Legally done in accordance with the laws of the US
Done in accordance with what US law ? Are you talking about the Patriot Act ? The same Patriot act that allows the government to monitor religious and political groups without evidence of criminal activity, to jail Americans without being charged or being able to confront witnesses against them, allows The government to search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause to aid terrorism investigation, Allows the government to prosecute librarians, telecommunication company officials and anyone else who reveals they have received a subpoena for records related to the terrorism investigation,
Allows the government to monitor penal communications between attorneys and clients, and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes, Allows the government to jail Americans indefinitely without a trial. Allows the government to close once-public immigration hearings, secretly detain hundreds of people without charges, and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist requests for public records under the Freedom of Information Act. You mean that Patriot Act ?
There are precedents for what Bush has done.
Yes there are precedents, but that does not make it right or just and I hardly consider imprisioning thousands of innocent Americans during WWII a shining moment in our history.
Why don't you read a little before mouthing off your talk-show soundbites.
I have to mouth off now, because I will not likely be able to do so in the future.
Now if they could just dispense with this habeas corpus nonsense
I take it you haven't heard, The Bush administration claims the power to detain "enemy combatants" indefinitely without trial, an effective suspension of Habeas Corpus. All they have to do is label you a terrorist and you disappear in the night never to be heard from again.
I'd like to know why this anonymous donor didn't spread some of that cash around and buy a couple of Congressmen and a Senator. Perhaps Prof. Boyle will do so.
Well, you can and you can't. OS X is coded and compiled for PPC processors not x86, so going out and buying a copy and installing it on your x86 PC is out. You can however get the underlying OS Darwin, it is free for the download, there is even a port to x86. The problem here is, first Darwin does not come with the pretty OS X GUI, it is command prompt only, you must get the Darwin port of X Windows for a GUI and second, the x86 port of Darwin supports a very narrow band of hardware. If you are considering this, goto the Darwin site and read the hardware compatibility list and build your system accordingly, otherwise you will be very disappointed.
I personally beleive the Federal Government should be banned for ten years from buying any NEW products or services from any company which has been found guilty of being an illegal monopoly, when there are alternatives available from other companies.
Let me put it like this, you may be willing to throw away your constitutional rights for some vague sense of security, but I am not. The US Patriot Act is the single worst result of 9/11. Lets go over some of the rights this act stripped from me:
Freedom of association: The government may monitor religious and political groups without evidence of criminal activity.
Right to liberty: Americans may be jailed without being charged or being able to confront witnesses against them.
Freedom from unreasonable searches: The government may search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause to aid terrorism investigation.
Freedom of speech: The government may prosecute librarians, telecommunication company officials and anyone else who reveals they have received a subpoena for records related to the terrorism investigation.
Right to legal representation: The government may monitor penal communications between attorneys and clients, and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.
Right to a speedy and public trial: The government may jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.
Freedom of information: The government has closed once-public immigration hearings, secretly detained hundreds of people without charges, and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist requests for public records under the Freedom of Information Act.
He can't sign something that guts the Constitution, unless it is also upheld by the Supreme Court. It also seems like everyone is forgetting that it was first passed by overwhelming margins in both the Senate -- 98-1 -- and the House of Representatives -- 356-66.
I don't like the Patriot Act any more than you do, but it's not entirely the work of GW Bush.
Every point you made here is absolutly true and only goes to prove that the Government as whole is the largest threat to our freedom, not just "Terrorists" and "Liberials" as the idiot who I was responding to said.
Well, if we live in constant fear of being killed, and therefore cannot travel, work or even leave our homes...can you truly call that Freedom?
Cold as it may sound, I would consider this a personal choice and/or problem. There are many places in the world were terrorism is a daily occurance, and yet they manage to leave thier houses to goto work, go on vacations and generally live thier lives.
Those freedoms are being threatened by terrorist and domestic liberalism. Get your facts straight!
Really? When did we elect Bin Laden as President ? I didn't think he signed the US Patriot Act into Law, I thought GW Bush did. Terrorists can't take away our freedom, short of a full scale invasion, only our government can. As I recall, Bush is a conservative, if he is bent on protecting our freedom, why did he sign the US Patroit Act (which guts the constitution) ? Why is his administration holding American citizens without charging them with anything, without access to a lawyer, without any trial, let alone a speedy trial with a jury of peers ? I suspect you need to rethink that statement.
I hate to admit it, but I am looking forward to the first major Linux trojan that comes along and is tuned to delete home directories.
I have to ask, why would you be looking forward to such a thing ? Do you really hate Linux users that much ? I have never had a Trojan or a virus of any kind, but I know people who have, I also worked Phone Tech Support during the height of the Chernobyl virus and I can honestly say, I wouldn't wish it off on anyone.
Furthermore, disable auto-updating and do it manually and the problem is solved, moot, and done.
This is not a technical issue, disabling Auto-Update is trivial. This is a legal issue, the real problem is by agreeing to the EULA they are giving a third party, who has no due cause, access to thier system. Whether or not Microsoft ever actually accesses thier system is not the point, the point is they have given consent and Microsoft could in theory demand access at anytime, say for example to check for unlicensed copies of software. I suggest you get a lawyer who can sort this out for you, it is also possible, however unlikely, a good lawyer could negotiate a different EULA with Microsoft.
This was my point exacty, which MoThugz missed entirely. A stock install of Win2K is useless. That is unless all you need is Solitaire, WordPad, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. I have always said, I will switch to Windows when I can get Windows 2K Server, Visual C++, Office, SQL 2K, IIS, licened so I can install them on as many systems as I like for no additional charge, on a 6 CD set for $49.99. I'd go up tp $99.99 if it included source code and the tools required to recompile it all (anybody who thinks MS uses Visual C++ to compile thier own software is fooling themselves).
Does anyone else think this review would have been more fair if he had used a retail win2k pro disc instead of using the Sony system restore cd's?
Personally I think he was cutting Win2K alot of slack by doing it with the restore CD. Think about it, a standard worksation install of RedHat 7.3 installs alot of software that does not come standard with Win2K. At the very least you'd need to install Visual C++, Office and a couple of those MS Entertainment Packs after you finished with the OS install, to get anything near what RedHat installs.
It's going to be interesting to see if/how the US Govt steps in to support WorldCom
With as much infrastructure as Worldcom owns, I seriously doubt GW Bush and the other Corporate Cronies on the Hill will allow it to simply collapse. I suppose if you have an extra $200 it might not be a bad idea to buy some Worldcom stock, at its current price, you could get 1000+ shares. Worst case scenario, you loose $200, but is possible, after a bailout, the stock price will goto $10 a share in a few years or they will be bought out and you will end up with 5 shares of AT&T or something. This is simply theory, and I am no expert, so if you invest your life savings in Worldcom and then it does simply collapse, don't blame me, you shouldn't be taking investment advice from Slashdot.
If my cable company renders my Tivo usless, I will no longer have any use for thier service and I will cancel. Sure I loose the cost of my TiVo, but it would only take about 6 months of not having to pay a cable bill to recover the cost of my TiVo.
And Linux is maybe 2-5 years behind the *BSDs...".
I am 100% in agreement with everything you said. Linux security does leave something to be desired when compared to *BSD and I encourage anyone who has serious concerns about security, should use *BSD. Microsofts biggest security problem is the monoculture they are trying to force on everyone, if they would back away from thier monopoly and allow a diverse computer environment to develope, things like VB Script virus's would be a minor annoyance instead of headline news.
Linux has about another two years to continue poking fun at Windows security defects, then Dotnet will be in place and the party will be well and truly over.
and
Dotnet (and Java) represent a quantum leap in the "securability" of a platform and one to which Linux has no answer
I would like to point out that Java runs just fine under Linux. The Mono and DotGNU projects are in the works, both of which will be answers to.NET . You are assuming.NET will live up to Microsofts hype and that Linux will not improve over the next 2-5 years. The past has shown, that Linux is constantly improving and that Microsofts products never live up to the hype. Microsoft has spent the last 5 years playing catch up to Linux in security and stability. They are still at least 2-5 years behind in both of these areas and I don't see this changing anytime soon.
Can I have someone come on over an catalog your CD collection and then sell the list under the table to Columbia House record scammers?
As long as you can find a way to do it from outside my front door, sure.
This is exactly what you are doing, you are inviting MS into your house and allowing them to catalog all your data and once DRM is implemented, you will be the one standing on your front porch waiting to be let in.
For the millions of PC users who exists, only a small fraction of them have any data that anyone gives two cents about.
What about marketing data ? Don't you think Microsoft would love to be able collect picture perfect marketing data on each and every one of thier customers ? What websites they visit, what items they buy online, what software they have installed, how many people use the system. Much of this data could easily be collected simply by retrieving everyones IE history and cookie files. You may lead a completely uninteresting life, but other people have data they would rather not have collected on them. AIDS patients and unpopular political or religious views to just name a few. So you go ahead and trust Microsoft to do the "Right Thing", me, I prefer to keep my life private thank you very much.
Well, my ATI TV wonder VE is lacking in linux drivers
I have been using an ATI TV Wonder VE with Linux for a long time. The bttv kernel driver works fine for it. xawtv is a little sparse when compared to ATI's software, but it is easy to use and does the job nicely. xawtv comes with streamer, which I use in cron jobs to record my shows to AVI and if I really want to keep the show I use mpegtools, vcdimager and cdrdao to burn the show to VCD. Works very nice.
So tell me, are you 100% sure Word isn't Trojaned ? Seriously thousands of programers have worked on it over the years, how can we be sure a Trojan wasn't introduced. Microsofts policy is not to do complete rewrites of code, they always start with what they already have, try to fix bugs and add features. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that a Trojan has existed in Word for years undetected (it is not likely, but it is possible). Even if they did find it, they would certainly take it out in the next version or even in a service pack, but they probably wouldn't tell anyone and they would only admit to it if a third party exploited it and made it public.
Er... I was trying to point out that we *do* have an equivalent to our 1st amendment, and that any restrictions to our freedom of speech are minor compared to what happens elsewhere. This was an attempt to provide some perspective, and be funny.
Try this: During the next Republican National Convention, got the front of the building where it is being held, Wear a low-cut dress (trust me, this will work regardless of gender). Start passing out leaflets saying the government is corrupt, and should abdicate, and that people should be allowed to do/act/say/pray as they please.
Then tell me how much the 1st Amendment means in this country.
Slashdot Mirror
Legally done in accordance with the laws of the US
Done in accordance with what US law ? Are you talking about the Patriot Act ? The same Patriot act that allows the government to monitor religious and political groups without evidence of criminal activity, to jail Americans without being charged or being able to confront witnesses against them, allows The government to search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause to aid terrorism investigation, Allows the government to prosecute librarians, telecommunication company officials and anyone else who reveals they have received a subpoena for records related to the terrorism investigation, Allows the government to monitor penal communications between attorneys and clients, and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes, Allows the government to jail Americans indefinitely without a trial. Allows the government to close once-public immigration hearings, secretly detain hundreds of people without charges, and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist requests for public records under the Freedom of Information Act. You mean that Patriot Act ?
There are precedents for what Bush has done.
Yes there are precedents, but that does not make it right or just and I hardly consider imprisioning thousands of innocent Americans during WWII a shining moment in our history.
Why don't you read a little before mouthing off your talk-show soundbites.
I have to mouth off now, because I will not likely be able to do so in the future.
Now if they could just dispense with this habeas corpus nonsense
I take it you haven't heard, The Bush administration claims the power to detain "enemy combatants" indefinitely without trial, an effective suspension of Habeas Corpus. All they have to do is label you a terrorist and you disappear in the night never to be heard from again.
I'd like to know why this anonymous donor didn't spread some of that cash around and buy a couple of Congressmen and a Senator. Perhaps Prof. Boyle will do so.
then why can't I put OSX on my IBM clone
Well, you can and you can't. OS X is coded and compiled for PPC processors not x86, so going out and buying a copy and installing it on your x86 PC is out. You can however get the underlying OS Darwin, it is free for the download, there is even a port to x86. The problem here is, first Darwin does not come with the pretty OS X GUI, it is command prompt only, you must get the Darwin port of X Windows for a GUI and second, the x86 port of Darwin supports a very narrow band of hardware. If you are considering this, goto the Darwin site and read the hardware compatibility list and build your system accordingly, otherwise you will be very disappointed.
I'd rather invest my money in a company with fiscal assets than one with moral and ethical ones.
I know someone with 10,000 WorldCom stock they'd sell you cheap.
(which, based on the way government works, I'm sure is easy to get.)
Then theres no problem is there.
Then why make the policy at all ?
I personally beleive the Federal Government should be banned for ten years from buying any NEW products or services from any company which has been found guilty of being an illegal monopoly, when there are alternatives available from other companies.
Let me put it like this, you may be willing to throw away your constitutional rights for some vague sense of security, but I am not. The US Patriot Act is the single worst result of 9/11. Lets go over some of the rights this act stripped from me:
Freedom of association: The government may monitor religious and political groups without evidence of criminal activity.
Right to liberty: Americans may be jailed without being charged or being able to confront witnesses against them.
Freedom from unreasonable searches: The government may search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause to aid terrorism investigation.
Freedom of speech: The government may prosecute librarians, telecommunication company officials and anyone else who reveals they have received a subpoena for records related to the terrorism investigation.
Right to legal representation: The government may monitor penal communications between attorneys and clients, and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.
Right to a speedy and public trial: The government may jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.
Freedom of information: The government has closed once-public immigration hearings, secretly detained hundreds of people without charges, and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist requests for public records under the Freedom of Information Act.
How can any of this be viewed as a "Good Thing"
He can't sign something that guts the Constitution, unless it is also upheld by the Supreme Court. It also seems like everyone is forgetting that it was first passed by overwhelming margins in both the Senate -- 98-1 -- and the House of Representatives -- 356-66. I don't like the Patriot Act any more than you do, but it's not entirely the work of GW Bush.
Every point you made here is absolutly true and only goes to prove that the Government as whole is the largest threat to our freedom, not just "Terrorists" and "Liberials" as the idiot who I was responding to said.
Well, if we live in constant fear of being killed, and therefore cannot travel, work or even leave our homes...can you truly call that Freedom?
Cold as it may sound, I would consider this a personal choice and/or problem. There are many places in the world were terrorism is a daily occurance, and yet they manage to leave thier houses to goto work, go on vacations and generally live thier lives.
Those freedoms are being threatened by terrorist and domestic liberalism. Get your facts straight!
Really? When did we elect Bin Laden as President ? I didn't think he signed the US Patriot Act into Law, I thought GW Bush did. Terrorists can't take away our freedom, short of a full scale invasion, only our government can. As I recall, Bush is a conservative, if he is bent on protecting our freedom, why did he sign the US Patroit Act (which guts the constitution) ? Why is his administration holding American citizens without charging them with anything, without access to a lawyer, without any trial, let alone a speedy trial with a jury of peers ? I suspect you need to rethink that statement.
I hate to admit it, but I am looking forward to the first major Linux trojan that comes along and is tuned to delete home directories.
I have to ask, why would you be looking forward to such a thing ? Do you really hate Linux users that much ? I have never had a Trojan or a virus of any kind, but I know people who have, I also worked Phone Tech Support during the height of the Chernobyl virus and I can honestly say, I wouldn't wish it off on anyone.
Furthermore, disable auto-updating and do it manually and the problem is solved, moot, and done.
This is not a technical issue, disabling Auto-Update is trivial. This is a legal issue, the real problem is by agreeing to the EULA they are giving a third party, who has no due cause, access to thier system. Whether or not Microsoft ever actually accesses thier system is not the point, the point is they have given consent and Microsoft could in theory demand access at anytime, say for example to check for unlicensed copies of software. I suggest you get a lawyer who can sort this out for you, it is also possible, however unlikely, a good lawyer could negotiate a different EULA with Microsoft.
This was my point exacty, which MoThugz missed entirely. A stock install of Win2K is useless. That is unless all you need is Solitaire, WordPad, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. I have always said, I will switch to Windows when I can get Windows 2K Server, Visual C++, Office, SQL 2K, IIS, licened so I can install them on as many systems as I like for no additional charge, on a 6 CD set for $49.99. I'd go up tp $99.99 if it included source code and the tools required to recompile it all (anybody who thinks MS uses Visual C++ to compile thier own software is fooling themselves).
Does anyone else think this review would have been more fair if he had used a retail win2k pro disc instead of using the Sony system restore cd's?
Personally I think he was cutting Win2K alot of slack by doing it with the restore CD. Think about it, a standard worksation install of RedHat 7.3 installs alot of software that does not come standard with Win2K. At the very least you'd need to install Visual C++, Office and a couple of those MS Entertainment Packs after you finished with the OS install, to get anything near what RedHat installs.
It's going to be interesting to see if/how the US Govt steps in to support WorldCom
With as much infrastructure as Worldcom owns, I seriously doubt GW Bush and the other Corporate Cronies on the Hill will allow it to simply collapse. I suppose if you have an extra $200 it might not be a bad idea to buy some Worldcom stock, at its current price, you could get 1000+ shares. Worst case scenario, you loose $200, but is possible, after a bailout, the stock price will goto $10 a share in a few years or they will be bought out and you will end up with 5 shares of AT&T or something. This is simply theory, and I am no expert, so if you invest your life savings in Worldcom and then it does simply collapse, don't blame me, you shouldn't be taking investment advice from Slashdot.
Who is it we're at war against this week?
Judging from the Patriot Act, I'd say we were at War with the Constitution.
If my cable company renders my Tivo usless, I will no longer have any use for thier service and I will cancel. Sure I loose the cost of my TiVo, but it would only take about 6 months of not having to pay a cable bill to recover the cost of my TiVo.
And Linux is maybe 2-5 years behind the *BSDs...".
I am 100% in agreement with everything you said. Linux security does leave something to be desired when compared to *BSD and I encourage anyone who has serious concerns about security, should use *BSD. Microsofts biggest security problem is the monoculture they are trying to force on everyone, if they would back away from thier monopoly and allow a diverse computer environment to develope, things like VB Script virus's would be a minor annoyance instead of headline news.
Linux has about another two years to continue poking fun at Windows security defects, then Dotnet will be in place and the party will be well and truly over.
and
Dotnet (and Java) represent a quantum leap in the "securability" of a platform and one to which Linux has no answer
I would like to point out that Java runs just fine under Linux. The Mono and DotGNU projects are in the works, both of which will be answers to .NET . You are assuming .NET will live up to Microsofts hype and that Linux will not improve over the next 2-5 years. The past has shown, that Linux is constantly improving and that Microsofts products never live up to the hype. Microsoft has spent the last 5 years playing catch up to Linux in security and stability. They are still at least 2-5 years behind in both of these areas and I don't see this changing anytime soon.
Can I have someone come on over an catalog your CD collection and then sell the list under the table to Columbia House record scammers?
As long as you can find a way to do it from outside my front door, sure.
This is exactly what you are doing, you are inviting MS into your house and allowing them to catalog all your data and once DRM is implemented, you will be the one standing on your front porch waiting to be let in.
For the millions of PC users who exists, only a small fraction of them have any data that anyone gives two cents about.
What about marketing data ? Don't you think Microsoft would love to be able collect picture perfect marketing data on each and every one of thier customers ? What websites they visit, what items they buy online, what software they have installed, how many people use the system. Much of this data could easily be collected simply by retrieving everyones IE history and cookie files. You may lead a completely uninteresting life, but other people have data they would rather not have collected on them. AIDS patients and unpopular political or religious views to just name a few. So you go ahead and trust Microsoft to do the "Right Thing", me, I prefer to keep my life private thank you very much.
Well, my ATI TV wonder VE is lacking in linux drivers
I have been using an ATI TV Wonder VE with Linux for a long time. The bttv kernel driver works fine for it. xawtv is a little sparse when compared to ATI's software, but it is easy to use and does the job nicely. xawtv comes with streamer, which I use in cron jobs to record my shows to AVI and if I really want to keep the show I use mpegtools, vcdimager and cdrdao to burn the show to VCD. Works very nice.
So tell me, are you 100% sure Word isn't Trojaned ? Seriously thousands of programers have worked on it over the years, how can we be sure a Trojan wasn't introduced. Microsofts policy is not to do complete rewrites of code, they always start with what they already have, try to fix bugs and add features. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that a Trojan has existed in Word for years undetected (it is not likely, but it is possible). Even if they did find it, they would certainly take it out in the next version or even in a service pack, but they probably wouldn't tell anyone and they would only admit to it if a third party exploited it and made it public.
Er ... I was trying to point out that we *do* have an equivalent to our 1st amendment, and that any restrictions to our freedom of speech are minor compared to what happens elsewhere. This was an attempt to provide some perspective, and be funny.
Try this: During the next Republican National Convention, got the front of the building where it is being held, Wear a low-cut dress (trust me, this will work regardless of gender). Start passing out leaflets saying the government is corrupt, and should abdicate, and that people should be allowed to do/act/say/pray as they please.
Then tell me how much the 1st Amendment means in this country.