If it was just built for advertising I'm sure Microsoft could make it evil enough in it's own right to make people feel uncomfortable. But if we consider the bigger picture and throw in some NSA interests, then it becomes scary.
So we have a device in the living room that is always on, always connected and can recognize who is in the room. This means you have to assume there will be a record in some NSA database not only of your playing habits, but also of all people who ever sat there in the couch with you.
Add to this the possibility to join data from several sources. Like some friend visiting, no problem, just match his face against what people tagged on Facebook, match against people you emailed or skyped with. Verify with location data from your smartphones and why not run an automated fingerprint check while they are at it and your phone anyway has a fingerprint sensor. Or add in some voice recognition..
Automatically identifying people with high accuracy and keeping a permanent database of who associated with who at what periods of their lives seemed like science fiction just a couple of years ago. So do we live in the future now? Yes we do, unfortunately it's the one described in 1984.
Either they will be replaced, in which case the problem is addressed
Depends on how and by who they were replaced I would say. If things get too bad a name change and a some $$$ into a propaganda campaign about the "new NSA" could probably get them by on trustworthiness in the eyes of the general public. At least until the next whistleblower.
This, and add to it that whatever is 'bad' doesn't have to be 'bad' today since the data will be kept practically forever for any future government to analyze.
If you still don't have anything to hide you must have a confidence in both the current and all future governments that is so unshakeable I'd almost call it stupidity.
XP is not the latest software, it is simply the most popular. Even if the majority of people in the world preferred the original VW Beetle from the 30s (or whenever it started production, I think it was in production for something crazy like 50 years), it doesn't mean that VW are still obliged to find and fix design flaws in it.
Sure, they are not required to. But there are a lot of third party manufacturers that would produce replacement parts, sometimes even better parts than the originals if there was a demand for it. This is simply not an option for Win XP no matter how high the demand is.
This should not be news to anyone making themselves dependent on Microsoft products, but lots of companies are doing it anyway. Guess it would be a bit different if the market was not monopolized.
If a civilization is advanced enough to travel here, they're probably advanced enough to not have any good reason to be hostile.
And we who are the equivalent of amoebas compared to them would know that how?
We can't just assume that advanced civilizations will be nice just because we want it to be like that, there is simply too many unknown factors for us to assume anything. They could just as well have the attitude that there's another little developing planet, blast them quickly before they too invent the Xyz rays and can start to compete with us
The default bootup option should of course be your dummy OS that is passwordless with no personal information in it and a backup job to transmit photos, keylogs etc. to your server.
Protects your real data from getting wiped by tech-challenged thiefs and will also help you getting your laptop back if stolen.
If the prosecution fails the next step will be even heavier lobbying against politicians, "look what they are doing and they are getting away with it".
There are a few legal changes related to IP law and the operators resposibilities coming up for discussion in the swedish parliament soon. A failed prosecution would likely be used to point out how unfair the content owners are being treated in Sweden compared to other countries.
When Small company deals with Big company Small company often has to sign the deal Big company offers or there will not be any deal at all and perhaps not even a Small company a year from now.
It is open. The reason why Adobe threatened to sue Microsoft seems to be that they would use their monopoly situation to force a certain Adobe product line out of business by offering the "save as PDF" in Office.
Believe it or not, but a lot of companies actually pay money for propriety software used only to convert their documents to PDF format. The lawsuit threat proves it.
The monopoly situation is what allows them to sue. If everyone was using OpenOffice I suppose they could sue Sun(?) for making Adobes business idea irrelevant unless Sun removed the PDF conversion.
So Microsoft actually wanted to do something good and implement an open standard, even if it was probably not out of love for open standards in general. They were stopped by anti-monopoly laws that should be a good idea since monopolies are bad, but which in this case is used to sustain Adobes sales of the same function a few more years just because the customers they would otherwise loose doesn't realize they could get the same thing for free. Their terms for letting Microsoft include the function was that they should charge extra for it and let Adobe in on the revenue. Adobe is just after the money whether it comes from their own products or from getting a piece of the monopoly.
You may consider it good or bad, but the fact is that monopoly regulations doesn't let the market leader compete on even terms featurewise with other products when it comes to functionality that can be seen as a separate business niche.
Now I am sure that Adobes package does a lot more than just convert other documents to PDF and some customers actually need that extra functionality, but Adobe still considers the conversion alone important enough for their business model to go to court over so that alone is the important feature here.
The geeks have already installed Firefox on their grandmoms computers and giving the geeks another non-IE option to install would not really help decrease the IE marketshare. So it would make sense for Google to primarily try and reach the remaining IE users by other means than the geek install squad.
Making it the default browser with OEM sales would really be the killing blow. I am not sure what it takes to do that, but can imagine Google having both the means and the motivation.
Great from a windows standpoint yes, I am still amazed that one of the most widely used server OS:s in the world need to reboot because it installed updates to it's web browser and similar idiotic things.
A client I was working for once had a mysterious problem that their servers sometimes rebooted for no apparent reason, after some looking around I noticed that automatic windows update was enabled.
And why have things like a media player, sound recorder, paint program and fscking outlook express in a server release by default? If you scratch a bit under the surface you could almost believe it was just a quick paintjob on some cheap home desktop OS to make it passable as a server OS.
IMHO this is a damn sight better than SOME of the DRM employed by other companies which even lock out other operating systems (Windows MediaSlayer I'm looking at you)
Do you think Apple would hesitate a second if they had the same market share as Microsoft?
NASA never said anything about this planet being able to support life. The good news is that the methods used in finding this planet and determine the atmospheric contents could lead to much more interesting finds in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Different feedback mechanisms. Mobsters who don't encrypt go to jail, politicians who don't encrypt still get reelected.
If it was just built for advertising I'm sure Microsoft could make it evil enough in it's own right to make people feel uncomfortable. But if we consider the bigger picture and throw in some NSA interests, then it becomes scary.
So we have a device in the living room that is always on, always connected and can recognize who is in the room. This means you have to assume there will be a record in some NSA database not only of your playing habits, but also of all people who ever sat there in the couch with you.
Add to this the possibility to join data from several sources. Like some friend visiting, no problem, just match his face against what people tagged on Facebook, match against people you emailed or skyped with. Verify with location data from your smartphones and why not run an automated fingerprint check while they are at it and your phone anyway has a fingerprint sensor. Or add in some voice recognition..
Automatically identifying people with high accuracy and keeping a permanent database of who associated with who at what periods of their lives seemed like science fiction just a couple of years ago. So do we live in the future now? Yes we do, unfortunately it's the one described in 1984.
Either they will be replaced, in which case the problem is addressed
Depends on how and by who they were replaced I would say. If things get too bad a name change and a some $$$ into a propaganda campaign about the "new NSA" could probably get them by on trustworthiness in the eyes of the general public. At least until the next whistleblower.
This, and add to it that whatever is 'bad' doesn't have to be 'bad' today since the data will be kept practically forever for any future government to analyze. If you still don't have anything to hide you must have a confidence in both the current and all future governments that is so unshakeable I'd almost call it stupidity.
In Soviet Russia the news watches YOU!
This is so much more accurate than you may think when every click done online is being logged. Except it's not only done in Russia.
any in flesh searches that is not approved by the government would be as successful as the one to hunt down the moderate Tibet journalist.
XP is not the latest software, it is simply the most popular. Even if the majority of people in the world preferred the original VW Beetle from the 30s (or whenever it started production, I think it was in production for something crazy like 50 years), it doesn't mean that VW are still obliged to find and fix design flaws in it.
Sure, they are not required to. But there are a lot of third party manufacturers that would produce replacement parts, sometimes even better parts than the originals if there was a demand for it. This is simply not an option for Win XP no matter how high the demand is.
This should not be news to anyone making themselves dependent on Microsoft products, but lots of companies are doing it anyway. Guess it would be a bit different if the market was not monopolized.
If a civilization is advanced enough to travel here, they're probably advanced enough to not have any good reason to be hostile.
And we who are the equivalent of amoebas compared to them would know that how?
We can't just assume that advanced civilizations will be nice just because we want it to be like that, there is simply too many unknown factors for us to assume anything. They could just as well have the attitude that there's another little developing planet, blast them quickly before they too invent the Xyz rays and can start to compete with us
The default bootup option should of course be your dummy OS that is passwordless with no personal information in it and a backup job to transmit photos, keylogs etc. to your server.
Protects your real data from getting wiped by tech-challenged thiefs and will also help you getting your laptop back if stolen.
No, they are just ordinary ISP:s and offer no such service as far as I know, but there are of course others who does like http://ipredator.se/
I regard Microsoft keyboards and mice as the nicest products they sell.
Then it is almost a little sad that they are rebranded products made by other manufacturers like Logitech or Dell.
If the prosecution fails the next step will be even heavier lobbying against politicians, "look what they are doing and they are getting away with it".
There are a few legal changes related to IP law and the operators resposibilities coming up for discussion in the swedish parliament soon. A failed prosecution would likely be used to point out how unfair the content owners are being treated in Sweden compared to other countries.
When Small company deals with Big company Small company often has to sign the deal Big company offers or there will not be any deal at all and perhaps not even a Small company a year from now.
Would his changes then be compatible with changes made by the rest of the world.
I would say probably not.
Speaking of other open games, take a look at this:
http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/
Of course they need to use other platforms in their research lab, it's called R&D on innovative new features you know.
It is open. The reason why Adobe threatened to sue Microsoft seems to be that they would use their monopoly situation to force a certain Adobe product line out of business by offering the "save as PDF" in Office.
Believe it or not, but a lot of companies actually pay money for propriety software used only to convert their documents to PDF format. The lawsuit threat proves it.
The monopoly situation is what allows them to sue. If everyone was using OpenOffice I suppose they could sue Sun(?) for making Adobes business idea irrelevant unless Sun removed the PDF conversion.
So Microsoft actually wanted to do something good and implement an open standard, even if it was probably not out of love for open standards in general. They were stopped by anti-monopoly laws that should be a good idea since monopolies are bad, but which in this case is used to sustain Adobes sales of the same function a few more years just because the customers they would otherwise loose doesn't realize they could get the same thing for free. Their terms for letting Microsoft include the function was that they should charge extra for it and let Adobe in on the revenue. Adobe is just after the money whether it comes from their own products or from getting a piece of the monopoly.
You may consider it good or bad, but the fact is that monopoly regulations doesn't let the market leader compete on even terms featurewise with other products when it comes to functionality that can be seen as a separate business niche.
Now I am sure that Adobes package does a lot more than just convert other documents to PDF and some customers actually need that extra functionality, but Adobe still considers the conversion alone important enough for their business model to go to court over so that alone is the important feature here.
And this is of course why you should avoid getting locked in with a proprietary file format in the first place.
The geeks have already installed Firefox on their grandmoms computers and giving the geeks another non-IE option to install would not really help decrease the IE marketshare. So it would make sense for Google to primarily try and reach the remaining IE users by other means than the geek install squad.
Making it the default browser with OEM sales would really be the killing blow. I am not sure what it takes to do that, but can imagine Google having both the means and the motivation.
Great from a windows standpoint yes, I am still amazed that one of the most widely used server OS:s in the world need to reboot because it installed updates to it's web browser and similar idiotic things.
A client I was working for once had a mysterious problem that their servers sometimes rebooted for no apparent reason, after some looking around I noticed that automatic windows update was enabled.
And why have things like a media player, sound recorder, paint program and fscking outlook express in a server release by default? If you scratch a bit under the surface you could almost believe it was just a quick paintjob on some cheap home desktop OS to make it passable as a server OS.
Any chance for a remake of the old Amiga classic Moonstone? And don't forget the gore option.
IMHO this is a damn sight better than SOME of the DRM employed by other companies which even lock out other operating systems (Windows MediaSlayer I'm looking at you)
Do you think Apple would hesitate a second if they had the same market share as Microsoft?
NASA never said anything about this planet being able to support life. The good news is that the methods used in finding this planet and determine the atmospheric contents could lead to much more interesting finds in the future.
If you don't want a certain URL in your history you probably don't want to have the same URL stored in your blacklist either.
I wonder what the system requirements for the next windows version will be.