You really have to wonder what idiots at Microsoft think this stuff up? Presumably some idiot proposed crippling it to absurdity as "a way to combat piracy" and the co-idiots in the room nodded enthusiastically: "Hey! That'll work." They really needed someone, as Bill used to say, to tell them "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. You're fired, and everyone who worked on Vista too." (I made up the last part, but it's true).
Same logic Congress uses. Hell, its the same logic you see on TDWTF from time to time: "If I pretend to fix it, the boss [in Congress's case this is the electorate] won't bother to check if I actually did." Think about anti-gun laws. Think about anti-piracy... efforts. ETC.
With Vista you need "Ultimate" + an obscure configuration utility run from the command line just to make the thing MS Windows compatible as far as networking goes!
There are still a lot of large organisations that are not using active directory, perhaps making Vista incompatible with the older MS standard was a bit of an attempt to get people to change their infrastructure. Either that or gross incompatance on a Zune leap year scale.
I seriously hope that last sentence is sarcasm... consider OOXML (.docx,.xlsx,.pptx, etc.). Now the Zune... that really was a flop... I think.
the answer is presumably because they consider piracy to be wrong, but don't want shell out money for the full version.
Presumably, but if that's the case it's not terribly smart.
Sort of like how IE8's clickjacking fix requires the author of the web page to do something in order to not behave like IE7 (i.e. in order to not get fooled). This is also similar to the way ActiveX controls work... (by default anyway): The only barrier to running (besides changing the default settings, which lusers never do) is whether the author of a control has marked it as safe. Or like how Congress thinks it can outlaw something and it'll "just work" (a law is a piece of paper; criminals have no difficulty ignoring pieces of paper)
The economic crisis derives directly from the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking, neither of which is free market. Centrally controlled interest rates are not in any way 'free market', and fractional reserve banking is simply fraud (which should be replaced with 100% reserve deposits and the option to invest at the customers discretion and the customers risk). [emphasis added]
Um, wrong. If the bank doesn't have any opportunity to make a profit, why should it operate? This is an example of a risk/reward thing: There is low risk to you, but also a low reward. If you don't like the idea of the bank profiting off your money, don't give it to them. You are not entitled to free interest.
Blaming the market for doing what the Fed told them to is pointless; when the Fed policy threatens to inflate away any money people have that they don't invest, people are going to invest it. Regulation to prevent it would be ineffective, as you'll currently note, when the Fed doesn't get what it wants it'll go on lowering rates and then simply printing money until people do what it wants. This is the fundamental nature of the Fed, and until it's abolished it's going to continue to mismanage rates and cause bubbles and collapses like this.
Ignoring the last 5 years or so, the Fed has ~never encouraged inflation. Look at the '70s. Look at what the Fed is doing now. If they don't want to help us, what do they want, exactly?
With free market rates and without FRB the housing bubble would never have come to pass; as demand for capital increased, so would the interest that depositors demanded, borrowers would have to compete for money to borrow. Only with infinite credit and artificially low rates is it possible to build unsustainable bubbles of the kinds we've seen.
Funny, I always thought the loaners (banks etc.) were issuing bad loans (aka sub-prime mortgages). If the Fed had been somehow "pressuring" them into doing this (by a mechanism still opaque to me), why didn't they just lower their interest rates and continue with reasonable credit requirements.
I haven't seen any of the prophecies
You probably haven't looked too carefully. Austrian school economists predicted exactly what happened. Unless, of course, by 'free-market' you mean the self-serving monetarist clowns running a lot of US finance, most of whose approval of 'free markets' is strictly limited to the features that serve them and their friends.
In a world with 7 billion people, I suppose someone has to have predicted this perfectly... Would you mind explaining (or better yet linking) what, exactly, is Austrian school economics? Also, I call FUD on the free market stuff. Price ceilings and price floors just cause shortages and surpluses. If the market "wants" to go somewhere, in the long run we cannot stop it. We can divert it, we can delay it, but we cannot prevent it (unless we delay it until it "changes its mind").
The problem is natural selection. If anyone decides to "stop having babies", that person's genes will be disadvantaged. So we're evolving to have babies. I don't see what to do about that...
I'm just not a climatological chicken little and I am skeptical of folks who are especially when 'climate change' is used by everyone and their mother to push pet causes like birth control, vegan diets,
Oh come on! Al Gore has to get himself elected somehow!
Well, fork over $300 for a (legally) unlocked G1 (Google's iPhone killer). It gives you root access (it's a ~Linux OS). I sure hope this bill won't kill that...
IE is NOT the first browser to implement anti-clickjacking tech. Firefox + NoScript has had a non-obtrusive (read:it works with the "globally allow scripts [etc]" option enabled) clickjacking blocker known as ClearClick for quite a whilenow. It is inaccurate to compare vanilla Firefox with other browsers since Mozilla intended Fx to be used with addons. NoScript is a perfect example.
Something I've learned about this site... it's only a monopoly and/or evil if it's Microsoft.
Adobe has somehow convinced people that its a good thing that they have little to no competition and that they'd never be an "evil" corporation like Microsoft.
Maybe Adobe does need competition. However, Silverlight is a form of vendor lock-in: You can't use it outside of Windows (well, you could use Mono, but that's buggy/broken and M$ is doing everything it can to prevent that from working -- not exactly a standard). I don't know much about what Adobe thinks of gnash and swfdec, but at least Adobe provides a Linux plugin/player (and one for Mac OS X, and one for Windows (duh)).
Slashdot Mirror
Okay... what idiot rated that "Overrated" when it was at 0?!
Why would you want a "pro" Win ME? Is that as in "Professional 'piss off *.* OS'"?
Wikitext (used by MediaWiki, which is used by Wikipedia) is NOT complicated.
''italic''
'''bold'''
[[link]]
etc.
Ubuntu has 32 and 64 bit editions (they're very similar AFAIK).
No, because tech as a whole is bullish, bizarrely enough. But if they have to they'll certainly try your angle -- better than bankruptcy!
for the uninitiated
You really have to wonder what idiots at Microsoft think this stuff up? Presumably some idiot proposed crippling it to absurdity as "a way to combat piracy" and the co-idiots in the room nodded enthusiastically: "Hey! That'll work." They really needed someone, as Bill used to say, to tell them "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. You're fired, and everyone who worked on Vista too." (I made up the last part, but it's true).
Same logic Congress uses. Hell, its the same logic you see on TDWTF from time to time: "If I pretend to fix it, the boss [in Congress's case this is the electorate] won't bother to check if I actually did." Think about anti-gun laws. Think about anti-piracy ... efforts. ETC.
With Vista you need "Ultimate" + an obscure configuration utility run from the command line just to make the thing MS Windows compatible as far as networking goes!
There are still a lot of large organisations that are not using active directory, perhaps making Vista incompatible with the older MS standard was a bit of an attempt to get people to change their infrastructure. Either that or gross incompatance on a Zune leap year scale.
I seriously hope that last sentence is sarcasm... consider OOXML (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.).
Now the Zune... that really was a flop... I think.
My linux licenses are so much easier.
Server: $0
Workstation: $0
Database (MySQL or Postgresql): $0
Jabber collaboration server: $0
Development workstation (with any combination of vi, vim, emacs, openkomodo, kate, eclipse, etc...): $5
(Actually, my linux sales rep says 'Just kidding stupid, it's $0')
A fully functional server: Priceless.
What, 404s?
I think you mean "apps" not "programs" else you would already have explorer.exe and systray...
the answer is presumably because they consider piracy to be wrong, but don't want shell out money for the full version.
Presumably, but if that's the case it's not terribly smart.
Sort of like how IE8's clickjacking fix requires the author of the web page to do something in order to not behave like IE7 (i.e. in order to not get fooled). This is also similar to the way ActiveX controls work... (by default anyway): The only barrier to running (besides changing the default settings, which lusers never do) is whether the author of a control has marked it as safe. Or like how Congress thinks it can outlaw something and it'll "just work" (a law is a piece of paper; criminals have no difficulty ignoring pieces of paper)
If M$ wanted Silverlight to work on Linux, they would have made a plugin for Linux in the first place. This is the same as Samba.
...which isn't exactly the same thing as an iPhone.
The economic crisis derives directly from the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking, neither of which is free market. Centrally controlled interest rates are not in any way 'free market', and fractional reserve banking is simply fraud (which should be replaced with 100% reserve deposits and the option to invest at the customers discretion and the customers risk). [emphasis added]
Um, wrong. If the bank doesn't have any opportunity to make a profit, why should it operate? This is an example of a risk/reward thing: There is low risk to you, but also a low reward. If you don't like the idea of the bank profiting off your money, don't give it to them. You are not entitled to free interest.
Blaming the market for doing what the Fed told them to is pointless; when the Fed policy threatens to inflate away any money people have that they don't invest, people are going to invest it. Regulation to prevent it would be ineffective, as you'll currently note, when the Fed doesn't get what it wants it'll go on lowering rates and then simply printing money until people do what it wants. This is the fundamental nature of the Fed, and until it's abolished it's going to continue to mismanage rates and cause bubbles and collapses like this.
Ignoring the last 5 years or so, the Fed has ~never encouraged inflation. Look at the '70s.
Look at what the Fed is doing now. If they don't want to help us, what do they want, exactly?
With free market rates and without FRB the housing bubble would never have come to pass; as demand for capital increased, so would the interest that depositors demanded, borrowers would have to compete for money to borrow. Only with infinite credit and artificially low rates is it possible to build unsustainable bubbles of the kinds we've seen.
Funny, I always thought the loaners (banks etc.) were issuing bad loans (aka sub-prime mortgages). If the Fed had been somehow "pressuring" them into doing this (by a mechanism still opaque to me), why didn't they just lower their interest rates and continue with reasonable credit requirements.
I haven't seen any of the prophecies
You probably haven't looked too carefully. Austrian school economists predicted exactly what happened. Unless, of course, by 'free-market' you mean the self-serving monetarist clowns running a lot of US finance, most of whose approval of 'free markets' is strictly limited to the features that serve them and their friends.
In a world with 7 billion people, I suppose someone has to have predicted this perfectly... Would you mind explaining (or better yet linking) what, exactly, is Austrian school economics? Also, I call FUD on the free market stuff. Price ceilings and price floors just cause shortages and surpluses. If the market "wants" to go somewhere, in the long run we cannot stop it. We can divert it, we can delay it, but we cannot prevent it (unless we delay it until it "changes its mind").
The problem is natural selection. If anyone decides to "stop having babies", that person's genes will be disadvantaged. So we're evolving to have babies. I don't see what to do about that...
[snip]
I'm just not a climatological chicken little and I am skeptical of folks who are especially when 'climate change' is used by everyone and their mother to push pet causes like birth control, vegan diets,
Oh come on! Al Gore has to get himself elected somehow!
</sarcasm>
The bill contains the word "reasonable", which translates to (IANAL) "I know it when I see it"
I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. If you are reading slashdot looking for legal advice, you sir, are an idiot.
If they wanted to protect my privacy, why didn't they just repeal the PATRIOT act? Seems simpler.
Sort of like some people think you can legislate net-neutrality when the telcos have armies of lawyers (duh they'll find a loophole).
The problem is that Google will sell an (admittedly expensive) unlocked G1.
Unlocked == root access == I can turn on/off whatever I want
Why would M$ do that? Google is about to give Apple a run for its money; why should M$ interfere at this point when it'll primarily help Apple?
Well, fork over $300 for a (legally) unlocked G1 (Google's iPhone killer). It gives you root access (it's a ~Linux OS). I sure hope this bill won't kill that...
IE is NOT the first browser to implement anti-clickjacking tech. Firefox + NoScript has had a non-obtrusive (read:it works with the "globally allow scripts [etc]" option enabled) clickjacking blocker known as ClearClick for quite a while now. It is inaccurate to compare vanilla Firefox with other browsers since Mozilla intended Fx to be used with addons. NoScript is a perfect example.
Something I've learned about this site... it's only a monopoly and/or evil if it's Microsoft.
Adobe has somehow convinced people that its a good thing that they have little to no competition and that they'd never be an "evil" corporation like Microsoft.
Maybe Adobe does need competition. However, Silverlight is a form of vendor lock-in: You can't use it outside of Windows (well, you could use Mono, but that's buggy/broken and M$ is doing everything it can to prevent that from working -- not exactly a standard). I don't know much about what Adobe thinks of gnash and swfdec, but at least Adobe provides a Linux plugin/player (and one for Mac OS X, and one for Windows (duh)).