. M$ so squashed all the software firms that bought into the M$ way, that there have been few dumb enough to follow in their footsteps. As Lotus, Corel and other huge firms failed, VC went to zero and developers exited to free software. They won't buy GPL, what's left to them?
They have borged themseves into so much software they can't keep half of it competitive. IE can not keep up with Mozilla. Word never was as good as Word Perfect and now a slew of superior editors are rising. Their email client is a hopless security nighmare. Their aging GUI is hoplessly outclassed by modern well thought out windowing systems like X. Their kenrel still lacks fundamental archetecture to keep track of running processes and users. Their inability to see various file systems is also a liability. Most of the problems they foist onto their users in a vain attempt to lock them in. Free software is, for that reason, eminsly easier to use and maintain. The differnce between the two systems is so huge now that people are realizing that they not only don't need Microsft, they are better off without them. That's what Steve's complaint is all about. This is just the start of their flailing.
It's going to hurt in the short term, but Microsft's elimination will be better for everyone. Free software answers people's needs more directly and efficently. The difference will be kept by consultants, programers and the compaines being served. All your base is free, get you some!
The solutions? More adverts and a continued effort of dominate every facet of computing. It's stupid because they can't maintain what the've already got. Though hoplessly outnumbered, they continue to try to take on new projects, X-Box, moble phones, servers, handhelds. Nuts, their greed is their undoing.
It's only going to get worse for them. They have entered the typical downward cycle of a failing company. Their basic model of software development through aquisition and minimal maintenence was never nice but is now dysfuncitonal as fewer people take the bait and develop for M$ platforms. Look for them to become ever less capable of making decisions and more erratic. They will concentrate on silly things like tablet PCs and bet the company multiple times on hardware their software can't support in a competitive way. At some point their declining stock price will trigger panics and layoffs. In the end they will engage in more silly SCO type lawsuits because that's all they will have left.
Oh, that's true. Microsoft has bought many software companies and stagnated all the code. I could care less what they do outside unAmerican lobby efforts. They can't stagnate free code without bad laws to back them up any more than they can win developers back. It was over about 4 years ago when all of the developers left the M$ community. The result is what you see. Microsoft's employees can only do so much. The free software world is doing much more.
Any teacher that demands my little girl uses some crappy vendor lock in format like Word, is going to get lots of help from me. I'll bring them over and show them how to be free and make better use of scarce resources.
That's true, but not for the reasons you put forth.
So, until the law will work we have to live in the anarchy and chaos of hackers, virus writers and, of course, spammers (BTW, not spammer courses around yet?).
The law will no more catch up to cracking than it will catch up to murder. It will always be possible.
The more bad guys the less Windows market share.
That does not follow. It only takes a few malicious people to screw the M$ monoculture. The more knowledgable people there are, the fewer people will use M$. I don't see this place creating bad guys, I see it teaching people skills they can use one way or another.
A security plan involves the follwoing things:
While other schools are teaching dummies how to use VB script, this one will learn why they should not.