acting like a total prick and trying to beat confessions of wrongdoing out of the guy will surely make him repent all of his sins, join the EFF and start downloading movies.
That's not what I advocated, but this guy can do anything he wants. He's already a marked man, and will need video evidence that he was not rude just to keep himself from being fired. Acting like a prick is for industry flacks like yourself, jb.
Perhaps you could invite him to your class to discuss some issues but I wouldn't use this opportunity to harangue him and make yourself look like a whiny prick in the process.
It is already too late to co-operate and that's the story that will be told, regardless of what really happens. He just published his intention to ask difficult questions and will be treated as an enemy. The industry will now do it's worst to him regardless of what he does, so he might as well go down fighting.
If he or someone else records the QA session, it will be harder for the industry to lie about it but they will then smear him with other things. Angry people in odd places can and will be used as tools. To see how easy this is, look at what M$ did to Quinn. You can go further back and look at how telphone operators, hotel clerks and other people were happy to help the FBI wiretap and spy on Martin Luther King Jr.
The man or someone petending to be him has just kicked a powerful industry. Things are going to be hard for him.
Good idea, get student help. Make him feel the evil he's doing to people just like himself. There are several issues that he might be sympathetic to if he was presented with them and he could be made to say and do several useful things:
The average student only has a PC to watch movies and listen to music. Everthing else is too expensive and can be stolen. What is the MPAA doing to make their life easy? DRM is snake oil - get him to admit it is little more than a headache for legitimate users.
Get him to admit that video made the MPAA plenty of money. Ask why the member companies are so paranoid after watching supposedly deadly threats turn into profit centers.
The student victim of copyright warrior attacks. Get him to repudiate the RIAA's random and unjust attack on the student population. This would best be done by an actual victim.
What opportunities does his industry have for the graduating class? Does the career path he took still exist?
Chances are, he's just a flack. Even if you could gain his sympathy, it would not matter. What he says, though, can be good for all of us.
Maybe. Investing in a home installation? Call me when the break even point drops below 10 years. How many people even live in their houses for that long anymore?
There is growing evidence that CA suffered shortages and blackouts because generators wanted higher prices for themselves. They got those prices and more!
why a ps3? i'm no console player myself, but from what i heard so far from xbox360 vs ps3 is that the 360 is cheaper, better graphics (for now at least), more and better games
PS3 has way more capacity than that silly Xbox and will last much longer. It's also got a better chance of being a non free video hub, as it already is in the EU and Japan. Xbox 360 is just like the original Xbox, it's only a few months old and it already looks obsolete. PS3, on the other hand, is going to be around for years and that kind of stability encourages game makers. There's a reason PS2 so completely dominated the market and I expect things to stay that way.
This exact same journal entry was penned by twitter, who had it rejected from the Firehose probably because of his negative moderation and the fact that editors are starting to wise up to him.
You ACs and M$ spammers do this to me all the time. No big deal, it's not like I'd enforce a copyright or anything. Enjoy Twitter's work anyway you like.
It's funny that you would argue with what the president of Valve has to say about M$'s marketing strategy. What typical M$ bluster. Sometimes it can be useful, thank you so very much!
I can't even begin to imagine what the relevance of Christmas and back to school as claimed by twitter is for gamers who probably switch OSes only when they switch their $3,000 boxes anyway, but I'd say that 8% share is actually not bad in that segment.
If I can't run Vista on a $3,000 computer, what will it run on? Don't you think that kind of doubt is bad for the gaming market? If I'm going to buy a non free gaming system right now, it's going to be a $600 PS3.
As for the fortunes of Vistsa, we'll see. Looks like a sinking ship to me.
it's generally drivers and hardware that cause Windows to fail to suspend/resume, I'd be surprised if Linux running on the same hardware could.
Does the cause really matter if it's a universal problem?
At the same time, I've never met a laptop that would not work with either APM or ACPI power management under gnu/linux. The worst I've seen has been some buggy graphics, which are resolved by either an/etc/powersaved/events modification or switching to VT1 and back to X with ctrl-alt-F1, ctrl-alt-F7.
The irony of all this is that Bill Gates tried to make ACPI Windoze only. Free software had the manpower to overcome the insanely complicated and poorly implemented specification M$ came out with but non free software failed. Eventually, all of M$'s dirty tricks bite M$ harder than anyone else and the user always loses.
The 1990s called and would like their Win95/98/ME FUD back.... XP it's been mostly stable. It will go months between every time I have an involuntary shutdown...
There's not much difference between those releases, XP and Vista.
Everyone I know who uses XP boots it at least once a day because power management does not work for them. The widows web servers you mentioned with expensive hardware can barely make thirty days on average. Do you want airline customers to see a boot screen?
With Windows, you are stuck with a choice of an old OS that sort of works and the new one that does not. If they go with XP, they will soon look and be dated. How long do you think they could run XP and have it look new? Parts will be harder to get and reliability will go down toilet as the upgrade train leaves XP behind. You might as well recommend Win98 or W2k. Then there's Vista. The biggest problems with Vista involve media which, I presume, will be a major function of airline computers.
Non free software never really works because you would never have to replace it if it did. This makes Windows the wrong choice any year you care to bring it up.
Outside of Windows, you can use gnu/linux with cheap commodity hardware. It looks good and works well. Even you have noticed how well gnu/linux upgrades. That's exactly what airline passengers want to see, something that looks good and just works. Airline operators can look forward to giving them that for at least five years before they have to replace the system due to ordinary wear and tear. Can you tell them as much for XP?
Someone who reads everything I write but is still clueless, says:
Well, following your logic, now they have an OS synonymous with "difficult" in front of passengers.
That would be great from the airline's perspective. Pulling off that "difficult" and high tech thing called flying is what they are all about. I'd say it's easier to maintain a gnu/linux box than an airplane, but the one the passenger sees will instill trust in the other. We would all hope that the aircraft maker is lord and master of every line of every code that flies and that they can transfer that competence to the airline.
You might not have noticed but recent events have all played to free software's advantage. Secret, artificial and greedy are all very much out of favor. There are poison food, lead painted toy, wiretapping, voter fraud and scandals all contributing to a sudden outbreak of common sense. In food, Whole Foods and the like are cleaning up. Just try to give someone's kid a toy from China now and see how they look at you. State and local election commissions are looking at non free voting booths the same way. People are just starting to get angry about wiretaps, extraordinary rendition and other evil practices. In the software world, the greedy, non free way is failing in every way. You will see more gnu/linux because freedom, honesty, integrity and efficiency are things people crave.
Airlines are not going to put an OS synonymous with "crash" in front of passengers. Everything, right down to the lighting has to work well to keep the appearance of order. Anything else makes the passengers nervous and looking for another airline.
In most cases the user does not notice the impact of this as the decrease in network performance is slight.
Which is contradicted by the entire conversation. People have noticed that 90% performance drop on ordinary networks, not some fancy gigabit thing most people do not have yet.
'Well, our new architecture can't theoretically acheive X anymore, so it's a design limitation, not a bug'.
Must be a bug in their design process but it could be something to do with the company structure. I suspect it comes from the marketing interface which is horribly broken. The customer value in gates.h is still pointing to RIAA and MPAA rather than user.
I suppose this explains why MS has been so reticent to start afresh with the codebase until now. Even basic things are buggy and it's costing the reputation of the latest roll-out. Pushing Vista too early is only going to hinder long-term deployment.
This has been the case for every "new" M$ OS ever. When talking to their investors, they are proud to say they never enter a market that's not "mature" and always do so by purchasing someone else's "killer" code for pennies on the dollar. The only difference is that the problems have added up and that investors have quit funding Windoze startups so M$ no longer has anyone to buy. This is why exploits invariably encompass every version of Winblows listed by those who publish them. It's also part of the reason Vista has taken so long to roll out. Every "new" release of Winblows is promissed to have rewritten code from the ground up and all the best features of every rival without any of the problems. As the world outside of M$ is much larger than M$ itself, their boasting is clearly impossible. If reason alone is not good enough, just look back at all of the things promissed but not delivered for every previous version of Windows. I'm not sure they have delivered on all the promisses made for Win95 yet but I am sure their infamous "backward compatibility" is from never writting much new code.
Separating the value and the display solves the problem. As long as the value stored is preserved, other programs can work with it without introducing arbitrary changes. That M$ does not store the exact value and relies on the reader to make the same rounding error is crazy. It's a trap for every system that is not M$, and might not even work across different processors for M$.
I've run into this problem in my own work, where it did not matter. A data acquisition system I used required Winblows. It could write to either text or some nasty binary format. I chose text with a sufficient number of digits to avoid the binary conversion. This blew up my file size, but made it easy to read. In my case, the extra digits were noise anyway and it only gets read once by other programs. In a bank this clearly would not work. In a place where the values must be read and saved multiple times, this would not work. As a programmer, I'm a relative zero but even I can see how broken the M$ way is.
Value storage was only the beginning of OOXML problems. The formula and binary inclusions are even worse. Hopefully, ISO will reject this mess.
not everyone wants their software to be "Free" in the way RMS does
Not everyone wants to publish a newspaper either. That does not make it right to restrict presses.
The issue is what control authors have over their work. This court has weakened the control everyone has. Following the idiot logic of this court, I can take your unpublished manuscript, promote it, sell it and never fear an injunction simply because you did not restrict your work enough.
What's suddenly very unclear here is the difference between a 'license' and a 'contract'.
The terminology is meaningless.
You can call it anything you want, but that does not change what the GPL or any other license says and what that's based on. These things are based on copyright, where the author alone has the right to publish works. That power must be absolute to be worth anything. Copyleft licenses generously give people that right as long as they agree to a few simple conditions. People who refuse to obey those conditions lose their right to distribute.
The fact that copyleft authors are not collecting money should not be held against them because they are doing what copyright law was designed to encourage. In every other copyright violation case, the authors are allowed an injunction because the rogue publication does the author real financial harm. That harm, for a limited time, is held greater than the good done by extra publication. In the copyleft case, harm is also done to the author and the public. The author is deprived of control of work and potential revenue, which should not be ignored any more than the revenue from a previously unpublished work. The public is also deprived of their freedom. That freedom has motivated publication of lots of high quality software. If the purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation and distribution of public works, software freedom must be protected and preserved.
If these jokers managed to weaken copyright, they will undo the power that also protects most non free software. You can't weaken control of free work without weakening that of non free work and because non free publishers depend on so much more control, that weakening will be more important to them.
So what does this do for EULA? Do all the obnoxious terms of use suddenly vaporize? Can people now publish Oracle studies? Can I now use Front Page to say bad things about M$? Can I now use Windoze under as many VMs as I want and serve it with Xforwarding or as a web service because, I'm not really making a copy and that's all that copyright halts? I can see all sorts of ways the non free software world will rue the day copyright was weakened.
What would a zealot like you know about "Windoze"? Why should anyone listen to what you have to say about Microsoft/Apple/your "non-free" enemy du jour?
I used Windoze as a desktop for seven years, had program development as part of a job for a year, did more than a year of retail tech, and I'm still surrounded by it. I've seen it as a user, I've programed for it and I've seen how myself and other users get creamed by poor security and the intentional waste of non free software. That's how I know what I'm talking about.
The Bungi just admitted to never really having used free software. That makes him an idiot.
it's not like I'd switch to Linux anyway. Ubuntu completely screwed up my X configuration after an apt-get upgrade... [more hate for gnu/linux]
Gee, Mr. Bungi, why don't you use some of that BSD you claim to love. I'm sure that would be easier on you. What? You are really just a troll? Who would have guessed that?
As you can imagine I really don't like the GPL or the FSF or Richard Stallman or any of his friends too much. While I recognize their contributions I think that they've fallen into the trap of trying to force everyone to convert to what has become a quasi-religion [it goes on without gettin better]
I don't have to imagine your hatred because you constantly display it. What would a Windoze user like you know about freedom? Why should anyone listen to what you have to say about free software licenses?
Too bad Vista is also affected, along with other versions of "M$ Windoze".
I never said that today's screw up was intentional. I said it was food for thought. Sooner or later M$ is going to stop "authenticating" XP, Vista and every other OS they bother to authenticate.
For the last 18 hours or so,... the nag screen, the message in the corner and Aero isn't working
So, he and every other Vista and XP user has got degraded graphics and two big blinking signs that tell them they are dirty bad pirates. I'm going to play a few games to celebrate. Oh yes, feel the warm, golden Windows Advantage.
For me it started with XP. Since I can no longer interchange parts in and out of my computer without worrying about setting off the authentication
WGA is just another way to kill of old versions of Windoze. All M$ has to do to kill XP is to quit "authenticating" it. Sooner or later, every Windoze box has to be wiped and reloaded. You might do it once a month or you might wait a year or so, but it's all over when M$ kills it.
This feature was added because XP did not replace previous versions fast enough. The end of XP will come sooner because Vista is a failure. What's the use of having a teather if you never pull it?
Actions of supplying Iran, Cuba, Syria, North Korea and the other countries on the weapon export list with the technology or know how to build weapons can result in jail time.
You forgot China because it undermines the premise.
There is nothing on a UAV list the "bad guys" don't already have. Violations come when big dumb companies like Boeing provide countries with technology that improves the accuracy of ICBMs in a real way. Something that can be thought up by a few people in their garages is something you should assume the enemy already has.
I also expect a serious effort, backed by several billion dollars in bribe money (oops, excuse me, campaign contributions), to get open-source software outlawed on some kind of theory that it aids terrorists.
First note that this is not an Open Source problem. Lists that work with commercial software and hardware have the same set of concerns.
Nor is it a problem of lists. There's no reason to keep a person off a list. If this were true, it would be easy to DoS every list in existence by creating "Iranian" or "North Korean" sock puppets. It's what you put on the list that you have to be careful with and you should really expect information you share to go where you don't want it to. Each individual contributor has to be careful with what they put up.
Being cavalier and saying he shouldn't worry about it till they shut him down is encouraging him to gamble with his freedom.
A country where people can't get together and talk about their toys is a country that has abandoned its freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
A troll taunts:
acting like a total prick and trying to beat confessions of wrongdoing out of the guy will surely make him repent all of his sins, join the EFF and start downloading movies.
That's not what I advocated, but this guy can do anything he wants. He's already a marked man, and will need video evidence that he was not rude just to keep himself from being fired. Acting like a prick is for industry flacks like yourself, jb.
Perhaps you could invite him to your class to discuss some issues but I wouldn't use this opportunity to harangue him and make yourself look like a whiny prick in the process.
It is already too late to co-operate and that's the story that will be told, regardless of what really happens. He just published his intention to ask difficult questions and will be treated as an enemy. The industry will now do it's worst to him regardless of what he does, so he might as well go down fighting.
If he or someone else records the QA session, it will be harder for the industry to lie about it but they will then smear him with other things. Angry people in odd places can and will be used as tools. To see how easy this is, look at what M$ did to Quinn. You can go further back and look at how telphone operators, hotel clerks and other people were happy to help the FBI wiretap and spy on Martin Luther King Jr.
The man or someone petending to be him has just kicked a powerful industry. Things are going to be hard for him.
Think teamwork.
Good idea, get student help. Make him feel the evil he's doing to people just like himself. There are several issues that he might be sympathetic to if he was presented with them and he could be made to say and do several useful things:
Chances are, he's just a flack. Even if you could gain his sympathy, it would not matter. What he says, though, can be good for all of us.
Maybe. Investing in a home installation? Call me when the break even point drops below 10 years. How many people even live in their houses for that long anymore?
There is growing evidence that CA suffered shortages and blackouts because generators wanted higher prices for themselves. They got those prices and more!
why a ps3? i'm no console player myself, but from what i heard so far from xbox360 vs ps3 is that the 360 is cheaper, better graphics (for now at least), more and better games
PS3 has way more capacity than that silly Xbox and will last much longer. It's also got a better chance of being a non free video hub, as it already is in the EU and Japan. Xbox 360 is just like the original Xbox, it's only a few months old and it already looks obsolete. PS3, on the other hand, is going to be around for years and that kind of stability encourages game makers. There's a reason PS2 so completely dominated the market and I expect things to stay that way.
This exact same journal entry was penned by twitter, who had it rejected from the Firehose probably because of his negative moderation and the fact that editors are starting to wise up to him.
You ACs and M$ spammers do this to me all the time. No big deal, it's not like I'd enforce a copyright or anything. Enjoy Twitter's work anyway you like.
It's funny that you would argue with what the president of Valve has to say about M$'s marketing strategy. What typical M$ bluster. Sometimes it can be useful, thank you so very much!
I can't even begin to imagine what the relevance of Christmas and back to school as claimed by twitter is for gamers who probably switch OSes only when they switch their $3,000 boxes anyway, but I'd say that 8% share is actually not bad in that segment.
If I can't run Vista on a $3,000 computer, what will it run on? Don't you think that kind of doubt is bad for the gaming market? If I'm going to buy a non free gaming system right now, it's going to be a $600 PS3.
As for the fortunes of Vistsa, we'll see. Looks like a sinking ship to me.
it's generally drivers and hardware that cause Windows to fail to suspend/resume, I'd be surprised if Linux running on the same hardware could.
Does the cause really matter if it's a universal problem?
At the same time, I've never met a laptop that would not work with either APM or ACPI power management under gnu/linux. The worst I've seen has been some buggy graphics, which are resolved by either an /etc/powersaved/events modification or switching to VT1 and back to X with ctrl-alt-F1, ctrl-alt-F7.
The irony of all this is that Bill Gates tried to make ACPI Windoze only. Free software had the manpower to overcome the insanely complicated and poorly implemented specification M$ came out with but non free software failed. Eventually, all of M$'s dirty tricks bite M$ harder than anyone else and the user always loses.
The 1990s called and would like their Win95/98/ME FUD back. ... XP it's been mostly stable. It will go months between every time I have an involuntary shutdown ...
There's not much difference between those releases, XP and Vista.
Everyone I know who uses XP boots it at least once a day because power management does not work for them. The widows web servers you mentioned with expensive hardware can barely make thirty days on average. Do you want airline customers to see a boot screen?
With Windows, you are stuck with a choice of an old OS that sort of works and the new one that does not. If they go with XP, they will soon look and be dated. How long do you think they could run XP and have it look new? Parts will be harder to get and reliability will go down toilet as the upgrade train leaves XP behind. You might as well recommend Win98 or W2k. Then there's Vista. The biggest problems with Vista involve media which, I presume, will be a major function of airline computers.
Non free software never really works because you would never have to replace it if it did. This makes Windows the wrong choice any year you care to bring it up.
Outside of Windows, you can use gnu/linux with cheap commodity hardware. It looks good and works well. Even you have noticed how well gnu/linux upgrades. That's exactly what airline passengers want to see, something that looks good and just works. Airline operators can look forward to giving them that for at least five years before they have to replace the system due to ordinary wear and tear. Can you tell them as much for XP?
Someone who reads everything I write but is still clueless, says:
Well, following your logic, now they have an OS synonymous with "difficult" in front of passengers.
That would be great from the airline's perspective. Pulling off that "difficult" and high tech thing called flying is what they are all about. I'd say it's easier to maintain a gnu/linux box than an airplane, but the one the passenger sees will instill trust in the other. We would all hope that the aircraft maker is lord and master of every line of every code that flies and that they can transfer that competence to the airline.
You might not have noticed but recent events have all played to free software's advantage. Secret, artificial and greedy are all very much out of favor. There are poison food, lead painted toy, wiretapping, voter fraud and scandals all contributing to a sudden outbreak of common sense. In food, Whole Foods and the like are cleaning up. Just try to give someone's kid a toy from China now and see how they look at you. State and local election commissions are looking at non free voting booths the same way. People are just starting to get angry about wiretaps, extraordinary rendition and other evil practices. In the software world, the greedy, non free way is failing in every way. You will see more gnu/linux because freedom, honesty, integrity and efficiency are things people crave.
Airlines are not going to put an OS synonymous with "crash" in front of passengers. Everything, right down to the lighting has to work well to keep the appearance of order. Anything else makes the passengers nervous and looking for another airline.
gad_zuki quotes the M$ party line:
In most cases the user does not notice the impact of this as the decrease in network performance is slight.
Which is contradicted by the entire conversation. People have noticed that 90% performance drop on ordinary networks, not some fancy gigabit thing most people do not have yet.
'Well, our new architecture can't theoretically acheive X anymore, so it's a design limitation, not a bug'.
Must be a bug in their design process but it could be something to do with the company structure. I suspect it comes from the marketing interface which is horribly broken. The customer value in gates.h is still pointing to RIAA and MPAA rather than user.
I suppose this explains why MS has been so reticent to start afresh with the codebase until now. Even basic things are buggy and it's costing the reputation of the latest roll-out. Pushing Vista too early is only going to hinder long-term deployment.
This has been the case for every "new" M$ OS ever. When talking to their investors, they are proud to say they never enter a market that's not "mature" and always do so by purchasing someone else's "killer" code for pennies on the dollar. The only difference is that the problems have added up and that investors have quit funding Windoze startups so M$ no longer has anyone to buy. This is why exploits invariably encompass every version of Winblows listed by those who publish them. It's also part of the reason Vista has taken so long to roll out. Every "new" release of Winblows is promissed to have rewritten code from the ground up and all the best features of every rival without any of the problems. As the world outside of M$ is much larger than M$ itself, their boasting is clearly impossible. If reason alone is not good enough, just look back at all of the things promissed but not delivered for every previous version of Windows. I'm not sure they have delivered on all the promisses made for Win95 yet but I am sure their infamous "backward compatibility" is from never writting much new code.
Separating the value and the display solves the problem. As long as the value stored is preserved, other programs can work with it without introducing arbitrary changes. That M$ does not store the exact value and relies on the reader to make the same rounding error is crazy. It's a trap for every system that is not M$, and might not even work across different processors for M$.
I've run into this problem in my own work, where it did not matter. A data acquisition system I used required Winblows. It could write to either text or some nasty binary format. I chose text with a sufficient number of digits to avoid the binary conversion. This blew up my file size, but made it easy to read. In my case, the extra digits were noise anyway and it only gets read once by other programs. In a bank this clearly would not work. In a place where the values must be read and saved multiple times, this would not work. As a programmer, I'm a relative zero but even I can see how broken the M$ way is.
Value storage was only the beginning of OOXML problems. The formula and binary inclusions are even worse. Hopefully, ISO will reject this mess.
not everyone wants their software to be "Free" in the way RMS does
Not everyone wants to publish a newspaper either. That does not make it right to restrict presses.
The issue is what control authors have over their work. This court has weakened the control everyone has. Following the idiot logic of this court, I can take your unpublished manuscript, promote it, sell it and never fear an injunction simply because you did not restrict your work enough.
What's suddenly very unclear here is the difference between a 'license' and a 'contract'.
The terminology is meaningless.
You can call it anything you want, but that does not change what the GPL or any other license says and what that's based on. These things are based on copyright, where the author alone has the right to publish works. That power must be absolute to be worth anything. Copyleft licenses generously give people that right as long as they agree to a few simple conditions. People who refuse to obey those conditions lose their right to distribute.
The fact that copyleft authors are not collecting money should not be held against them because they are doing what copyright law was designed to encourage. In every other copyright violation case, the authors are allowed an injunction because the rogue publication does the author real financial harm. That harm, for a limited time, is held greater than the good done by extra publication. In the copyleft case, harm is also done to the author and the public. The author is deprived of control of work and potential revenue, which should not be ignored any more than the revenue from a previously unpublished work. The public is also deprived of their freedom. That freedom has motivated publication of lots of high quality software. If the purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation and distribution of public works, software freedom must be protected and preserved.
If these jokers managed to weaken copyright, they will undo the power that also protects most non free software. You can't weaken control of free work without weakening that of non free work and because non free publishers depend on so much more control, that weakening will be more important to them.
So what does this do for EULA? Do all the obnoxious terms of use suddenly vaporize? Can people now publish Oracle studies? Can I now use Front Page to say bad things about M$? Can I now use Windoze under as many VMs as I want and serve it with Xforwarding or as a web service because, I'm not really making a copy and that's all that copyright halts? I can see all sorts of ways the non free software world will rue the day copyright was weakened.
What would a zealot like you know about "Windoze"? Why should anyone listen to what you have to say about Microsoft/Apple/your "non-free" enemy du jour?
I used Windoze as a desktop for seven years, had program development as part of a job for a year, did more than a year of retail tech, and I'm still surrounded by it. I've seen it as a user, I've programed for it and I've seen how myself and other users get creamed by poor security and the intentional waste of non free software. That's how I know what I'm talking about.
The Bungi just admitted to never really having used free software. That makes him an idiot.
it's not like I'd switch to Linux anyway. Ubuntu completely screwed up my X configuration after an apt-get upgrade ... [more hate for gnu/linux]
Gee, Mr. Bungi, why don't you use some of that BSD you claim to love. I'm sure that would be easier on you. What? You are really just a troll? Who would have guessed that?
As you can imagine I really don't like the GPL or the FSF or Richard Stallman or any of his friends too much. While I recognize their contributions I think that they've fallen into the trap of trying to force everyone to convert to what has become a quasi-religion [it goes on without gettin better]
I don't have to imagine your hatred because you constantly display it. What would a Windoze user like you know about freedom? Why should anyone listen to what you have to say about free software licenses?
Too bad Vista is also affected, along with other versions of "M$ Windoze".
I never said that today's screw up was intentional. I said it was food for thought. Sooner or later M$ is going to stop "authenticating" XP, Vista and every other OS they bother to authenticate.
Let me quote another just calm down person:
So, he and every other Vista and XP user has got degraded graphics and two big blinking signs that tell them they are dirty bad pirates. I'm going to play a few games to celebrate. Oh yes, feel the warm, golden Windows Advantage.
For me it started with XP. Since I can no longer interchange parts in and out of my computer without worrying about setting off the authentication
WGA is just another way to kill of old versions of Windoze. All M$ has to do to kill XP is to quit "authenticating" it. Sooner or later, every Windoze box has to be wiped and reloaded. You might do it once a month or you might wait a year or so, but it's all over when M$ kills it.
This feature was added because XP did not replace previous versions fast enough. The end of XP will come sooner because Vista is a failure. What's the use of having a teather if you never pull it?
That is very funny.
Actions of supplying Iran, Cuba, Syria, North Korea and the other countries on the weapon export list with the technology or know how to build weapons can result in jail time.
You forgot China because it undermines the premise.
There is nothing on a UAV list the "bad guys" don't already have. Violations come when big dumb companies like Boeing provide countries with technology that improves the accuracy of ICBMs in a real way. Something that can be thought up by a few people in their garages is something you should assume the enemy already has.
This kind of bullshit was predicted three years ago:
First note that this is not an Open Source problem. Lists that work with commercial software and hardware have the same set of concerns.
Nor is it a problem of lists. There's no reason to keep a person off a list. If this were true, it would be easy to DoS every list in existence by creating "Iranian" or "North Korean" sock puppets. It's what you put on the list that you have to be careful with and you should really expect information you share to go where you don't want it to. Each individual contributor has to be careful with what they put up.
Being cavalier and saying he shouldn't worry about it till they shut him down is encouraging him to gamble with his freedom.
A country where people can't get together and talk about their toys is a country that has abandoned its freedom.