It also assumes that the factory did not print 16 million extra copies and that the "pirates" won't be able to duplicate the image. The widespread counterfieting of currency is evidence to the contrary.
Later, when she returned to the bank that had been her original destination that morning and took possession of the lost driver's license, it was a perfect forgery -- with a hologram and a California seal -- and it had Lodrick's name but Nelson's photo and physical characteristics.
"You can buy the technology (to add marks and holograms) on your computer from companies that have legitimate government contracts and then make a lot of money selling the technology to people they must know are not legitimate," Fairbairn said. "Millions and millions of dollars." The black market, he said, is "a growth industry."
It's amazing how deeply you trolls will modbomb usefull and accurate information. Keep bombing, that's what Bill Gates pays you for.
You know, jokes are one thing, but this is just painful. Is this what you mean when you say anyone who doesn't think like you is "against freedom"?
Actually, I said I was an advocate of freedom. I also have a sense of humor, which is something you should try. I don't know what you think, dedazo, because I've never seen you have a thought.
The fact that it took five months for this to get caught shows the problem: There could have been anything there. Whoever stuck in that photo could have stuck in a penis, and Microsoft will probably feel the need to go with overkill to prevent that ever happening.
Lesson learned: put your penis in it, they are going to fire you anyway. If you are short in that department, you might put a picture of someone you don't like in it.
What I'm waiting to see are Debian swirls, happy Mac faces, iPods, Tux and other funnies.
Before this, I thought Vista DVDs were worth less than an AOL coaster, but now I know there's entertainment value. Sooner or later, I'd like to add one of these to my software CD collection. It's significant enough as the failure of Windoze edition. They will end up in the trash sooner than later.
It also assumes that the factory did not print 16 million extra copies and that the "pirates" won't be able to duplicate the image. The widespread counterfieting of currency is evidence to the contrary. M$'s attempt to print money by boxing bits is laughable, despite his previous success. Vista is still not selling.
Well, we certainly agree on the text of the constitution. I'm not qualified to debate in detail the intricacies of copyright law...
The language is clear and there's not much to debate about. Intricacies and details that contradict such clear language are deceptive nonsense.
Your contention was that, "some form of copyright is ensconced within the US constitution, so to achieve the ideal you propose would require a successful constitutional amendment." I think we can both agree that is not true.
I don't like dealing with deceptive details, but you brought them up to avoid the simple question, "should it be against the law for people to share with their friends and family?" Laws are based on simple principles like that, which in theory are the will of those governed. Quibbling over details obscures the real issue which should direct the course of future laws.
Evacuating ISS is always a last resort, because should something happen to it while unoccupied, it'd be a total loss.
As opposed to the "total loss" suffered with crew on board? Men are more important than equipment and experiments. New equipment can be built and experiments can be repeated.
If the equipment can't sustain the men, it's time to bring them home. There will always be risks and facing them is brave. Wishful thinking in the face of known problems is foolhardy and irresponsible. It's better to risk the equipment for a month than the equipment and the men. If they can't fix it in a few days, all they will be able to do is sit for a month as things get worse.
Could these computers have MicroSoft's Windows as the OS?
OK, it failed the WGA and they could not update it in time to have relatively bug free solar drivers.
That's the skinny, but keep it under your hat. We don't want another row like this when Bill G finds out there's a problem with licensing. They will throw the IT head in jail and confiscate the rest of the machines.
Further, some form of copyright is ensconced within the US constitution, so to achieve the ideal you propose would require a successful constitutional amendment.
No copyright laws are mandatory. Copyright laws are entirely elective and must meet Constitutional goals to be valid. The basis of US copyright law comes from this innocent looking grant of permission:
Section. 8.
The Congress shall have Power To... promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
If at anytime authors and inventors are hindered by copyrights or patents, the laws are unconstitutional. Perpetual copyrights and patents are unconstitutional. Any law which limits your freedom and fails to promote progress of science and useful arts is unconstitutional. A person who believes in minimizing government intrusion would conclude that most current copyright laws are unconstitutional and that real rights have been trampled to protect private and public revenue.
Should it be against the law to share with your friends and family?
My answer is no and publishers need to get over it. Digital restrictions don't work and society is not going to tolerate the kind of laws required to make people obey. The point of publishing is to share information. It happened before mechanical presses and insane copyright law and it will happen when those silly laws are repealed. People have been singing, dancing, writing and otherwise entertaining each other forever and they will continue to do so. It is natural and right for people to share catchy tunes and intersting ideas with each other. Laws that forbid that kind of activity rob everyone for the benefit of a few. The laws required to enforce that kind of robbery are increasingly insane. The thousands of lawsuits launched in the US each year are thousands of people who are threatened with losing their life savings, reputation and earning power. It is a reign of terror designed to keep money flowing to obsolete businesses. People are not going to put up with that for long.
I just have a few questions which probably are irrelevant to all this but, what happens if you have 4 or 5 people split the cost of a few albums equally and then listen to the music between themselves on a folder available over a network connection... is this breaking the law?
The MAFIAA companies have already slammed at least one company where employees were sharing their music over their network. I do not think it was criminal at the time but the MAFIAA took all of the companies assets just the same.
What you are looking at is the difficulty of making a private or public electronic library. If we want free libraries in the future, copyright law must be drastically changed. The way things are going, we will end up with a pay per play memory hole where everything is expensive and nothing can be trusted. Copyright law is intends to enrich the public domain, but it has been used to outlaw it.
Society is finally crawling out of the information dark age caused by public broadcast monopolies. Yes, people were less informed under consolidated print and broadcast than they were with more expensive but independent printing technology. Finally, with free electronic publication, we can hear voices other than those of two or three industrial giants.
I do generally disagree with nearly everything you say. You don't like Microsoft. We get it, it's not a bloody religion you should preach. I don't like Stallman, I don't preach the evils of the FSF (even though their ultimate goals are noble, I just don't agree with the way Stallman goes about it. My opinion, your miles may vary).
All I advocate is user freedom. How can you dissagree with that? Why do you get angry when people point out M$'s flaws, both moral and product? Is your love of M$ so great that your own freedom is unimportant and you are willing to put up with software that's second rate? I may not have to use it, but I hear people whine about it all the time. Paradoxically, the people who whine the loudest are the biggest defenders. Office, Outlook, Exchange and the other things you praise, are they more important than your freedom? The ownership of your computer and it's contents?
There's something wrong with your world view. It's keeping you from seeing that Vista is not selling, that XP never sold well enough and that the non free way of doing business is over.
with how often you get moderated Troll, I wonder how you can post more than once a day
I think it's funny you would know how that works. It makes sense when I survey all of the insults you hurl. "utter bullshit," "morons like you," "whiney, zealous imbeciles," you sound like Steve Ballmer.
... but it works as well as their speech recognition. Between this, face recognition and kill drones OBL will be found and exterminated early and often. I hope it's not me next.
The programmers put in an Easter egg, just for you. Whenever Twitter says "shit" into his cell phone, the official Microsoft transcript has "M$".
far too many RTFM's for the OSS community to be lecturing Closed Source companies on treating people like they matter.
Where do you see that? It's not on my LUG or in the class I help teach. Elitism is entirely a closed source constrution. Non free software is designed from the beginning to keep people helpless and divided, to create haves and have nots. Free software, by design, is inclusive and friendly. Have you ever seen a Vista install fest where enthusiastic volunteers come together and give a configured OS to anyone who wants it?
Are you actually praising the upgrade train and trying to tell me that people like it? That's the impression I get when I read:
Microsoft's got a tight-knit set of products out there - businesses want to run Office because everybody else does, so they buy Windows to run it on, and buy upgrades to Office when it comes out, and buy upgrades to Windows when Office needs them.
Let's get this straight. M$ is coercive monopoly. People do not want Vista because it's expensive and restrictive. People are not buying it. The only thing they want less than Vista is a new Office design, complete with a format no one can open that forces them to buy the OS they don't want.
The real question is how long hardware vendors can hold their breath before deserting M$ entirely. They have waited six years for Vista and it's a dud. Retailer have been squeezed into buying 20,000,000 coppies of Vista that no one is buying, which adds insult to the poor hardware sales injury. The complex and anti-competitive standards M$ has pushed on hardware makers has made hardware purchases a real crapshot, solved only by purchasing systems as a unit or meticulous research. How long are they going to back that kind of inefficiency when the result is a stab in the back like Plays for Sure?
Their "crown jewels" are third rate and increasingly irrelevant. Digital restrictions are an obvious dissaster which must be removed if they want any media market share. After six years of development, mostly wasted on digital restrictions, we get Vista. I've never, ever, heard anyone say they like a new Office format that causes them to go spend a bunch of money. M$ can't fix these problems on their own and no one is going to ride to their aid unless the result is really free.
M$ has a choice to make: go free or die. I have not had any of their stuff in my house for six years and I could care less. Either way they are a diminishing threat to hardware and file formats.
Irritating Windoze defender, Macthorpe, pretends there's a GNU/Linux botnet problem:
Have you ever heard of Q8bot or kaiten? Probably not, but they're Unix/Linux flavoured bots. So much for your 'all botnets are Windoze' FUD.
Well, no, I had not heard of such things. Ever helpful Macthorpe even offered a link to tell me why I don't hear about such things. They are listed under this heading:
Besides these three types of bots which we find on a nearly daily basis, there are also other bots that we see more seldom. Some of these bots offer "nice" features and are worth mentioning here:
In the description, they note they have yet to find the mechanism of spread. A reasonable person will conclude that Botnets are a Windoze created problem and not something to worry about. After all, study after study shows the average time it takes to break a Windoze box is on the order of minutes, but a GNU/Linux box will last for months out of the box. A paranoid person will wonder if M$ has not honeynetted honeynet themselves with bogus infected GNU/Linux machines.
In spite of his obvious and heavy bias towards Gecko, he chose KHTML. That should tell you something about the quality of the Gecko codebase.
What it tells me is that KHTML was better suited to the task. Without knowing more about programming for OSX, I can't tell you more than that other than both Gecko and KHTML could have done the job.
Konqueror has spoiled me. KIOslaves rock. Nothing comes close to it in terms of a unified desktop experience.
kdevelop is nice, but I don't do a lot of GUI programming. For what I do, Kate and kdbg work great.
Kate is a good GUI text editor and a joy to use. It has a file browser and quick picker for open files. Sessions act like project files, so you can quickly load all the files you need to work on. The editor itself has excellent syntax highlighting, tabs and split screens, so you can see multiple versions of the same file and compare it to others.
Kdbg is a GUI front end to the gnu debugger. It has all the usual things and a few nice extras all workable with a mouse. It has easy to manipulate step through, locals and watches. Variables that change are highlighted in red. One of the neat extras the watches has is the ability to do simple math and return values of functions used in your code. If you have a function dot_ab(a b) that returns dot products, you can put variables you are watching in and get back the answer you want.
I don't know what "the relative risks" means, but since none of my Windows machines are in a botnet...
I'd believe you if you were running some other software to monitor your network activity, but that's beside the point.
What I want from the FBI are statistics on botnet populations. How many computers are compromised and what steps were taken to secure them that failed. Michael Dell and Vint Cerf estimate that 25% of "internet connected" computers are part of a botnet. I think they have vastly underestimated the problem, that botnets are entirely Windoze driven and that most of the steps taken by people like you are ineffective. None of these things is really effective and using Microsoft's auto-update is the surest way to have your computer broken. The FBI is collecting and can provide some hard numbers to back up our assertions. If you care about truth, you want the numbers.
Maybe one of these days you'll inherit 800 million completely clueless users, and maybe then you'll call it a "Linux problem"?
Free software welcomes the people you and M$ despise, but there will be no equivalent monoculture for them and the problem will go away as it becomes increasingly more difficult and less profitable.
The advice given to home users (and this) is clearly Windows specific, even though Windows is not mentioned. They go through the usual laundry list of things which are failing corporate users, firewalls, "patches", anti-virus and so on and so forth. Way down in the glossary is a mention of "Linux" linked to the "webopedia".
As I said before, these are important first steps. The information presented may be useful to novice computer users, but it's incomplete because it does not include some of the most effective options. We can only hope they follow up on this start.
That they are looking into the problem is a good start. Gmen reading are advised to consult with the Honeynet Project and regard vector vendor "help" with suspicion. It would also be nice to see them call a spade a spade and abandon the false OS neutrality that keeps them for doing so. This is a Windows problem and the relative risks should be published. Otherwise they are lying to us and keeping information we can all use locked away. Most importantly, though, they need to clean their own house.
If you drive for your work or have a small fleet of trucks, biodiesel is a winner. The key is to find a local restaurant willing to do business with you. They have waste oil and need to have it reliably removed. The equipment needed to clean that kind of oil is not expensive and your business will save money on fuel, especially now that the Iraq war has blown the price of petrol through the roof. An added benefit is that biodiesel is easier on your engine and my lungs, so both last longer. I know someone who's been doing this for years and he's very happy with it.
Taxes are always a wild card. It would suck if big oil managed to tax away biodiesel.
This is a complete lie. If I'm looking at a FOSS OS, then I have a much smaller list of products I can use, INCREASING my cost compared to say, running Windows, which allows the use of whatever hardware is cheaper.
I don't think so. Free software can be deployed on dozens of architectures, from embedded to big iron. Windoze does i368 only and the newest only comes with drivers for the very newest, most expensive i386. 64bit Linux and BSD have better hardware support than Vista does right now. XP only works with i386 that's as old as it is, but free software can use all of that AND other architectures. So are right only if your idea of cheapest hardware is the cheapest of the newest, most expensive i386 compatibles. Outside of the intentional churn of i386, the world is much cheaper.
Bill Gates has done his best to make life difficult for other software, so there are some problems. Winmodems, cheap wifi chips and other hardware are best avoided and perform poorly under Windoze too. Once you get past that, your hardware always works better and longer if you use free software and that represents significant savings.
Slashdot Mirror
It also assumes that the factory did not print 16 million extra copies and that the "pirates" won't be able to duplicate the image. The widespread counterfieting of currency is evidence to the contrary.
And from a story the next day, a report of just that:
It's amazing how deeply you trolls will modbomb usefull and accurate information. Keep bombing, that's what Bill Gates pays you for.
You know, jokes are one thing, but this is just painful. Is this what you mean when you say anyone who doesn't think like you is "against freedom"?
Actually, I said I was an advocate of freedom. I also have a sense of humor, which is something you should try. I don't know what you think, dedazo, because I've never seen you have a thought.
From your M$ blog article:
Lesson learned: put your penis in it, they are going to fire you anyway. If you are short in that department, you might put a picture of someone you don't like in it.
What I'm waiting to see are Debian swirls, happy Mac faces, iPods, Tux and other funnies.
Before this, I thought Vista DVDs were worth less than an AOL coaster, but now I know there's entertainment value. Sooner or later, I'd like to add one of these to my software CD collection. It's significant enough as the failure of Windoze edition. They will end up in the trash sooner than later.
you have to play them forward to hear the devil talking.
And you have to let it onto your computer for it to do any real harm.
it only assumes the buyer cares.
It also assumes that the factory did not print 16 million extra copies and that the "pirates" won't be able to duplicate the image. The widespread counterfieting of currency is evidence to the contrary. M$'s attempt to print money by boxing bits is laughable, despite his previous success. Vista is still not selling.
Well, we certainly agree on the text of the constitution. I'm not qualified to debate in detail the intricacies of copyright law ...
The language is clear and there's not much to debate about. Intricacies and details that contradict such clear language are deceptive nonsense.
Your contention was that, "some form of copyright is ensconced within the US constitution, so to achieve the ideal you propose would require a successful constitutional amendment." I think we can both agree that is not true.
I don't like dealing with deceptive details, but you brought them up to avoid the simple question, "should it be against the law for people to share with their friends and family?" Laws are based on simple principles like that, which in theory are the will of those governed. Quibbling over details obscures the real issue which should direct the course of future laws.
Evacuating ISS is always a last resort, because should something happen to it while unoccupied, it'd be a total loss.
As opposed to the "total loss" suffered with crew on board? Men are more important than equipment and experiments. New equipment can be built and experiments can be repeated.
If the equipment can't sustain the men, it's time to bring them home. There will always be risks and facing them is brave. Wishful thinking in the face of known problems is foolhardy and irresponsible. It's better to risk the equipment for a month than the equipment and the men. If they can't fix it in a few days, all they will be able to do is sit for a month as things get worse.
Could these computers have MicroSoft's Windows as the OS?
OK, it failed the WGA and they could not update it in time to have relatively bug free solar drivers.
That's the skinny, but keep it under your hat. We don't want another row like this when Bill G finds out there's a problem with licensing. They will throw the IT head in jail and confiscate the rest of the machines.
Further, some form of copyright is ensconced within the US constitution, so to achieve the ideal you propose would require a successful constitutional amendment.
No copyright laws are mandatory. Copyright laws are entirely elective and must meet Constitutional goals to be valid. The basis of US copyright law comes from this innocent looking grant of permission:
If at anytime authors and inventors are hindered by copyrights or patents, the laws are unconstitutional. Perpetual copyrights and patents are unconstitutional. Any law which limits your freedom and fails to promote progress of science and useful arts is unconstitutional. A person who believes in minimizing government intrusion would conclude that most current copyright laws are unconstitutional and that real rights have been trampled to protect private and public revenue.
Should it be against the law to share with your friends and family?
My answer is no and publishers need to get over it. Digital restrictions don't work and society is not going to tolerate the kind of laws required to make people obey. The point of publishing is to share information. It happened before mechanical presses and insane copyright law and it will happen when those silly laws are repealed. People have been singing, dancing, writing and otherwise entertaining each other forever and they will continue to do so. It is natural and right for people to share catchy tunes and intersting ideas with each other. Laws that forbid that kind of activity rob everyone for the benefit of a few. The laws required to enforce that kind of robbery are increasingly insane. The thousands of lawsuits launched in the US each year are thousands of people who are threatened with losing their life savings, reputation and earning power. It is a reign of terror designed to keep money flowing to obsolete businesses. People are not going to put up with that for long.
I just have a few questions which probably are irrelevant to all this but, what happens if you have 4 or 5 people split the cost of a few albums equally and then listen to the music between themselves on a folder available over a network connection... is this breaking the law?
The MAFIAA companies have already slammed at least one company where employees were sharing their music over their network. I do not think it was criminal at the time but the MAFIAA took all of the companies assets just the same.
What you are looking at is the difficulty of making a private or public electronic library. If we want free libraries in the future, copyright law must be drastically changed. The way things are going, we will end up with a pay per play memory hole where everything is expensive and nothing can be trusted. Copyright law is intends to enrich the public domain, but it has been used to outlaw it.
Society is finally crawling out of the information dark age caused by public broadcast monopolies. Yes, people were less informed under consolidated print and broadcast than they were with more expensive but independent printing technology. Finally, with free electronic publication, we can hear voices other than those of two or three industrial giants.
I do generally disagree with nearly everything you say. You don't like Microsoft. We get it, it's not a bloody religion you should preach. I don't like Stallman, I don't preach the evils of the FSF (even though their ultimate goals are noble, I just don't agree with the way Stallman goes about it. My opinion, your miles may vary).
All I advocate is user freedom. How can you dissagree with that? Why do you get angry when people point out M$'s flaws, both moral and product? Is your love of M$ so great that your own freedom is unimportant and you are willing to put up with software that's second rate? I may not have to use it, but I hear people whine about it all the time. Paradoxically, the people who whine the loudest are the biggest defenders. Office, Outlook, Exchange and the other things you praise, are they more important than your freedom? The ownership of your computer and it's contents?
There's something wrong with your world view. It's keeping you from seeing that Vista is not selling, that XP never sold well enough and that the non free way of doing business is over.
with how often you get moderated Troll, I wonder how you can post more than once a day
I think it's funny you would know how that works. It makes sense when I survey all of the insults you hurl. "utter bullshit," "morons like you," "whiney, zealous imbeciles," you sound like Steve Ballmer.
... but it works as well as their speech recognition. Between this, face recognition and kill drones OBL will be found and exterminated early and often. I hope it's not me next.
The programmers put in an Easter egg, just for you. Whenever Twitter says "shit" into his cell phone, the official Microsoft transcript has "M$".
Wake me up when you have real evidence of Vista or Office 2007 sales.
far too many RTFM's for the OSS community to be lecturing Closed Source companies on treating people like they matter.
Where do you see that? It's not on my LUG or in the class I help teach. Elitism is entirely a closed source constrution. Non free software is designed from the beginning to keep people helpless and divided, to create haves and have nots. Free software, by design, is inclusive and friendly. Have you ever seen a Vista install fest where enthusiastic volunteers come together and give a configured OS to anyone who wants it?
Are you actually praising the upgrade train and trying to tell me that people like it? That's the impression I get when I read:
Microsoft's got a tight-knit set of products out there - businesses want to run Office because everybody else does, so they buy Windows to run it on, and buy upgrades to Office when it comes out, and buy upgrades to Windows when Office needs them.
Let's get this straight. M$ is coercive monopoly. People do not want Vista because it's expensive and restrictive. People are not buying it. The only thing they want less than Vista is a new Office design, complete with a format no one can open that forces them to buy the OS they don't want.
The real question is how long hardware vendors can hold their breath before deserting M$ entirely. They have waited six years for Vista and it's a dud. Retailer have been squeezed into buying 20,000,000 coppies of Vista that no one is buying, which adds insult to the poor hardware sales injury. The complex and anti-competitive standards M$ has pushed on hardware makers has made hardware purchases a real crapshot, solved only by purchasing systems as a unit or meticulous research. How long are they going to back that kind of inefficiency when the result is a stab in the back like Plays for Sure?
Their "crown jewels" are third rate and increasingly irrelevant. Digital restrictions are an obvious dissaster which must be removed if they want any media market share. After six years of development, mostly wasted on digital restrictions, we get Vista. I've never, ever, heard anyone say they like a new Office format that causes them to go spend a bunch of money. M$ can't fix these problems on their own and no one is going to ride to their aid unless the result is really free.
M$ has a choice to make: go free or die. I have not had any of their stuff in my house for six years and I could care less. Either way they are a diminishing threat to hardware and file formats.
Irritating Windoze defender, Macthorpe, pretends there's a GNU/Linux botnet problem:
Have you ever heard of Q8bot or kaiten? Probably not, but they're Unix/Linux flavoured bots. So much for your 'all botnets are Windoze' FUD.
Well, no, I had not heard of such things. Ever helpful Macthorpe even offered a link to tell me why I don't hear about such things. They are listed under this heading:
In the description, they note they have yet to find the mechanism of spread. A reasonable person will conclude that Botnets are a Windoze created problem and not something to worry about. After all, study after study shows the average time it takes to break a Windoze box is on the order of minutes, but a GNU/Linux box will last for months out of the box. A paranoid person will wonder if M$ has not honeynetted honeynet themselves with bogus infected GNU/Linux machines.
In spite of his obvious and heavy bias towards Gecko, he chose KHTML. That should tell you something about the quality of the Gecko codebase.
What it tells me is that KHTML was better suited to the task. Without knowing more about programming for OSX, I can't tell you more than that other than both Gecko and KHTML could have done the job.
Konqueror has spoiled me. KIOslaves rock. Nothing comes close to it in terms of a unified desktop experience.
kdevelop is nice, but I don't do a lot of GUI programming. For what I do, Kate and kdbg work great.
Kate is a good GUI text editor and a joy to use. It has a file browser and quick picker for open files. Sessions act like project files, so you can quickly load all the files you need to work on. The editor itself has excellent syntax highlighting, tabs and split screens, so you can see multiple versions of the same file and compare it to others.
Kdbg is a GUI front end to the gnu debugger. It has all the usual things and a few nice extras all workable with a mouse. It has easy to manipulate step through, locals and watches. Variables that change are highlighted in red. One of the neat extras the watches has is the ability to do simple math and return values of functions used in your code. If you have a function dot_ab(a b) that returns dot products, you can put variables you are watching in and get back the answer you want.
I don't know what "the relative risks" means, but since none of my Windows machines are in a botnet ...
I'd believe you if you were running some other software to monitor your network activity, but that's beside the point.
What I want from the FBI are statistics on botnet populations. How many computers are compromised and what steps were taken to secure them that failed. Michael Dell and Vint Cerf estimate that 25% of "internet connected" computers are part of a botnet. I think they have vastly underestimated the problem, that botnets are entirely Windoze driven and that most of the steps taken by people like you are ineffective. None of these things is really effective and using Microsoft's auto-update is the surest way to have your computer broken. The FBI is collecting and can provide some hard numbers to back up our assertions. If you care about truth, you want the numbers.
Maybe one of these days you'll inherit 800 million completely clueless users, and maybe then you'll call it a "Linux problem"?
Free software welcomes the people you and M$ despise, but there will be no equivalent monoculture for them and the problem will go away as it becomes increasingly more difficult and less profitable.
The advice given to home users (and this) is clearly Windows specific, even though Windows is not mentioned. They go through the usual laundry list of things which are failing corporate users, firewalls, "patches", anti-virus and so on and so forth. Way down in the glossary is a mention of "Linux" linked to the "webopedia".
As I said before, these are important first steps. The information presented may be useful to novice computer users, but it's incomplete because it does not include some of the most effective options. We can only hope they follow up on this start.
That they are looking into the problem is a good start. Gmen reading are advised to consult with the Honeynet Project and regard vector vendor "help" with suspicion. It would also be nice to see them call a spade a spade and abandon the false OS neutrality that keeps them for doing so. This is a Windows problem and the relative risks should be published. Otherwise they are lying to us and keeping information we can all use locked away. Most importantly, though, they need to clean their own house.
If you drive for your work or have a small fleet of trucks, biodiesel is a winner. The key is to find a local restaurant willing to do business with you. They have waste oil and need to have it reliably removed. The equipment needed to clean that kind of oil is not expensive and your business will save money on fuel, especially now that the Iraq war has blown the price of petrol through the roof. An added benefit is that biodiesel is easier on your engine and my lungs, so both last longer. I know someone who's been doing this for years and he's very happy with it.
Taxes are always a wild card. It would suck if big oil managed to tax away biodiesel.
This is a complete lie. If I'm looking at a FOSS OS, then I have a much smaller list of products I can use, INCREASING my cost compared to say, running Windows, which allows the use of whatever hardware is cheaper.
I don't think so. Free software can be deployed on dozens of architectures, from embedded to big iron. Windoze does i368 only and the newest only comes with drivers for the very newest, most expensive i386. 64bit Linux and BSD have better hardware support than Vista does right now. XP only works with i386 that's as old as it is, but free software can use all of that AND other architectures. So are right only if your idea of cheapest hardware is the cheapest of the newest, most expensive i386 compatibles. Outside of the intentional churn of i386, the world is much cheaper.
Bill Gates has done his best to make life difficult for other software, so there are some problems. Winmodems, cheap wifi chips and other hardware are best avoided and perform poorly under Windoze too. Once you get past that, your hardware always works better and longer if you use free software and that represents significant savings.