the main reason for keeping searches anonymous is that you have no idea where that data will end up.
Yes, but since we know that there is no privacy (and never has been any reason to expect it) that should be the reason to either (1) change the law like they are trying to do here or (2) self censor what you search for, or at least make it hard to trace to you.
Marketeers wet dreams and bottom lines only go so far, it's perfectly possible to run a search engine without profiling and still make a buck.
If you are a publically held company, you pretty much have to do what your stockholders want. If becoming a data warehouse for users searches makes a lot of money, that is what you will do. Or you will be removed and someone who will do it will be put in your place.
It would be like the phone company keeping a record of all your CONVERSATIONS, not just the numbers that you have dialled.
Ok, but there is some history here. The phone company was a fully regulated monopoly. Basically an arm of government. So they did not answer to shareholders, they did what the government told them. This meant that they did not need to find profit lurcking under every rock, they were doing just fine.
That is no longer the case, but during that time we had many laws passed specifically for the phone system regarding privacy and recording. Those laws do not address the internet and people should not view the internet as an extension of the phone system, inheriting all of its characteristics. You want searches to be private and untracable? You have to do it yourself in the form of either passing a law to make it so, or taking your own steps to be anonymous (and even then, no way to know for sure). Unless a law is passed, there is absolutely no expectation of privacy, and there should almost be the expectation that your search patters are being sold to the highest bidder.
I'm not here to Clinton bash, but if you will check out the percentages of the 1992 election you will find that Clinton got 43% of the popular vote.
I'm fully aware, but you make the assumption that Perot took all votes away from Bush (and Dole), when I believe it would have been more evenly distributed than, say, the votes Nader took from Gore. Regardless, Clinton was popular through much of his two terms, significantly moreso than Bush (excepting Bush's post 9/11 rating which he quickly squandered). I'm not a Clinton fan by any means, but even I will concede that, at least when he spoke, he usually commanded respect and appeared presidental (I feel the same way about Regan). Bush inspires nobody, even the most stalwart Bush supporters I know often cringe when he speaks.
I think it'd be wonderful to see the Democrats put up a candidate like JFK, though I wonder if the rose-tinted glasses we view him through are mostly due to his assasination in the line of duty?
I'm sure that is a large part of it, but it is still undeniable that he inspired people and motivated many (especially young people) to get involved and active in politics. He also gave off a very positive "vibe" as it were, contrast to Bush's doom and gloom, "we are all gonna die" attitude. Frankly I would be happy if EITHER party would put up a positive candidate, or at least one who's platform was not essentially "vote for me becasue my opponant will destroy us all".
Let's face it, the president does not do a whole lot. Every president has an army of handlers, policy people, speech writers, etc. doing the real work while their primary job is to be the "face" of government home and abroad. What those policies are depends on the party, so really all the President does is communicate. By that standard Bush mostly sucks, and Clinton mostly rocked. There have been exceptions (Bush's scripted or not speech at the WTC and Clinton's hamfisted addresses to the nation regarding his libido issues), but for the most part it is obvious who was the better communicator.
(1) The identity can sometimes (often?) be figured out by going through all of the searches. This is basically what all of the uproar over the AOL snafu was all about
(2) The US government wants this data to be saved and tied to users in case they need to get it (via a court order I'm sure *snicker*). If you are against this you must love the terrorists and child porn.
(3) This data represents significant intellectual property of the search engines. Remember, you are NOT their customer, you are their product. The advertisers are their customers. As their product, they want to collect and retain as much as they can about you, this makes their product more valuble.
Basically, the search companies and government are not going to want to do this, only the "product". And if the data is all tied to a single IP (or long term cookie like google's), encrypted or not it is possibly still traceable.
Part of the problem is the weird notion that all internet searches should be completely anonymous, I don't know where that came from.
Regardless, he was popular through a lot of his two terms.
Granted I didn't like him. But I did not like him because he expanded the power of the executive branch greatly through executive orders, he bombed a couple of countries for no good reason, he displayed absolutely no respect for privacy with the Clipper chip initiative, and his staff was mired in conflict of interest, incompetence, and other questionable activities.
No, what we need is for everyone to realize that an election is not like ordering a burger at McDonalds and should not be rushed to make sure everyone knows who won the same night. This is too important to sacrifice accuracy for speed, expecially when speed is not important AT ALL to the process. For crying out loud, just vote with check boxes on paper dropped into a box. Then have many many people counting. Yes there is still the chance for fraud but with so many people involved (have volunteers overseeing the counting process from every part represented in the election) it will be much harder to pull off.
Electronic voting is just a stupid idea all around, there is no benefit to it that is not vastly overshadowed by the very real possibility of fraud, and it should be dropped. So we have to wait a day or two for the election results, boo freaking hoo.
No, the Democrats lose because the party has not been able to put up someone inspiring (or hell, electable) since Clinton (Or arguably JFK). Say what you want about Clinton or Regan, they both inspired people, and both convinced the majority of voters (not tiny contestable majority either) to get the job. Bush sucks, but he keeps his job because (1) his opponents have somehow managed to be less appealing than him and (2) the Democrat party has basically become the "oppose Bush" party. No real ideas of their own, no "contract with America" style plan to recapture the votes, just oppose Bush at every turn. Don't get me wrong, if Bush and co keep screwing up that eventually will work, but he probably could have been easily beaten (election fraud or not) if there were some kind of leadership or direction in the Democratic party.
Both parties are full of shit. Although it appears that Republicans are simply more full of shit than Democrats at the moment.
You mispelled "the ones in power"
Time was, the Democrats were making a concerted effort to make cryptography illegal and force a back door into all communications. The was spearheaded by the Clinton admin (specifically Al Gore was its most vocal champion) which attacked PGP, attempted to classify academic research into crypto and force the ill-advised clipper initiative down our throats.
Guess who was one of the most vocal opponants to this, on the grounds that we had the right to encrypt messages and export strong encryption, even if it hurt law enforcement? John Ashcroft. No kidding, he was once the champion of privacy.
It does not matter which party is in power, that party is the one that wants a police state. They want absolute control and civil rights be damned. The party not in control is forced to take the contrary view and attempt to gain control by appealing to the people on those grounds.
I made the mistake of trusting the Republican in this regard once, and voted against Gore because he was anti-crypto (privacy) and the Republicans seemed for it. I am sure not going to make the same mistake with the Dems. No matter how you hear them now rail on about civil liberties and rights to privacy, and all that jazz, don't beleve for a second they actually care about it. Once in the Whitehouse they will "embrace and extend" the powers that Bush has granted the position of the Presidency and use it for their gain. So the boogieman being targeted may be different (probably gun owners, right wing terroists, anti-abortion groups, what-have-you) but the spying, lying, and complete disregard for anyone's privacy will continue.
And the Republicans will be right back to where they were in the 90s, as once again the party that was outraged at ruby ridge, waco, and all of the scary executive orders Clinton signed giving more power to the executive branch. They will not mention that they themselves shat on the consitution, abused power, and took steps to bring the office of the presidency closer to a total dictatorship. You the voters will also forget this, you will be outraged at the erosion of the consitution and vote the Republicans in to fix the problem. Just as we now look to the Democrats to be our saviors when all they want is to get back into power to do the exact same thing.
Damn I really depressed myself. Thanks/. now I need a drink
I didn't say it was not different, I said it was not imporant. Strip away the new gui (which could be an asset or a major strike against it depending on who you ask) and what is there that makes it imporant for the average end user to want? DRM is a feature no end user has ever wanted, so that is a huge strike against it. The so called "security-enhancements" will likely make matters worse by prompting the user "are you sure?" before everything and just training them to click "yes" to whatever they see. I really cannot find a driving need for this, other than it has been 6 years and MS wants to sell another OS. The other internal security enhancements they claim (except for NX) are the same exact security enhancements they claimed about XP.
I take that back, I forgot about the parental controlls, that will probably be nice. I imagine a lot of people can dump AOL once that comes out. For the life of me I do not understand why there has been no build in way to control what programs users can run, internet sites, email, chat, etc. short of running Active Directory up to this point.
Speech recognition might also be nice. But both of these things are small add ons like IE7 which could easily be made available to XP, and do not require a whole new OS.
I still maintain that at this point, Vista's primary purpose is a DRM delivery mechanism. MS has long shown that they no longer consider their Windows customers to be customers. You are now their product, the entertainment industry is their customer.
Ok, but for the average end user wouldn't a linux distro be a much better choice when you factor in package selection/delivery and ease of administraton? Darwin != OSX and to suggest otherwise is silly. Without the GUI, it is yet another unix clone with a strange filesystem layout.
I doubt it, WinFS is one of the many features cut from Vista on the grounds that (1) it was unstable and not going to be ready and (2) it is not DRM, which is really all vista is about when you get past the eye candy.
Except it does not work that way. The people who want this data (lenders, companies doing background checks, etc) need it to be valid and accurate. Nevermind that choicepoint has a history of screwing up and having inaccurate data, they are percieved as being the best and having the most (if not most accurate) data around, so that makes them useful. Those companies are not going to do their credit/background checks using data they got from a hackerz stolen ID website. The ID brokers have really nothing to fear when it comes to losing data. It does not hurt them, the people it does hurt cannot opt out of doing business with them (you have no say in the matter), and leaking it really does not decrease the value of it (for their purposes).
Extrapolated to the extreme, we could conclude, then, that the only way to make 'our data' less valuable, or have no value at all, is to distribute it far and wide. Once everybody has access to it, it becomes worthless as a commodity to be traded.
The problem with this is the value that lenders place on this data. Banks in the US make the totally braindead assumption that anyone with this data must be you, therefor they happily approve loans, credit cards, and in some cases let someone else sell your house (happens in Canada) just because they have gathered enough identifiers to convince a lender that they are you. Now you would think that this is clearly the lender's mistake, and their problem to deal with, but it is yours. And it generally takes thousands of dollars and years of work to clear your name (which sometimes never totally happens).
You can (and I usually do) make the arguement that while these ID brokers are causing a lot of problems with their incompetent security measures, the real problem is that the financial community places so much importance on this data as an identifier and authenticator.
In fairness I will say that OSX is one of the few (only?) OSes I have used that seems to get faster with each release. Well, the 10.4 broke this trend but up to that point it kept performing better and better on my flat panel iMac. I still think it should be doable to make a truely stripped down version for older G3 machines though.
That is great to hear, but I suspect your bank is the minority.
And either way, the real problem is the instant credit industry, which has no real reason to exist yet opens up all of these ID theft problems by rushing to approve any and all credit without any checking of identity. They treat SSN like a kerberos ticket when it is barely even a good ID.
So, I am to believe that my identity will be stolen because my laptop is not secure enough.
NOT, mind you, because dozens (hundreds? Impossible for me to find out) of companies consider my personal and financial information to be their intellectual property to be sold to other companies.
NOT, mind you, because these companies have basically no interest in protecting the data in that losing it does not hurt them any (maybe a token fine tops). So they don't encrypt it, lose backup tapes, let employees take it home on laptops, etc.
NOT, mind you, because the banking and finance industry, against all common sense, believes my social security number to be not only a positive identifier, but an authentication token that obviously only I could ever know. And since we all need same minute loans, any credit apps must go through ASAP, no wasting time to take any steps to actually identify the person making the request.
Nope, it must be because my laptop is running the right CA software.
Good point, but much less accessable to the average person. Very few people I know (normal people, not people like us who have CDs of every os) have NT4 or 2k.
Either way, 2k has been end of lifed, so it is a moot point.
Ok, well clearly Bush is to blame for the decline in civil liberties, that is a given.
The islamic extremists hating us? Well Bush certainly fanned the flames of that but then so did they, and they initiatied it. (No, 9/11 is not a good excuse for going into Iraq, but that is undoubtably what triggered it). Either way, they have been hating and attacking us long before Bush took office, I seem to recall a few attacks during the 90's (one involving the wtc).
Blaming Bush for the economic situation involving the Chinese though? That is kinda over the top. I recall a certain previous president taking illegall campaign contributions from them, and opening up all kinds of oppertunities for them to "buy us up" as it were. The problem is not limited to any one person or party, the US government as a whole is broken. The sad part is that most of us seem to prefer it that way, as long as we feel "safe".
What you miss, is those new UI features. Are they really that important?
A better question is: "without those new UI features, is Vista really that important?"
Most of the really cool features have long been stripped out of Vista, so you are effectivly paying a lot of money for XP+DRM, which is clearly the real reason for Vista to exist.
Big deal. Call me when you write an object review. I want to know which of these operating systems will run on my old ass laptop with a low end P4 in it. Not all of us have the new intel core 2 duos.
Neither, you will run XP or Linux/Solaris/*BSD, those are your options. Or buy a new computer, which is really what they want.
To put it another way, Apple and Microsoft could very easily produce a modern *-lite version of their respective OSes and sell them to people with older or not maxed out hardware and probably keep a high percentage of the population happy with just that. However that will not help Apple (or MS's hardware partners) sell new machines that most people don't really need, so it will not happen.
Excluding gamers, developers, and people who work a lot with media (photoshop, video editing, etc), a 500Mhz box running windows 98 with office, outlook, and IE serves the vast majority just fine, but where is the profit in that?(*)
And even though Gnome and KDE are not doing much better, fortunetely there exists fluxbox and xfce for those who think an 1GHz P3 should still be usable as a desktop machine.
(*) note: windows 98 is criminally insecure, and not being patched anymore, I don't recommend you do this.
The Chinese can launch satelites, put men into orbit, have nuclear weapons, are financing most of our balance or payments thanks to Bush
Honestly, did the world just begin for many of you people in 2000? Look I'm no fan of Bush, but it is not like prior to 2000 the Chinese held none of our assets, the Islamic extremists loved us, and the federal government held civil liberties in high regard. You know, EVERYTHING is not Bush's fault.
Oil companies claim the backers of Prop 87, some of them venture capitalists, would profit from state money flowing into the alternative-energy projects they are funding.
Ah, business patent violation I'm sure. No wonder the oil companies are mad.
Slashdot Mirror
the main reason for keeping searches anonymous is that you have no idea where that data will end up.
Yes, but since we know that there is no privacy (and never has been any reason to expect it) that should be the reason to either (1) change the law like they are trying to do here or (2) self censor what you search for, or at least make it hard to trace to you.
Marketeers wet dreams and bottom lines only go so far, it's perfectly possible to run a search engine without profiling and still make a buck.
If you are a publically held company, you pretty much have to do what your stockholders want. If becoming a data warehouse for users searches makes a lot of money, that is what you will do. Or you will be removed and someone who will do it will be put in your place.
It would be like the phone company keeping a record of all your CONVERSATIONS, not just the numbers that you have dialled.
Ok, but there is some history here. The phone company was a fully regulated monopoly. Basically an arm of government. So they did not answer to shareholders, they did what the government told them. This meant that they did not need to find profit lurcking under every rock, they were doing just fine.
That is no longer the case, but during that time we had many laws passed specifically for the phone system regarding privacy and recording. Those laws do not address the internet and people should not view the internet as an extension of the phone system, inheriting all of its characteristics. You want searches to be private and untracable? You have to do it yourself in the form of either passing a law to make it so, or taking your own steps to be anonymous (and even then, no way to know for sure). Unless a law is passed, there is absolutely no expectation of privacy, and there should almost be the expectation that your search patters are being sold to the highest bidder.
Finkployd
I'm not here to Clinton bash, but if you will check out the percentages of the 1992 election you will find that Clinton got 43% of the popular vote.
I'm fully aware, but you make the assumption that Perot took all votes away from Bush (and Dole), when I believe it would have been more evenly distributed than, say, the votes Nader took from Gore. Regardless, Clinton was popular through much of his two terms, significantly moreso than Bush (excepting Bush's post 9/11 rating which he quickly squandered). I'm not a Clinton fan by any means, but even I will concede that, at least when he spoke, he usually commanded respect and appeared presidental (I feel the same way about Regan). Bush inspires nobody, even the most stalwart Bush supporters I know often cringe when he speaks.
I think it'd be wonderful to see the Democrats put up a candidate like JFK, though I wonder if the rose-tinted glasses we view him through are mostly due to his assasination in the line of duty?
I'm sure that is a large part of it, but it is still undeniable that he inspired people and motivated many (especially young people) to get involved and active in politics. He also gave off a very positive "vibe" as it were, contrast to Bush's doom and gloom, "we are all gonna die" attitude. Frankly I would be happy if EITHER party would put up a positive candidate, or at least one who's platform was not essentially "vote for me becasue my opponant will destroy us all".
Let's face it, the president does not do a whole lot. Every president has an army of handlers, policy people, speech writers, etc. doing the real work while their primary job is to be the "face" of government home and abroad. What those policies are depends on the party, so really all the President does is communicate. By that standard Bush mostly sucks, and Clinton mostly rocked. There have been exceptions (Bush's scripted or not speech at the WTC and Clinton's hamfisted addresses to the nation regarding his libido issues), but for the most part it is obvious who was the better communicator.
Finkployd
(1) The identity can sometimes (often?) be figured out by going through all of the searches. This is basically what all of the uproar over the AOL snafu was all about
(2) The US government wants this data to be saved and tied to users in case they need to get it (via a court order I'm sure *snicker*). If you are against this you must love the terrorists and child porn.
(3) This data represents significant intellectual property of the search engines. Remember, you are NOT their customer, you are their product. The advertisers are their customers. As their product, they want to collect and retain as much as they can about you, this makes their product more valuble.
Basically, the search companies and government are not going to want to do this, only the "product". And if the data is all tied to a single IP (or long term cookie like google's), encrypted or not it is possibly still traceable.
Part of the problem is the weird notion that all internet searches should be completely anonymous, I don't know where that came from.
Finkployd
Regardless, he was popular through a lot of his two terms.
Granted I didn't like him. But I did not like him because he expanded the power of the executive branch greatly through executive orders, he bombed a couple of countries for no good reason, he displayed absolutely no respect for privacy with the Clipper chip initiative, and his staff was mired in conflict of interest, incompetence, and other questionable activities.
Imagine how I feel about Bush...
Finkployd
No, what we need is for everyone to realize that an election is not like ordering a burger at McDonalds and should not be rushed to make sure everyone knows who won the same night. This is too important to sacrifice accuracy for speed, expecially when speed is not important AT ALL to the process. For crying out loud, just vote with check boxes on paper dropped into a box. Then have many many people counting. Yes there is still the chance for fraud but with so many people involved (have volunteers overseeing the counting process from every part represented in the election) it will be much harder to pull off.
Electronic voting is just a stupid idea all around, there is no benefit to it that is not vastly overshadowed by the very real possibility of fraud, and it should be dropped. So we have to wait a day or two for the election results, boo freaking hoo.
Finkployd
No, the Democrats lose because the party has not been able to put up someone inspiring (or hell, electable) since Clinton (Or arguably JFK). Say what you want about Clinton or Regan, they both inspired people, and both convinced the majority of voters (not tiny contestable majority either) to get the job. Bush sucks, but he keeps his job because (1) his opponents have somehow managed to be less appealing than him and (2) the Democrat party has basically become the "oppose Bush" party. No real ideas of their own, no "contract with America" style plan to recapture the votes, just oppose Bush at every turn. Don't get me wrong, if Bush and co keep screwing up that eventually will work, but he probably could have been easily beaten (election fraud or not) if there were some kind of leadership or direction in the Democratic party.
Finkployd
No one in the know uses .gz anymore, they use .bz2
I generally find that bz2 gives slightly better compression with significantly worse performance.
Finkployd
So which is it: the best of times or the worst of times?
According to Schrodinger, both.
Finkployd
Both parties are full of shit. Although it appears that Republicans are simply more full of shit than Democrats at the moment.
/. now I need a drink
You mispelled "the ones in power"
Time was, the Democrats were making a concerted effort to make cryptography illegal and force a back door into all communications. The was spearheaded by the Clinton admin (specifically Al Gore was its most vocal champion) which attacked PGP, attempted to classify academic research into crypto and force the ill-advised clipper initiative down our throats.
Guess who was one of the most vocal opponants to this, on the grounds that we had the right to encrypt messages and export strong encryption, even if it hurt law enforcement? John Ashcroft. No kidding, he was once the champion of privacy.
It does not matter which party is in power, that party is the one that wants a police state. They want absolute control and civil rights be damned. The party not in control is forced to take the contrary view and attempt to gain control by appealing to the people on those grounds.
I made the mistake of trusting the Republican in this regard once, and voted against Gore because he was anti-crypto (privacy) and the Republicans seemed for it. I am sure not going to make the same mistake with the Dems. No matter how you hear them now rail on about civil liberties and rights to privacy, and all that jazz, don't beleve for a second they actually care about it. Once in the Whitehouse they will "embrace and extend" the powers that Bush has granted the position of the Presidency and use it for their gain. So the boogieman being targeted may be different (probably gun owners, right wing terroists, anti-abortion groups, what-have-you) but the spying, lying, and complete disregard for anyone's privacy will continue.
And the Republicans will be right back to where they were in the 90s, as once again the party that was outraged at ruby ridge, waco, and all of the scary executive orders Clinton signed giving more power to the executive branch. They will not mention that they themselves shat on the consitution, abused power, and took steps to bring the office of the presidency closer to a total dictatorship. You the voters will also forget this, you will be outraged at the erosion of the consitution and vote the Republicans in to fix the problem. Just as we now look to the Democrats to be our saviors when all they want is to get back into power to do the exact same thing.
Damn I really depressed myself. Thanks
Finkployd
I didn't say it was not different, I said it was not imporant. Strip away the new gui (which could be an asset or a major strike against it depending on who you ask) and what is there that makes it imporant for the average end user to want? DRM is a feature no end user has ever wanted, so that is a huge strike against it. The so called "security-enhancements" will likely make matters worse by prompting the user "are you sure?" before everything and just training them to click "yes" to whatever they see. I really cannot find a driving need for this, other than it has been 6 years and MS wants to sell another OS. The other internal security enhancements they claim (except for NX) are the same exact security enhancements they claimed about XP.
I take that back, I forgot about the parental controlls, that will probably be nice. I imagine a lot of people can dump AOL once that comes out. For the life of me I do not understand why there has been no build in way to control what programs users can run, internet sites, email, chat, etc. short of running Active Directory up to this point.
Speech recognition might also be nice. But both of these things are small add ons like IE7 which could easily be made available to XP, and do not require a whole new OS.
I still maintain that at this point, Vista's primary purpose is a DRM delivery mechanism. MS has long shown that they no longer consider their Windows customers to be customers. You are now their product, the entertainment industry is their customer.
Finkployd
Ok, but for the average end user wouldn't a linux distro be a much better choice when you factor in package selection/delivery and ease of administraton? Darwin != OSX and to suggest otherwise is silly. Without the GUI, it is yet another unix clone with a strange filesystem layout.
Finkployd
I doubt it, WinFS is one of the many features cut from Vista on the grounds that (1) it was unstable and not going to be ready and (2) it is not DRM, which is really all vista is about when you get past the eye candy.
Finkployd
Except it does not work that way. The people who want this data (lenders, companies doing background checks, etc) need it to be valid and accurate. Nevermind that choicepoint has a history of screwing up and having inaccurate data, they are percieved as being the best and having the most (if not most accurate) data around, so that makes them useful. Those companies are not going to do their credit/background checks using data they got from a hackerz stolen ID website. The ID brokers have really nothing to fear when it comes to losing data. It does not hurt them, the people it does hurt cannot opt out of doing business with them (you have no say in the matter), and leaking it really does not decrease the value of it (for their purposes).
Extrapolated to the extreme, we could conclude, then, that the only way to make 'our data' less valuable, or have no value at all, is to distribute it far and wide. Once everybody has access to it, it becomes worthless as a commodity to be traded.
The problem with this is the value that lenders place on this data. Banks in the US make the totally braindead assumption that anyone with this data must be you, therefor they happily approve loans, credit cards, and in some cases let someone else sell your house (happens in Canada) just because they have gathered enough identifiers to convince a lender that they are you. Now you would think that this is clearly the lender's mistake, and their problem to deal with, but it is yours. And it generally takes thousands of dollars and years of work to clear your name (which sometimes never totally happens).
You can (and I usually do) make the arguement that while these ID brokers are causing a lot of problems with their incompetent security measures, the real problem is that the financial community places so much importance on this data as an identifier and authenticator.
Finkployd
Finkployd
In fairness I will say that OSX is one of the few (only?) OSes I have used that seems to get faster with each release. Well, the 10.4 broke this trend but up to that point it kept performing better and better on my flat panel iMac. I still think it should be doable to make a truely stripped down version for older G3 machines though.
Finkployd
That is great to hear, but I suspect your bank is the minority.
And either way, the real problem is the instant credit industry, which has no real reason to exist yet opens up all of these ID theft problems by rushing to approve any and all credit without any checking of identity. They treat SSN like a kerberos ticket when it is barely even a good ID.
Finkployd
So, I am to believe that my identity will be stolen because my laptop is not secure enough.
NOT, mind you, because dozens (hundreds? Impossible for me to find out) of companies consider my personal and financial information to be their intellectual property to be sold to other companies.
NOT, mind you, because these companies have basically no interest in protecting the data in that losing it does not hurt them any (maybe a token fine tops). So they don't encrypt it, lose backup tapes, let employees take it home on laptops, etc.
NOT, mind you, because the banking and finance industry, against all common sense, believes my social security number to be not only a positive identifier, but an authentication token that obviously only I could ever know. And since we all need same minute loans, any credit apps must go through ASAP, no wasting time to take any steps to actually identify the person making the request.
Nope, it must be because my laptop is running the right CA software.
Finkployd
Good point, but much less accessable to the average person. Very few people I know (normal people, not people like us who have CDs of every os) have NT4 or 2k.
Either way, 2k has been end of lifed, so it is a moot point.
Finkployd
Ok, well clearly Bush is to blame for the decline in civil liberties, that is a given.
The islamic extremists hating us? Well Bush certainly fanned the flames of that but then so did they, and they initiatied it. (No, 9/11 is not a good excuse for going into Iraq, but that is undoubtably what triggered it). Either way, they have been hating and attacking us long before Bush took office, I seem to recall a few attacks during the 90's (one involving the wtc).
Blaming Bush for the economic situation involving the Chinese though? That is kinda over the top. I recall a certain previous president taking illegall campaign contributions from them, and opening up all kinds of oppertunities for them to "buy us up" as it were. The problem is not limited to any one person or party, the US government as a whole is broken. The sad part is that most of us seem to prefer it that way, as long as we feel "safe".
Finkployd
What you miss, is those new UI features. Are they really that important?
A better question is: "without those new UI features, is Vista really that important?"
Most of the really cool features have long been stripped out of Vista, so you are effectivly paying a lot of money for XP+DRM, which is clearly the real reason for Vista to exist.
Finkployd
Yeah, I've done this one a lombard (with 512mb ram) with 10.3, it runs but it is not really usable.
Finkployd
Big deal. Call me when you write an object review. I want to know which of these operating systems will run on my old ass laptop with a low end P4 in it. Not all of us have the new intel core 2 duos.
Neither, you will run XP or Linux/Solaris/*BSD, those are your options. Or buy a new computer, which is really what they want.
To put it another way, Apple and Microsoft could very easily produce a modern *-lite version of their respective OSes and sell them to people with older or not maxed out hardware and probably keep a high percentage of the population happy with just that. However that will not help Apple (or MS's hardware partners) sell new machines that most people don't really need, so it will not happen.
Excluding gamers, developers, and people who work a lot with media (photoshop, video editing, etc), a 500Mhz box running windows 98 with office, outlook, and IE serves the vast majority just fine, but where is the profit in that?(*)
And even though Gnome and KDE are not doing much better, fortunetely there exists fluxbox and xfce for those who think an 1GHz P3 should still be usable as a desktop machine.
(*) note: windows 98 is criminally insecure, and not being patched anymore, I don't recommend you do this.
Finkployd
The Chinese can launch satelites, put men into orbit, have nuclear weapons, are financing most of our balance or payments thanks to Bush
Honestly, did the world just begin for many of you people in 2000? Look I'm no fan of Bush, but it is not like prior to 2000 the Chinese held none of our assets, the Islamic extremists loved us, and the federal government held civil liberties in high regard. You know, EVERYTHING is not Bush's fault.
Finkployd
the world doesn't revolve around Earth.
I cannot tell if that was really deep, or really dumb.
Finkployd
You jerk
Finkployd
Oil companies claim the backers of Prop 87, some of them venture capitalists, would profit from state money flowing into the alternative-energy projects they are funding.
Ah, business patent violation I'm sure. No wonder the oil companies are mad.
Finkployd