To those who modded me funny: Thanks, but I meant it. Sexuality is a private matter, and unless I am directly involved with someone I am not interested in their orientation. It's their business, not mine.
Happened a few times. I just politely decline, and if asked explain that I am not interested in guys. So far no-one has taken any offence as far as I can tell.
And does "not giving a damn" mean you really don't care if they say anything about it or not, in which case congrats and what I said has nothing to do with you?
If not, does "not giving a damn" mean you don't want to hear about it, as in you do care about not knowing?
If so, are you equally offended by the OPs admission of heterosexuality? [...]
I am not offended by anyone's sexual orientation, or their announcing it to the world at large. I am offended however by people who expect to elicit a reaction from me on their announcement. Or judge my own sexual openness and my social tolerance by my (lack of) interest in whom they are going to share their bed with tonight.
Why should I be interested in your orientation, or that of the OP, or that of the chick in TFA? Does it matter to my personal life? I don't think so.
Just to make this clear: I am not taking sides in the original issue. Microsoft should not be allowed to discriminate against anyone, but on the other hand - assuming they wrote their TOS as careful as it is common for this company - it's well within their right to wipe any and all mention of sexual preference from their users' profiles as long as they do it equally to all sides involved.
Er, no. I seriously don't give the slightest damn about anyone's sexual orientation unless they are female and I'm in the process of offering them a drink.
Sure. Coder A, in Amersterdam, logs on to the team website and starts work on foo.bar in the web editor. Coder B, in Japan, logs on to the team website and starts work on foo.bar in the web editor. Since both are actually working remotely on the same server, sure would be nice if both could see the other person's changes in realtime.
Ah, ok. Sounds interesting. Though I certainly would not agree to share "my" editor with another coder concurrently. Such an approach would require rather stringent social rules and the goodwill of the participants to prevent real-time edit wars within one file if both editors want to change the same part of the code. Though it would be an interesting option for education/training/supervision.
A slightly different model, of course, has Coder A do his changes to foo.bar and save, Coder B do his changes to foo.bar and save, and Project Manager C gets an e-mail alert with a URL to jump into a pair of DIFF editor windows to reconcile the changes for final checkin.
Ok. But IDEs and source management platforms already support this today, so the benefit would lie in having the IDE on a centralised platform, accessible from virtually anywhere, so you could be sure that everyone uses the same environment.
Not to disqualify your ideas. I am very interested in how this whole move to web-based applications will turn out. I personally just don't see much incentive for switching from local apps to remote ones. Time will tell how useful that brave new world will actually be.
Maybe I should rephrase my comment: Being able to control the versioning from within the IDE (as Subclipse does for Eclipse and Subversion) of course is great. Still the storage system and the IDE don't have much to do with each other in my eyes. Could you please elaborate a bit on what you mean by
[...] integrating the two makes for another channel of communication [...]
? I am not really clear what kind of integration you are talking about. Could you point out an example?
That's not a logically attitude, it's a negative and defeatist attitude. [...]
Nope, it is not. I am quite an optimistic and cheerful person - depending on whether the subject merits one of those traits. If they don't, and the issue in question here does not as far as I'm concerned, I strive to take a pragmatist position, guided by logic and objectivity.
The scripting language I used to to code a website last week will likely be obsolete in a decade or so, so I don't know why I even bothered writing it in the first place.
That is defeatism. My position would be to use the language as long as it is widely supported and satisfies all requirements but drop it once something better comes around.
If I would deduct your position from your line of argument, you'd still be coding in Plankalkül, despite the fact that no-one but you (and possibly a few museums) has an interpreter for it any more.
A building can't realistically be expected to last forever, so why do we bother with structural engineering, or safety codes, or any of that.
You can engineer a building so that it withstands fire, earthquakes and hurricanes. That will allow you to live in it even if a small-scale disaster happens to strike it. This is sensible and doable. I have yet to see a house, though, that will survive the eruption of a volcano directly below it.
You see the fallacy in your examples? There are changes in our surroundings that we can adapt to, and there are changes that will eradicate us. Just like any other organism that we know. I just don't understand where this belief that humans are somehow special and have some natural right or obligation to prevail until the end of days comes from. We'll cease to exist someday. Too bad. Unless we happen to meet and befriend E. T. somewhere in the next few centuries no-one will miss us. Therefore it is my firm belief that we should scrap that colonise-the-Mars bullshit and clean up the mess down here first before ever considering to move somewhere else. What do you think would come out of a Mars colony comprised of people with today's screwed-up mindset? It'd take barely months before the first idiot declares themselves king of the castle, and all the human failures, shortcomings and plain stupidity that have caused and continue to fan all the problems in this world just start all over again.
Frankly, humanity in its current state does not deserve to survive.
One of the fundamentals of life is that tries to continue to exist, either through not dying or reproducing. You should not be surprised that humans generally have the same inclination. The fact that the world/universe is a dangerous place makes surviving rather difficult, especially over the long term. Your response to this challenge is apparently to declare it hopeless and ridicule anyone for even trying. There's no logic in that, you're just being lazy.
The survival of life itself does not imply that we'll be in for the ride. There are many far more adaptive and resilient species in this planet's ecosystem than us. And I'm not just talking about bacteria.
It is hopeless. If the meteors don't get us, the sun will, upon its death, with all probability wipe out this solar system, and even if we manage to escape to a more distant system the heat death of the universe will get us eventually. So instead of madly and mindlessly racing for the next best planet no matter what, we could just try to improve conditions here and enjoy the show while it lasts.
Seriously: What would be lost if all humans died tomorrow? Would the universe freeze in awe? Nope. Would the rest of this planet even notice we're gone? Hardly, apart from those animals and plants we forced into dependency. And on the other hand, what would be so great about humanity still being around in 20 billion years? Hum, I don't know, we'd still be watching entertainment shows, killing each other over bullshit and causing massive ecological damage, I guess.
On the whole we just don't matter that much to anyone but ourselves. And even there I have my doubts.
It also sounds to me like something that would be *really neat* to include in a source code control product for teams. [...]
The one does not have anything to do with the other. One provides a managed place for you to put your code, the other lets you write code in a comfortable unified environment. Why would you want to integrate those two?
(Assuming just for a moment that web-based IDEs actually make sense for professional software development.)
If we fail to do this, then a global catastrophe will eventually happen which outstrips our technology and render us extinct.
So?
Honestly I could not care less. Not trying to troll, I really don't see an issue here. Humans have been around for some 200,000 years. Nice, but that is not exactly a long time span. Dinosaurs were around for more than 160 million years - 160,000,000, you notice the difference? And they still vanished. Humanity as a whole is quite insignificant, one amongst an uncountable mass of life forms in this planet, outlived (by time of existence, not concurrency) by most other species.
Why does everyone believe that we should be destined to walk this universe forever? Sorry, folks, hate to break it to you: The odds of that are damningly slim.
Big deal. By my estimation one of the following will have occurred well before our earth evolves to a point where living conditions will not allow us to adapt anymore:
We will have suffocated from our own toxins, fumes and trash.
Global nuclear armageddon, triggered by either a russian fascist, a chinese fascist or an american retard.
God proves his existence - by hitting the reset switch.
I am really surprised, and somewhat concerned here. Supposedly/.'s target group should predominantly consist of engineers, scientists and generally geeks and nerds - people who rely on common sense and logic to make a living. (Not counting those working for Microsoft or Sun. Those have somehow mastered the forbidden art of producing systematically structured chaos.)
Here's a thought. What if each spacecraft did not lug a big old shield up into orbit. What if we build an orbiting "overcoat" which had the necessary shielding and a space inside to accomodate the spacecraft.
And that overcoat is built by hauling material from the earth into space (with every transport flight being exposed to the very risk that now jeopardises the Hubble repair mission), putting it together there (with those unlucky astronauts who have to do this being exposed to the very risk that now jeopardises the Hubble repair mission), to then haul up the actual spacecraft (with that transport flight being exposed to the very risk that now jeopardises the Hubble repair mission).
You are not, by chance, an accountant, a corporate lawyer or a politician?
[...] I don't see more need for a state run Linux distribution than for state run car factories. [...]
A state-run distro does make sense for certain types of users, namely those within the state's institutions. In many countries software that is, for example, used to access personal data on citizens (tax records, registration offices' data...) has to be certified for compliance with regulations and legal requirements. Here it is perfectly sensible to put together a well-defined distro under supervision of an official state body. Though that distro may of course be based on something like Debian.
But a general-purpose state distro for businesses and individuals is not really sensible, that's right.
If evolution be not true, the only explanation for the appearance of varied life on the planet is intelligent design. [...]
I call bullshit on this. I still believe we were spawned by pure accident. Completely random. Only an idiot would intentionally plague such a beautiful planet with the pest that is humanity, and any sensible evolutionary system would have seen us wiped out long ago.
I full well understood what you meant, but it still just does not make any sense in light of what the comment you responded to says. You can swap out certain specific parts of the underlying hardware without any redeployment (I'd be careful with reconfiguration; if you put a "real" or virtual OS on a faster CPU or more RAM you might want to reconfigure scheduling, swapping etc. to get the most out of your upgrade. But you should not need to reinstall anything, that's of course right.). Besides, virtualisation is no silver bullet. There are other means to achieve the flexibility associated with it, and without the performance hit and management overhead. And in many situations you simply don't gain anything from virtualising. What I gathered from affidel's post makes me believe his is such a case. If you have a low number of machines, but those need enormous amounts of raw processing power, you're better off putting those directly on physical machines. Virtualisation allows you to saturate a machine's performance with many concurrent systems, but it does not by itself help with performance issues.
Clustering, as you mentioned, comes to mind here, but it is not always feasible and indeed sensible.
Sometimes you can only replace big iron with bigger iron. And AMD's pledge to compatibility helps here.
Exactly how does virtualisation magically add performance out of hot air? And exactly how does buying additional iron provide that same kind of performance increase per $ spent that the parent mentioned?
Gosh, can we please have an automated -2 buzzword sucker whenever someone comes up with fancy terms where they just don't fit?
That has got to be the most short-sighted and ignorant comment I've read on an article unrelated to Vista, Apple and iTunes ever. By your logic, all RPGs created after 2000 should have been doomed to failure since Diablo 2 took the market by storm. And the Colin Mc Rae franchise should have been ruined by MarioKart. Nice. You haven't, by accident, heard of something called target audience? There is a market for complex games. It's smaller and harder to cater to than the mass-market, but apparently it is there, and viable.
The current Bundeswehr consists of people being drafted from the normal population.
(Emphasis mine)
I would certainly contest that. The Draftees, for the most part, are a nice enough crowd, but God help us should we ever have to engage in a full-scale military operation against a traditional armed force. The median IQ on the "executional" level is not exactly stunning, to say the least.
The Bundeswehr has quite a history of misplacing vehicles and weapons on their own exercise areas, and I had the questionable pleasure of experiencing first-hand how prone to getting lost even with maps and GPS a lot of the lower rank officers are. Horrifying, really. Our OpenStreetmap volunteers and geo cachers can muster better strategic movement than our citizens in uniform.
There certainly are very fine men and women in our armed services, and I mean no disrespect to them. But the Bundeswehr as a whole is an embarrassment. Part of that is due to underfunding, part is due to infighting amongst branches, part is simply due to stupidity, and the rest gets whacked by politics: No-one wants our soldiers to go anywhere because of Germany's past image, so they get bad gear and budget cuts, but when an opportunity arises to look good internationally (so-called peace-keeping etc.) our politicians are all too eager to ship them out by the thousands in no time. Our army is too small and underpowered to defend us, but too immobile and too badly managed to attack anyone.
Sure, but that means nothing can be secure unless nobody knows about it and nobody can find out about it OR it in inaccesable for everyone. [...]
Yes and no. Security is not absolute, it's not binary. It is the factor by which the amount of time and resources needed to break a certain security measure outnumbers the value of what's protected (or the effort needed to go through a different vector).
Obscurity does not add anything on your side of the scale because you can't depend on it, you can't measure it, you can't audit it, and in most cases you will only know it has been broken when it is too late. It is a good idea to keep information about your valuable goods and the security measures that protect them hidden, but this does not add any security in itself.
Not giving away your IP on/. may protect you from "our" wrath, but some script kiddie randomly scanning for open ports might still wreak havoc on your machine if you didn't lock it down properly.
Don't mix up security and secrecy! They have little to do with each other.
You can complain all you want, however don't expect anyone will listen until you provide an alternative.
The alternative is to sell a solid product at a reasonable price. Y'know, what all the other industries have been doing quite successfully for the last decades.
Lots of customers are willing to pay for entertainment. Lots of users are unwilling or unable to spend fourty bucks on a video game. No amount of bullying is going to make them change their mind. Bullying will however make the paying customers go away, and rightly so. As long as unlicensed copies are more convenient than licensed originals people don't have any incentive to shell out money.
This begins with the retarded requirement to have the disc in the drive while playing. It inconveniences me, the lawful customer, but it does nothing to stop my friend who got their copy from ThePirateBay. Similarly unskippable copyright notices and anti copyright infringement propaganda on retail DVDs and in cinemas only hit the paying customers; anyone else just cuts them from their copies. And don't get me started on artificial market-walling. I'd pay good money to get my hands on House, MD episodes in english, in HD quality. But no, some greedy fuck-up decided that Ze Tscherrmans can do with a shoddily localised release that lags hopelessly behind the US air dates. The failed attempt at audio cd protection should have made it clear that technology can't solve social problems: Many cds were unplayable in car radios and top-grade cd players, but that didn't stop the songs from popping up in emule.
As many other posters already said: Copyright infringement is the companies' problem, not the customers'.
Half of my linux boxes only get re-booted during a power outage, like once in 3 years. What's all the hype about?
Hibernation is not to everyone's liking. Some people (including me) prefer to shut down their machines properly, both laptops and desktops. Improving boot time would make me very, very happy.
Yeah, but they are not distributed under the GPL, which makes them unusable for Linux, and they are not patentable, which makes them unusable for Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? That was my first post on the issue. Are you confusing me with someone else from this discussion?
(Besides, you missed my point.)
To those who modded me funny: Thanks, but I meant it. Sexuality is a private matter, and unless I am directly involved with someone I am not interested in their orientation. It's their business, not mine.
Happened a few times. I just politely decline, and if asked explain that I am not interested in guys. So far no-one has taken any offence as far as I can tell.
And does "not giving a damn" mean you really don't care if they say anything about it or not, in which case congrats and what I said has nothing to do with you?
If not, does "not giving a damn" mean you don't want to hear about it, as in you do care about not knowing?
If so, are you equally offended by the OPs admission of heterosexuality? [...]
I am not offended by anyone's sexual orientation, or their announcing it to the world at large. I am offended however by people who expect to elicit a reaction from me on their announcement. Or judge my own sexual openness and my social tolerance by my (lack of) interest in whom they are going to share their bed with tonight.
Why should I be interested in your orientation, or that of the OP, or that of the chick in TFA? Does it matter to my personal life? I don't think so.
Just to make this clear: I am not taking sides in the original issue. Microsoft should not be allowed to discriminate against anyone, but on the other hand - assuming they wrote their TOS as careful as it is common for this company - it's well within their right to wipe any and all mention of sexual preference from their users' profiles as long as they do it equally to all sides involved.
Er, no. I seriously don't give the slightest damn about anyone's sexual orientation unless they are female and I'm in the process of offering them a drink.
Sure. Coder A, in Amersterdam, logs on to the team website and starts work on foo.bar in the web editor. Coder B, in Japan, logs on to the team website and starts work on foo.bar in the web editor. Since both are actually working remotely on the same server, sure would be nice if both could see the other person's changes in realtime.
Ah, ok. Sounds interesting. Though I certainly would not agree to share "my" editor with another coder concurrently. Such an approach would require rather stringent social rules and the goodwill of the participants to prevent real-time edit wars within one file if both editors want to change the same part of the code. Though it would be an interesting option for education/training/supervision.
A slightly different model, of course, has Coder A do his changes to foo.bar and save, Coder B do his changes to foo.bar and save, and Project Manager C gets an e-mail alert with a URL to jump into a pair of DIFF editor windows to reconcile the changes for final checkin.
Ok. But IDEs and source management platforms already support this today, so the benefit would lie in having the IDE on a centralised platform, accessible from virtually anywhere, so you could be sure that everyone uses the same environment.
Not to disqualify your ideas. I am very interested in how this whole move to web-based applications will turn out. I personally just don't see much incentive for switching from local apps to remote ones. Time will tell how useful that brave new world will actually be.
Maybe I should rephrase my comment: Being able to control the versioning from within the IDE (as Subclipse does for Eclipse and Subversion) of course is great. Still the storage system and the IDE don't have much to do with each other in my eyes. Could you please elaborate a bit on what you mean by
[...] integrating the two makes for another channel of communication [...]
? I am not really clear what kind of integration you are talking about. Could you point out an example?
While I disagree, that was the most sensible answer so far. Seriously.
That's not a logically attitude, it's a negative and defeatist attitude. [...]
Nope, it is not. I am quite an optimistic and cheerful person - depending on whether the subject merits one of those traits. If they don't, and the issue in question here does not as far as I'm concerned, I strive to take a pragmatist position, guided by logic and objectivity.
The scripting language I used to to code a website last week will likely be obsolete in a decade or so, so I don't know why I even bothered writing it in the first place.
That is defeatism. My position would be to use the language as long as it is widely supported and satisfies all requirements but drop it once something better comes around.
If I would deduct your position from your line of argument, you'd still be coding in Plankalkül, despite the fact that no-one but you (and possibly a few museums) has an interpreter for it any more.
A building can't realistically be expected to last forever, so why do we bother with structural engineering, or safety codes, or any of that.
You can engineer a building so that it withstands fire, earthquakes and hurricanes. That will allow you to live in it even if a small-scale disaster happens to strike it. This is sensible and doable. I have yet to see a house, though, that will survive the eruption of a volcano directly below it.
You see the fallacy in your examples? There are changes in our surroundings that we can adapt to, and there are changes that will eradicate us. Just like any other organism that we know. I just don't understand where this belief that humans are somehow special and have some natural right or obligation to prevail until the end of days comes from. We'll cease to exist someday. Too bad. Unless we happen to meet and befriend E. T. somewhere in the next few centuries no-one will miss us. Therefore it is my firm belief that we should scrap that colonise-the-Mars bullshit and clean up the mess down here first before ever considering to move somewhere else. What do you think would come out of a Mars colony comprised of people with today's screwed-up mindset? It'd take barely months before the first idiot declares themselves king of the castle, and all the human failures, shortcomings and plain stupidity that have caused and continue to fan all the problems in this world just start all over again.
Frankly, humanity in its current state does not deserve to survive.
One of the fundamentals of life is that tries to continue to exist, either through not dying or reproducing. You should not be surprised that humans generally have the same inclination. The fact that the world/universe is a dangerous place makes surviving rather difficult, especially over the long term. Your response to this challenge is apparently to declare it hopeless and ridicule anyone for even trying. There's no logic in that, you're just being lazy.
Seriously: What would be lost if all humans died tomorrow? Would the universe freeze in awe? Nope. Would the rest of this planet even notice we're gone? Hardly, apart from those animals and plants we forced into dependency. And on the other hand, what would be so great about humanity still being around in 20 billion years? Hum, I don't know, we'd still be watching entertainment shows, killing each other over bullshit and causing massive ecological damage, I guess.
On the whole we just don't matter that much to anyone but ourselves. And even there I have my doubts.
It also sounds to me like something that would be *really neat* to include in a source code control product for teams. [...]
The one does not have anything to do with the other. One provides a managed place for you to put your code, the other lets you write code in a comfortable unified environment. Why would you want to integrate those two?
(Assuming just for a moment that web-based IDEs actually make sense for professional software development.)
If we fail to do this, then a global catastrophe will eventually happen which outstrips our technology and render us extinct.
So?
Honestly I could not care less. Not trying to troll, I really don't see an issue here. Humans have been around for some 200,000 years. Nice, but that is not exactly a long time span. Dinosaurs were around for more than 160 million years - 160,000,000, you notice the difference? And they still vanished. Humanity as a whole is quite insignificant, one amongst an uncountable mass of life forms in this planet, outlived (by time of existence, not concurrency) by most other species.
Why does everyone believe that we should be destined to walk this universe forever? Sorry, folks, hate to break it to you: The odds of that are damningly slim.
Big deal. By my estimation one of the following will have occurred well before our earth evolves to a point where living conditions will not allow us to adapt anymore:
I am really surprised, and somewhat concerned here. Supposedly /.'s target group should predominantly consist of engineers, scientists and generally geeks and nerds - people who rely on common sense and logic to make a living. (Not counting those working for Microsoft or Sun. Those have somehow mastered the forbidden art of producing systematically structured chaos.)
Here's a thought. What if each spacecraft did not lug a big old shield up into orbit. What if we build an orbiting "overcoat" which had the necessary shielding and a space inside to accomodate the spacecraft.
And that overcoat is built by hauling material from the earth into space (with every transport flight being exposed to the very risk that now jeopardises the Hubble repair mission), putting it together there (with those unlucky astronauts who have to do this being exposed to the very risk that now jeopardises the Hubble repair mission), to then haul up the actual spacecraft (with that transport flight being exposed to the very risk that now jeopardises the Hubble repair mission).
You are not, by chance, an accountant, a corporate lawyer or a politician?
That would be a typo, not a grammatical mistake.
"My ancestors came here legally [...]"
Unless you are of what's considered Native American offspring I am fully convinced quite a lot of people would contest your claim.
[...] I don't see more need for a state run Linux distribution than for state run car factories. [...]
A state-run distro does make sense for certain types of users, namely those within the state's institutions. In many countries software that is, for example, used to access personal data on citizens (tax records, registration offices' data...) has to be certified for compliance with regulations and legal requirements. Here it is perfectly sensible to put together a well-defined distro under supervision of an official state body. Though that distro may of course be based on something like Debian.
But a general-purpose state distro for businesses and individuals is not really sensible, that's right.
the countires adopting Linux in the first place are rthose where people cannot afford the price of retail Microsoft software [...]
You don't read much news, do you?
If evolution be not true, the only explanation for the appearance of varied life on the planet is intelligent design. [...]
I call bullshit on this. I still believe we were spawned by pure accident. Completely random. Only an idiot would intentionally plague such a beautiful planet with the pest that is humanity, and any sensible evolutionary system would have seen us wiped out long ago.
I full well understood what you meant, but it still just does not make any sense in light of what the comment you responded to says. You can swap out certain specific parts of the underlying hardware without any redeployment (I'd be careful with reconfiguration; if you put a "real" or virtual OS on a faster CPU or more RAM you might want to reconfigure scheduling, swapping etc. to get the most out of your upgrade. But you should not need to reinstall anything, that's of course right.). Besides, virtualisation is no silver bullet. There are other means to achieve the flexibility associated with it, and without the performance hit and management overhead. And in many situations you simply don't gain anything from virtualising. What I gathered from affidel's post makes me believe his is such a case. If you have a low number of machines, but those need enormous amounts of raw processing power, you're better off putting those directly on physical machines. Virtualisation allows you to saturate a machine's performance with many concurrent systems, but it does not by itself help with performance issues.
Clustering, as you mentioned, comes to mind here, but it is not always feasible and indeed sensible.
Sometimes you can only replace big iron with bigger iron. And AMD's pledge to compatibility helps here.
Exactly how does virtualisation magically add performance out of hot air? And exactly how does buying additional iron provide that same kind of performance increase per $ spent that the parent mentioned?
Gosh, can we please have an automated -2 buzzword sucker whenever someone comes up with fancy terms where they just don't fit?
That has got to be the most short-sighted and ignorant comment I've read on an article unrelated to Vista, Apple and iTunes ever. By your logic, all RPGs created after 2000 should have been doomed to failure since Diablo 2 took the market by storm. And the Colin Mc Rae franchise should have been ruined by MarioKart. Nice. You haven't, by accident, heard of something called target audience? There is a market for complex games. It's smaller and harder to cater to than the mass-market, but apparently it is there, and viable.
The current Bundeswehr consists of people being drafted from the normal population.
(Emphasis mine)
I would certainly contest that. The Draftees, for the most part, are a nice enough crowd, but God help us should we ever have to engage in a full-scale military operation against a traditional armed force. The median IQ on the "executional" level is not exactly stunning, to say the least.
The Bundeswehr has quite a history of misplacing vehicles and weapons on their own exercise areas, and I had the questionable pleasure of experiencing first-hand how prone to getting lost even with maps and GPS a lot of the lower rank officers are. Horrifying, really. Our OpenStreetmap volunteers and geo cachers can muster better strategic movement than our citizens in uniform.
There certainly are very fine men and women in our armed services, and I mean no disrespect to them. But the Bundeswehr as a whole is an embarrassment. Part of that is due to underfunding, part is due to infighting amongst branches, part is simply due to stupidity, and the rest gets whacked by politics: No-one wants our soldiers to go anywhere because of Germany's past image, so they get bad gear and budget cuts, but when an opportunity arises to look good internationally (so-called peace-keeping etc.) our politicians are all too eager to ship them out by the thousands in no time. Our army is too small and underpowered to defend us, but too immobile and too badly managed to attack anyone.
Sure, but that means nothing can be secure unless nobody knows about it and nobody can find out about it OR it in inaccesable for everyone. [...]
Yes and no. Security is not absolute, it's not binary. It is the factor by which the amount of time and resources needed to break a certain security measure outnumbers the value of what's protected (or the effort needed to go through a different vector).
Obscurity does not add anything on your side of the scale because you can't depend on it, you can't measure it, you can't audit it, and in most cases you will only know it has been broken when it is too late. It is a good idea to keep information about your valuable goods and the security measures that protect them hidden, but this does not add any security in itself.
Not giving away your IP on /. may protect you from "our" wrath, but some script kiddie randomly scanning for open ports might still wreak havoc on your machine if you didn't lock it down properly.
Don't mix up security and secrecy! They have little to do with each other.
You can complain all you want, however don't expect anyone will listen until you provide an alternative.
The alternative is to sell a solid product at a reasonable price. Y'know, what all the other industries have been doing quite successfully for the last decades.
Lots of customers are willing to pay for entertainment. Lots of users are unwilling or unable to spend fourty bucks on a video game. No amount of bullying is going to make them change their mind. Bullying will however make the paying customers go away, and rightly so. As long as unlicensed copies are more convenient than licensed originals people don't have any incentive to shell out money.
This begins with the retarded requirement to have the disc in the drive while playing. It inconveniences me, the lawful customer, but it does nothing to stop my friend who got their copy from ThePirateBay. Similarly unskippable copyright notices and anti copyright infringement propaganda on retail DVDs and in cinemas only hit the paying customers; anyone else just cuts them from their copies. And don't get me started on artificial market-walling. I'd pay good money to get my hands on House, MD episodes in english, in HD quality. But no, some greedy fuck-up decided that Ze Tscherrmans can do with a shoddily localised release that lags hopelessly behind the US air dates. The failed attempt at audio cd protection should have made it clear that technology can't solve social problems: Many cds were unplayable in car radios and top-grade cd players, but that didn't stop the songs from popping up in emule.
As many other posters already said: Copyright infringement is the companies' problem, not the customers'.
Half of my linux boxes only get re-booted during a power outage, like once in 3 years. What's all the hype about?
Hibernation is not to everyone's liking. Some people (including me) prefer to shut down their machines properly, both laptops and desktops. Improving boot time would make me very, very happy.
Haven't we had those for a while?
Yeah, but they are not distributed under the GPL, which makes them unusable for Linux, and they are not patentable, which makes them unusable for Microsoft.
BSD's, give it a shot!