As long as it's voluntary, then we all win - you can either take the test and get cheaper premiums, or you can not take the test and satisfy your urge for privacy. It's a win-win situation.
The problem is that the health insurance megacorps can make coverage for untested people VERY expensive. So while it will never be mandatory, eventually choosing the privacy option might triple your premium.
Big companies will do whatever they can to maximize profit, and so will do whatever they can to make people take the genetic tests. So either take the test, get tested positive for one of 10,000 possible diseases and pay higher rates, or choose to keep your privacy, and pay higher rates. Maybe you'll get lucky and not test positive for anything, and you'll pay "reduced rates" (i.e. the rates you were paying before they hiked everyone else's)
It's a "they win"-"you lose" situation once you factor in typical corprate greed.
I get the impression that Sharky's reviewers have sort of lost touch with the real world a bit. They talk about how one card is better than another because it has TV-out or TV-in... yet how many hardcore gamers use such a feature? would a hardcore gamer (sharky's intended audience) EVER play Q3 on a fuzzy, 640x480 television? Would anyone even drag their rig out into the living room?
All this from the same crew who benchmarks Q3 at 1600x1200, and spits on any card that loses that race (how many ppl have monitors that can do 1600x1200 at 100 hz anyways?)
They rated the Elsa card as SuperFantasticGetOneOrDie, yet the identical Powergene card was rated as "bleh," for those "those on an extremely tight budget" (the powergene is only $10 less than the elsa.) But according to the reviewer "you don't get a name brand" with the powergene, so stay away unless you are ghetto. Reality check anyone? BOTH cards are stock reference designs, except for a possible future tv in/out module for the elsa.
Also, by reading these "shootouts" one would get the impression that quake 3 is the only game on the market. If they benchmark some other game, it has to be a quake clone. I play the Quake series to death, but I also play strategy games like Homeworld (which can bring a video card/cpu to its KNEES during intense battles.) Where is the benchmark on some non-FPS game?
How about image quality? I personally turn on FSAA on my Geforce when playing Homeworld at 800x600, because it looks SO much better than 1024/768 without FSAA. If sharky reviewers would play something besides FPSs then stuff like image quality would get ranked way higher.
Anyways, thats the end of my rant. Whenever you read one of these reviews, keep in mind the biases of the reviewer, and remember that they sometimes get caught up in "reviewerland," which is not necessarily connected to the "real world."
"Consider this: The process of preserving foods in tin cans was invented in 1810, but it wasn't until 1854, more that 40 years later, that someone invented the can opener. Go figure."
Can you imagine the dismay of the person who first canned something?
Scene from the First Cannery:
Minion: "Hey boss, so like, how do you get it back out?"
What recourse does your team have if, in the name of "National Security," the FBI edits your report in such a way that the final published document contradicts your actual findings? In other words, how much do you trust the FBI censorship team to edit "fairly," and can you publically say anything if you feel they did not?
If you read the article, the FCC is not involved in this deal because AIM is some kind of "communications protocol" that falls under their jurisdiction. The FCC is involved in anything that Time Warner (a cable company) does, because it requires the transfer of cable operation licenses.
From the article:
FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth told reporters later Wednesday that he would find it difficult to impose conditions on the companies regarding IM and cable services.
"To the extent we don't regulate them in the first instance, it would be very peculiar, in my view, to begin regulating them as part of the license transfer," FCC Commissioner Furchtgott-Roth told reporters
So the FCC does realize that it is a bit weird for them to be setting down rules regarding AIM. However the FCC was petitioned by AOL competitors to use their license transfer jurisdiction to put the brakes on the merger unless AOL plays nice.
This would otherwise be a total non-issue, and the FCC wouldn't give a damn about application level protocols. This is all about Microsoft et al. doing whatever they can to break into a lucrative market that AOL for the most part established or bought when nobody thought it was worth anything.
As much as I would like to see an open AIM protocol, I don't want to see that happen as a result of competitors whining to the government to help them break a company that had a bit more foresight in this arena.
Let the FCC worry more about open access to cable systems than application protocols.
Indeed, I think lots of people here are bashing RMS more out of habit than out of rationality.
Some posters here perhaps don't realize that RMS isn't forcing the GPL on anyone. If the Python crew want to release a license that is not compatible with the GPL, they are perfectly free to do so. They just have to accept the consequences, for themselves and for the python community.
On the other hand, Stallman HAS been fairly consistent in his goals and interpretation of the GPL. He also has somewhat of an obligation to all the people who have chosen to use the GPL, to defend it to the letter. Anyone who has (freely!!!) chosen to use the GPL did so because they believe in this particular mechanism to release "Free Software," and in the FSF to defend it on their behalf. If any coder had problems with FSF/GNU, they would have used a different license and dealt with the possible consequences.
If Stallman were to "just ignore that trivial little incompatibility" in this case or that case, he would be doing do a disservice to everyone who got on to the GPL bandwagon. He can't stop now.
That being said, RMS does sometimes seem to go over the top. But otherwise we would have a GPL that is routinely breached, with not much consistency and totally watered down. Not the stuff of revolution.
Stephen King is not using the Street Performer's Protocol, he's asking for a percentage of his readers to pay per chapter. Thus, his potential revenues are not capped in advance.
The band you mentioned sounds interesting... are they going to release the album in stores anyway (thus getting "unlimited" revenues) while giving advanced copies to their dontating fans? Sounds cool. However you have to have an existing reputation in order for that to work, new or "local" bands (even good ones) would find it difficult to get enough capital to cover making a fully professional recording.
So the SPP seems to fail for established artists by artificially capping their potential revenue, and seems to fail for new artists who are not well known enough to make the donation system work.
I'll check out the NPR piece as soon as I can get RA working on this linux box....
The problem with the street performer protocol is that it makes an author declare up front what his/her maximum profit will be. Since after the work is published the work is free to all, donations are unlikely to keep coming in.
If you stick to a more traditional method (i.e. any other method that pays based on popularity, such as subscriptions, banner ads, etc) then the author doesn't have to set a profitability limit. Thus, there isn't a good business reason to try the SPP if you are interested in "keeping kibble in the cat bowl" for as long as possible.
Additionally, the problem of even specifying your "max profit" under the SPP is hard to overcome. How many donors is your book likely to attract? How long will it take you to put it together (thus keeping you from other kibble-producing work)? If you undershoot, you end up wasting time/effort as your book goes "overbudget." If you overshoot, your contribution cap isn't met and has to be refunded. What if you have no reputation to justify ANY contribution cap?
I read the SPP pdf and I think it's an interesting idea, but the "max profit" model probably won't seem like good business sense to most performers.
All the distro makers are trying very hard to make a luser friendly yet powerful unix system, but that exactly describes OS X. Except for the hardware constraints, anybody interested in linux from a user standpoint is better served using MacOS X. Why give Grandma Redhat when you can give her OSX?
RedHat/GNOME/KDE & crew have a loooong way to go before they match the user experience of OS X. It will be hard to even try to match level that since Apple controls the hardware too.
Throw in all the standard OSS tools (gcc/gmake/perl/apache/etc..) and what is there for a geek not to like too?
Mac OS X seems really cool, unfortunately Apple needed this about 4 years ago. Still, OS X makes me seriously consider picking up a mac (ibook perhaps) just to play around with it.
Accusing the TA of "not really teaching" is quite a bit unfair. Asking the TA to be able to replicate any student's programming environment in order to grade code is ridiculous.
Joey has GCC 1.0 on BeOS? gotta get that installer. Susy has egcs on Solaris? gotta get THAT installer. How about Bobby who has Visual Studio 4.56 running on windows 3.1? Better sharpen up those quintuple boot skills. Or figure out how to use use VMware in a hurry. Either way, give the TA an extra semester or two to finish grading.
According to this question the textbook comes with a compiler. This means that lots of the sample code, excercises, and information in the class is geared to work on that particular compiler. Answering questions on why "Foo didn't work for me during the homework assignment" is a waste of class time.
Would this question have been framed so negatively if the class required GCC/Linux?
if the PHBs are mandating win2k everywhere (along with full compliance to the Microsoft Apps party line) then you have another option... Metaframe/Terminal services.
Let them beat themselves senseless "driving Microsoft solutions", then plug in a server farm of win2k servers with Terminal services and Metaframe. Distribute the Metaframe client to your unix boxes and voila, everyone has a Windows 2000 desktop inside their trusty Unix workstation.
All your unix brethren can then run office 2k, outlook, the goofy accounting custom VB app, etc without harming your current investment.
win2k should have no problem accessing a samba share, so ppl can still access unix files and home directories from within their session.
The only issue left is the pain of maintaining 2 separate logins (your users get their existing unix world and the new win2k login id) but supposedly you can authenticate a unix workstation to a Win2k KDC (but not the other way around without serious issues). So, once you have a terminal services farm in place, at your leisure figure out how to auth your unix boxes to a win2k kdc while preserving all your permissions.
Eventually you will have single signon, full unix stability, and a way for your users to run the "Corporate Standard Win2k desktop". I have a feeling that the unix to win2k auth will be a bit of a bear, so brush up on your perl/nis/c skills.
Remember that this is an editorial. That means that it's supposed to show "bias" or "FUD" or whatever you want to call it. This is not a news article.
Lots of people have opinions on those subjects you mentioned. This guy does too, and he's letting you know what they are. Is there some special reason that he should be 100% neutral and have no opinions on anything? Are you implying that he should just "shut up"? Change the channel, then.
Just remember that everything you get from The Media is biased in some fashion. It's YOUR job as a reader to detect the bias and deal with it, not the author's. There is no such thing as "unbiased reporting."
-Nehril
christ, I'm trying out m16 on windows and the thing can't even cut and paste, has trouble logging into authenticated sites, has drop down list for recently visited sites that doesn't work, the list goes on.
basic, fundamental things are broken in m16. no way can they release this. I wish they would fix these "little" things before implementing Platforms and Skins and Kitchen Sinks.
if only they had released a nice, working standalone browser, they could have had lots of positive press and had plenty of time to implement the rest in version 1.5. Somebody get them a project manager.
Windows code is notorious for "requiring" certain bugs to be present in order for things to work properly. It seems that to fully implement a 100% compatible product they will have to replicate most, if not every, bug. What then is the point?
Additionally, if they intend to use existing software from everywhere, how will they deal with incompatible licenses? There are lots of "free" licenses that are fundamentally incompatible with GPL. Will they ask developers to sign over copyright ownership ala GNU?
Sounds like a nice way to kill time, but developer time could probably be better spent on helping out the Wine people, and then making a distro around that.
apple did not "sue" anyone because they made a theme that looked like Aqua. They sent a cease-and-desist for certain themes that actually contained the apple logo.
As far as I know, a company CANNOT allow their trademarks/logos to be used without permission otherwise they lose the trademark.
The whole emachines debacle happened because emachines INTENTIONALLY tried to confuse customers with an extremely similar looking machine. That sort of thing is generally frowned upon by the courts, whether or not the plaintiff is Apple.
Hate apple all you want, but at least get the facts straight.
But by your logic, they should institute phone surveillance of everyone, just in case. And we should welcome this, apparently?
No, Carnivore does not mean that they will be "instituting surveillance of everyone." It means that they now have a tool to implement "internet" surveillance. Just like the tools they have to do phone taps.
Is IP traffic somehow more sacred than phone conversations? Where is the outrage against the tools the FBI uses to tap voice communications? Where is the cry to make voice tap gear "open source"? Let's not apply a dual standard.
The FBI's worst mistake was to call this gadget "carnivore." It's probably no more than a collection of stuff from Scr1p7Kiddi3z.com. I'm sure that most hackers can throw together a Carnivore-clone in a few hours. The technology itself is not very interesting. The FBI probably has LOTS of secret "evidence gathering tools." I don't care about the tools, I care about what's DONE with the tools.
What you really want is better accountability for any FBI actions against citizens. Forget the Carnivore red herring and focus on that if you want to avoid a Police State (tm).
NVIDIA have publically stated that they cannot open their source because they use a third party AGP driver implementation which they do not have a license to release to the public. This code is responsible for a great deal of their performance.
They could spend lots of time and money to get rid of this code, just for the sake of being Open Source, but it doesn't make business sense at this time since they already have a kick ass driver. Not to mention that they would probably get immediately sued by the AGP driver company the instant they "came up with a new implementation" and stopped paying royalties or whatever.
Tech companies that can't/don't go OSS are not automatically the Anti-Christ. They are free to choose whatever makes economic/business sense for their company, just like you have the freedom to publish everything under the GPL.
If you go with a full linux desktop but find some "must have app" that only runs on Windows, then definitely consider a Windows Terminal Server with Metaframe to serve just those apps.
This lets you keep the coolness and control of having linux on the desktop but lets you run a "thin client" to a Windows machine to run all your windows only apps. It can also be the thing that keeps the Pointy Haired Boss from deep-sixing your linux project because of some particular app.
The client protocol is also very bandwidth-lean and depending on the app you can get 40-60 users on a dual proc PIII-800 WTS machine. The licensing for a Windows Terminal Server is nightmarish but it might be the only solution to some real business problems .
Read the entire article series. this was NOT a business... it was a free service provided by volunteers. In other words, everyone had day jobs, and nobody had extra cash to do things "right."
I still don't blame the sysadmin. Sure, he could have done a better job, but thats sort of like telling a victim of a mugging "Hey, it's your fault because you coulda learned karate."
Let's not absolve the cracker of his obvious guilt by "blaming" the sysadmin.
I actually read part of the original script for an Art of the Film class, and the ending (not filmed) in the script left no doubt that Deckard was a replicant. This is old news.
No, BDR do not think they have an absolute right to make money. They want to make money on their OWN terms, not yours. In otherwords, they don't want people to steal their music off of napster. That demonstrably lowers their income, because VERY FEW people would pay if they can get the whole thing for free.
Just because YOU think they should make money doing something else (tshirts, touring etc) doesn't change the fact that BDR gets to choose how to distribute their music, not Joe Napster.
That's what freedom is about right? You get to choose how you make money or what to do with your property?
Why code under Linux? Because you need to make a program that runs under Linux!! If you need to make a Windows program, develop it in Windows.
The fact that this question focusses exclusively on the "what to develop in" aspect ignores the fact that computers are just a tool, and you use the right one for solving whatever problem you need fixed.
So the question should really be, "For what kinds of problems is Linux a better solution that Windows?" Answer that, and you have also answered which system to develop under.
Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses for development, and a competent coder can do a good job on either platform.
Adding toolkits to make Linux more gooey or Windows more command-liney doesn't at all help you answer the "which is more appropriate for this task" question.
too often technologists embark on a new project thinking the same way: "Lets make it work and let someone else figure out how to secure it."
Thus we end up with useful protocols like SMTP that are also prone to abuse. These guys have the right idea, i.e. lets talk about security FIRST so that the right measures will be built right into whatever mechanism does end up working.
A basic problem is that since now that advertisers can actually measure the impact of a given ad (via clickthroughs), they base their payment plans on this rather than on the popularity of the site. This leads to very low banner ad income for popular websites.
Where is the clickthrough for a television ad, or a movie trailer? Advertisers are willing to pay big bucks because they know that lots of people in their target audience will see the ad, but they have no way of knowing how many people paid attention to it. They pay enough money to keep these institutions running--i.e. ST: NG cost a lot of money to make, but advertisers were willing to cover most of the costs.
Additionally site owners will have to diversify their income methods, with merchandising, "sponsorships" of special events etc.
Eventually advertisers will end up paying much more to have their ads appear on premium sites with a proven target audience, enough to cover the costs of running the site. There will necessarily be a shakedown as the smaller players won't attract enough "customers", but that happens in every industry. The good thing about the net is that if you have a good idea, it is still cheap to get started.
The net may never go back to how it was 5 years ago, but it is certainly more interesting now. I wouldn't mind seeing more advertising on my favorite sites if it meant they could keep going free of charge to me. Isn't free slashdot worth seeing an extra ad or two?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the health insurance megacorps can make coverage for untested people VERY expensive. So while it will never be mandatory, eventually choosing the privacy option might triple your premium.
Big companies will do whatever they can to maximize profit, and so will do whatever they can to make people take the genetic tests. So either take the test, get tested positive for one of 10,000 possible diseases and pay higher rates, or choose to keep your privacy, and pay higher rates. Maybe you'll get lucky and not test positive for anything, and you'll pay "reduced rates" (i.e. the rates you were paying before they hiked everyone else's)
It's a "they win"-"you lose" situation once you factor in typical corprate greed.
All this from the same crew who benchmarks Q3 at 1600x1200, and spits on any card that loses that race (how many ppl have monitors that can do 1600x1200 at 100 hz anyways?)
They rated the Elsa card as SuperFantasticGetOneOrDie, yet the identical Powergene card was rated as "bleh," for those "those on an extremely tight budget" (the powergene is only $10 less than the elsa.) But according to the reviewer "you don't get a name brand" with the powergene, so stay away unless you are ghetto. Reality check anyone? BOTH cards are stock reference designs, except for a possible future tv in/out module for the elsa.
Also, by reading these "shootouts" one would get the impression that quake 3 is the only game on the market. If they benchmark some other game, it has to be a quake clone. I play the Quake series to death, but I also play strategy games like Homeworld (which can bring a video card/cpu to its KNEES during intense battles.) Where is the benchmark on some non-FPS game?
How about image quality? I personally turn on FSAA on my Geforce when playing Homeworld at 800x600, because it looks SO much better than 1024/768 without FSAA. If sharky reviewers would play something besides FPSs then stuff like image quality would get ranked way higher.
Anyways, thats the end of my rant. Whenever you read one of these reviews, keep in mind the biases of the reviewer, and remember that they sometimes get caught up in "reviewerland," which is not necessarily connected to the "real world."
Can you imagine the dismay of the person who first canned something?
Scene from the First Cannery:
Minion: "Hey boss, so like, how do you get it back out?"
Boss: "Doh!"
From the article:
FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth told reporters later Wednesday that he would find it difficult to impose conditions on the companies regarding IM and cable services.
"To the extent we don't regulate them in the first instance, it would be very peculiar, in my view, to begin regulating them as part of the license transfer," FCC Commissioner Furchtgott-Roth told reporters
So the FCC does realize that it is a bit weird for them to be setting down rules regarding AIM. However the FCC was petitioned by AOL competitors to use their license transfer jurisdiction to put the brakes on the merger unless AOL plays nice.
This would otherwise be a total non-issue, and the FCC wouldn't give a damn about application level protocols. This is all about Microsoft et al. doing whatever they can to break into a lucrative market that AOL for the most part established or bought when nobody thought it was worth anything.
As much as I would like to see an open AIM protocol, I don't want to see that happen as a result of competitors whining to the government to help them break a company that had a bit more foresight in this arena.
Let the FCC worry more about open access to cable systems than application protocols.
Some posters here perhaps don't realize that RMS isn't forcing the GPL on anyone. If the Python crew want to release a license that is not compatible with the GPL, they are perfectly free to do so. They just have to accept the consequences, for themselves and for the python community.
On the other hand, Stallman HAS been fairly consistent in his goals and interpretation of the GPL. He also has somewhat of an obligation to all the people who have chosen to use the GPL, to defend it to the letter. Anyone who has (freely!!!) chosen to use the GPL did so because they believe in this particular mechanism to release "Free Software," and in the FSF to defend it on their behalf. If any coder had problems with FSF/GNU, they would have used a different license and dealt with the possible consequences.
If Stallman were to "just ignore that trivial little incompatibility" in this case or that case, he would be doing do a disservice to everyone who got on to the GPL bandwagon. He can't stop now.
That being said, RMS does sometimes seem to go over the top. But otherwise we would have a GPL that is routinely breached, with not much consistency and totally watered down. Not the stuff of revolution.
The band you mentioned sounds interesting... are they going to release the album in stores anyway (thus getting "unlimited" revenues) while giving advanced copies to their dontating fans? Sounds cool. However you have to have an existing reputation in order for that to work, new or "local" bands (even good ones) would find it difficult to get enough capital to cover making a fully professional recording.
So the SPP seems to fail for established artists by artificially capping their potential revenue, and seems to fail for new artists who are not well known enough to make the donation system work.
I'll check out the NPR piece as soon as I can get RA working on this linux box....
If you stick to a more traditional method (i.e. any other method that pays based on popularity, such as subscriptions, banner ads, etc) then the author doesn't have to set a profitability limit. Thus, there isn't a good business reason to try the SPP if you are interested in "keeping kibble in the cat bowl" for as long as possible.
Additionally, the problem of even specifying your "max profit" under the SPP is hard to overcome. How many donors is your book likely to attract? How long will it take you to put it together (thus keeping you from other kibble-producing work)? If you undershoot, you end up wasting time/effort as your book goes "overbudget." If you overshoot, your contribution cap isn't met and has to be refunded. What if you have no reputation to justify ANY contribution cap?
I read the SPP pdf and I think it's an interesting idea, but the "max profit" model probably won't seem like good business sense to most performers.
RedHat/GNOME/KDE & crew have a loooong way to go before they match the user experience of OS X. It will be hard to even try to match level that since Apple controls the hardware too.
Throw in all the standard OSS tools (gcc/gmake/perl/apache/etc..) and what is there for a geek not to like too?
Mac OS X seems really cool, unfortunately Apple needed this about 4 years ago. Still, OS X makes me seriously consider picking up a mac (ibook perhaps) just to play around with it.
Accusing the TA of "not really teaching" is quite a bit unfair. Asking the TA to be able to replicate any student's programming environment in order to grade code is ridiculous.
Joey has GCC 1.0 on BeOS? gotta get that installer. Susy has egcs on Solaris? gotta get THAT installer. How about Bobby who has Visual Studio 4.56 running on windows 3.1? Better sharpen up those quintuple boot skills. Or figure out how to use use VMware in a hurry. Either way, give the TA an extra semester or two to finish grading.
According to this question the textbook comes with a compiler. This means that lots of the sample code, excercises, and information in the class is geared to work on that particular compiler. Answering questions on why "Foo didn't work for me during the homework assignment" is a waste of class time.
Would this question have been framed so negatively if the class required GCC/Linux?
Let them beat themselves senseless "driving Microsoft solutions", then plug in a server farm of win2k servers with Terminal services and Metaframe. Distribute the Metaframe client to your unix boxes and voila, everyone has a Windows 2000 desktop inside their trusty Unix workstation.
All your unix brethren can then run office 2k, outlook, the goofy accounting custom VB app, etc without harming your current investment.
win2k should have no problem accessing a samba share, so ppl can still access unix files and home directories from within their session.
The only issue left is the pain of maintaining 2 separate logins (your users get their existing unix world and the new win2k login id) but supposedly you can authenticate a unix workstation to a Win2k KDC (but not the other way around without serious issues). So, once you have a terminal services farm in place, at your leisure figure out how to auth your unix boxes to a win2k kdc while preserving all your permissions.
Eventually you will have single signon, full unix stability, and a way for your users to run the "Corporate Standard Win2k desktop". I have a feeling that the unix to win2k auth will be a bit of a bear, so brush up on your perl/nis/c skills.
Lots of people have opinions on those subjects you mentioned. This guy does too, and he's letting you know what they are. Is there some special reason that he should be 100% neutral and have no opinions on anything? Are you implying that he should just "shut up"? Change the channel, then.
Just remember that everything you get from The Media is biased in some fashion. It's YOUR job as a reader to detect the bias and deal with it, not the author's. There is no such thing as "unbiased reporting." -Nehril
basic, fundamental things are broken in m16. no way can they release this. I wish they would fix these "little" things before implementing Platforms and Skins and Kitchen Sinks.
if only they had released a nice, working standalone browser, they could have had lots of positive press and had plenty of time to implement the rest in version 1.5. Somebody get them a project manager.
Additionally, if they intend to use existing software from everywhere, how will they deal with incompatible licenses? There are lots of "free" licenses that are fundamentally incompatible with GPL. Will they ask developers to sign over copyright ownership ala GNU?
Sounds like a nice way to kill time, but developer time could probably be better spent on helping out the Wine people, and then making a distro around that.
As far as I know, a company CANNOT allow their trademarks/logos to be used without permission otherwise they lose the trademark.
The whole emachines debacle happened because emachines INTENTIONALLY tried to confuse customers with an extremely similar looking machine. That sort of thing is generally frowned upon by the courts, whether or not the plaintiff is Apple.
Hate apple all you want, but at least get the facts straight.
No, Carnivore does not mean that they will be "instituting surveillance of everyone." It means that they now have a tool to implement "internet" surveillance. Just like the tools they have to do phone taps.
Is IP traffic somehow more sacred than phone conversations? Where is the outrage against the tools the FBI uses to tap voice communications? Where is the cry to make voice tap gear "open source"? Let's not apply a dual standard.
The FBI's worst mistake was to call this gadget "carnivore." It's probably no more than a collection of stuff from Scr1p7Kiddi3z.com. I'm sure that most hackers can throw together a Carnivore-clone in a few hours. The technology itself is not very interesting. The FBI probably has LOTS of secret "evidence gathering tools." I don't care about the tools, I care about what's DONE with the tools.
What you really want is better accountability for any FBI actions against citizens. Forget the Carnivore red herring and focus on that if you want to avoid a Police State (tm).
They could spend lots of time and money to get rid of this code, just for the sake of being Open Source, but it doesn't make business sense at this time since they already have a kick ass driver. Not to mention that they would probably get immediately sued by the AGP driver company the instant they "came up with a new implementation" and stopped paying royalties or whatever.
Tech companies that can't/don't go OSS are not automatically the Anti-Christ. They are free to choose whatever makes economic/business sense for their company, just like you have the freedom to publish everything under the GPL.
If they didn't spend so much effort putting regular people on their damned spam lists they wouldn't have this problem.
This lets you keep the coolness and control of having linux on the desktop but lets you run a "thin client" to a Windows machine to run all your windows only apps. It can also be the thing that keeps the Pointy Haired Boss from deep-sixing your linux project because of some particular app.
The client protocol is also very bandwidth-lean and depending on the app you can get 40-60 users on a dual proc PIII-800 WTS machine. The licensing for a Windows Terminal Server is nightmarish but it might be the only solution to some real business problems .
I still don't blame the sysadmin. Sure, he could have done a better job, but thats sort of like telling a victim of a mugging "Hey, it's your fault because you coulda learned karate."
Let's not absolve the cracker of his obvious guilt by "blaming" the sysadmin.
I actually read part of the original script for an Art of the Film class, and the ending (not filmed) in the script left no doubt that Deckard was a replicant. This is old news.
Just because YOU think they should make money doing something else (tshirts, touring etc) doesn't change the fact that BDR gets to choose how to distribute their music, not Joe Napster.
That's what freedom is about right? You get to choose how you make money or what to do with your property?
The fact that this question focusses exclusively on the "what to develop in" aspect ignores the fact that computers are just a tool, and you use the right one for solving whatever problem you need fixed.
So the question should really be, "For what kinds of problems is Linux a better solution that Windows?" Answer that, and you have also answered which system to develop under.
Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses for development, and a competent coder can do a good job on either platform.
Adding toolkits to make Linux more gooey or Windows more command-liney doesn't at all help you answer the "which is more appropriate for this task" question.
Thus we end up with useful protocols like SMTP that are also prone to abuse. These guys have the right idea, i.e. lets talk about security FIRST so that the right measures will be built right into whatever mechanism does end up working.
Where is the clickthrough for a television ad, or a movie trailer? Advertisers are willing to pay big bucks because they know that lots of people in their target audience will see the ad, but they have no way of knowing how many people paid attention to it. They pay enough money to keep these institutions running--i.e. ST: NG cost a lot of money to make, but advertisers were willing to cover most of the costs.
Additionally site owners will have to diversify their income methods, with merchandising, "sponsorships" of special events etc.
Eventually advertisers will end up paying much more to have their ads appear on premium sites with a proven target audience, enough to cover the costs of running the site. There will necessarily be a shakedown as the smaller players won't attract enough "customers", but that happens in every industry. The good thing about the net is that if you have a good idea, it is still cheap to get started.
The net may never go back to how it was 5 years ago, but it is certainly more interesting now. I wouldn't mind seeing more advertising on my favorite sites if it meant they could keep going free of charge to me. Isn't free slashdot worth seeing an extra ad or two?