Sure I know it is "haha" since Microsoft in the recieving end, but take the context put linux and gpl on one end, and you will realize that a court could rule that since no one is placed in a financial disadvantage people can abuse the gpl. When Microsoft gets screwed over by something it is just a matter of time before someone applies to opensource stuff.
It's not quite that simple. The judge said that the damages were not substantial enough to merit a criminal case. That's a far cry from saying that copyright infringement is ok. In any case, this was not even a real piracy case to begin with.
From what I had read, the teacher was warned once, and he still continued using pirated software. Frankly he did break the law, he deserves a punishment, maybe not prison, but atleast slap on the wrist. People should be encouraged to follow licenses be in Sony's music license, microsoft's eula, or FSF's gpl.
This guy was supposed to stop doing what? Using the software he bought and paid for just because Microsoft says it's no longer valid? This is just proof of what we have been saying all along. Using Microsoft software is a time bomb. They are getting cockier about this lately. It's ridiculous that you can pay for windows -- even directly from Microsoft -- and then find out later that they decide you don't deserve to use their software after all so they deactivate you, or worse, try to blackmail you into buying more software because they don't think you paid enough protection money this year. Microsoft is a racket and the only way to get out of it is to build viable alternatives.
In the American justice system he would never have gotten away. Justice here can only be had for a price. That's why OJ and Beretta can be found not guilty in the face of overwhelming evidence when so many others who cannot afford lawyers are executed with no evidence at all.
It's also not to kind to teachers; there's a teacher rotting in jail right now because malware generated a bunch of pornographic popups in front of a classroom full of kids.
And I find it bitterly amusing that the same Slashdot community who wants to put the blame on the parents in this case - raises a huge outcry whenever someone floats the idea of logging software as limiting the rights of the child.
We don't raise outcry when parents log their kids' behaviour. Hell there have been a good bunch of threads where slashdotters discussed keylogging spouses/[boy|girl]friends. What we tend to object to tends to be more of the following:
1) Porn blocking software that blocks legitemate content, as when, for instance a major software package that is supposed to be blocking porn, etc was blocking things like the Democratic Party website.
2) Laws requiring bad software like the above to be installed in schools and public libraries. I don't think most of us mind the idea of schools and workplaces blocking porn as long as that is really what they are blocking. But in the case of libraries there is the question of blocking adults from things that are either inappropriately flagged or might legitemately be inappropriate for children yet are legitemate research sources for adults or even perhaps teenagers (teenagers make this sort of thing more complicated, which is just another reason to hate them:D ).
3) Logging and such by entities other than parents, especially of adults. Context determines how egregious this is.
Still, I'd say of all these things the one most likely to find a majority of slashdotters up in arns is the wrongful blocking of information, especially in the educational and research setting (like schools and libraries). I doubt you could find a majority of slashdotters opposed to the idea of parents being given *working* tools to stem the tide of pornography flying before their toddlers' faces. There might be a significant number who will say they don't want to overtly block their own children from any part of the net, but I doubt that the majority here really believes we should prevent parents from being able to do it if they choose to. Even so we don't like the idea that the parent who wants to keep their kid from seeing tubgirl will end up inadvertantly and unknowingly keeping them from seeing the world wildlife foundation website or wikipedia or something just because some asshole knowing their database is secret slips that kind of junk into the list of offending sites to be blocked.
Dammit Alaska, will y'all do something about that guy sometime soon?
It's not in their best interest. I mean, he's the king of pork (which means he has brought record breaking Federal dollars to the state), and he's on some important committees. He's been in Congress for a long time, has connections, and therefore Gets Things Done. Alaska has a very low population and therefore only 2 Senators and 1 Representative. But it is a very important state and there are a lot of issues which directly affect Alaska which are basically going to be decided by the government. 90% of the state is federal land, and the main economic drivers are oil and fishing. Fishing isn't doing that great and I don't think it ever brought in the kind of money the oil does. In any case both industries are heavily regulated and the land use required for both is likely to be regulated by virtue of the aforementioned fact that the majority of the land in the state is federal land (that is, parks, reserves, etc in addition to government/military installations/bases).
If they get a new dog in the race they have to start all over and go back to the unenviable position of having no say over choices that directly affect their lives and their livelihood.
Are you telling me that Bill Gates lied to the population about their situation? And we gobbled it up?
Bill Gates: computer scientist, marketer, business man, philanthropist... politician?
Who would have thought the term Renaissance Man could have such negative connotations?
I have come to prefer Alvin Toffler's term, The Third Wave, to apply to men like that, though similar to Rennaissance Men the men of The Third Wave are the men of the future (although now that future is present). This would seem to apply well to Gates as he does exhibit the qualities of such men and has the additional distinction of having made a great difference in society by virtue of these traits, as Toffler had predicted. It is funny, though, that now this is itself a dated term and by our current reckoning might as well be as distant in time as the Renaissance, given that computing achievements contemporaneous with the publication of Toffler's book now belong to Classical History (of computing) just as the works of ancient Greece belong to Classical History in the absolute sense of the term.
I think this is something that should be solved. PErsonally I'm flying my Terran flag, and urging all Earthlings to form a unified race working for the good of all.
Terran? Sounds like some kinda Terrist! better go carpet bomb them Terrans just to be sure.
Not just applications, but hardware for that matter. I just found out that my HP5400 scanner won't work with Vista. HP says too bad, "consider buying a new product (from us)".
That's nothing new. Typically HP direct-attach printers and scanners only work with one version of Windows. They expect you to buy a new one every time a new version comes out. The only exception seems to be their network printers which are usually bought by corporate customers, have a more or less generic interface, are more expensive, and most importantly are real printers. One of the things that drove down the cost of consumer printers was the rise of "winprinters." Like winmodems, winprinters delegate important functions that were once implemented in hardware to the driver and other printer software. This virtually guarantees that such hardware will only work on one version of one OS.
That's where Linux zealots have their revenge. Whereas people may not give a rat's ass that their printer or modem will not work in Linux or on the Mac OS, they soon find that new versions of the OS, and sometimes even service packs, put them in a position where they have to buy a whole new piece of hardware because it just became a brick.
It reminds me of a funny story, too. A company was stupid enough to buy one of those 4-in-1 HP printer/scanner/fax/copier things. But they needed to upgrade their accountant's computer to Windows 2000 to get better security and support newer versions of quickbooks. Unfortunately this meant now their fax machine didn't work. And even though they were lucky enough in that HP was nice enough to make drivers for Windows 2000, they were mean enough not to offer them for download from their website and require $99.99 + shipping to get the CD with the drivers. And after exhausting all other options and confirming this was indeed the case, the company paid and waited 2 weeks to get them with "rush shipping."
As long as companies can get away with screwing customers they will. But when "everybody's doing it" as is the case in many industries, or when they have the upper hand for some other reason, or they just have a giant market share, the balance of power is so much out of whack that it's pretty much impossible for companies *not* to get away with it.
"It may have cost them $2 million, but the amount of coverage (read: free advertising) they got for the upcoming ATHF movie is almost immeasurable."
Seems to me they'll need an immeasurable amount of publicity for the movie, since it doesn't seem like one single person in Boston was able to recognize an ATHF character.
That's because they are lowly Earth creatures, who are ignorant of the advanced ways of the Moon.
BUT, this whole thing afterwards is just insane. Politicians criticizing the company for doing this post 9-11, decrying the use of them putting up "hoax bombs", etc -- that stuff just infuriates me. The company could have handled the whole thing better, that's for sure, but they weren't putting up "hoax bombs," they were putting up advertisements. I realize they could have easily been IEDs but if you nail them for putting up "hoax bombs" you'll need to nail everyone that puts up anything short of a piece of paper.
Personally, if I were in Boston right now I would be pissed off. Not at the advertisers, but at the city that wasted millions on a force that cannot tell the difference between a bomb and a 40 year old child's toy which for some reason they never got. I guess all the journalists and police got coal in their stocking instead. Not one journalist has pointed out the real problem here, which is that this *proves* that Homeland Security is too poorly run and trained to keep us safe in a real emergency. They shut down parts of a large city all day to determine that a Lite Bright is not a bomb. How long could it possibly take?
It's clear to me that they would not know a real bomb if it bit them on the ass, and that they have no idea how bombs are made or work. Don't they have demolitions classes for these guys? They shut down a whole river for a "potential bomb" smaller than a childrens' book! They wasted over a million dollars on one days' activity clearly designed to justify their existence which in reality proved their utter incompetance. But instead of taking them to task, every news show is clucking their tongues and saying we should just cane the ad guys to death and burn the bodies. Can you say "talking points?"
It's not like this is the first time a harmless gesture was ridiculously treated as terrorism. In Ohio some obviously overworked law enforcers seem unfortunately unaquainted with Mario Bros and decided that the little guys were the next incarnation of Hezbollah. Meanwhile the real Hezbollah were probably laughing their asses off right under their noses.
I think incidents like this should result in some serious public hearings on the readiness of those who claim to protect us. Obviously they are doing a piss-poor job and it's only the relative stupidity/poverty of our enemies that really protects us here (in other words, they are just that much dumber than the dumbasses protecting us from them, and that sliver has been enough).
Which, if the media would start telling the truth, only really applies to actions taken by the Federal Government. If we'd be following the Constitution, as it was written, the States are free to fine-tune things as they see fit.
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This only reinforces other parts of the Constitution, such as the Supremacy Clause, from a section quoted in your journal:
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
Really, I thought you were on the side of civil rights, here. Yet you seem to be advocating absolute power of States to ignore the Constitution (which is a frighteningly common claim these days). This is for instance the basis for claims that it is entirely constitutional for States to establish a religion and require everyone in that state to practice it, as Fox News once broadcast. It's illegal for the same reason the Jim Crow laws were illegal. It violates the Constitution of the United States to which every state swears when it becomes one.
Fact: The only economically viable solution is complete and utter dismantling of the Federal Government. Failure to do so will inevitably result in pi55ing off someone who _is_ crazy enough to start a real war or execute a series, not just one, but a whole string of 9/11 style strategic attacks.
I don't know why I am even responding to you, but I'll give it a whirl anyhow. Besides the fact that you are intermixing fact with opinion which due to passion has run into hyperbole, your whole premise has serious flaws. Even given the extreme case you present, and the inevitable dystopia you propose, your cure would be worse than the disease. Dismantling the government is precisely what we cannot do, because it is likely to be rebuilt even worse than it is now. With no guiding structure, like the current Constitution, you are basically casting dice in the same wind you are pissing in.
Also violent prognostications like this are often made by people who would themselves like to be the actors. And what happens almost invariably when they act on their desire is another meaningless act of carnage followed by another useless death, and another example for the portfolio of those who agitate for stricter control. When the violent succeed in taking over the government you end up with a violent government paranoid of anyone who threatens the revolution, thus the inevitable terror, secret police, etc known in fascist states, for example.
It is a good rule of thumb that one should prefer not to endeavour to fix, and never to tear down, a machine one does not fully understand. If you would make the process of government better, you should learn how it works, and seek to understand where it has gone wrong. Most people seem to agree there is something wrong with the government, but few agree on what that is or how to fix it, if they have any idea at all. That is the holy grail of anyone who truly wishes to make a difference in this regard.
Managers manage until things fail. They will work you to death if you let them. They can't tell the difference between normal grousing and and genuine problems. When things break down, they know they've pushed to hard and they finally back off.
A good manager would know they have pushed too hard, but if they are a good manager they would not be using the technique you describe. When did Stalin back off?
As long as the teachers are putting their own money in, there is no failure.
Relying on failure to precipitate positive change is not a reliable method. It requires that the blame for the failure be properly placed, and that is highly unlikely here (as in most mismanaged systems). Failures of our government and of school administrators have been blamed instead on the teachers for decades (much as failures in other workplaces often fall on the heads of workers rather than managers). Why would that magically stop now?
The teachers are using their own money to help the children because they are dedicated to their job and do not think that the chidlren deserve to suffer because the adults running things are complete assholes. It is unfair to ask that children be given an even more substandard education just so that people will somehow wake up and find a better, more fair method of funding schools, when all the hard-luck cases in the world (like schools in the South with no air conditioning and such outdated wiring that it is impossible to support things like computers in that environment) have not been enough to cause the outcry for real change. What little politicians have done has actually served to make the problem worse. Why bait the monster?
Teachers are just doing what any professional would do under the circumstances. It's not that different from what many IT workers have had to do, for example. You do what you can to make things better within the limited sphere you are granted. If that means buying a few extra reams of paper and pencils and such so that kids have at least some semblance of a chance of participating in the educational process, so be it. If that means teaching the kids a few of the things they are supposed to be learning in between the time you are forced to cram them for tests whose results will be skewed or faked anyway then you do that, too. What you don't do is let a child do without when you could have helped, anymore than you would fail to put out a fire on your company's main file server just because your boss was too cheap to buy th eright fire extinguishing equipment.
"If he works at a school that has to watch every penny in its budget (like 90% of schools in the world), and he makes barely enough to live on himself (like 90% of teachers in the world)"
Horsehockey. Not saying Windows isn't overpriced (although there is now a version for developing countries), teachers, at least in the US, are paid better than most white collar workers.
First off, the article you cite is an opinion piece, biased by the author's agenda, and uses faulty data and reasoning to reach its conclusion. Attempts to break down a teacher's salary into an hourly wage invariably rely upon the myth that teachers only work during class hours and at no other time during the day/year. This is manifestly untrue as any teacher will tell you. Inservices, workshops, and other work-related meetings are held year-round; quite a bit of work is being done during the summer which is never counted in these types of articles. This is quite apart from the vast amounts of time during evenings and weekends spent creating lesson plans, grading papers, and creating tests. Lumping all teachers together is also going to skew your results, as teacher salaries vary wildy depending on district, region, state, and even between different parts of the same city. Then of course there are the variables of performance and experience which influence any salary for any job. At the very least a comparison of absolute salaries is closer, though it must also be weighed against the above in similar fashion to a proper analysis of IT salaries.
A more detailed approach is required to truly understand a problem like teacher pay, but articles like the one you cite abound. After all it is easy to dash off a poorly researched, bombastic article with crudely manipulated "factoids" and whip people into a frenzy over some controversial issue, but real research is quite a bit harder. If anything articles like this are proof that someone is getting a very bad education, but a displayed attitude like that toward educators does beg the question of whether the person was not himself part of that problem. In any case, F- for the article and shame on you for believing such garbage. No wonder you get your news here:D.
It is funny that someone writing in a forum frequented by people who are routinely lambasted as overpaid yet know better by virtue of things like 80 hour workweeks, 24 hour on-call status, potentially very short careers due to the dual press between age bias and the need for experience, etc would not be more sympathetic to teachers. But then our profession is also notorious for attracting dropouts from college as well; perhaps that would explain some of the anti-academic attitude which seems incongruous with the fact that our profession is supposed to be a science.
Secondly, the whole question of US K-12 teacher salaries is irrelevant to the question of the funding of a rural school in Russia or that teacher's salary. So -1 offtopic, F- for reading comprehension, and detention for you!:D
The reason you should not drive drunk is because it endangers others, not because it is illegal. True the law draws a sharp line at a certain blood alcohol level that you may not know. However that level is chosen in a way that you should know without being told that that much drinking is incompatible with safe motor vehicle operation.
At one time this was the case, or at least reasonably close. But laws are formed by politicians acting on prompts from lobbyists, not by wise scientist doctors or some such nonsense. So in order to appear "tough" on an issue, they must make the laws regarding a given act more and more strict and the punishment more and more stringent. This is not done with an eye to actual correction, but rather with an eye to reelection. In any case in many states the blood alcohol level required for drunkenness is ridiculously low, to the point where it is far beyond the level where one is far from intoxicated yes legally "drunk," into the fantasy land where drinking pretty much ever is going to screw you. I think in some states they are actually trying to beat the limit by going for 0.01% BAC as drunkenness. It's pretty much standard to see 0.08% and I think 0.06% and 0.05% have started floating around. It's a game.
I personally think it is manifestly wrong, immoral, and grossly irresponsible to drive when you are under the influence of a drug that you know is impairing your ability. I also think that drugs of that nature tend to encourage that behaviour, but that's beside the point, as is the fact that our vehicle-driven society has led us to a place where bars exist outside of town when your homes are inside, or vice versa, and there is no public transport therefrom. Gee I wonder what goes on there every night. People walk the line, test their limits, and some of them get caught before they kill someone. But at the same time the law that is supposed to stop that happening criminalizes the guy who wasn't actually impaired as well. Meanwhile cleverly failing to address the underlying problem of why in the hell are people still doing this in the first place, like some responsible nations have done.
In any case, regardless of your feelings on the matter, no, it has been pretty much proven that unless you use a breathalyzer yourself you do not know what your BAC is. That goes for the supremely sloshed (who should sure know they aren't in any shape to drive) as well as the guy who had one beer an hour ago and should have metabolized it, but is astonished to find himself breaking the law.
A Constitution could have a lifespan of say 200 or 100 years, and if a country survives long enough it can throw a huge party when the times comes to renew it.
1) If we did that, it is unlikely that the Constitution would be renewed.
2) As it stands, politicians simply ignore it anyhow, regardless of the fact that absent the Constitution they have no authority at all!
Laws requiring expiry in general might not seem a bad idea on their face. After all all a party needs to do to get rid of an egregious law is nothing at all, or at most filibuster and run out the clock. Then the law expires and they did not have to take an up/down vote on it. Voila! Some fun laws that actually did this include the Patriot Act. Unfortunately they seem to have kept that one around.
Still I am not sure it's such a good idea for all laws, mainly for the above reaosn, but also for the fact that it requires then that any good laws be reinvented constantly or at least reconstituted. That could cause a bit of chaos and deter progress in actual legal reform.
Personally I have always agreed that we have too many laws, and in the deregulation of individuals. That is, why are politicians so hot to remove silly safety and environmental laws from poor innocent big giant corporations with the claim that enforcement is too tough, not cost effective, and counterproductive to letting said entities Get Things Done, yet they seem perfectly content to regulate the hell out of me, my personal life, who I marry, who I have sex with and where and when, what I eat and drink, whether I smoke, and when and what I say wherever I may say it! For crying out loud! The same assholes that think it's fine to release more arsenic in my drinking water want to make it illegal for me to eat Oreos. Fucking OREOS! They even convinced Nabisco to change their recipe. I've been afraid to look ever since, lest I confirm my fear that the original Oreo has indeed gone the way of New Coke, or maybe the way we thought Classic Coke had. Gone never to be seen again. Lost in a forest of regulation.
It only makes sense that we reduce our laws, weeding out unnecessary garbage so that the real needs are addressed; further we should rewrite those few laws left that actually apply to ordinary folk so that they are in plain decent english and not a bunch of Bullshit. No more of this business of laws like the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance reform bill which, after years of blood sweat and tears was so shredded it did nothing at all; some of these bills actually end up making the problem they were supposed to correct worse, and they can get away with it because of legalese and bullshitese, which tend to share a common lexicon. And no more of that Orwell crap where you pass a law that is named the exact opposite of what it really does -- on purpose. If there is a use for Gitmo it is for people who pull that crap. Passing bills that increase spending and calling it balanced budget, passing bills that increase pollution and calling it "clear skies," etc etc. That shit needs to stop too.
Unfortunately we have very little chance under the current system of fixing any of this because the little gremlins who gummed up the works in the first place are the only mechanics allowed to tinker with the engine, and they like it with pork stuck in the gears and hoi polloi crushed under the byzantine, rube-goldberg inspired works. It amuses them and serves their purpose, and the only way to clear them all out is by summoning a clear consensus and political will to do so in a world where such things are deliberately manipulated through media maestros. In other words, the same struggle mankind has engaged in from the first Ziggurat to the latest FNC broadcast antenna.
That said, I believe if someone knowing commits an infraction, they should be able to sustain the punishment. But, I don't always agree with the punishment in light of the crime. The world of software piracy is especially troubling to me.
Have we all gone insane here? It's okay for people in the US to p2p all the warez they want but this poor bastard should die in a gulag for offending Lord Gates? This man was an educator simply trying to give students a chance to learn about computers and have some semblance of a chance in life. If there is a crime here it is the fact that the Russian government did not adequately fund the school so that legal copies could be obtained, and Microsoft did not give them the beneficial deals that they claim to give schools. Yes, I know, it's nothing like some companies that have given software and equipment to schools for free in the past, but at least it would be something, and it would appear there was a failure here in that regard which Gorbachev is simply asking Gates to rectify.
Besides the fact that in a country where intellectual property did not exist at all not long ago, and in which piracy is apparently so rampant you could throw a rock (a snowball) and hit a pirate, it is apalling to think that software piracy is a criminal offense in the first damn place. Especially when you consider that there are no "country club prisons" in Russia. They are serious business over there; seriously old-school as in medieval.
Did you miss the bit where they bombed the shit out of Lebanese civilians, bridges, water plants and UN observers? At that time the majority of israelis supported the action too. Does that make all Jews violent and evil?
1) Original point about broadbrushing taken. Nevertheless we ust point out that
2) the government of Israel is a secular institution in which probably ethnic Jews have the majority but it is not monolithic on any ground
3) the decision to bomb prople who are shooting rockets at civilians is not a decision of genocide, religious fanaticism/hatred, or terrorism.
I might give you an argument that less collateral damage is desirable and give you a chance to explain how that could have been achieved under the circumstances. But to describe a situation in which one side deliberately targets civilians as their primary choice, and the other is trying to stop those people (unfortunately killing civilians in the process) and say that the side that was going after a military target is the terrorist and the side that targetted civilians is the freedom fighter... that is ridiculous on its face. It is just as ridiculous as the insurgents who shoot down US helicopters and take sniper shots at US troops then cry "foul atrocity" when those troops shoot back at them.
How can you win people to an argument when you have thrown logic and reason out the window and the only emotion you evoke (by your own actions) is negative towards you?
Come on, man, even us Americans know Hiroshima isn't in Germany... don't ask us to point it out on a map because we're as likely to point at Hawaii or the Aleutians, but still.. pretty sure it's not in Germany.:D
Having started out in the Hauptschule doesn't keep you from, say, becoming chancellor later in your life.
Well, I am glad to hear that the machinery is still ticking along like a clock over there in Germany. After all having a German chancellor who received a poor education, especially one who feels he was unfairly held back, never caused any trouble... Well, okay there was that one guy. He never did forgive those academics for the negative control he felt they had over his destiny.
His name slips my mind just now, but then you must excuse a poor American his failings in the study of history as over here even so far as it is studied we are often told the memorization of names, dates, places, and events is unnecessary.
Granted our most recent leader supposedly did badly in school, and this is given as an excuse for many of his more egregious failings, but in his case he actually graduated with an advanced degree after attending two of the most prestigious universities in our country. It does give us pause. But maybe your next chancellor fitting the above description will not be so bad as that other guy and no more worse than ours. We can only hope.:D
What's worse, would EZ-Pass or On*Star (I have neither system - I'd rather bleed to death at the side of the road after an accident than lose my privacy 100% of the time) data obtained without a warrant now be admissible in court? I suspect that the cops might not even have to leave the comfort of their offices to attach the GPS bug if they play the game right.
If you own a cell phone you could conceivably be tracked that way as well. Most cell phones now have GPS location tech built into them now. In fact Nextel (or at least I think it was Nextel) was advertising a service where you could get a plan for your employees, give them cell phones, and then watch on their website exactly where those employees went at all times. So it's not just the police that could potentially have access to that information, it could be anyone. How they use that information depends on their needs and motivations.
The problem is not Microsoft specific. It's a problem with overly complex software. Word processors are overly complex which means that there is a lot of code that can contain errors. Most users don't use the full functionality of the software and therefore don't require it to be so complex.
I never saw the point of allowing scripting within word processing documents, for instance. It violates the fundamental premise of seperating code from data. It was bound to cause problems, it has, and it pretty much is only ever used to cause trouble in the first place, probably because there just isn't a legitemate use for it. Yet Microsoft insists on continuing to use it and expand the scriptability of their software and thus the points of entry for trouble, with no good to show for it.
"I'm on OS X and if a client or contractor sends me"
Most businesses can not afford or would not like to treat their a client like that. They are your client because you work for them. Unless your business is "IT general awareness" or "Subtle OS agenda pushing", you are not providing them a very good service. Maybe you are from the bizzaro world where the customers and clients do not come first or your clients have no choice to come your way because of prior arrangements and/or you are part of a much larger group that does not have the same feelings as you.
Funny, that seems to be the world where Microsoft lives, which is what leads us to this problem in the first place.:D
Slashdot Mirror
Sure I know it is "haha" since Microsoft in the recieving end, but take the context put linux and gpl on one end, and you will realize that a court could rule that since no one is placed in a financial disadvantage people can abuse the gpl. When Microsoft gets screwed over by something it is just a matter of time before someone applies to opensource stuff.
It's not quite that simple. The judge said that the damages were not substantial enough to merit a criminal case. That's a far cry from saying that copyright infringement is ok. In any case, this was not even a real piracy case to begin with.
From what I had read, the teacher was warned once, and he still continued using pirated software. Frankly he did break the law, he deserves a punishment, maybe not prison, but atleast slap on the wrist. People should be encouraged to follow licenses be in Sony's music license, microsoft's eula, or FSF's gpl.
This guy was supposed to stop doing what? Using the software he bought and paid for just because Microsoft says it's no longer valid? This is just proof of what we have been saying all along. Using Microsoft software is a time bomb. They are getting cockier about this lately. It's ridiculous that you can pay for windows -- even directly from Microsoft -- and then find out later that they decide you don't deserve to use their software after all so they deactivate you, or worse, try to blackmail you into buying more software because they don't think you paid enough protection money this year. Microsoft is a racket and the only way to get out of it is to build viable alternatives.
Did we export the American justice system too?
(or they just stole it)
In the American justice system he would never have gotten away. Justice here can only be had for a price. That's why OJ and Beretta can be found not guilty in the face of overwhelming evidence when so many others who cannot afford lawyers are executed with no evidence at all.
It's also not to kind to teachers; there's a teacher rotting in jail right now because malware generated a bunch of pornographic popups in front of a classroom full of kids.
And I find it bitterly amusing that the same Slashdot community who wants to put the blame on the parents in this case - raises a huge outcry whenever someone floats the idea of logging software as limiting the rights of the child.
We don't raise outcry when parents log their kids' behaviour. Hell there have been a good bunch of threads where slashdotters discussed keylogging spouses/[boy|girl]friends. What we tend to object to tends to be more of the following:
1) Porn blocking software that blocks legitemate content, as when, for instance a major software package that is supposed to be blocking porn, etc was blocking things like the Democratic Party website.
2) Laws requiring bad software like the above to be installed in schools and public libraries. I don't think most of us mind the idea of schools and workplaces blocking porn as long as that is really what they are blocking. But in the case of libraries there is the question of blocking adults from things that are either inappropriately flagged or might legitemately be inappropriate for children yet are legitemate research sources for adults or even perhaps teenagers (teenagers make this sort of thing more complicated, which is just another reason to hate them :D ).
3) Logging and such by entities other than parents, especially of adults. Context determines how egregious this is.
Still, I'd say of all these things the one most likely to find a majority of slashdotters up in arns is the wrongful blocking of information, especially in the educational and research setting (like schools and libraries). I doubt you could find a majority of slashdotters opposed to the idea of parents being given *working* tools to stem the tide of pornography flying before their toddlers' faces. There might be a significant number who will say they don't want to overtly block their own children from any part of the net, but I doubt that the majority here really believes we should prevent parents from being able to do it if they choose to. Even so we don't like the idea that the parent who wants to keep their kid from seeing tubgirl will end up inadvertantly and unknowingly keeping them from seeing the world wildlife foundation website or wikipedia or something just because some asshole knowing their database is secret slips that kind of junk into the list of offending sites to be blocked.
Dammit Alaska, will y'all do something about that guy sometime soon?
It's not in their best interest. I mean, he's the king of pork (which means he has brought record breaking Federal dollars to the state), and he's on some important committees. He's been in Congress for a long time, has connections, and therefore Gets Things Done. Alaska has a very low population and therefore only 2 Senators and 1 Representative. But it is a very important state and there are a lot of issues which directly affect Alaska which are basically going to be decided by the government. 90% of the state is federal land, and the main economic drivers are oil and fishing. Fishing isn't doing that great and I don't think it ever brought in the kind of money the oil does. In any case both industries are heavily regulated and the land use required for both is likely to be regulated by virtue of the aforementioned fact that the majority of the land in the state is federal land (that is, parks, reserves, etc in addition to government/military installations/bases).
If they get a new dog in the race they have to start all over and go back to the unenviable position of having no say over choices that directly affect their lives and their livelihood.
Are you telling me that Bill Gates lied to the population about their situation? And we gobbled it up?
Bill Gates: computer scientist, marketer, business man, philanthropist ... politician?
Who would have thought the term Renaissance Man could have such negative connotations?
I have come to prefer Alvin Toffler's term, The Third Wave, to apply to men like that, though similar to Rennaissance Men the men of The Third Wave are the men of the future (although now that future is present). This would seem to apply well to Gates as he does exhibit the qualities of such men and has the additional distinction of having made a great difference in society by virtue of these traits, as Toffler had predicted. It is funny, though, that now this is itself a dated term and by our current reckoning might as well be as distant in time as the Renaissance, given that computing achievements contemporaneous with the publication of Toffler's book now belong to Classical History (of computing) just as the works of ancient Greece belong to Classical History in the absolute sense of the term.
Are you kidding? The American way is to build a highway through it!
But we'd need millions of illegal immigrants to do that!
I think this is something that should be solved. PErsonally I'm flying my Terran flag, and urging all Earthlings to form a unified race working for the good of all.
Terran? Sounds like some kinda Terrist! better go carpet bomb them Terrans just to be sure.
Not just applications, but hardware for that matter. I just found out that my HP5400 scanner won't work with Vista. HP says too bad, "consider buying a new product (from us)".
That's nothing new. Typically HP direct-attach printers and scanners only work with one version of Windows. They expect you to buy a new one every time a new version comes out. The only exception seems to be their network printers which are usually bought by corporate customers, have a more or less generic interface, are more expensive, and most importantly are real printers. One of the things that drove down the cost of consumer printers was the rise of "winprinters." Like winmodems, winprinters delegate important functions that were once implemented in hardware to the driver and other printer software. This virtually guarantees that such hardware will only work on one version of one OS.
That's where Linux zealots have their revenge. Whereas people may not give a rat's ass that their printer or modem will not work in Linux or on the Mac OS, they soon find that new versions of the OS, and sometimes even service packs, put them in a position where they have to buy a whole new piece of hardware because it just became a brick.
It reminds me of a funny story, too. A company was stupid enough to buy one of those 4-in-1 HP printer/scanner/fax/copier things. But they needed to upgrade their accountant's computer to Windows 2000 to get better security and support newer versions of quickbooks. Unfortunately this meant now their fax machine didn't work. And even though they were lucky enough in that HP was nice enough to make drivers for Windows 2000, they were mean enough not to offer them for download from their website and require $99.99 + shipping to get the CD with the drivers. And after exhausting all other options and confirming this was indeed the case, the company paid and waited 2 weeks to get them with "rush shipping."
As long as companies can get away with screwing customers they will. But when "everybody's doing it" as is the case in many industries, or when they have the upper hand for some other reason, or they just have a giant market share, the balance of power is so much out of whack that it's pretty much impossible for companies *not* to get away with it.
"It may have cost them $2 million, but the amount of coverage (read: free advertising) they got for the upcoming ATHF movie is almost immeasurable."
Seems to me they'll need an immeasurable amount of publicity for the movie, since it doesn't seem like one single person in Boston was able to recognize an ATHF character.
That's because they are lowly Earth creatures, who are ignorant of the advanced ways of the Moon.
A terrorist is NOT going to go about doing something like this
Although, in the light of the brouhaha over those Danish newspapers a kind of sick thought does enter the mind.
Terrorist: "So you think you *like* cartoons, do you?"
BUT, this whole thing afterwards is just insane. Politicians criticizing the company for doing this post 9-11, decrying the use of them putting up "hoax bombs", etc -- that stuff just infuriates me. The company could have handled the whole thing better, that's for sure, but they weren't putting up "hoax bombs," they were putting up advertisements. I realize they could have easily been IEDs but if you nail them for putting up "hoax bombs" you'll need to nail everyone that puts up anything short of a piece of paper.
Personally, if I were in Boston right now I would be pissed off. Not at the advertisers, but at the city that wasted millions on a force that cannot tell the difference between a bomb and a 40 year old child's toy which for some reason they never got. I guess all the journalists and police got coal in their stocking instead. Not one journalist has pointed out the real problem here, which is that this *proves* that Homeland Security is too poorly run and trained to keep us safe in a real emergency. They shut down parts of a large city all day to determine that a Lite Bright is not a bomb. How long could it possibly take?
It's clear to me that they would not know a real bomb if it bit them on the ass, and that they have no idea how bombs are made or work. Don't they have demolitions classes for these guys? They shut down a whole river for a "potential bomb" smaller than a childrens' book! They wasted over a million dollars on one days' activity clearly designed to justify their existence which in reality proved their utter incompetance. But instead of taking them to task, every news show is clucking their tongues and saying we should just cane the ad guys to death and burn the bodies. Can you say "talking points?"
It's not like this is the first time a harmless gesture was ridiculously treated as terrorism. In Ohio some obviously overworked law enforcers seem unfortunately unaquainted with Mario Bros and decided that the little guys were the next incarnation of Hezbollah. Meanwhile the real Hezbollah were probably laughing their asses off right under their noses.
I think incidents like this should result in some serious public hearings on the readiness of those who claim to protect us. Obviously they are doing a piss-poor job and it's only the relative stupidity/poverty of our enemies that really protects us here (in other words, they are just that much dumber than the dumbasses protecting us from them, and that sliver has been enough).
> a failure of my rights under the Constitution
Which, if the media would start telling the truth, only really applies to actions taken by the Federal Government. If we'd be following the Constitution, as it was written, the States are free to fine-tune things as they see fit.
Wrong. Read the 14th Amendment, which says in part:
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This only reinforces other parts of the Constitution, such as the Supremacy Clause, from a section quoted in your journal:
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
Really, I thought you were on the side of civil rights, here. Yet you seem to be advocating absolute power of States to ignore the Constitution (which is a frighteningly common claim these days). This is for instance the basis for claims that it is entirely constitutional for States to establish a religion and require everyone in that state to practice it, as Fox News once broadcast. It's illegal for the same reason the Jim Crow laws were illegal. It violates the Constitution of the United States to which every state swears when it becomes one.
Fact: The only economically viable solution is complete and utter dismantling of the Federal Government. Failure to do so will inevitably result in pi55ing off someone who _is_ crazy enough to start a real war or execute a series, not just one, but a whole string of 9/11 style strategic attacks.
I don't know why I am even responding to you, but I'll give it a whirl anyhow. Besides the fact that you are intermixing fact with opinion which due to passion has run into hyperbole, your whole premise has serious flaws. Even given the extreme case you present, and the inevitable dystopia you propose, your cure would be worse than the disease. Dismantling the government is precisely what we cannot do, because it is likely to be rebuilt even worse than it is now. With no guiding structure, like the current Constitution, you are basically casting dice in the same wind you are pissing in.
Also violent prognostications like this are often made by people who would themselves like to be the actors. And what happens almost invariably when they act on their desire is another meaningless act of carnage followed by another useless death, and another example for the portfolio of those who agitate for stricter control. When the violent succeed in taking over the government you end up with a violent government paranoid of anyone who threatens the revolution, thus the inevitable terror, secret police, etc known in fascist states, for example.
It is a good rule of thumb that one should prefer not to endeavour to fix, and never to tear down, a machine one does not fully understand. If you would make the process of government better, you should learn how it works, and seek to understand where it has gone wrong. Most people seem to agree there is something wrong with the government, but few agree on what that is or how to fix it, if they have any idea at all. That is the holy grail of anyone who truly wishes to make a difference in this regard.
Managers manage until things fail. They will work you to death if you let them. They can't tell the difference between normal grousing and and genuine problems. When things break down, they know they've pushed to hard and they finally back off.
A good manager would know they have pushed too hard, but if they are a good manager they would not be using the technique you describe. When did Stalin back off?
As long as the teachers are putting their own money in, there is no failure.
Relying on failure to precipitate positive change is not a reliable method. It requires that the blame for the failure be properly placed, and that is highly unlikely here (as in most mismanaged systems). Failures of our government and of school administrators have been blamed instead on the teachers for decades (much as failures in other workplaces often fall on the heads of workers rather than managers). Why would that magically stop now?
The teachers are using their own money to help the children because they are dedicated to their job and do not think that the chidlren deserve to suffer because the adults running things are complete assholes. It is unfair to ask that children be given an even more substandard education just so that people will somehow wake up and find a better, more fair method of funding schools, when all the hard-luck cases in the world (like schools in the South with no air conditioning and such outdated wiring that it is impossible to support things like computers in that environment) have not been enough to cause the outcry for real change. What little politicians have done has actually served to make the problem worse. Why bait the monster?
Teachers are just doing what any professional would do under the circumstances. It's not that different from what many IT workers have had to do, for example. You do what you can to make things better within the limited sphere you are granted. If that means buying a few extra reams of paper and pencils and such so that kids have at least some semblance of a chance of participating in the educational process, so be it. If that means teaching the kids a few of the things they are supposed to be learning in between the time you are forced to cram them for tests whose results will be skewed or faked anyway then you do that, too. What you don't do is let a child do without when you could have helped, anymore than you would fail to put out a fire on your company's main file server just because your boss was too cheap to buy th eright fire extinguishing equipment.
"If he works at a school that has to watch every penny in its budget (like 90% of schools in the world), and he makes barely enough to live on himself (like 90% of teachers in the world)"
Horsehockey. Not saying Windows isn't overpriced (although there is now a version for developing countries), teachers, at least in the US, are paid better than most white collar workers.
First off, the article you cite is an opinion piece, biased by the author's agenda, and uses faulty data and reasoning to reach its conclusion. Attempts to break down a teacher's salary into an hourly wage invariably rely upon the myth that teachers only work during class hours and at no other time during the day/year. This is manifestly untrue as any teacher will tell you. Inservices, workshops, and other work-related meetings are held year-round; quite a bit of work is being done during the summer which is never counted in these types of articles. This is quite apart from the vast amounts of time during evenings and weekends spent creating lesson plans, grading papers, and creating tests. Lumping all teachers together is also going to skew your results, as teacher salaries vary wildy depending on district, region, state, and even between different parts of the same city. Then of course there are the variables of performance and experience which influence any salary for any job. At the very least a comparison of absolute salaries is closer, though it must also be weighed against the above in similar fashion to a proper analysis of IT salaries.
A more detailed approach is required to truly understand a problem like teacher pay, but articles like the one you cite abound. After all it is easy to dash off a poorly researched, bombastic article with crudely manipulated "factoids" and whip people into a frenzy over some controversial issue, but real research is quite a bit harder. If anything articles like this are proof that someone is getting a very bad education, but a displayed attitude like that toward educators does beg the question of whether the person was not himself part of that problem. In any case, F- for the article and shame on you for believing such garbage. No wonder you get your news here :D.
It is funny that someone writing in a forum frequented by people who are routinely lambasted as overpaid yet know better by virtue of things like 80 hour workweeks, 24 hour on-call status, potentially very short careers due to the dual press between age bias and the need for experience, etc would not be more sympathetic to teachers. But then our profession is also notorious for attracting dropouts from college as well; perhaps that would explain some of the anti-academic attitude which seems incongruous with the fact that our profession is supposed to be a science.
Secondly, the whole question of US K-12 teacher salaries is irrelevant to the question of the funding of a rural school in Russia or that teacher's salary. So -1 offtopic, F- for reading comprehension, and detention for you! :D
The reason you should not drive drunk is because it endangers others, not because it is illegal. True the law draws a sharp line at a certain blood alcohol level that you may not know. However that level is chosen in a way that you should know without being told that that much drinking is incompatible with safe motor vehicle operation.
At one time this was the case, or at least reasonably close. But laws are formed by politicians acting on prompts from lobbyists, not by wise scientist doctors or some such nonsense. So in order to appear "tough" on an issue, they must make the laws regarding a given act more and more strict and the punishment more and more stringent. This is not done with an eye to actual correction, but rather with an eye to reelection. In any case in many states the blood alcohol level required for drunkenness is ridiculously low, to the point where it is far beyond the level where one is far from intoxicated yes legally "drunk," into the fantasy land where drinking pretty much ever is going to screw you. I think in some states they are actually trying to beat the limit by going for 0.01% BAC as drunkenness. It's pretty much standard to see 0.08% and I think 0.06% and 0.05% have started floating around. It's a game.
I personally think it is manifestly wrong, immoral, and grossly irresponsible to drive when you are under the influence of a drug that you know is impairing your ability. I also think that drugs of that nature tend to encourage that behaviour, but that's beside the point, as is the fact that our vehicle-driven society has led us to a place where bars exist outside of town when your homes are inside, or vice versa, and there is no public transport therefrom. Gee I wonder what goes on there every night. People walk the line, test their limits, and some of them get caught before they kill someone. But at the same time the law that is supposed to stop that happening criminalizes the guy who wasn't actually impaired as well. Meanwhile cleverly failing to address the underlying problem of why in the hell are people still doing this in the first place, like some responsible nations have done.
In any case, regardless of your feelings on the matter, no, it has been pretty much proven that unless you use a breathalyzer yourself you do not know what your BAC is. That goes for the supremely sloshed (who should sure know they aren't in any shape to drive) as well as the guy who had one beer an hour ago and should have metabolized it, but is astonished to find himself breaking the law.
A Constitution could have a lifespan of say 200 or 100 years, and if a country survives long enough it can throw a huge party when the times comes to renew it.
1) If we did that, it is unlikely that the Constitution would be renewed.
2) As it stands, politicians simply ignore it anyhow, regardless of the fact that absent the Constitution they have no authority at all!
Laws requiring expiry in general might not seem a bad idea on their face. After all all a party needs to do to get rid of an egregious law is nothing at all, or at most filibuster and run out the clock. Then the law expires and they did not have to take an up/down vote on it. Voila! Some fun laws that actually did this include the Patriot Act. Unfortunately they seem to have kept that one around.
Still I am not sure it's such a good idea for all laws, mainly for the above reaosn, but also for the fact that it requires then that any good laws be reinvented constantly or at least reconstituted. That could cause a bit of chaos and deter progress in actual legal reform.
Personally I have always agreed that we have too many laws, and in the deregulation of individuals. That is, why are politicians so hot to remove silly safety and environmental laws from poor innocent big giant corporations with the claim that enforcement is too tough, not cost effective, and counterproductive to letting said entities Get Things Done, yet they seem perfectly content to regulate the hell out of me, my personal life, who I marry, who I have sex with and where and when, what I eat and drink, whether I smoke, and when and what I say wherever I may say it! For crying out loud! The same assholes that think it's fine to release more arsenic in my drinking water want to make it illegal for me to eat Oreos. Fucking OREOS! They even convinced Nabisco to change their recipe. I've been afraid to look ever since, lest I confirm my fear that the original Oreo has indeed gone the way of New Coke, or maybe the way we thought Classic Coke had. Gone never to be seen again. Lost in a forest of regulation.
It only makes sense that we reduce our laws, weeding out unnecessary garbage so that the real needs are addressed; further we should rewrite those few laws left that actually apply to ordinary folk so that they are in plain decent english and not a bunch of Bullshit. No more of this business of laws like the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance reform bill which, after years of blood sweat and tears was so shredded it did nothing at all; some of these bills actually end up making the problem they were supposed to correct worse, and they can get away with it because of legalese and bullshitese, which tend to share a common lexicon. And no more of that Orwell crap where you pass a law that is named the exact opposite of what it really does -- on purpose. If there is a use for Gitmo it is for people who pull that crap. Passing bills that increase spending and calling it balanced budget, passing bills that increase pollution and calling it "clear skies," etc etc. That shit needs to stop too.
Unfortunately we have very little chance under the current system of fixing any of this because the little gremlins who gummed up the works in the first place are the only mechanics allowed to tinker with the engine, and they like it with pork stuck in the gears and hoi polloi crushed under the byzantine, rube-goldberg inspired works. It amuses them and serves their purpose, and the only way to clear them all out is by summoning a clear consensus and political will to do so in a world where such things are deliberately manipulated through media maestros. In other words, the same struggle mankind has engaged in from the first Ziggurat to the latest FNC broadcast antenna.
That said, I believe if someone knowing commits an infraction, they should be able to sustain the punishment. But, I don't always agree with the punishment in light of the crime. The world of software piracy is especially troubling to me.
Have we all gone insane here? It's okay for people in the US to p2p all the warez they want but this poor bastard should die in a gulag for offending Lord Gates? This man was an educator simply trying to give students a chance to learn about computers and have some semblance of a chance in life. If there is a crime here it is the fact that the Russian government did not adequately fund the school so that legal copies could be obtained, and Microsoft did not give them the beneficial deals that they claim to give schools. Yes, I know, it's nothing like some companies that have given software and equipment to schools for free in the past, but at least it would be something, and it would appear there was a failure here in that regard which Gorbachev is simply asking Gates to rectify.
Besides the fact that in a country where intellectual property did not exist at all not long ago, and in which piracy is apparently so rampant you could throw a rock (a snowball) and hit a pirate, it is apalling to think that software piracy is a criminal offense in the first damn place. Especially when you consider that there are no "country club prisons" in Russia. They are serious business over there; seriously old-school as in medieval.
If you're going to be inside the gulag, wouldn't you want there to be more vulnerabilities??
Dude. Gulag is in Siberia. Is very cold. Last thing you are wanting is holes in the firewall, dig?
Did you miss the bit where they bombed the shit out of Lebanese civilians, bridges, water plants and UN observers? At that time the majority of israelis supported the action too. Does that make all Jews violent and evil?
1) Original point about broadbrushing taken. Nevertheless we ust point out that
2) the government of Israel is a secular institution in which probably ethnic Jews have the majority but it is not monolithic on any ground
3) the decision to bomb prople who are shooting rockets at civilians is not a decision of genocide, religious fanaticism/hatred, or terrorism.
I might give you an argument that less collateral damage is desirable and give you a chance to explain how that could have been achieved under the circumstances. But to describe a situation in which one side deliberately targets civilians as their primary choice, and the other is trying to stop those people (unfortunately killing civilians in the process) and say that the side that was going after a military target is the terrorist and the side that targetted civilians is the freedom fighter ... that is ridiculous on its face. It is just as ridiculous as the insurgents who shoot down US helicopters and take sniper shots at US troops then cry "foul atrocity" when those troops shoot back at them.
How can you win people to an argument when you have thrown logic and reason out the window and the only emotion you evoke (by your own actions) is negative towards you?
Or hiroshima, oh christians again.
Come on, man, even us Americans know Hiroshima isn't in Germany ... don't ask us to point it out on a map because we're as likely to point at Hawaii or the Aleutians, but still.. pretty sure it's not in Germany. :D
Having started out in the Hauptschule doesn't keep you from, say, becoming chancellor later in your life.
Well, I am glad to hear that the machinery is still ticking along like a clock over there in Germany. After all having a German chancellor who received a poor education, especially one who feels he was unfairly held back, never caused any trouble... Well, okay there was that one guy. He never did forgive those academics for the negative control he felt they had over his destiny.
His name slips my mind just now, but then you must excuse a poor American his failings in the study of history as over here even so far as it is studied we are often told the memorization of names, dates, places, and events is unnecessary.
Granted our most recent leader supposedly did badly in school, and this is given as an excuse for many of his more egregious failings, but in his case he actually graduated with an advanced degree after attending two of the most prestigious universities in our country. It does give us pause. But maybe your next chancellor fitting the above description will not be so bad as that other guy and no more worse than ours. We can only hope. :D
What's worse, would EZ-Pass or On*Star (I have neither system - I'd rather bleed to death at the side of the road after an accident than lose my privacy 100% of the time) data obtained without a warrant now be admissible in court? I suspect that the cops might not even have to leave the comfort of their offices to attach the GPS bug if they play the game right.
If you own a cell phone you could conceivably be tracked that way as well. Most cell phones now have GPS location tech built into them now. In fact Nextel (or at least I think it was Nextel) was advertising a service where you could get a plan for your employees, give them cell phones, and then watch on their website exactly where those employees went at all times. So it's not just the police that could potentially have access to that information, it could be anyone. How they use that information depends on their needs and motivations.
The problem is not Microsoft specific. It's a problem with overly complex software. Word processors are overly complex which means that there is a lot of code that can contain errors. Most users don't use the full functionality of the software and therefore don't require it to be so complex.
I never saw the point of allowing scripting within word processing documents, for instance. It violates the fundamental premise of seperating code from data. It was bound to cause problems, it has, and it pretty much is only ever used to cause trouble in the first place, probably because there just isn't a legitemate use for it. Yet Microsoft insists on continuing to use it and expand the scriptability of their software and thus the points of entry for trouble, with no good to show for it.
"I'm on OS X and if a client or contractor sends me"
Most businesses can not afford or would not like to treat their a client like that. They are your client because you work for them. Unless your business is "IT general awareness" or "Subtle OS agenda pushing", you are not providing them a very good service. Maybe you are from the bizzaro world where the customers and clients do not come first or your clients have no choice to come your way because of prior arrangements and/or you are part of a much larger group that does not have the same feelings as you.
Funny, that seems to be the world where Microsoft lives, which is what leads us to this problem in the first place. :D