Given that the Zune is also not compatible with Microsoft's own "PlaysForSure" music initiave, and its own Urge music store, could this be a trend?
What, you mean like the new thing forcing you to buy everyting again? Like Office formats forcing a new Office that only runs worth a damn on the new OS which requires two to three times the computer you have now? Welcome to the M$ "entertainment" upgrade train. The only difference this time is that they are admitting things won't work before they launch both! So, you can call it a speeding up of events. Next, they will finally admit that their vapor ware is incompatible with other vapor ware. If the trend continues, they will come full circle and admit that none of their previous products were really compatible either. The next day they will roll out M$ Linux.
... if Amarok and Rockbox will work with the brick before Vista does. Hell, that would make it useful. I know, few people would waste their money on something they have to reprogram to make useful... outside M$ PCs that is. Just get a Zaurus it's got better battery life!
Everyone knows that Microsoft is a pitcher, not a catcher.
Except when it comes to Malware, where they are both. Too bad they can't be fined for the damage their crappy OS does to the internet every day. If they were made to bear just 1/10th the cost of spam filtering and DoS attacks launched from their platform, they would have been out of business long ago.
I'd lake to know where you got that 70% figure from.
I can't put my finger on it but I remember 66% was a target. SP2 reduced the remainder by another 10%. The move to Vista promisses to be worse and is according to Ars Technica. If you are going to do a "clean" install, and Linux will do better.
Unless your distro is 100% backwards compatible (ok, 90% compatible, there are always problems) back to, say... the 2.2 kernel many corporations won't take Linux seriously as a solution because the cost of debugging the problems that accompany each upgrade because of broken compatibility issues would be prohibitive.
This is just more Vista bullshit, much like the "XP is solid" nonsense that came before the launch of XP. Everyone knows that the upgrade train forces everything in it's chain. Just a few days ago Ars Technica did a study on how sucky in place upgrades to Vista were. As a normal free software user, I almost never see version and upgrade problems with data. As a user of lots of old equipment and new software, I know free software offers much better support. How anyone can declare M$ a winner in any kind of compatibility contest is beyond me.
But isn't it true that if there is patent-infringing code in Linux that it won't matter whether Novell has made an agreement to immunize its users?
No and no! First, it's hard to have patent-infringing code that simply implements Unix concepts that were pioneered 30 years ago, regardless of how slow software vendors have been to adopt those improvements. Second, software patents are just as bogus as a patent on gramma's chili ingredients. Third, it matters. A company full of "experts" caving into this obvious extortion lends weight to both software patents and M$'s bogus claim to own concepts implemented in free software.
It's diabolically anti-competitive and should be against the law if in fact is is not. M$ would use "intellectual property" law to steal other people's work. It makes a mockery of everthing patent and copyright laws are supposed to stand for. As Bruce pointed out, they are licensing patents. Those patents are backed only by judicial extortion. The DoJ should gear up the next series of anti-trust cases around this.
No, this time M$ is selling a "I won't sue you license" directly. In the SCO case, M$ hired a proxy for it's dirty business. This time they are making the threat directly. The only thing the two cases share is a bogus claim to other people's work and FUD generation. Hopefully, IBM will make them pay for business lost to the fiaSCO and people have learned to ignore M$'s groundless threats.
Don't pay the extortion. It strengthens M$'s ownership of your work and gives them money to sue your neighbor.
Does my "reverse engineered" linux driver have this bug?
Probably not. If it does, it will be fixed soon.
Why is it that a bunch of people who don't get paid come up with bug-free solutions?
It gets fixed because it's free and therefore it can be. Non free software writers put up with NDA's and code they can't share even if they wanted to. Their code is owned and so their effort and good will is likewise owned. Free software writers are free to share their tools as well as their improvements, so it's much easier to help your friends.
By the way, there's no law against being paid to write free software. With all the tools available, free software writers can get the job done faster and for less money. That's something worth paying for and many people do. The vast majority of software jobs are in house, so GPL distribution conditions never take effect and are not an issue. It would be better to share the work with others if you can, but you don't have to and often can't under those circumstances and there is therefore no difference at all between your choice of tools besides the lower cost of the free tools.
Linux won't kill Windows in the next decade and vice versa. No one is winning but rather both sides are in a pissing contest they refuse to admit is worthless.
That sounds even handed but it's whack. The pissing is vastly one sided. No one in the Free Software world has done anything to "fight" other than state the obvious shortcomings of non free software. Microsoft, on the other hand, has spent billions calling free software a "communist" "cancer", and extended all of the tools they used to destroy their non free competitors: non-standard "extensible standards", secret file formats, and threats for vendors who would carry anything else. The real problem M$ has is competing. They had a difficult enough time matching non free competitor's offerings. It's impossible for them to match free software. Just look at the monster that Vista is - it's the end of the line for the non free way. Only M$ really cares about market share. Free software vendors know there's more than enough work in the world for everyone to be a winner. Projecting M$ like attitudes onto free software developers and users is deeply offensive.
somebody is pointing a gun at the back of your head and demanding that you upgrade should be enough to get you to do so. Wait... What do you mean, "Nobody's forcing me?"
So your principles involve pulling clients into your own holy war and immersing them in technical details that don't directly drive their business? If I was a customer of a business who demanded that I start changing my technical decisions in order to communicate with them, I wouldn't remain their customer long.
So, which is it? Go with the M$ flow to avoid "holy war" or buck the upgrade train because no one is forcing you to do anything?
I didn't know you were also an ignorant racist. You have no clue at all what India or the people who live there are like, do you?
No, I'm not familiar with the hundreds of nations that live on the sub continent. God might be. My bigotry must have been apparent when I said that I wanted them all to have a decent standard of living or berated my greedy fellow citizens who would rape them instead.
Regardless of my ignorance about India, I can speak from painful personal experience about the love of corporate America. I got laid off from a Fortune 100 company four years ago and spent two years looking for work before giving up and going back to school for a job in a non transferable industry, medicine. They don't give a shit. I'm lucky enough to have had savings to make it through.
outsourcing would be a net benefit for everyone. For India and for America. This seems to be confirmation of that.
Show me an overall improvement in Indian standards of living and what percentage of that is due to IT and you might have something. Really, I'd rather see that than a hegemony of US "IP" owners picking and choosing half trained techs as "winners" from starving, divided, helpless and desperate crowds. I want everyone to have what I enjoy and think the Earth has the resources for it.
How you get success out of failure is beyond me. India, despite tremendous US corporate investment, is unable to train enough people to replace their fired US counterparts. That shows a damnable lack of planning on the part of your corporate masters and their inability to create educational opportunities for enough Indians. Neither of those things is anything to crow about but the bottom line is worse - they can't get the job done. That's a failure even if you consider the most narrow and cynical of corporate goals.
Ha, ha, serves M$, and everyone else rushing to fire their loyal employees, right.
I don't know about you, but if I had just been screwed like this I wouldn't pick the Microsoft option...
I can imagine that most people won't pick the M$ option if they do so much as hear about "Plays for Sure", which is practically unavoidable if you bought anything but an iPod. The majority of MP3 player owners did just that in the past, but M$ seems determined to change things in the future. WMP is a steaming pile of dog poop, their players don't let you buy an keep music online, what more can they do to make themselves and DRM look bad?
People with reasonable sense of life will not trust complete strangers.... dumb people will always get what they deserve. They will screw their life by trusting complete strangers and also they will screw their PCs, again
Don't blame the victim, their only fault is to trust Microsoft. Do you know and trust people at Microsoft or are they just another group of "strangers" who screwed your PC with stuff that's easy for malicious people to exploit? I trust another group of "strangers" at Debian but have not been screwed in any of these ways. When and if someone moles their way into Debian, I'm going to blame the mole not myself. Reputation and knowledge are not absolute protection from the malicious. The only thing that's dumb here is that people continue to use and trust Microsoft. Any organization that trusts or works with Microsoft can be screwed this way.
Sure, because Steve Baller told me that switching software was just as important as my faith and immortal soul. Indeed, before the Novel deal, he told me that leaving Windows behind would be like going to hell and that I'd better not do it. He said something like, "Please don't tell me it's Linux! I'm going to fucking kill Linux, I've done it before and I've done it again." Then he threw a chair at me. It was an awful display of his power, but I shrank and he then showed mercy by allowing me to turn off the Windoze start up noise, which had made me an outcast at the coffee shop. He then said something about denying my OS use three times before the cock crow but I did not follow.
Make sure to install the non-free media libraries (e.g. libxine-extracodecs, Adobe Flash 9 beta, libdvdcss2).
Mepis comes with all of that but decss, which is against the law to distribute in the US. Mepis now uses Ubunto as a base but still has the same KDE look and feel it always did. You might also have to get the "essential" Windoze Media codecs listed in the xine comand line dump, if you want to play some types of WMV. For all that, Mepis is a great time saver on installation for "normal" users who want all of the above non free junk.
You are asking for the impossible, as long as you keep them on M$. There is no end of effort required, as the last six years of "security is job #1" have shown, and none of it is easy to explain. When your parents lose data they care about, it won't be their fault it will be yours for not moving them. It is indeed only a mater of time before their computer is malwared out. It is much easier to move them to Mepis, Ubunto, Fedora or Debian, than it is to explain all of the easy to do things they should not do that won't mater in the end anyway. Microsoft's operating systems are so flawed that no amount of user inconvenience will fix it. It's better to offer them software that's designed well to begin with.
If you are a Linux user (like me), then you will be pissed of by Windows because you aren't as productive immediately (because, *gasp*, it's different).
Immediately? How about for ever? The absolute best you can do with Windoze is take Michael Dell's pre-installed packages, which sucks, then things quickly go downhill from there. You will never get a choice of productive GUI's like Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, etc, that deliver multiple screens and system stability. What would I do without sftp built into my browser, virtual windows and spell checks everywhere? Adding applications to Windoze is a crapshoot, thanks to the way non free programmers are unable to share their effort. A new application can easily wreck everything else you have, not that you have a choice about that. If the Malware makers don't jump something onto your computer, M$ themselves will through auto-updating. The effort required to keep on top of each and every one of your programs and security will make you nuts. All of that and choice are taken for granted in the free softwar world. Once you have a Linux box working, it will always work and new programs and upgrades are effortless.
It won't make a difference unless they let you share the modified source code. Without that, M$ still holds all the cards as the only party able to integrate all improvements. Given their record of improving things, no change is to be expected. Embedded development mindshare will continue to flow to free software.
You can say Hell froze on the day M$ releases code under a real free license. They might, one day, but it's diametrically opposed to Mr. Gate's control freak personality.
... you have to wonder if YouTube will be worth that $1.65 billion on Monday.
No I don't, it's Comedy Central that needs YouTube not the other way around. As there's far more cable television access than broadband in the US, I imagine everyone who wants Comedy Central already has it and that's not what actally drives traffic to YouTube. What drives traffic to YouTube is interesting content you can't get anywhere else. The people who are going to YouTube are a demographic that traditional broadcasters are desperate to reach: young, wealthy trendsetters. Those kinds of people are increasingly entertaining themselves and think of the big broadcasters as greedy providers of costly, government censored and advert filled shows. If the big broadcasters want to keep selling to people, they need companies like YouTube. People will still go to YouTube to both post and find first rate entertainment, regardless of what Comedy Central does.
EMI is going to war against the CD format. What the ass is saying is that CDs don't make enough money for them, despite being the only thing people are willing to buy. The "additional content", we can be sure, is going to be DRM that destroys what makes CDs useful.
Our wild-eyed radical phase must ultimately give way to some replacement. We cannot permanently be the rebels.
What on Earth is he talking about?
Enlightenment thinking was clear and organized. There were disagreements amongst the thinkers of the Era, but the Era itself was definable.
So he says, but is unable to recognize it's principles as they are applied to software freedom. There's a straight line between the US Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the "rhetoric" of the internet liberating electronic expression from Government control. Business and economic success are simple byproduct of freedom. We can and must all be rebels so long as others would tax and control us without consent. Making money off the result is secondary.
The name calling is more understandable if he's forcasting the next big company caused IT meltdown. The so called "bursting of the internet bubble" was a direct result of bad laws which allowed public resources to be stolen by the likes of Bellsouth. The laws which allowed them to crush the DSL companies were bought with the promise of shiny fiber to the curb networks which were charged for but never appeared. Other companies, Netscape etc, were crushed in much the same way. As the next set of shitty laws are passed in the name of fighting terrorism and big dumb executives gloat at their expected revenues, I suppose it's time to crank up the "wild eyed rebel propaganda." It would not do to crush "small business innovators" and "mom and pop shops" now would it?
Uhhh stick your headphones in some chicks ear and she'll probably slap you. Who wants someones else`s freshly waxed earbuds in their ear?
Most people spell it "Duh", but I understand BRUTICUS has neither manners or sense. Before you touch someone else, it's a good idea to... that it... ASK. If the answer is "yes", she's told you a lot about herself. Charm comes from doing, Bruty, go out and talk to a girl some time.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that the Zune is also not compatible with Microsoft's own "PlaysForSure" music initiave, and its own Urge music store, could this be a trend?
What, you mean like the new thing forcing you to buy everyting again? Like Office formats forcing a new Office that only runs worth a damn on the new OS which requires two to three times the computer you have now? Welcome to the M$ "entertainment" upgrade train. The only difference this time is that they are admitting things won't work before they launch both! So, you can call it a speeding up of events. Next, they will finally admit that their vapor ware is incompatible with other vapor ware. If the trend continues, they will come full circle and admit that none of their previous products were really compatible either. The next day they will roll out M$ Linux.
Everyone knows that Microsoft is a pitcher, not a catcher.
Except when it comes to Malware, where they are both. Too bad they can't be fined for the damage their crappy OS does to the internet every day. If they were made to bear just 1/10th the cost of spam filtering and DoS attacks launched from their platform, they would have been out of business long ago.
You are at step 2. Steps 3 and 5 are ongoing and it's not really funny when those in jail might be executed for their organs. Yes, Microsoft is still "committed" to business in China.
Trade with Communits Countries like China endorses crimes against humanity and makes the criminals stronger and richer.
I can't put my finger on it but I remember 66% was a target. SP2 reduced the remainder by another 10%. The move to Vista promisses to be worse and is according to Ars Technica. If you are going to do a "clean" install, and Linux will do better.
But they take an OS with less than 70% seriously?
This is just more Vista bullshit, much like the "XP is solid" nonsense that came before the launch of XP. Everyone knows that the upgrade train forces everything in it's chain. Just a few days ago Ars Technica did a study on how sucky in place upgrades to Vista were. As a normal free software user, I almost never see version and upgrade problems with data. As a user of lots of old equipment and new software, I know free software offers much better support. How anyone can declare M$ a winner in any kind of compatibility contest is beyond me.
But isn't it true that if there is patent-infringing code in Linux that it won't matter whether Novell has made an agreement to immunize its users?
No and no! First, it's hard to have patent-infringing code that simply implements Unix concepts that were pioneered 30 years ago, regardless of how slow software vendors have been to adopt those improvements. Second, software patents are just as bogus as a patent on gramma's chili ingredients. Third, it matters. A company full of "experts" caving into this obvious extortion lends weight to both software patents and M$'s bogus claim to own concepts implemented in free software.
It's diabolically anti-competitive and should be against the law if in fact is is not. M$ would use "intellectual property" law to steal other people's work. It makes a mockery of everthing patent and copyright laws are supposed to stand for. As Bruce pointed out, they are licensing patents. Those patents are backed only by judicial extortion. The DoJ should gear up the next series of anti-trust cases around this.
It's SCO all over again.
No, this time M$ is selling a "I won't sue you license" directly. In the SCO case, M$ hired a proxy for it's dirty business. This time they are making the threat directly. The only thing the two cases share is a bogus claim to other people's work and FUD generation. Hopefully, IBM will make them pay for business lost to the fiaSCO and people have learned to ignore M$'s groundless threats.
Don't pay the extortion. It strengthens M$'s ownership of your work and gives them money to sue your neighbor.
Does my "reverse engineered" linux driver have this bug?
Probably not. If it does, it will be fixed soon.
Why is it that a bunch of people who don't get paid come up with bug-free solutions?
It gets fixed because it's free and therefore it can be. Non free software writers put up with NDA's and code they can't share even if they wanted to. Their code is owned and so their effort and good will is likewise owned. Free software writers are free to share their tools as well as their improvements, so it's much easier to help your friends.
By the way, there's no law against being paid to write free software. With all the tools available, free software writers can get the job done faster and for less money. That's something worth paying for and many people do. The vast majority of software jobs are in house, so GPL distribution conditions never take effect and are not an issue. It would be better to share the work with others if you can, but you don't have to and often can't under those circumstances and there is therefore no difference at all between your choice of tools besides the lower cost of the free tools.
Linux won't kill Windows in the next decade and vice versa. No one is winning but rather both sides are in a pissing contest they refuse to admit is worthless.
That sounds even handed but it's whack. The pissing is vastly one sided. No one in the Free Software world has done anything to "fight" other than state the obvious shortcomings of non free software. Microsoft, on the other hand, has spent billions calling free software a "communist" "cancer", and extended all of the tools they used to destroy their non free competitors: non-standard "extensible standards", secret file formats, and threats for vendors who would carry anything else. The real problem M$ has is competing. They had a difficult enough time matching non free competitor's offerings. It's impossible for them to match free software. Just look at the monster that Vista is - it's the end of the line for the non free way. Only M$ really cares about market share. Free software vendors know there's more than enough work in the world for everyone to be a winner. Projecting M$ like attitudes onto free software developers and users is deeply offensive.
somebody is pointing a gun at the back of your head and demanding that you upgrade should be enough to get you to do so. Wait... What do you mean, "Nobody's forcing me?"
Interesting how that jibes with what you say when talking about Office 2003:
So, which is it? Go with the M$ flow to avoid "holy war" or buck the upgrade train because no one is forcing you to do anything?
I didn't know you were also an ignorant racist. You have no clue at all what India or the people who live there are like, do you?
No, I'm not familiar with the hundreds of nations that live on the sub continent. God might be. My bigotry must have been apparent when I said that I wanted them all to have a decent standard of living or berated my greedy fellow citizens who would rape them instead.
Regardless of my ignorance about India, I can speak from painful personal experience about the love of corporate America. I got laid off from a Fortune 100 company four years ago and spent two years looking for work before giving up and going back to school for a job in a non transferable industry, medicine. They don't give a shit. I'm lucky enough to have had savings to make it through.
Now fuck off, you hateful, little troll.
outsourcing would be a net benefit for everyone. For India and for America. This seems to be confirmation of that.
Show me an overall improvement in Indian standards of living and what percentage of that is due to IT and you might have something. Really, I'd rather see that than a hegemony of US "IP" owners picking and choosing half trained techs as "winners" from starving, divided, helpless and desperate crowds. I want everyone to have what I enjoy and think the Earth has the resources for it.
How you get success out of failure is beyond me. India, despite tremendous US corporate investment, is unable to train enough people to replace their fired US counterparts. That shows a damnable lack of planning on the part of your corporate masters and their inability to create educational opportunities for enough Indians. Neither of those things is anything to crow about but the bottom line is worse - they can't get the job done. That's a failure even if you consider the most narrow and cynical of corporate goals.
Ha, ha, serves M$, and everyone else rushing to fire their loyal employees, right.
I don't know about you, but if I had just been screwed like this I wouldn't pick the Microsoft option...
I can imagine that most people won't pick the M$ option if they do so much as hear about "Plays for Sure", which is practically unavoidable if you bought anything but an iPod. The majority of MP3 player owners did just that in the past, but M$ seems determined to change things in the future. WMP is a steaming pile of dog poop, their players don't let you buy an keep music online, what more can they do to make themselves and DRM look bad?
People with reasonable sense of life will not trust complete strangers. ... dumb people will always get what they deserve. They will screw their life by trusting complete strangers and also they will screw their PCs, again
Don't blame the victim, their only fault is to trust Microsoft. Do you know and trust people at Microsoft or are they just another group of "strangers" who screwed your PC with stuff that's easy for malicious people to exploit? I trust another group of "strangers" at Debian but have not been screwed in any of these ways. When and if someone moles their way into Debian, I'm going to blame the mole not myself. Reputation and knowledge are not absolute protection from the malicious. The only thing that's dumb here is that people continue to use and trust Microsoft. Any organization that trusts or works with Microsoft can be screwed this way.
Sure, because Steve Baller told me that switching software was just as important as my faith and immortal soul. Indeed, before the Novel deal, he told me that leaving Windows behind would be like going to hell and that I'd better not do it. He said something like, "Please don't tell me it's Linux! I'm going to fucking kill Linux, I've done it before and I've done it again." Then he threw a chair at me. It was an awful display of his power, but I shrank and he then showed mercy by allowing me to turn off the Windoze start up noise, which had made me an outcast at the coffee shop. He then said something about denying my OS use three times before the cock crow but I did not follow.
Make sure to install the non-free media libraries (e.g. libxine-extracodecs, Adobe Flash 9 beta, libdvdcss2).
Mepis comes with all of that but decss, which is against the law to distribute in the US. Mepis now uses Ubunto as a base but still has the same KDE look and feel it always did. You might also have to get the "essential" Windoze Media codecs listed in the xine comand line dump, if you want to play some types of WMV. For all that, Mepis is a great time saver on installation for "normal" users who want all of the above non free junk.
You are asking for the impossible, as long as you keep them on M$. There is no end of effort required, as the last six years of "security is job #1" have shown, and none of it is easy to explain. When your parents lose data they care about, it won't be their fault it will be yours for not moving them. It is indeed only a mater of time before their computer is malwared out. It is much easier to move them to Mepis, Ubunto, Fedora or Debian, than it is to explain all of the easy to do things they should not do that won't mater in the end anyway. Microsoft's operating systems are so flawed that no amount of user inconvenience will fix it. It's better to offer them software that's designed well to begin with.
If you are a Linux user (like me), then you will be pissed of by Windows because you aren't as productive immediately (because, *gasp*, it's different).
Immediately? How about for ever? The absolute best you can do with Windoze is take Michael Dell's pre-installed packages, which sucks, then things quickly go downhill from there. You will never get a choice of productive GUI's like Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, etc, that deliver multiple screens and system stability. What would I do without sftp built into my browser, virtual windows and spell checks everywhere? Adding applications to Windoze is a crapshoot, thanks to the way non free programmers are unable to share their effort. A new application can easily wreck everything else you have, not that you have a choice about that. If the Malware makers don't jump something onto your computer, M$ themselves will through auto-updating. The effort required to keep on top of each and every one of your programs and security will make you nuts. All of that and choice are taken for granted in the free softwar world. Once you have a Linux box working, it will always work and new programs and upgrades are effortless.
Microsoft releasing their source?
It won't make a difference unless they let you share the modified source code. Without that, M$ still holds all the cards as the only party able to integrate all improvements. Given their record of improving things, no change is to be expected. Embedded development mindshare will continue to flow to free software.
You can say Hell froze on the day M$ releases code under a real free license. They might, one day, but it's diametrically opposed to Mr. Gate's control freak personality.
No I don't, it's Comedy Central that needs YouTube not the other way around. As there's far more cable television access than broadband in the US, I imagine everyone who wants Comedy Central already has it and that's not what actally drives traffic to YouTube. What drives traffic to YouTube is interesting content you can't get anywhere else. The people who are going to YouTube are a demographic that traditional broadcasters are desperate to reach: young, wealthy trendsetters. Those kinds of people are increasingly entertaining themselves and think of the big broadcasters as greedy providers of costly, government censored and advert filled shows. If the big broadcasters want to keep selling to people, they need companies like YouTube. People will still go to YouTube to both post and find first rate entertainment, regardless of what Comedy Central does.
Granted, there are a ton of people out there that don't realize that they rely on iTunes to decrypt their music for them ...
No, even iTunes users overwhelmingly prefer CDs to DRM shit.
EMI is going to war against the CD format. What the ass is saying is that CDs don't make enough money for them, despite being the only thing people are willing to buy. The "additional content", we can be sure, is going to be DRM that destroys what makes CDs useful.
Our wild-eyed radical phase must ultimately give way to some replacement. We cannot permanently be the rebels.
What on Earth is he talking about?
Enlightenment thinking was clear and organized. There were disagreements amongst the thinkers of the Era, but the Era itself was definable.
So he says, but is unable to recognize it's principles as they are applied to software freedom. There's a straight line between the US Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the "rhetoric" of the internet liberating electronic expression from Government control. Business and economic success are simple byproduct of freedom. We can and must all be rebels so long as others would tax and control us without consent. Making money off the result is secondary.
The name calling is more understandable if he's forcasting the next big company caused IT meltdown. The so called "bursting of the internet bubble" was a direct result of bad laws which allowed public resources to be stolen by the likes of Bellsouth. The laws which allowed them to crush the DSL companies were bought with the promise of shiny fiber to the curb networks which were charged for but never appeared. Other companies, Netscape etc, were crushed in much the same way. As the next set of shitty laws are passed in the name of fighting terrorism and big dumb executives gloat at their expected revenues, I suppose it's time to crank up the "wild eyed rebel propaganda." It would not do to crush "small business innovators" and "mom and pop shops" now would it?
Uhhh stick your headphones in some chicks ear and she'll probably slap you. Who wants someones else`s freshly waxed earbuds in their ear?
Most people spell it "Duh", but I understand BRUTICUS has neither manners or sense. Before you touch someone else, it's a good idea to ... that it ... ASK. If the answer is "yes", she's told you a lot about herself. Charm comes from doing, Bruty, go out and talk to a girl some time.