Why bother with a Windows solution? Is your tape drive that horrible? If it's scsi, there should be no problem mounting it up elsewhere and using all the normal tools like tar.
It would be easier still to use an external hard drive and grsync, a gui for rsync.
Did the situation occur in a mental hospital, or were the users you're talking about just mildly retarded? There's a fucking floppy disk icon at the top of application, it will open the Save As dialog if it's the first time you're saving it,
Details here, not that someone so rude as you deserves them.
It happened at my university.
She tried the silly floppy. It worked the first time but did not do what she wanted.
I had asked her for coppies so I could try them out with Open Office. It was a simple enough request - make a "hello world" Word Doc and save it to this USB fob.
As a long time word user she tried various keystrokes with no further result than a strobing Office Icon. As a long term M$ user, she's been trained to ignore all sorts of blinking and flashing and would never have noticed it on her own. It's amazing that the application understood what she wanted but did not give her any further indication that the most subtle color changing of something no previous M$ application has ever had. I suppose that's M$'s idea of tact and class. Nice. This is the kind of behavior that makes people curse.
I don't have the crap in front of me, so I can't test out the nonsensical alt-f keystroke. As there's no File menu with an underlined F waiting for you, I'm not sure why anyone would try that - except out of desperation. Somewhere before that, I'd expect the user to smash the keyboard or find a Linux ISO.
I don't see any evidence of torture, except for Abdullah al-Muhajir's claims. However, it's hard to take that seriously when claiming torture is literally taken directly from the Al Qaeda handbook. Does it not bother you that you are playing into the hands of the enemies of the US just because you hate Bush so much?
I'm not sure that I trust the FBI these days, but some of them have come forward with allegations of routine torture for people who are often released without charge. They may have been guilty of only being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and most are deemed safe for release, aka not dangerous. In Jose's case, it was to a US citizen.
What enemy? My country is defined by a Constitution and Bill of Rights, nothing more. The US can be any shape and size or hold any people, so long as they understand and obey the US constitution. Those who violate the Constitution are enemies of the US, regardless of party affiliation or anything else they might say. Wiretapping, torture, unreasonable search, and so on are un-American. Bandits who fly airplanes into buildings are unable to do real damage.
Microsoft is in a "can't lose" situation with VISTA in the developed world - OEM systems will all be shipped with it no questions asked, and most businesses will drink the TCO cool-aid and go with what they think is safe.
A lot of businesses still run on W2K and 98 because XP took too much control. Those businesses are not likely to use Vista, which takes even more control and breaks even more applications they did not want to spend money on.
Microsoft has failed to deliver what business wants, low costs and reliability. Instead, they have spent their development effort on GUI enhancements, easily circumvented dissapearing ink and other destabilizing DRM. An employee who wants a copy of their email that they company wants to vanish is going to print it. If they can't print it they will take out a digital camera. Instead of making the fundamental design changes required to fix system security, M$ bought one of the many ineffective anti-virus tools and eliminated the rest. The interface redesign is exactly what business did not ask for and what M$ themselves has been FUDing about as the "cost of retraining" in their own promotional material. The result of this and other efforts is a buggy, 10 Gigabyte install that sucks electricity and hardware that no one will be familiar with and no one asked for. Free software is looking very attractive to people who consider computers another tool that just needs to keep working.
The future is anything but set, but the world is leaning heavily away from Microsoft.
... does the slashdot community have to constantly reminded not only of the benefits of open source but more annoyingly, of every single government and private organization which switches from Microsoft to OSS? (Text translated to correct US English free of charge and effort by my browser.)
You are going to hear variations on the same theme here and everywhere. As organization and individual user discovers the advantages of free software they will tell you about it. The move has already reached far beyond the Slashdot community, so you will see more "mainstream" media telling you the same things. Cut them some slack, everyone who's been raised on non free software goes through the same transformantion and feels obligated to tell people about the things they were lied about for so long. Free software is the next big thing in computing. When the story dies the normal opinion will be, "I can't believe anyone is still running that M$ stuff."
2007 is the year of Linux. By the end of the year, the tipping point will be passed and all of the major vendors will be considering it as a pre-install or be losing serious business, kind of like Dell and Intel.
MS et.all are toast. And with them out, our IT staff becomes second-rate as they become irrelevant.
Your perspective has drifted and needs to be fixed. You seem to equate M$ with US and US technical excellence. Most people would throw away a meter like you, but a new faceplate and a few twists should have you back in operation.
Developers and IT staff at IBM, Red Hat, Novel, Ubuntoo, Mepis, Chrysler, Lowes, GE, and so on and so forth, would tell you that M$ and those who know only that are already second rate. They would not share you assessment of "our IT staff," nor do they fear foreign "competition". In their world, the more the merrier. American excellence does not have to be anti-social.
If anyone is interested then please deposit a small sum of money $1,000 into my bank account to cover the cost of Visa and other associated licensing. Because I am so desperate for developers I will be paying $100,000 so it is really only a very small sum of money.
That's the song we've been hearing about closed source software making you rich. The "economic benefits" of Vista make me laugh every time I read about them. It's like a casino, they don't build and run them by giving money away. It's better to pool your money and talent with people who share.
Star Wars is not nearly as homoerotic as Triumph of the Will.
How do you get "homoerotic" out of a film made by a woman? The thing is a long nightmare of twisted sentiment, logic and fanaticism, brilliantly captured, with one awful end - 25% of the people you see will die violently and no two bricks will be left standing a few short years after filming. The sexual aspects of boys playing escaped me. To each, their own.
The easiest thing to do is simply make the fingerprints cover more stuff ("fuzzing" the fingerprint is a pretty good mental model), which definitely increases the false-positive rate on audio.
I would have thought the easiest thing to do would be to take the Vista approach: all video will be reduced to a 2x2 pixel screen size. Content will easy to identify that way, because it will all look the same.
You seem to be assuming that the only "fingerprint" algorithm that exists is something like MD5.
You have something better? MD5 is the easiest computationally and produces the smallest result to store, using other techniques will increase the size of your database and computational expense. They could do FFT on single frame images, but you would need one for each scene of interest. The result could be made independent of size but not encoding quality. It would also be large and could create hundreds of fingerprints from each "protected" film. Trivial modifications, cropping and luck would circumvent the routine. Any way you look at the problem, what's required is intelligence well beyond the state of the art for machines and impractically expensive though human labor. It's not going to work.
A perfect result, as I argued, would unravel the whole game. It would prove that the industry "pirates" it's own content. That would lead to an impossible leagal quagmire that would show the folly of existing copyright law. If individuals could be sued years after the fact for fair use based on the results of a computer program, so could the big companies. If they did not pounce on each other, they would be in violation of anti-trust laws. It would be easier to skip all the heartache of DRM and recognize fair use in the first place. No one lost any money when Star Wars used themes, images and dialog from previous movies. Most of all, it would be a tremendous waste of intelligence. There are much better uses for a machine that could do the kind of matching the MPAA and RIAA dream of.
Finally, the MPAA and other copyright holders should bear the cost of policing their own works. YouTube is more of a common carrier than it is an entertainment company. Forcing Google to police it's users is kind of like holding the phone company or the post office responsible for pranks and crimes committed by their users.
The project is a pipe dream by companies that already enjoy tremendous compensation for the most minor of infractions. It's impossible, impractical, immoral and stupid, but they have gotten away with so much they might as well try this too. The sooner the broadcast monopoly companies die off, the better off all of us will be.
Google drops "Don't be evil" as its corporate mantra. Evil has its justifications, but no one likes a hypocrite.
I pity people who think that the only way to get ahead is to screw someone else. It's the soul of the criminal and they are doomed to a lifetime of paranoia, betrayal and failure. It is right to shun people who think this way and have proven it but perverse to judge everyone before they have acted. The first step in abusing someone is to degrade them in your own mind. The result it that you treat everyone as guilty and become the worst of offenders yourself. People like that are unable to cooperate and are ultimately doomed to fail, regardless of initial resources and initial success. As honest people are burnt and avoid the disshonest, the disshonest are left with an ever decreasing quality of partner.
Bill Gates is a prime example. He's burnt every partner he ever had, in ever more blatant ways. Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" dissaster is the latest, but show what kind of company he's had to keep. Now that he's burnt through software and hardware makers, he's left with entertainment sharks and the promise of DRM is the biggest scam of them all. So, despite tremendous family money and legal connections and great initial success, Microsoft will soon fail. He'll keep his money and be a force of evil in shipping, medicine and education for some time to come, but he has to surround himself with a bigger body guard than the president of the US. Isolated and uber-paranoid he will never have a clue.
... is it really possible to do an automated content identifier/filter solution?
To take away your fair use they would have to fingerprint both the audio and video content. That's possible for whole works at a given frame size, rate and audio quality. Already, you can see the problem because there's an almost unlimited choice of those. Couple that problem to every length variation and you have an impossible task for any single work. The database of fingerprints would be infinitely large. You can multiply this infinite sized database time the hundreds of thousands of works the crackpots want to "protect" for a result thats that many times less practical. Policing for original works based on someone else's "intellectual property," such as a Star Wars parody, is clearly impossible. The already impractical task of making fingerprints of each submission is trivial by comparison. Even if they could fingerprint all submissions, there is no way they can match it to their satisfaction. Policing will require AI or a human inspector because the "crime" is sharing the details of a story, something only a person can recognize. If they do make it work, the first thing it will do is point to the blatant theft of concepts by every movie ever made, such as Star War's liberal use of "Triumph of Will", "Forbidden Planet" and several WWII films.
Uh, name one. Just one... actually, you said citizenS... so I guess you should name at least two. Oh and define torture while you are at it.
José Padilla, a US citizen is one such victim. There may be others, but the US government does not have to tell you about them for "national security" reasons. Certainly, there are hundreds if not thousands of foreign torture victims, examples and more examples. Not even guilty people deserve that kind of barbaric treatment. This is the result of approving "stress positions," sleep deprivation and other "mild" forms of torture for suspects.
So tell me, who's taking away rights again?... Have you been arrested for what you are typing?
In the US, it's easier to smear and blacklist your political or economic enemies than it is to jail them. It's called "economic assassination." Domestic spying programs are used to make the blacklists. Political abuse of such programs has happened in the past and should be expected but they hardly ever round up real criminals, so they are always a waste of money. The harm they can do is gauged by the extent of government GDP, currently larger than 25% of the economy. The victim never knows.
That's a lame excuse for violations of your rights and it does not save you from real harm. When you give government the power to intimidate and harass, they might use it on people who are fighting for your rights.
Nothing is going to be "inspected" by US authorities, and if anything is "inspected", it's not at-will and not arbitrary.
It's already inspected arbitrarily. The Patriot Act, and several later court decisions gives the US government the ability to read anyone's email at will. It would be nice if other governments did not help themselves in the same way, but they do. Princess Dianna's cell phone was tapped by the CIA ten years ago, do you really think your email is private? The criteria of inspection is as arbitrary as politics will always be - a decision is made based on someone's OPINION of what is dangerous. That opinion can be coded or forced onto clerks who get to do the dirty work themselves or by reviewing what carnivore spits out.
All of the above is unconstitutional, illegal and immoral but ongoing. The US has given up the Bill of Rights for it's own citizens, and cares even less about others. It is violating the private papers, homes and conversations of it's citizens. It has curtailed the right to bear arms. It has launched religious based policies but thwarted legitimate religious expression. It has censored the New York Times, created agencies to flood the news with disinformation and thereby shown itself an enemy of truth itself. It has imprisoned and tortured it's own citizens, which shows the regard it really has.
In spite of all that, you think the demand for information is harmless?
Even if you have the proverbial, "nothing to hide," you need to think twice before you give over those who might. You benefit from the efforts of those who "leak" the truth and do other things the current government might not like. As the Irqui insurgence shows, no real security is gained by all of these repressive measures. Peace and security only comes through respect and justice.
You say you are using Win2k and Linux, however you don't state any reasons as to why you need to move to Vista.
New hardware will provide the reason, but Vista will be a no go. The problem he faces is that the upgrade train is busy wrecking XP and other older versions of Windoze, but there is no real M$ upgrade path he can use. Installing new drivers to older systems can introduce changes that destabilize the system - M$ puts them into the SDK and everyone has to move along. If Vista degrades his performance like people think it will, content creators will be forced to look elsewhere.
It sounds like what might happen is the big players (huge music labels, etc.) will just pay MS to expedite their company's files and processes,
Because the "trusted path" contains everything from the monitor to the OS kernel, the only way to expedite the processes will be to replace everything. You will have to have special video drivers, a special version of Vista and perhaps special hardware. That's the kind of special that killed off non free Unix. The whole point of M$ was that you could use cheap, "off the shelf" equipment without worry. DRM has undone that for them and this creates a huge opportunity for free software.
"Yes! Linux can handle them! It's easy...just get mplayer and install the right codecs...they are easy to find, and you'll be watching your video in no time".
whenever we see some site choose to make new content available in those very same Windows formats, many of the same people who were telling potential new users that all these things were easy on Linux suddenly switch and say that Linux users are locked out.
Both are true. It is easy to make the formats work. The problem is that it requires binaries of dubious legality. That's not an excuse for governments to make immoral laws or to force people to use non free software to participate in their own governance. I mostly avoid the content and consider the formats an affront: forcing people to chose between cultural participation and software freedom is evil.
That's an unbelievably bizarre metaphor - equating operating system support as anything like racial discrimination.
I can't understand why anyone would confuse freedom and civil liberties, can you? Is it worse to screw everyone for the benefit of a few, than it is to screw other races? Violating others is wrong, regardless of numbers.
A government that forces non free software for popular participation is not interested in popular participation or does not mind having a third party as a mediator of that participation. It is perverse and wrong for governments to force people to chose between software freedom and participation in their culture. They would have more control if they were to broadcast on TV only. They will have more particpation if they chose a free format and force the third parties to make due. Microsoft is never going to behave and the problems will never end unless people quit using their shit.
The database is nice but it would be nicer if we'd simply apply what we already know to prevent the outbreaks in the first place. There's nothing new about composting and how to do it safely, yet we see big commercial farms rush the job and spray immature and dissease causing crap on food stuffs that will be eaten raw. I'm not sure if this is a problem of economies of scale or lax enforcement of existing laws. I am sure that the problem needs to be fixed in a way that won't discriminate against small operators who have never had the problem to begin with.
What are you going to have to do to restart your car?
The following procedure has drastically improved the performance of non automotive computers and has been modified to suit it's new host.
Stop car and disconnect battery.
Put Knoppix CD into CD player.
Reconnect battery.
Turn ignition key.
Your automotive computer will now perform well. Audio function should have already been demonstrated but a full test of functions should be performed with Amarok. Network services will soon emerge to take advantage of the new platform and the reasonable ones will not discriminate on brand of OS used when money is offered. See Google Earth and GPS as an example of a reasonable service.
One computer costs $1,000 in hardware. One employee costs $120,000 per year, with burdening. One "mission-critical" application costs anywhere from $800 (AutoCAD 2007) to $5,000 (Inventor 11, non-pro.) One WinXP Pro license costs mere $150...
Software costs are a burden. Employees are productive assets.
The rest of your analysis is based on the presumption that Windows works. If that was true, no one would be considering a migration.
... if you want to migrate entirely off of Windows, you've first got to migrate to all cross-platform applications.
No, all that you should worry about is data continuity. Your criteria, which sounds reasonable, removes KDE and other best of class choices from consideration. Why do that if the substitute application can use the data without problem and then do many more things with it? KDE's groupware is excellent and as good a reason as any to migrate away from Windows. Not considering it because it won't run on Windoze is silly. You are moving away from Windoze because the Windoze world is limited, why constrain yourself to the even smaller world of stuff that runs on Windoze and Linux? If you can suck up your company's data and your employees can continue to use it you have everything you need.
Slashdot Mirror
Why bother with a Windows solution? Is your tape drive that horrible? If it's scsi, there should be no problem mounting it up elsewhere and using all the normal tools like tar.
It would be easier still to use an external hard drive and grsync, a gui for rsync.
Did the situation occur in a mental hospital, or were the users you're talking about just mildly retarded? There's a fucking floppy disk icon at the top of application, it will open the Save As dialog if it's the first time you're saving it,
Details here, not that someone so rude as you deserves them.
It happened at my university.
She tried the silly floppy. It worked the first time but did not do what she wanted.
I had asked her for coppies so I could try them out with Open Office. It was a simple enough request - make a "hello world" Word Doc and save it to this USB fob.
As a long time word user she tried various keystrokes with no further result than a strobing Office Icon. As a long term M$ user, she's been trained to ignore all sorts of blinking and flashing and would never have noticed it on her own. It's amazing that the application understood what she wanted but did not give her any further indication that the most subtle color changing of something no previous M$ application has ever had. I suppose that's M$'s idea of tact and class. Nice. This is the kind of behavior that makes people curse.
I don't have the crap in front of me, so I can't test out the nonsensical alt-f keystroke. As there's no File menu with an underlined F waiting for you, I'm not sure why anyone would try that - except out of desperation. Somewhere before that, I'd expect the user to smash the keyboard or find a Linux ISO.
Office doesn't have a 'save as' shortcut
She was trying to use an ancient F key shortcut. Whatever it used to be, it was no more and broke her little heart.
I don't see any evidence of torture, except for Abdullah al-Muhajir's claims. However, it's hard to take that seriously when claiming torture is literally taken directly from the Al Qaeda handbook. Does it not bother you that you are playing into the hands of the enemies of the US just because you hate Bush so much?
I'm not sure that I trust the FBI these days, but some of them have come forward with allegations of routine torture for people who are often released without charge. They may have been guilty of only being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and most are deemed safe for release, aka not dangerous. In Jose's case, it was to a US citizen.
What enemy? My country is defined by a Constitution and Bill of Rights, nothing more. The US can be any shape and size or hold any people, so long as they understand and obey the US constitution. Those who violate the Constitution are enemies of the US, regardless of party affiliation or anything else they might say. Wiretapping, torture, unreasonable search, and so on are un-American. Bandits who fly airplanes into buildings are unable to do real damage.
Microsoft is in a "can't lose" situation with VISTA in the developed world - OEM systems will all be shipped with it no questions asked, and most businesses will drink the TCO cool-aid and go with what they think is safe.
A lot of businesses still run on W2K and 98 because XP took too much control. Those businesses are not likely to use Vista, which takes even more control and breaks even more applications they did not want to spend money on.
Microsoft has failed to deliver what business wants, low costs and reliability. Instead, they have spent their development effort on GUI enhancements, easily circumvented dissapearing ink and other destabilizing DRM. An employee who wants a copy of their email that they company wants to vanish is going to print it. If they can't print it they will take out a digital camera. Instead of making the fundamental design changes required to fix system security, M$ bought one of the many ineffective anti-virus tools and eliminated the rest. The interface redesign is exactly what business did not ask for and what M$ themselves has been FUDing about as the "cost of retraining" in their own promotional material. The result of this and other efforts is a buggy, 10 Gigabyte install that sucks electricity and hardware that no one will be familiar with and no one asked for. Free software is looking very attractive to people who consider computers another tool that just needs to keep working.
The future is anything but set, but the world is leaning heavily away from Microsoft.
You are going to hear variations on the same theme here and everywhere. As organization and individual user discovers the advantages of free software they will tell you about it. The move has already reached far beyond the Slashdot community, so you will see more "mainstream" media telling you the same things. Cut them some slack, everyone who's been raised on non free software goes through the same transformantion and feels obligated to tell people about the things they were lied about for so long. Free software is the next big thing in computing. When the story dies the normal opinion will be, "I can't believe anyone is still running that M$ stuff."
2007 is the year of Linux. By the end of the year, the tipping point will be passed and all of the major vendors will be considering it as a pre-install or be losing serious business, kind of like Dell and Intel.
MS et.all are toast. And with them out, our IT staff becomes second-rate as they become irrelevant.
Your perspective has drifted and needs to be fixed. You seem to equate M$ with US and US technical excellence. Most people would throw away a meter like you, but a new faceplate and a few twists should have you back in operation.
Developers and IT staff at IBM, Red Hat, Novel, Ubuntoo, Mepis, Chrysler, Lowes, GE, and so on and so forth, would tell you that M$ and those who know only that are already second rate. They would not share you assessment of "our IT staff," nor do they fear foreign "competition". In their world, the more the merrier. American excellence does not have to be anti-social.
You made a couple of typos
That's the song we've been hearing about closed source software making you rich. The "economic benefits" of Vista make me laugh every time I read about them. It's like a casino, they don't build and run them by giving money away. It's better to pool your money and talent with people who share.
Star Wars is not nearly as homoerotic as Triumph of the Will.
How do you get "homoerotic" out of a film made by a woman? The thing is a long nightmare of twisted sentiment, logic and fanaticism, brilliantly captured, with one awful end - 25% of the people you see will die violently and no two bricks will be left standing a few short years after filming. The sexual aspects of boys playing escaped me. To each, their own.
The easiest thing to do is simply make the fingerprints cover more stuff ("fuzzing" the fingerprint is a pretty good mental model), which definitely increases the false-positive rate on audio.
I would have thought the easiest thing to do would be to take the Vista approach: all video will be reduced to a 2x2 pixel screen size. Content will easy to identify that way, because it will all look the same.
You seem to be assuming that the only "fingerprint" algorithm that exists is something like MD5.
You have something better? MD5 is the easiest computationally and produces the smallest result to store, using other techniques will increase the size of your database and computational expense. They could do FFT on single frame images, but you would need one for each scene of interest. The result could be made independent of size but not encoding quality. It would also be large and could create hundreds of fingerprints from each "protected" film. Trivial modifications, cropping and luck would circumvent the routine. Any way you look at the problem, what's required is intelligence well beyond the state of the art for machines and impractically expensive though human labor. It's not going to work.
A perfect result, as I argued, would unravel the whole game. It would prove that the industry "pirates" it's own content. That would lead to an impossible leagal quagmire that would show the folly of existing copyright law. If individuals could be sued years after the fact for fair use based on the results of a computer program, so could the big companies. If they did not pounce on each other, they would be in violation of anti-trust laws. It would be easier to skip all the heartache of DRM and recognize fair use in the first place. No one lost any money when Star Wars used themes, images and dialog from previous movies. Most of all, it would be a tremendous waste of intelligence. There are much better uses for a machine that could do the kind of matching the MPAA and RIAA dream of.
Finally, the MPAA and other copyright holders should bear the cost of policing their own works. YouTube is more of a common carrier than it is an entertainment company. Forcing Google to police it's users is kind of like holding the phone company or the post office responsible for pranks and crimes committed by their users.
The project is a pipe dream by companies that already enjoy tremendous compensation for the most minor of infractions. It's impossible, impractical, immoral and stupid, but they have gotten away with so much they might as well try this too. The sooner the broadcast monopoly companies die off, the better off all of us will be.
Google drops "Don't be evil" as its corporate mantra. Evil has its justifications, but no one likes a hypocrite.
I pity people who think that the only way to get ahead is to screw someone else. It's the soul of the criminal and they are doomed to a lifetime of paranoia, betrayal and failure. It is right to shun people who think this way and have proven it but perverse to judge everyone before they have acted. The first step in abusing someone is to degrade them in your own mind. The result it that you treat everyone as guilty and become the worst of offenders yourself. People like that are unable to cooperate and are ultimately doomed to fail, regardless of initial resources and initial success. As honest people are burnt and avoid the disshonest, the disshonest are left with an ever decreasing quality of partner.
Bill Gates is a prime example. He's burnt every partner he ever had, in ever more blatant ways. Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" dissaster is the latest, but show what kind of company he's had to keep. Now that he's burnt through software and hardware makers, he's left with entertainment sharks and the promise of DRM is the biggest scam of them all. So, despite tremendous family money and legal connections and great initial success, Microsoft will soon fail. He'll keep his money and be a force of evil in shipping, medicine and education for some time to come, but he has to surround himself with a bigger body guard than the president of the US. Isolated and uber-paranoid he will never have a clue.
To take away your fair use they would have to fingerprint both the audio and video content. That's possible for whole works at a given frame size, rate and audio quality. Already, you can see the problem because there's an almost unlimited choice of those. Couple that problem to every length variation and you have an impossible task for any single work. The database of fingerprints would be infinitely large. You can multiply this infinite sized database time the hundreds of thousands of works the crackpots want to "protect" for a result thats that many times less practical. Policing for original works based on someone else's "intellectual property," such as a Star Wars parody, is clearly impossible. The already impractical task of making fingerprints of each submission is trivial by comparison. Even if they could fingerprint all submissions, there is no way they can match it to their satisfaction. Policing will require AI or a human inspector because the "crime" is sharing the details of a story, something only a person can recognize. If they do make it work, the first thing it will do is point to the blatant theft of concepts by every movie ever made, such as Star War's liberal use of "Triumph of Will", "Forbidden Planet" and several WWII films.
Uh, name one. Just one... actually, you said citizenS... so I guess you should name at least two. Oh and define torture while you are at it.
José Padilla, a US citizen is one such victim. There may be others, but the US government does not have to tell you about them for "national security" reasons. Certainly, there are hundreds if not thousands of foreign torture victims, examples and more examples. Not even guilty people deserve that kind of barbaric treatment. This is the result of approving "stress positions," sleep deprivation and other "mild" forms of torture for suspects.
So tell me, who's taking away rights again? ... Have you been arrested for what you are typing?
In the US, it's easier to smear and blacklist your political or economic enemies than it is to jail them. It's called "economic assassination." Domestic spying programs are used to make the blacklists. Political abuse of such programs has happened in the past and should be expected but they hardly ever round up real criminals, so they are always a waste of money. The harm they can do is gauged by the extent of government GDP, currently larger than 25% of the economy. The victim never knows.
That's a lame excuse for violations of your rights and it does not save you from real harm. When you give government the power to intimidate and harass, they might use it on people who are fighting for your rights.
Some interesting reading:
The list of current issues goes on and on. When you allow government to abuse you, it will.
Nothing is going to be "inspected" by US authorities, and if anything is "inspected", it's not at-will and not arbitrary.
It's already inspected arbitrarily. The Patriot Act, and several later court decisions gives the US government the ability to read anyone's email at will. It would be nice if other governments did not help themselves in the same way, but they do. Princess Dianna's cell phone was tapped by the CIA ten years ago, do you really think your email is private? The criteria of inspection is as arbitrary as politics will always be - a decision is made based on someone's OPINION of what is dangerous. That opinion can be coded or forced onto clerks who get to do the dirty work themselves or by reviewing what carnivore spits out.
All of the above is unconstitutional, illegal and immoral but ongoing. The US has given up the Bill of Rights for it's own citizens, and cares even less about others. It is violating the private papers, homes and conversations of it's citizens. It has curtailed the right to bear arms. It has launched religious based policies but thwarted legitimate religious expression. It has censored the New York Times, created agencies to flood the news with disinformation and thereby shown itself an enemy of truth itself. It has imprisoned and tortured it's own citizens, which shows the regard it really has.
In spite of all that, you think the demand for information is harmless?
Even if you have the proverbial, "nothing to hide," you need to think twice before you give over those who might. You benefit from the efforts of those who "leak" the truth and do other things the current government might not like. As the Irqui insurgence shows, no real security is gained by all of these repressive measures. Peace and security only comes through respect and justice.
You will be seeing more of the same as people learn just how bad Vista is.
You say you are using Win2k and Linux, however you don't state any reasons as to why you need to move to Vista.
New hardware will provide the reason, but Vista will be a no go. The problem he faces is that the upgrade train is busy wrecking XP and other older versions of Windoze, but there is no real M$ upgrade path he can use. Installing new drivers to older systems can introduce changes that destabilize the system - M$ puts them into the SDK and everyone has to move along. If Vista degrades his performance like people think it will, content creators will be forced to look elsewhere.
It sounds like what might happen is the big players (huge music labels, etc.) will just pay MS to expedite their company's files and processes,
Because the "trusted path" contains everything from the monitor to the OS kernel, the only way to expedite the processes will be to replace everything. You will have to have special video drivers, a special version of Vista and perhaps special hardware. That's the kind of special that killed off non free Unix. The whole point of M$ was that you could use cheap, "off the shelf" equipment without worry. DRM has undone that for them and this creates a huge opportunity for free software.
Welcome to the Year of GNU/Linux.
Both are true. It is easy to make the formats work. The problem is that it requires binaries of dubious legality. That's not an excuse for governments to make immoral laws or to force people to use non free software to participate in their own governance. I mostly avoid the content and consider the formats an affront: forcing people to chose between cultural participation and software freedom is evil.
That's an unbelievably bizarre metaphor - equating operating system support as anything like racial discrimination.
I can't understand why anyone would confuse freedom and civil liberties, can you? Is it worse to screw everyone for the benefit of a few, than it is to screw other races? Violating others is wrong, regardless of numbers.
A government that forces non free software for popular participation is not interested in popular participation or does not mind having a third party as a mediator of that participation. It is perverse and wrong for governments to force people to chose between software freedom and participation in their culture. They would have more control if they were to broadcast on TV only. They will have more particpation if they chose a free format and force the third parties to make due. Microsoft is never going to behave and the problems will never end unless people quit using their shit.
The database is nice but it would be nicer if we'd simply apply what we already know to prevent the outbreaks in the first place. There's nothing new about composting and how to do it safely, yet we see big commercial farms rush the job and spray immature and dissease causing crap on food stuffs that will be eaten raw. I'm not sure if this is a problem of economies of scale or lax enforcement of existing laws. I am sure that the problem needs to be fixed in a way that won't discriminate against small operators who have never had the problem to begin with.
What are you going to have to do to restart your car?
The following procedure has drastically improved the performance of non automotive computers and has been modified to suit it's new host.
Your automotive computer will now perform well. Audio function should have already been demonstrated but a full test of functions should be performed with Amarok. Network services will soon emerge to take advantage of the new platform and the reasonable ones will not discriminate on brand of OS used when money is offered. See Google Earth and GPS as an example of a reasonable service.
Happy Hacking.
One computer costs $1,000 in hardware. One employee costs $120,000 per year, with burdening. One "mission-critical" application costs anywhere from $800 (AutoCAD 2007) to $5,000 (Inventor 11, non-pro.) One WinXP Pro license costs mere $150 ...
Software costs are a burden. Employees are productive assets.
The rest of your analysis is based on the presumption that Windows works. If that was true, no one would be considering a migration.
No, all that you should worry about is data continuity. Your criteria, which sounds reasonable, removes KDE and other best of class choices from consideration. Why do that if the substitute application can use the data without problem and then do many more things with it? KDE's groupware is excellent and as good a reason as any to migrate away from Windows. Not considering it because it won't run on Windoze is silly. You are moving away from Windoze because the Windoze world is limited, why constrain yourself to the even smaller world of stuff that runs on Windoze and Linux? If you can suck up your company's data and your employees can continue to use it you have everything you need.