Micro$oft have for long now been patent trolls who don't do much anything useful. Vista was a disaster, Seven was an improvement, but Eight is totally fucked up. I was sat before a computer with a starting view that looked almost exactly like a Windoze phone's display; but this one wasn't a touch screen. Go figure.
This is going to be quite interesting, when two of the biggest software monopolies have it out with each other. I hope they both get cut down to size. The typical Micro$oft patent trolling is against a startup, that they figure as competition, that they cannot undercut or buy out, so they try to starve them by litigating the hell out of them.
There is a possibility, that I am just a little bit partial here. But I'm still left with one question: WTF? M$ believe these patents entitle them to royalties over Android phones, but from whom? Google or every fucking smartphone maker including themselves?
The Justice Branch is based on bribery, just like the Legislative Branch. Where else can you have a judge deciding a case for the [plaintiff | defendant] just after an election, where the same spent almost a million to support his election. Not that this case was like that.
The Jury is usually cherry-picked, and bribing judges works here, too.
The Verdict is usually based on a decision by a Jury, who know nothing of the subject's background (thanks to an education that's totally fucked up. And bribery works here, too.
Ergo: Justice is for those who can afford it. Don't kid yourself about it.
How in the name of everything that is fair and just can a maker of equipment, that can be used for smuggling drugs, while a makers of guns, which are used all the time to kill people, have no liability?
Double Standard?
Democracy works, when you have a well-educated (good high-school level general education, that covers stuff like world history, ecology, languages and math & science), confident and a relatively well-off electorate. People who are scared and ignorant make shitty decisions, such as electing Dubya. Thus, the Executive Branch is elected by people who know nothing.
I so wish I'd have mod points. Because this is what they should do. The fuel + the ecosystem are worth the hot-tapping, and that amount of scrap metal must be worth some dough.
The latter especially since a ship like this contains quite a bit of metals somewhat more expensive than iron/steel.
It's true that Win 7 is a step ahead for windoze systems. It' practically workable! That is if you happen to like the way it works, because to tweak it even just a bit, you need to either be an expert or then buy a customising software.
But "Trustworthy Computing" has much more heinous objectives than making your windoze box more secure. It wants to make UEFI standards so that no other OS's can be run on a machine that uses M$ OS. It wants to make listening to your own music dependent on the presence of a TPM chip that takes care of all the critical security stuff, like Digital Rights Management. I guess it's in their interest to suck up to MPAA, RIAA and book publishers?
If George Orwell had had the vision, he'd have Micro$oft working for the Big Brother monitoring the people they don't like. I'm sorry, but I'll never again give M$ direct access to my hardware: it will always run in a virtual machine. I need to do it now and again to make sure that my stuff will also work with M$, specifically Internet Exploder. Granted, there are some pluses in IE9 over IE6, but they're negligible, basically eye candy.
Get behind FOSS or get left behind, is what I say.
Believe me, it's used frequently enough for any fluent speaker in conversations, let alone native speakers. It's an old one, besides, I found it in a dictionary from the 1950s.
This illustrates how they try to hook you to their format, their view of what you buy.
This is like leasing a car. They'll service it and add new features when the feel like it; as well as removing features when they feel like it. Like, they may think you don't really need a steering wheel — you'll enjoy your videos so much it's better you not be driving; and since you're not really driving, let's take the engine out, too.
It's "your" car, but you have nothing to say. Remember those Kindle eBooks from Amazon, that were deleted from the Kindles — Amazon used their own back door to remove the eBooks they found out they didn't have the legal right to sell.
All this gives us a new perspective of "owning" things. You know, I remember, when you bought your vinyl LP, and you could do any stupid thing you wanted with it, in addition to just playing it with any player that played anything else. Then came the C cassettes, and recorders, and Record Companies started complaining; it's only gotten worse in 45 years (or was it 44).
I think it may be good that SF.net abides the law. There are too many people who think that "open source" is all about breaking the law. That is, people crack copy protections, passwords etc. and some thing the whole community is about that, 'coz that's what they hear.
Now they see that the community is not about breaking the law, it's about making software.
Also, I think this may give to some a reason to perhaps rethink certain laws that restrict commerce and free exchange of ideas.
Linux has undoubtedly had an effect on PC world. I wonder if we can know really what that is, since it's hard to run alternative simulations in the real world, we only have this one history that is all-inclusive, if done right.
Linus is an example of how a project being controlled by a single actor can be very efficient in getting a fairly standardized product out (more so than many commercial operators), meaning, of course just the Kernel here.
In the future, I suppose it should become a committee effort, since there will be too many people, who want to influence it for him to work with eveyone, and too many people getting suspicious of the project being controlled by this Finnish-American guy, who may or may not have political ideas, too... Besides, the Chinese and the Russians already have their own ground-up distros that they use. They probably have government backdoors to every system???
And then the committee members will be bribed and boughtt by megacorporations and they will screw the development in behalf of their employers. Et cetera, et cetera...
Then, one day a guy goes out and buys a very basic computer and build a new kernel for a new kind of OS, because GNU/Linux has become such a f*@$kfest that you'll never be able to predict what's going to happen (if it doesn't end in some megacorp's pocket).
So no, I don't think that the world would have changed a lot. Perhaps Hurd would have gotten more attention, perhaps the BSD legal hassles would have been solved. Perhaps someone else would have created a kernel, and then been able to work with many people to make it better.
BTW, seems the Linus-mocking comments come from AC a lot. M$ fanbois or just people who like to yell "fire" in a full movie theatre?
I make spelling errors despite my good intentions.
But my basic attitude is, that if you don't care about what you're saying enough to spell it, then don't write it. There are plenty of insightful people, who will write readable text.
It might also be, that the company has already made some money from RIAA, MPAA and/or M$.
Who would most like to get P2P off the web? The first two, because they perceive it as a threat.
Who creates a virtual-monopoly desktop OS that has ridiculous vulnerabilities they don't like to address? The last one.
Besides, it is well within feasibility, that Micro$oft execs think P2P is responsible for a big chunk of the (albeit slowly) growing popularity of Linux. I mean, they hired Seinfeld as their spokesman, and then launched a funny service called "Bing". These are guys, who live in late 1980s or early 1990s and think they just nailed two of the biggest hit shows on air.
Conjecture, I admit. All of the above, except the bit about RIAA and MPAA wanting P2P off the web, the monopoly desktop OS, ridiculous vulnerabilities someone does not like to address, Seinfeld deal or... Bing, was it?
What do you think the 2nd amendment means today, and what do you think the founders meant it to do?
I mean, really, is this a trick question? I know there are a lot of (mainly right wing) blowhards yelling "you'll get my assault rifle, when you pry it out of my dead, cold fingers!" but is that really what the founders meant?
Did they mean, that the government can't require gun shows to do reasonable checks to slow down the gun running from U.S. to Mexico by Mexican drug lords — guns that often enough find their way to the good ol' U.S. of A. for the above mentioned blowhards to use as an argument in "guns should not only be in the hands of criminals" and "in New York City you can't get a handgun legally, but have no trouble getting one illegally".
Unfortunately, the Virginia Tech moved the issue in the wrong direction by making any mental patient unlikely to ever get a legal handgun in home state, but have no trouble finding one in another one. And this, because mental patients are the most likely to misuse it? No, actually, people, who do something like that have seldom been psych ward patients, and are only afterward seen to have exhibited signs of inordinate stress, violent behavior etc. — and have quite often been begging for someone to notice they're looking for help, but everybody just tells them to "cowboy up, everybody feels down every now and then."
I know that in my arguments I am using the same kind of tactics as the above mentioned blowhards. Well, another of their favorite sayings is that "you gotta fight fire with fire!"
I am also quite aware that there is no simple way to solve the problem.
RTFA! It was NOT in a home, they had payed 800 pounds to rent and haul the equipment there, they're obviously covering their asses now, after the fact.
Besides, the cops follow these things because too many people have thought it "funny" to invite people to an all-night party in someone else's home.
What I meant about the liability was, that if you screw up on your employer's time, your employer can be sued for any imaginary damages. That kind of thing. I know full well, that in most states you can get the boot without much of an explanation, let alone severance package. No golden parachutes for grunts...
About the only places where you have pretty good job guarantees are France and Germany. Even Denmark and Sweden, the socialist paradises, have reformed their labor laws so that it's fairly easy to hire and fire. There they have a safety net...
And, of course, all of this is offtopic, but sue me;)
If you were an employee of BFE, whatever, and you were observed drunkenly yelling "f#@* the mayor/equivalent" in a bar and got fired by him, would you say your freedom of speech was curtailed? I would suggest that a lot of people would make that a 1st Amendment issue. How is the 'net any different?
Anyhow, I would say that asking for public profile names would make some sense in a way...
perhaps trying to avoid employer liability for stuff you say "in secret". They ask you for it so they can vet you, and you hid stuff from em; so they are not liable?
I would surmise you are exactly right about that. If they have asked for it, they can say it's all your responsibility, fire you on the spot and say you defrauded them. In an age when employers are held liable for everything, it's hard to blame them...
Whatever you think about the Book of Mormon, it was published in 1830, and it has an interesting description of "judges" (what we would call "lawyers") creating cases out of thin air, because they were paid for the time they spent on cases (See Alma 11).
Slashdot Mirror
Micro$oft have for long now been patent trolls who don't do much anything useful. Vista was a disaster, Seven was an improvement, but Eight is totally fucked up. I was sat before a computer with a starting view that looked almost exactly like a Windoze phone's display; but this one wasn't a touch screen. Go figure.
This is going to be quite interesting, when two of the biggest software monopolies have it out with each other. I hope they both get cut down to size. The typical Micro$oft patent trolling is against a startup, that they figure as competition, that they cannot undercut or buy out, so they try to starve them by litigating the hell out of them.
There is a possibility, that I am just a little bit partial here. But I'm still left with one question: WTF? M$ believe these patents entitle them to royalties over Android phones, but from whom? Google or every fucking smartphone maker including themselves?
Here's why I don't like U.S. system:
Ergo: Justice is for those who can afford it. Don't kid yourself about it.
How in the name of everything that is fair and just can a maker of equipment, that can be used for smuggling drugs, while a makers of guns, which are used all the time to kill people, have no liability?
Double Standard?
Democracy works, when you have a well-educated (good high-school level general education, that covers stuff like world history, ecology, languages and math & science), confident and a relatively well-off electorate. People who are scared and ignorant make shitty decisions, such as electing Dubya. Thus, the Executive Branch is elected by people who know nothing.
The idea in TFA was that the built-in wipe, IOW "erase all content settings" was used, and much was still there.
Sometimes, one could perhaps RTFA before inserting foot.
Does it make you feel any better that a large percentage of those masks in Europe are "pirated"? ;)
I so wish I'd have mod points. Because this is what they should do. The fuel + the ecosystem are worth the hot-tapping, and that amount of scrap metal must be worth some dough.
The latter especially since a ship like this contains quite a bit of metals somewhat more expensive than iron/steel.
It's true that Win 7 is a step ahead for windoze systems. It' practically workable! That is if you happen to like the way it works, because to tweak it even just a bit, you need to either be an expert or then buy a customising software.
But "Trustworthy Computing" has much more heinous objectives than making your windoze box more secure. It wants to make UEFI standards so that no other OS's can be run on a machine that uses M$ OS. It wants to make listening to your own music dependent on the presence of a TPM chip that takes care of all the critical security stuff, like Digital Rights Management. I guess it's in their interest to suck up to MPAA, RIAA and book publishers?
If George Orwell had had the vision, he'd have Micro$oft working for the Big Brother monitoring the people they don't like. I'm sorry, but I'll never again give M$ direct access to my hardware: it will always run in a virtual machine. I need to do it now and again to make sure that my stuff will also work with M$, specifically Internet Exploder. Granted, there are some pluses in IE9 over IE6, but they're negligible, basically eye candy.
Get behind FOSS or get left behind, is what I say.
Believe me, it's used frequently enough for any fluent speaker in conversations, let alone native speakers. It's an old one, besides, I found it in a dictionary from the 1950s.
This illustrates how they try to hook you to their format, their view of what you buy.
This is like leasing a car. They'll service it and add new features when the feel like it; as well as removing features when they feel like it. Like, they may think you don't really need a steering wheel — you'll enjoy your videos so much it's better you not be driving; and since you're not really driving, let's take the engine out, too.
It's "your" car, but you have nothing to say. Remember those Kindle eBooks from Amazon, that were deleted from the Kindles — Amazon used their own back door to remove the eBooks they found out they didn't have the legal right to sell.
All this gives us a new perspective of "owning" things. You know, I remember, when you bought your vinyl LP, and you could do any stupid thing you wanted with it, in addition to just playing it with any player that played anything else. Then came the C cassettes, and recorders, and Record Companies started complaining; it's only gotten worse in 45 years (or was it 44).
Ideas yearn to be free.
I think it may be good that SF.net abides the law. There are too many people who think that "open source" is all about breaking the law. That is, people crack copy protections, passwords etc. and some thing the whole community is about that, 'coz that's what they hear.
Now they see that the community is not about breaking the law, it's about making software.
Also, I think this may give to some a reason to perhaps rethink certain laws that restrict commerce and free exchange of ideas.
Linux has undoubtedly had an effect on PC world. I wonder if we can know really what that is, since it's hard to run alternative simulations in the real world, we only have this one history that is all-inclusive, if done right.
Linus is an example of how a project being controlled by a single actor can be very efficient in getting a fairly standardized product out (more so than many commercial operators), meaning, of course just the Kernel here.
In the future, I suppose it should become a committee effort, since there will be too many people, who want to influence it for him to work with eveyone, and too many people getting suspicious of the project being controlled by this Finnish-American guy, who may or may not have political ideas, too... Besides, the Chinese and the Russians already have their own ground-up distros that they use. They probably have government backdoors to every system???
And then the committee members will be bribed and boughtt by megacorporations and they will screw the development in behalf of their employers. Et cetera, et cetera...
Then, one day a guy goes out and buys a very basic computer and build a new kernel for a new kind of OS, because GNU/Linux has become such a f*@$kfest that you'll never be able to predict what's going to happen (if it doesn't end in some megacorp's pocket).
So no, I don't think that the world would have changed a lot. Perhaps Hurd would have gotten more attention, perhaps the BSD legal hassles would have been solved. Perhaps someone else would have created a kernel, and then been able to work with many people to make it better.
BTW, seems the Linus-mocking comments come from AC a lot. M$ fanbois or just people who like to yell "fire" in a full movie theatre?
I make spelling errors despite my good intentions.
But my basic attitude is, that if you don't care about what you're saying enough to spell it, then don't write it. There are plenty of insightful people, who will write readable text.
So is M$ Word file format documented for the general public now?
It might also be, that the company has already made some money from RIAA, MPAA and/or M$.
Who would most like to get P2P off the web? The first two, because they perceive it as a threat.
Who creates a virtual-monopoly desktop OS that has ridiculous vulnerabilities they don't like to address? The last one.
Besides, it is well within feasibility, that Micro$oft execs think P2P is responsible for a big chunk of the (albeit slowly) growing popularity of Linux. I mean, they hired Seinfeld as their spokesman, and then launched a funny service called "Bing". These are guys, who live in late 1980s or early 1990s and think they just nailed two of the biggest hit shows on air.
Conjecture, I admit. All of the above, except the bit about RIAA and MPAA wanting P2P off the web, the monopoly desktop OS, ridiculous vulnerabilities someone does not like to address, Seinfeld deal or... Bing, was it?
Bada-Bing! Hahahahaha....
You mentioned "trust" and "defense contractor" in the same sentence.
Something in the Multiverse will break for that!
What do you think the 2nd amendment means today, and what do you think the founders meant it to do?
I mean, really, is this a trick question? I know there are a lot of (mainly right wing) blowhards yelling "you'll get my assault rifle, when you pry it out of my dead, cold fingers!" but is that really what the founders meant?
Did they mean, that the government can't require gun shows to do reasonable checks to slow down the gun running from U.S. to Mexico by Mexican drug lords — guns that often enough find their way to the good ol' U.S. of A. for the above mentioned blowhards to use as an argument in "guns should not only be in the hands of criminals" and "in New York City you can't get a handgun legally, but have no trouble getting one illegally".
Unfortunately, the Virginia Tech moved the issue in the wrong direction by making any mental patient unlikely to ever get a legal handgun in home state, but have no trouble finding one in another one. And this, because mental patients are the most likely to misuse it? No, actually, people, who do something like that have seldom been psych ward patients, and are only afterward seen to have exhibited signs of inordinate stress, violent behavior etc. — and have quite often been begging for someone to notice they're looking for help, but everybody just tells them to "cowboy up, everybody feels down every now and then."
I know that in my arguments I am using the same kind of tactics as the above mentioned blowhards. Well, another of their favorite sayings is that "you gotta fight fire with fire!"
I am also quite aware that there is no simple way to solve the problem.
In other words, the more illegal they are, the less likely they are to do mischief...
Like, a criminal mastermind would probably not use a stolen car that stands out like a sore thumb to transport a dead body to a dumpster crosstown.
RTFA! It was NOT in a home, they had payed 800 pounds to rent and haul the equipment there, they're obviously covering their asses now, after the fact.
Besides, the cops follow these things because too many people have thought it "funny" to invite people to an all-night party in someone else's home.
What I meant about the liability was, that if you screw up on your employer's time, your employer can be sued for any imaginary damages. That kind of thing. I know full well, that in most states you can get the boot without much of an explanation, let alone severance package. No golden parachutes for grunts...
About the only places where you have pretty good job guarantees are France and Germany. Even Denmark and Sweden, the socialist paradises, have reformed their labor laws so that it's fairly easy to hire and fire. There they have a safety net...
And, of course, all of this is offtopic, but sue me ;)
If you were an employee of BFE, whatever, and you were observed drunkenly yelling "f#@* the mayor/equivalent" in a bar and got fired by him, would you say your freedom of speech was curtailed? I would suggest that a lot of people would make that a 1st Amendment issue. How is the 'net any different?
Anyhow, I would say that asking for public profile names would make some sense in a way...
My kingdom for a mod point! :D
perhaps trying to avoid employer liability for stuff you say "in secret". They ask you for it so they can vet you, and you hid stuff from em; so they are not liable?
I would surmise you are exactly right about that. If they have asked for it, they can say it's all your responsibility, fire you on the spot and say you defrauded them. In an age when employers are held liable for everything, it's hard to blame them...
I get it. You have learned to copy and paste.
Yep, the quote from the Good Book is "[T]he love of money is the root of all evil." (Emphasis added.)
As your post so subtly hints, money is just a tool.
Whatever you think about the Book of Mormon, it was published in 1830, and it has an interesting description of "judges" (what we would call "lawyers") creating cases out of thin air, because they were paid for the time they spent on cases (See Alma 11).
The idea is not novel at all.
Exempting medical appliances from product liability as long as they're FDA-approved?
And, of course, no FDA employee has ever taken a kickback. Ever.
Or maybe you are the missing link?
(Hit "Submit" too soon...)