I can see it all now, NASA will be attending/testifying at an appropriation hearing, and Sean O'Keefe will take a sip of water and start in after being introduced to the corporate employees representing their states:
"Good morning, I'm proud to be speaking with you today about the prescense of WMD on the surface of Mars--"
He'll pause a little while as a furuor erupts in the chamber.
"As I was saying, we have significant reason to believe that the polar regions of Mars holds an incredible volume of WMD, and that unless we're the first to plant out flag and setup a permanent base there, we stand to loose out on a significant opportunty now and in the future."
A flabbergasted senator, having just woken up to hear the acronym will suddenly have a flashback and decide to "make a difference".
"Is there any evidence that WMD's actually do exist, or is this more poorly wish-for evidence?"
"No sir, " O'Keefe continues a bit hesitantly, "we've analyzed the data and my people assure me that Martian WMD does exist, and in sufficient quantities--"
"Martian WMD? Holy Crap! Since when did the Martians get WMD?"
O'keefe shakes his head and holds up a hand to draw attention. "Sir, I'm not sure--"
"Goddamn it? I asked when did this come to light? I mean, we haven't found it in the last three regimes we rolled and yet you're saying that the Martians are in on this? How much are you asking for?"
O'Keefe, for a brief moment runs through a thought experiment where he envisions the United States as a juggernaut of bold exploration, funded with the same passion that drove recent wars, the cold war, and brought sweeping innovations and discoveries decades ago. It would get presidents elected, generals promoted, and foster the complete and total government control of Space. It's a glorious scheme, but within a few heartbeats he realizes its just a dream.
"I'm sorry senator, but we're discussing Water, Massively Dispersed, within the sediment of the Martian polar regions. I apologize for the confusion. Apparently I'm using a term we were joking about earlier."
Even though the NASA chairman said it with a straight face, the senator feels like a complete fool.
"Ok, sorry about that, so you're asking for more funding for _another_ Mars mission?" The senator asks, unaware that he's scowling.
Two hours later O'Keefe will feel lucky to get out of comittee with enough funding to keep the lights on. Let's hear it for more wasted efforts from the government sector.
How long until we start seeing posters in classrooms with Micro$oft, FBI, and maybe some happy-joy comitte logo at the bottom with text like,
"Do your parents burn CD's? If they do, then they're probably copying without permission. Tell your Teacher and Always get permission before you make a copy. To find out more use keyword 'tocopyiswrong' or go to goodkids.fbi.gov and click on 'My parents copy'."
Or better yet, how about "Kid-Friendly" websites sponsored by the BSA with links that explain in happy-joy terms that mommy and daddy are criminals and all they have to do to get them help is to submit their home phone-number and press the button on the webpage.
Then there's always a campaign to have children turn their parents/teachers/friends in for a reward, revenge, or both. Imagine a pissed-off 13yr. old girl getting revenge on her mother, father, and family. Imagine the pissed off son who didn't get the family car for some bullcrap popularity fest. Oh yeah, lots and lots of possibilities on this one.
It won't be long until we're at the point where anybody who owns a computer is a criminal (remember, if you're not a cop, you're part of the problem). It won't happen overnight, but steps are being taken to ensure that it will happen, and that your computer can and will be audited regularly from a remote server and portable media which will happily RFID themselves as white-vans drive through neighborhoods with the appropriate active/passive scanners. It's not hard to implement now, and it will be easier in ten years when everyone is running wireless networks. If you've ever lived in another country where having "contraband" technology is a serious problem then the idea of a fleet of nondescript vehicles basically running the same routes as garbage trucks any time of the day or night shouldn't seem so far-fetched. If I had gone to the right schools and knew the right people I'd probably be deploying proof-of-concept hardware and software right now with a bunch of buddies in Virginia, and I would have been working at it since the eighties as more and more computers were being sold to the hobbyist market.
It won't be long before "Failure to register your computers" will result in stiff fines, jail time, and the Man taking all your nifty toys away. Right now, businesses that sell OEM M$ operating systems are the first step in the chain, but AMD and Intel will probably be targeted as the first line of "compliant" companies that will facillitate the security needs of big business over citizenry, and you can bet your ass that it will be slipped in under the asupices of "National Security", and "Trade Secrets". What applies to governments doesn't apply to businesses. Anyone who follows the privitization of the penal system will know exactly what a government-business relationship can do. Our only hope will be "whistle-blowers". Ahahahahaha.
People running OS'n which don't roll over and play happy with investigational API's are going to find themselves listed as pirates, and you can bet that 0400hrs housecalls with stun grenades, a battering ram, and anywhere from 8 to 15 officers all vying for the right to expertly place a knee on the back of your kneck while they zip-tie you and your family up and cart all your electronics out to a truck where they'll enjoy another life after they're auctioned off. Please remember that there's always a buck to be made from anyone "suspected" of criminal activity.
And before anyone thinks that they're safe using anything more advanced than a shovel or a rock needs to look back to the time when radios were a registered commodity. Even now in many parts of the world having anything capable of transmitting information can get you tortured or shot, and often the same applies to recievers. We still live in a world that is very very far from freedom.
I personally view any legislation that cloaks its true purposes with inappropriate language and exotic acronyms as a shot-across-the-bow of whatever fragile freed
(Evangelist: screams "OH GOD HELP ME!" more than most when savaged in the pits. Pompus squeakers, bleating what they think their masters want to hear. I've always found the hermits that wandered into Ur more entertaining with their stories of visions and hallucinations brought on by a lack of food and mastrubation. They made me smile when nothing short of de-gloving the dammed would do, and nobody missed them if they had to be put out of their misery.)
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I agree that the religous overtones of titles like "Evangelist" or "Guru" are misnomers. The problem is that somehow these "evangelists" are the luminaries of a big corp. and what they say is something that actually matters--toadies, all. However, I must disagree about what you have written about the advesarial nature of business. You dismiss it because it's just "Software".
Businesses which crush their competitors are waging war. Competing (businesses |people|..|ameoba) will go to almost any length to win. The use of the word "War" here just describes the scale and magnitude of the competition. It's also pretty nifty in describing the carnage (employees lose and customers lose and the technology/patents are locked away but the cats at the top just keep on going--ya cha-cha-cha-cha!).
And in the context to which I refer, we should regard anybody wanting to "make nice" from an on-high monopoly position as bait. Face it, from a historical viewpoint all M$ has to offer anybody who can bootstrap themselves are glass-beads and blankets. Sure, these days it's "SDK's and API's", but they're full of lice and covered in itchy embroidered unintelligible writing that says something to the effect that if your genitals are gnawed off because the material the blankets are made of attracts predators it's not the fault of the guy who gave you the blankets. And there's always the unspoken possibility that the next guy who comes to talk will bring some mercenaries along to knock down all your houses in order to count those blankets. I think it's a great time to be weaving, even if it's someone else's yarn.
Of course it's not really a war until you decide that this really isn't a good way to live and you stop taking their gifts and making noises when they step on your kneck. Better yet, when you ask them to take their blankets back and they count them, act all happy and then show up with the brute squad to knock down some houses anyway. Then comes the treaties, the concessions, and eventually after all the dust has settled you realize that you never stood a chance in the first place. Then you'll be happy to just draw your presentations in the dirt floor of your new internment-camp home and invite your friends and family over to see it. If you happen to have talented kids you can save yourself all that hassle and send them around to share that presentation. Remember, it's more secure than SMB/NMB and if your kids are clever they're much more reliable than TCP-IP. Of course, I have kids that behave more like UDP packets so I'd have to entertain guests.
Hopefully I can get them into art school before everything lands in the toilet so they can draw scenes from movies that will only play once before turning into nothing but commercials. It would be a great way to justify feeding my kids until they manage to get some kind of job when they're fifty with three degrees and a load-debt that will put their children's children in therapy and would require them to move to another country in order to use.
I don't care about UFO's, because they don't pass bullshit laws and step on my neck--however, it's really humiliating to have to pay for the priviledge.
It's also humiliating to look at "Declassified" documents and be expected to take them seriously. Face it, if they really wanted us to know what went on, they wouldn't have the gall to black out/omit everything useful. A lie of omission is still a lie. Anyone who thinks the USGOV is going to release anything that doesn't represent exactly what they've been saying all along is obviously not being very realistic.
Government isn't about playing fair. Releasing unmodified/unmasked, previously classified documentation would be fair. "Government" is all about limiting competition, fostering concensus, and marginalizing the many to the benefit of the few. They could be talking about the yeast in a baking exercise, and you'd still have to wash your hands after leafing through the "de-classified" recipie because the only thing you'd see would be the date, the form number, and four words between the top and bottom of the sheet. None of the words would be over 4 characters in length.
Reminds me of "Apathy" by 10000 Homo-Dj's, damn that's good jam. Think I'll go "jam" out. Cheers.
By mandating open-source/free software the government of Brazil has started down a path which provides a rich environment for opportunity--domestic and internationally. If the tools which are freely available cannot fully do the job, at least they have the source for those tools and a domestic labour force capable of picking up the slack and putting together solutions based on a working model. That domestic force also has ties to international sources of talent and software (community).
They can even hire abroad or take solutions from abroad as long as these solutions can be audited. That's just one of the things that makes this decision great. Think about this, why does a government like the United States pay lip service to M$ and permit them to go unpunished for monopolistic practices? Because it's in the interest of USGOV to see the majority of the world's domestic, business, and government networks running software which is easily crackable (easy to break at the TCP/IP stack-namespace and overflow/crack apps and kernels). Want a clue? Go check the Openbsd.org site's front page.
Now we have a government that can spend that money on hardening it's networks and liberating itself from long-term information retrival issues because some corporate clowns own their ass on document protocols. The USGOV also feels threatened when they have to view another government as a competitior (any government that can safeguard its information is no longer their bitch). Face it, we live in a world where secrets are like bombs. The more you don't share, the more chilly relations become. Imagine the NSA having actually create another specialized team to snoop Brazillian networks because they can't use the typical toolz which work almost everwhere else? The next thing you know, the State Department is sending icy messages, making 3am flights, sending mouthpieces with nasty little messages for face-to-face snarl and purr sessions, and dropping notes off at the IMF.
But even though these things will happen (and have probably been happening to some degree already) behind the scenes, this decision at a governmental level will have only as many teeth as is required to make the people in charge happy. Until we hear independent voices in the Open-source/Free software community talking at length about the trials and tribulations and the victories made towards freeing Brazil of closed-source/Lock-in solutions in government programs we should probably relax. Government is a lumbering beast, it can take a long time to turn it in any direction no matter what decision has been made, no matter what the desired outcome is.
Maybe what this topic needs is a good illumination of what happened with Mexico...anyone packing Free-software/open-source stories about Mexico?
I've been working with "Internet" companies since 1995 and I have a 9 year old son, and a 6 year old daughter. Neither of them are allowed on the computer to go browsing. Why? It's simple, the Internet is an anonymous medium, like a dark alley in the barrio at 0400hrs. Drop your kids off in the local ghetto at 0400hrs and tell them you'll be back to check on them in 30 minutes. That's how every parent should regard "Internet" usage. It doesn't take any time at all for some perp to tag your AIM id, hunt down your machine, attempt to exploit it, and ask your kids all sorts of interesting questions. Kids are kids...90% of them are dumber than dirt, prone to saying anything to anyone, and depending on how savvy (this really isn't a measure of intelligence or wisdom, I like to think of it as the "trained monkey quotient") your kids are, they can run software which makes your machines/networks even more susceptible to exploits at the behest of anyone who has quickly gained a measure of confidence with them.0
Until everyone has to have a license for Internet/Internet2 usage, and until we're all happily running IPV6 with identifier (CPUid tags, and license tags) information on packet headers and spam is a thing of the past, and M$ either goes away out of embarrassment or actually solves their OS woes, it's in the interest of every parent with Internet connectivity to just rely on other ways to keep their progeny entertained. I heartily recommend dead-tree reading, music, and outside activities until they're old enough to understand Pr0n. At the rate my kids are going, between "South Park", Shonen Jump, Anime (thankfully no tentacle Pr0n yet!!), and "The Man Show", they'll be able to laugh off and delete-without-bothering-to-look at questionable emails in about 5 years. It's in the interest of intelligent, understanding parents to unseal their emotional tupperware with regards to their kids and try to understand the homicidal sex-and-ultraviolent tendencies of the species. Sure, it's nice to think they're innocent, but then you're just putting off the inevitable. And what responsible Lord of their own personal hell would permit their demonic spawn to be weak in the face of all the wants and hungers this world can offer? Not me. Whenever they come mewling, "But I want to go online!" "I want to go to (some commerical site for a toy they saw on TV)!!" I explain the situation and redirect them to doing something else. This isn't hard, and costs me just a few minutes of my time. I can't be the only parent that sees this as a viable option for stupid filtering software that extorts money from both sides of the fence?
As for parents who are surprised by the "Internet", maybe we need to adopt a new term which describes that whole "Deer in the headlamps" outrage thing... "TIPPERISM", you know, from Tipper Gore, who had a horrific panty-wedging from some music lyrics and got a bunch of hypocritical and immature monied well-intentioned fools together under the banner of the PMRC.
RH "Bluecurve" is about leveraging market influence to convince corporate shops that they're like M$ Windows-one look, one feel. They're also about increasing the relative value of their RedHat certification programs by making administration of their distro so different that you have to buy-in to their whole scheme.
RH feels too much like a path requiring "corporate blinders", and I've been too free for too long to want "Bluecurve" blinders and a RH bit and bridle.
YMMV...but the last time I played around with GTK apps under KDE it all worked, and vice-versa under GNOME...all the KDE stuff worked too. Gotta admire a distro that can get something like that to work, eh? Of course, RH could do the same but then someone would have to act like it was so unusual that instead of making it just work by including the libs for both GTK and Qt the would have to geld one desktop while favoring their old love and then give the whole thing a new name...why would anyone ever bother doing that? Oh, yeah. It's the money.
What everyone who runs SunOne under Linux has to be asking themselves is "How much sand in the Linux Sun Hourglass is left?". Nearly a year ago Sun had an epiphany which resulted in them porting Iplanet and other software over to Linux.
Now companies who are using Webservers running SunOne/Iplanet under Linux are probably running on borrowed time. The last service pack for SunOne for Linux was released Oct 2k2(I could be full of crap, I'm running off memory on this one)...and there's at least one serious problem with SunOne that they're not talking about which is causing people problems because exploits exist.
Now without their own version of Linux driving complimentary development on supported products under the Linux Kernel what's to keep them producing and support software for an OS which is hurting the core of their business,their hardware bottom-line? A desire for warm-fuzzies and thank you notes? Ha! Not a damn thing.
What's the "Linux Strategy" for a company facing bad margins because customers who would normally use their hardware and software are dancing with Dell (and for good reason, Dell isn't bending customers over and breaking off stuff in their nethers) and Tux? Invent better lock-in or discard support for a rival free operating system which is bleeding them dry?
I read the article and it read like a combination "political/stockmarket" filler piece designed to confuse the hell out of the casual reader and introduce the "renegade former developer" like he's something special for being a 37yr old suit-hippy while inviting other suit-hippy-insiders to send offers to the magazine/writer for future work on obfuscating other "black and white" issues for fun and profit. Isn't it so chic to have your professional photo accompanied by the kind of filler that would give a White-house press secretary the kind of erection that would result in them passing out from the overstimulation of the vegas nerve the next time they took a piss? It works at so many levels we shouldn't be surprised by the delays in EMT calls due to the sudden escalation in calls for young executives passing out in the latrine around the time weekly business magazines featuring such pap come sliding across the desks.
If someone at Sun could anonymously write something with a grounding in reality it sure would help. Personally, I think it could be summed up with a single line,
"If we can't embrace and extend Linux for our own benefit, maybe the guys who buy us can."
What SCO needs to do is setup a deal with Think Geek to put out source code posters with the offending code clearly marked in high-lighter yellow and arranged to mimic that famous Viet-Nam war photo of that poor chap getting shot in the head at point blank range. Draw the parallels. I would gladly make room on my utilitarian wallspace for one of those. SCO and Microsoft would be fools to turn their back on the potential to put their handiwork, clearly marked with their corporate logos in the margins, in the hands of sales reps and unit managers. Business is war, red in tooth and claw. Have lotsa fun.
I agree, the USGOV basically thwarted the judgement of brighter minds and capitulated...now M$ publishes its own money. Short of M$ being shoved out, like Germany did to Scientology, M$ is going to show up to play no matter what.
However, unless there's some kind of "ABSOLUTELY NO ALTERNATIVES" clause, we can still encourage the deployment of adjacent alternatives on both the desktop and the server space. You can bet that it's something that's happening in areas where a corp. or gov. has been given software from M$ because you're not going to put WinXP/2k3 server on a p2-350, which is still a good desktop for business under Linux...the newer M$ software still requires newer hardware; which is why a gift from M$ is rarely the gift it sounds like. When they say they are "purely a software company", they seem to leave out other key departments like "Driving computer industry", "Licensing enforcement (BSA)", and "Buying up the Competition".
What would be interesting is if anyone has information about what kind of restrictions are placed upon the recipients of Free M$ products. That would be the kind of juicy stuff that M$ would absolutely go apeshit over if it ever saw the light of day. I'm sure some governments would be interested in terms and conditions too.
It's one thing to seem benificent and an entirely different thing to bait and entrap. The real thing we should fear is the complacency of people who no longer need to strive for a good solution when the one handed to them is good-enough. And then, when they decide to roll their own solution they run into the true boundaries of the questionable gift (I wonder what M$ calls their server-cabinet inspectors..."Local Sales Reps?").
Even in the face of crushing famine and drought and starvation people in Africa saw through the efforts of the USGOV and Monsanto to proliferate low-to-no-cost GM seeds which would lock up the surviors in a no-win situation where they wouldn't be able to grow their own food from the harvest--and due to cross-pollination with unmodified crops everyone would suddenly come under Monsanto licensing and inspections. In many ways, (Free) M$ products are much the same thing...only you can't eat them...they eat you when M$ comes to harvest anything you've done to help yourself using their FREE kit. I can almost feel a "In Soviet Russia..." comment in there somewhere.
I program, admin, and plot out incredibly complicated schemes to waste my time while maintaining the careful semblance of productivity. Since it's not feasible to carry around a 10mx3m messy white-board, I prefer using legal pads. If they came with wings, it would be a bonus. I fill them. I file them, I throw them (without wings they just go nuts!) and when things are really fun I jump up and down on them in a cathartic rage while shaking the walls with formless screams of primal fury. Face it, aside from dealing with the dioxin problems caused by the processing (and one wicked smell!) paper has an incredibly high return value.
-Go ahead, fold your laptop into a dart or a glider. Hey, just throw it. Please?
-Crayons, ink, watercolor, pencil, tempra, chalk all work well on paper, try it with a laptop, but don't insult us by calling it a "case mod". It would be interesting to hear a tape of the support call though. Be sure to put it on a M$ personal webserver directly on said laptop and link it to an "Ask slashdot" article. Thank you.
-One word....Origami!!
-Another victim....cursive/calligraphy. We will all write like doctors, dammit!
-Write and solve complex "anything" on a computer while you deny yourself the rich medium that lets you doodle, scribble, jot, or work on your limerics in the margins while still giving you the kind of dynamic outline capabilities of paper. My guess is that you'll suffer a kind of claustrophobia. I know I do. I can't even stand computer day-planners. They're a complete waste of time to everyone except the rigidly controlled. There's just too much chaos in my day-to-day, hour-to-hour world.
And comming soon..."Digital Ink"! It's short for "Another costly M$ Monopoly we will impale you on PC user--pay up and quit whining thieves!". Could you imagine having to purchase site licenses for a floor of tablet-pc's and then suffer the indignity of having to purchase "Refills"?!! (more primal screaming and breaking things)
There's also the cluelessness of computer use in the classroom. K12 Schools that want to present themsevles as being forward and progressive are actually just making the fat-cats fatter. What about all the infrastructure costs? You don't network for free with laptops...or anything. K12 should be about something other than the bored smart kids helping the bored kids fix their laptops or use M$ products...because after some buttmunch tweaks the registry you'd probably be lucky to have a character mapper or even notepad accessible on one of those things.
What about licensing fees for software?! Does "Ichman Highschool" suddenly transform into "The DELL-Ichman-Microsoft Campus" Screw the whole "highschool" thing, they're not _just_ a provider of k12 education. "Students...Parents...Please take the scalpel provided and while holding your forearm over the bloodletting tray, gently press and slice with the tip, just enough to get a good stream of blood started..."
On the upside, it's certainly easier to catalog and archive every deviant word, every unpleasant thought, computer doodles and website deviltry and sell access to it to the highest bidder, like PINKERTON, or to a Corporate Human Enslavement department. I'm sure everyone here would just love to know that their employer would be reading about a crush they had, or what they did some weekend tweleve years ago when they foolishly submitted some journal assignment. Of course the alternative is to have really savvy kids with such an entrenched reflexive mendacity that they would never write anything personal. I've already seen this kind of behavior in colleges where nobody ever really writes what they're thinking except for the former home-coming queens and class valedictorians who truly want whirrled peas and work with children.
"Do k12 students really need access to computers at all for anything other than entertainment?" The answer is a resounding "No." Even NASA would prefer that they just "write up" experiments and then scan in just the illustratio
I know I'm headed for the "Troll of the day" award for this, but doesn't the midwest have a pretty good "goddist" density? I figure anyone with some "faith" should be doing any one or combination of the following:
1) Having lots of unprotected sex...after all it could be your last day on the planet and if the females survive and of child-bearing age it's a good start on rebuilding their numbers. Remember, the papists want you chugging out children, by the litter if possible.
2) Praying. Sure it's just a feel-good measure for those involved, but face it, the survivors who did pray then will feel superior to the others in having survived. Feeling superior gives one group the license to exclude the inferior, and that's a prime "faith-building" opportunity.
3) Telling plenty of stories about how they survived the last big storm and how much good sex and service to their gods they provided. And remember, long-lasting infections are often caused by having whatever rags you clothe your disgusting soft bodies with litter wounds. If you're naked then it's just the surface bacteria and easily located and removed bits of whatever has wounded you.
And in closing remember that the harder you make it for your supreme-being to cash your meaty asses in the more likely you are to actually prevent yourselves from being granted access to whatever paradise you're promised. Of course you feel free to interpret the lack of deaths as the divine equivalent of "The silent treatment", but it feels more like the apathy felt at the loss of the great cypress forests in Summeria.
Earthlink is a service I value and gladly pay for. My email box has remained spam-free ever since I started with them. Of course I'm partly to blame for that because I simply don't give the address to any lists or do anything goofy with it. It's a valued resource. If more providers like Earthlink emphasised the importance of this and took active steps to secure it we wouldn't have the problems we have now.
We have an Internet culture of denial and over-reaction when it comes to how we have been dealing with email issues. RBL's are not the way to go for domestic providers with massive userbases like Earthlink. RBL's are ok for a private company, but an ISP has to be many things to many people.
Trying to force compliance between smaller companies and individuals with multi-homed private domains and international interests and RFC's is a pointless pissing contest. Some admins are unaware of the RFC's, or apathetic...in some cases it's not in their interest to fill in all the blanks and setup proper headers or within their ability.
I gladly applaud any move by a big provider to secure their services and give customers more protection. And since I'm an Earthlink customer I look forward to seeing how it all shakes out. I may pay more for Earthlink but I think it's money well spent if it keeps them around and keeps my email box from being stuffed with offers to grow my manhood, refinance my home, or join in some pyramid scheme. Contrary to belief's of email marketeers that people absolutely have a need to be informed of these things, if we ever need to find such information there are search engines...they should pay for their shingle and keep their pablum out of my filespace.
Thank you for the reply instead of a mod, but I know I walk a fine flame-bait line with a post that advocates the deaths of many...but the reason I posted was to draw attention to the ever growing number of consumers.
We have thumbs and shiny cars, terrifying weapons, and a proclivity to procreate like crazy and consume every resource on the planet with the kind of recklessness that goes far beyond just endangering our foolish selves. We're starting to aggressively modify crops in ways that are no longer self-sustaining (greedy monsanto idiots!) and will contaminate the food-supply...you can't stop bees or even the weirdness of life once it leaves the lab and happily does whatever it likes.
The problem is nobody looks at death like it's the tool the nature weilds to regulate life regardless of what perch/niche/or level an organism has within the food-chain. Governments with Death-Taxes view death as a great way to regulate competition and pay for their prosecutors and Windows Licenses. Life on this world guarantees Death. As a bicycle commuter, I live with DEATH tapping me on the shoulder for at least an hour every day. I fully expect to be road-kill before I'm old enough to die from all the crap I've been eating and drinking, and in a way, I'm looking forward to death instead of being butchered to stay alive later in life and give every dollar I've ever earned (and more) to pay for meds and doctors.
Of course we're sentient beings...thanks to Disney even Mice, Rabbits, Deer...Brooms, Dwarves, Tea-cups and Wardrobes are all happily self-aware but that doesn't remove Humanity from what our vast numbers are doing to everything.
What will our options as an eventual global civilization be?
A Larry Niven "Birth Lottery"?
Spoof Judgement Day World-Wide and pass the Koolaid?(oh man, I hope I'm alive to see that one!) Maybe James Cameron could be paid to do this and stop spanking over his Titanic Fetish.
Hope no amateur astronomers catch wind of "Project TOO DAMN NEAR" where a satellite influences the orbit of a comet over a long-long-time and in a brilliantly played game of interplanetary pool puts the 8-ball of Armageddon in our laps?
Pull a Piers Anthony "10 year moratoriumn on child-birth" and put contraceptives in the water and food?
So...where does that leave us when we pop the 10,20,or 30 Billion mark? That's only about 5 times the current estimate (http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html). Soylet Green? More War? Or maybe a little feigned and subsidized helplessness on the part of Governents and big business? I smell a potential conservation of effort, the kind that even Poe would enjoy, and when the producers of "24" are done torturing us with the current storyline they could run with something like a SARS outbreak. Plenty of drama for everyone.
SARS is one of those great biological opportunities that doesn't happen everyday. I'm surprised that there's not a "Hug a SARS Victim" campaign underway. It certainly shows a complete ignorance of the species which is really what underscores the fact that humanity may make nice toys, but it's still a collection of dumbfounded dipshits.
Humanity has no appreciation for a biological arms-race that will thin the herd and leave those who survive in a position of being able to cope with the new virus. Instead, the process is thwarted completely, leaving tens of billions of weak individuals where hundreds of millions of stronger individuals would be better off for having survived.
Sure this sounds silly or maybe even cruel, but in a hundred years at the current rate of population growth, if nature isn't producing a SARS-level outbreak of some kind you can bet your ass the governments of the world will. And then what will be the excuse?...profit shortfalls in some MEGA-PHARMA corp result in a 2 to 5 year moratorium on vaccine research...hand wringing, piles of dead bodies everywhere. It will be a wonderful time to ride a pale horse. Humanity is all about deferred suffering.
When it comes down to it, the evolution of everything on this planet is red in tooth and claw. Just because you can't see the critters, doesn't mean you're not prey.
We will be told to shut up, take our shots, and pay our insurance. In effect, nothing is going to change unless someone screws up.
If every company that used GM foods in the United States had to label the genetic purity of their food sources on the packages there would be a public outcry that would not be in the interest of big agri-business. ADM, and companies like it have taken large $$$teps to ensure that such a thing will only happen if say, two million people die overnight from a product. Even then they'll deny everything, blame it on some Ergot variant, and business will continue as usual until a loophole shows up and then and only then will doublespeak labelling even hint at what's happening in the DNA/RNA of processed/fresh foods.
Given that kind of mass ignorance/apathy in the face of sweeping public apathy and well-stocked shelves, we should view the current level of declaration and demarcation in the food supply as an example of what to expect once we start dabbling.
Richard Dawkins, an eloquent scientists, has pointed out several times over that genetic mutations almost never produce anything which will survive. This is because nature doesn't subscribe to the goddist fairy-tales and political correctness that humanity does. So, the tests which do occur will be baby-steps. Accidental death, sudden death, immuno-suppresive outbursts and conflagrations of entire communities by super-bugs taking advantage of common-flaws in people with similar genetic modification will be news that will show up in the time of our great-grandchildren (assuming you're of child-bearing age now). If it happens any sooner, then someone probably let something escape.
Society will adapt to the technology if it doesn't wax too many people in a generation. We will accept the problems, and leaders/liars will evoke the fantasies which have always worked for the cattle. While the elites are going to tweak themselves for longevity, virility, and sheer smarts/physical prowess. As long as the elities confine it to themselves and the lab-rats/human trials pugilists, things will be fine. Over generations those who are successfully modified will bear out the virtues of the changes, and these changes will be adopted en-mass just like we adopted polio and smallpox vaccinations. The changes will be small, but over time we will either thrive or die. Incremental and punctual change is not unprecedented in the evolution of species. That we can jump start the process is just another height-mark on the door-frame of our species' history.
Goddists/purists should feel free to form their communities where they don't accept such changes. Nobody in the general population is going to be left behind...changes in the environment are going to require changes in the majority. As long as nobody is kidnapping young men and women and using viral gene-manipulation to modify all of their reproductive genetics then things should be fine. However, life is the most pervasive technology on the planet. We cannot turn away from it when there are more crunchy humans on this planet than ever. When a hungry alien civilization shows up(thanks you stupid SETI assholes), or if we open the gates of Hell on Mars, we had better be able to either kick things up a notch and start taking trophies, or learn the manners necessary to introduce ourselves as dinner.
I'm sorry, but "microsoft.com" is synonymous with "mendacity". I don't belive them any more than I believe a street-corner preacher on his second fifth of Port.
With code, anything's possible. The impossible just takes effort. If M$ isn't obligated to fix something, they're always willing to lube you up to take the upgrade (Wot?! That one didn't fit as well? Ok, here's something that will stay snug! --THOOP!...screams of agony omitted).
I belive there's a long line of M$ lock-in-licensees who will be walking funny after this procedure.
If we had more legislators who were interested in things that mattered, we would have labels clearly identifying which strains of corn/wheat/hybrid vegetables we were consuming. That way when little Timmy, or Sally suddenly develops a 104 deg. fever, practices projectile vomiting and sentences our asses to $1000+/6 hr. emergency room visits and useless prescriptions of overly proscribed anti-biotics (while doctors shrug and tell you that it isn't a virus) we have a good idea what happened and can take steps to see that it doesn't happen again.
Maybe people need to grow up a bit and start walking CD's back to the point of purchase and protest when the assholes won't take them back. I've let friends know of anything I've purchased that won't allow me to back it up--and I imagine the ripple effect works well. If you let the point-of-sale know there's a problem and inform customers that there's a problem at the POS, and get on/. and other online sites, where online buyers are likely to notice a row, and inform people the word will get out and music sales will drop.
Sony Music is currently facing dark times. Good for them. Maybe it will make them more aware that there's a problem.
Music enriches our lives, but it doesn't cause health problems. It really isn't a sustenence item, is it? How important is music compared to food? Legislators need to stop worrying about re-election funding and understand that this is a non-issue. Standing up to the processed food industry is a noble fight, a heroic battle. Blasting the RIAA is like picking on a surly 10 year old.
Anyone who had to mess with the wacky 9u Compaq server hardware of a couple of years ago and wanted to run Linux on knows that Compaq (before HP) and RedHat we're holding hands a long time before this announcement. Not kissing or petting, but there was a tacit agreement that Compaq supported the RedHat distros (6.x and 7.x series) and RedHat made sure to roll their SCSI array drivers into the mix. They were good friends, and probably even exchanged a couple of "partner" trinkets over the years.
Before this, Dell was the RedHat "Daddy". That was probably before Michael Dell and Steve Ballmer had a couple of meetings and came to the agreement that Linux was bad for Dell in the "consumer space", which somehow included their laptops, and their website. Anyone remember the "powerapp" boxen. They were good, and came with RH 6.2 and 7.0 distros. That was before "Red the Hat", decided to really mess up their distro.
This latest announcement is a "Stock market Ad" designed to make both HP and RedHat look better than usual (warty beasts with scrabbling claws and pale lidless eyes which cannot withstand the brilliant light of full-disclosure) and to signal that server clients and channel partners can "Have RedHat, we mean Linux, with that".
And after RedHat's 8.x they can eat their distro one mylar shard at a time...I'll be nice and let them choose which end they want it in, because it's never going to see my servers again. Ever.
Spammers aren't a complete waste of skin. I know this is hard to believe.
We just need to remember that when we strap their heads into the kill-device, that the bolt-gun sends the bolt crashing through their head, pulping their brains. After all, this does destroy the one rotten organ in their body, leaving the rest of the body harvest-worthy. This is much more humane that what they have planned for us, because unlike our daily RTS-inducing spam-deletion cycles and the stress of having to deal with bandwidth fees and inappropriate porn content we're just going to shoot them in the head _once_.
And think of how they could give back to the non-spamming populace; retinas, eyes, livers, heart/lung, and kidney transplants.
OTOH...treating them like war criminals wouldn't be a bad thing either. It's just the whole "normal" execution thing is such a waste.
The Chinese will submit any plans for economic development of moon to the UN. I believe it's covered under the laws of Sea and Space, a pack of accepted conventions for the use and mis-use of vast areas of the planet where we're not currently putting any embassies.
Of course anything printed about this subject is going to be a lightning rod, and everyone here should accept that as the only valid reason this article was submitted in the first place.
Hopefully the Chinese will send automated mining equipment which creates other robotic units that use the materials available on the moon to create a series of long-range "pushers" that survey, mark, and redirect valuable asteroids (not just clumps of aggregate junk rock, but high-yield heavy mineral content bodies) into an orbit which will allow them to be captured by earth over a period of years. That's serious technology which would pay off big-time, and give them a chance at long-range sustainability. It could be done today if it was a priority for NASA (rather than the hollow science of trying to get ugly-bags-of-mostly-water into space). Provided they can create the robot-factory and manage all the other programming, any country which could play that kind of golf shouldn't have any problem creating a free-form smelter which would use solar power to perform an on-the-fly smelting operation and extract the minerals from their efforts later. Maybe my children's children can look forward to such things. I have given up on the United States space program their mission is a sham (ISS), and a rat-hole--Joe Public isn't going to see _anything_ from the efforts of NASA and the ISS. If the chinese can make something, anything happen, then good for them. Maybe my children's children will be dreaming of being Taikonauts. I wouldn't hold it against them.
I'm not alone when I say that artificial smells and designer perfumes in fabrics is a terrible idea.
There are many people who get migraine-level headaches when Ms. Thang and whatever she's doused herself with
come wafting through the office.
If I thought (vomiting,trepanation,pre-frontal lobotomy,ECT) would help get rid of the headache and nausea,
I'd do it. If they think they smell that bad, why don't they stay home.
I read somwhere that this is one of the major complaints people have against their
fellow employees...and we're not talking bad body odor. Some perfumes can make you violently ill.
Ahem...actually, that's the secret slashdot NERD handshake that you're talking about...you need to be careful whom you perform that feat around or you'll be single for life.
Well, apparently they don't have a "Gungan" or "Otalla" translation for Google _yet_. If I had the time and stamina to endure either of the last two Starwars movies again I'd probably give it a go. I know it would be a hoot to have someone eavesdropping your google search and start laughing uncontrollably.
And to really top it off, read an entry to them.
Cheers.
Hey, that's great "Jar-Jar"! I hate the character but your post makes me want to see if Google has a "Jar-Jar" mode, and maybe someone should consider a "Jar-alyzer", like Opera, who can "Jar-alyze" entire websites like they so fittingly "Borked" MSN.
Slashdot Mirror
I can see it all now, NASA will be attending/testifying at an appropriation hearing, and Sean O'Keefe will take a sip of water and start in after being introduced to the corporate employees representing their states:
"Good morning, I'm proud to be speaking with you today about the prescense of WMD on the surface of Mars--"
He'll pause a little while as a furuor erupts in the chamber.
"As I was saying, we have significant reason to believe that the polar regions of Mars holds an incredible volume of WMD, and that unless we're the first to plant out flag and setup a permanent base there, we stand to loose out on a significant opportunty now and in the future."
A flabbergasted senator, having just woken up to hear the acronym will suddenly have a flashback and decide to "make a difference".
"Is there any evidence that WMD's actually do exist, or is this more poorly wish-for evidence?"
"No sir, " O'Keefe continues a bit hesitantly, "we've analyzed the data and my people assure me that Martian WMD does exist, and in sufficient quantities--"
"Martian WMD? Holy Crap! Since when did the Martians get WMD?"
O'keefe shakes his head and holds up a hand to draw attention.
"Sir, I'm not sure--"
"Goddamn it? I asked when did this come to light? I mean, we haven't found it in the last three regimes we rolled and yet you're saying that the Martians are in on this? How much are you asking for?"
O'Keefe, for a brief moment runs through a thought experiment where he envisions the United States as a juggernaut of bold exploration, funded with the same passion that drove recent wars, the cold war, and brought sweeping innovations and discoveries decades ago. It would get presidents elected, generals promoted, and foster the complete and total government control of Space. It's a glorious scheme, but within a few heartbeats he realizes its just a dream.
"I'm sorry senator, but we're discussing Water, Massively Dispersed, within the sediment of the Martian polar regions. I apologize for the confusion. Apparently I'm using a term we were joking about earlier."
Even though the NASA chairman said it with a straight face, the senator feels like a complete fool.
"Ok, sorry about that, so you're asking for more funding for _another_ Mars mission?" The senator asks, unaware that he's scowling.
Two hours later O'Keefe will feel lucky to get out of comittee with enough funding to keep the lights on. Let's hear it for more wasted efforts from the government sector.
How long until we start seeing posters in classrooms with Micro$oft, FBI, and maybe some happy-joy comitte logo at the bottom with text like,
."
"Do your parents burn CD's?
If they do, then they're probably copying without permission.
Tell your Teacher and Always get permission before you make a copy.
To find out more use keyword 'tocopyiswrong' or go to
goodkids.fbi.gov and click on 'My parents copy'
Or better yet, how about "Kid-Friendly" websites sponsored by the BSA with links that explain in happy-joy terms that mommy and daddy are criminals and all they have to do to get them help is to submit their home phone-number and press the button on the webpage.
Then there's always a campaign to have children turn their parents/teachers/friends in for a reward, revenge, or both. Imagine a pissed-off 13yr. old girl getting revenge on her mother, father, and family. Imagine the pissed off son who didn't get the family car for some bullcrap popularity fest. Oh yeah, lots and lots of possibilities on this one.
It won't be long until we're at the point where anybody who owns a computer is a criminal (remember, if you're not a cop, you're part of the problem). It won't happen overnight, but steps are being taken to ensure that it will happen, and that your computer can and will be audited regularly from a remote server and portable media which will happily RFID themselves as white-vans drive through neighborhoods with the appropriate active/passive scanners. It's not hard to implement now, and it will be easier in ten years when everyone is running wireless networks. If you've ever lived in another country where having "contraband" technology is a serious problem then the idea of a fleet of nondescript vehicles basically running the same routes as garbage trucks any time of the day or night shouldn't seem so far-fetched. If I had gone to the right schools and knew the right people I'd probably be deploying proof-of-concept hardware and software right now with a bunch of buddies in Virginia, and I would have been working at it since the eighties as more and more computers were being sold to the hobbyist market.
It won't be long before "Failure to register your computers" will result in stiff fines, jail time, and the Man taking all your nifty toys away. Right now, businesses that sell OEM M$ operating systems are the first step in the chain, but AMD and Intel will probably be targeted as the first line of "compliant" companies that will facillitate the security needs of big business over citizenry, and you can bet your ass that it will be slipped in under the asupices of "National Security", and "Trade Secrets". What applies to governments doesn't apply to businesses. Anyone who follows the privitization of the penal system will know exactly what a government-business relationship can do. Our only hope will be "whistle-blowers". Ahahahahaha.
People running OS'n which don't roll over and play happy with investigational API's are going to find themselves listed as pirates, and you can bet that 0400hrs housecalls with stun grenades, a battering ram, and anywhere from 8 to 15 officers all vying for the right to expertly place a knee on the back of your kneck while they zip-tie you and your family up and cart all your electronics out to a truck where they'll enjoy another life after they're auctioned off. Please remember that there's always a buck to be made from anyone "suspected" of criminal activity.
And before anyone thinks that they're safe using anything more advanced than a shovel or a rock needs to look back to the time when radios were a registered commodity. Even now in many parts of the world having anything capable of transmitting information can get you tortured or shot, and often the same applies to recievers. We still live in a world that is very very far from freedom.
I personally view any legislation that cloaks its true purposes with inappropriate language and exotic acronyms as a shot-across-the-bow of whatever fragile freed
(Evangelist: screams "OH GOD HELP ME!" more than most when savaged in the pits. Pompus squeakers, bleating what they think their masters want to hear. I've always found the hermits that wandered into Ur more entertaining with their stories of visions and hallucinations brought on by a lack of food and mastrubation. They made me smile when nothing short of de-gloving the dammed would do, and nobody missed them if they had to be put out of their misery.)
---
I agree that the religous overtones of titles like "Evangelist" or "Guru" are misnomers. The problem is that somehow these "evangelists" are the luminaries of a big corp. and what they say is something that actually matters--toadies, all. However, I must disagree about what you have written about the advesarial nature of business. You dismiss it because it's just "Software".
Businesses which crush their competitors are waging war. Competing (businesses |people|..|ameoba) will go to almost any length to win. The use of the word "War" here just describes the scale and magnitude of the competition. It's also pretty nifty in describing the carnage (employees lose and customers lose and the technology/patents are locked away but the cats at the top just keep on going--ya cha-cha-cha-cha!).
And in the context to which I refer, we should regard anybody wanting to "make nice" from an on-high monopoly position as bait. Face it, from a historical viewpoint all M$ has to offer anybody who can bootstrap themselves are glass-beads and blankets. Sure, these days it's "SDK's and API's", but they're full of lice and covered in itchy embroidered unintelligible writing that says something to the effect that if your genitals are gnawed off because the material the blankets are made of attracts predators it's not the fault of the guy who gave you the blankets. And there's always the unspoken possibility that the next guy who comes to talk will bring some mercenaries along to knock down all your houses in order to count those blankets. I think it's a great time to be weaving, even if it's someone else's yarn.
Of course it's not really a war until you decide that this really isn't a good way to live and you stop taking their gifts and making noises when they step on your kneck. Better yet, when you ask them to take their blankets back and they count them, act all happy and then show up with the brute squad to knock down some houses anyway. Then comes the treaties, the concessions, and eventually after all the dust has settled you realize that you never stood a chance in the first place. Then you'll be happy to just draw your presentations in the dirt floor of your new internment-camp home and invite your friends and family over to see it. If you happen to have talented kids you can save yourself all that hassle and send them around to share that presentation. Remember, it's more secure than SMB/NMB and if your kids are clever they're much more reliable than TCP-IP. Of course, I have kids that behave more like UDP packets so I'd have to entertain guests.
Hopefully I can get them into art school before everything lands in the toilet so they can draw scenes from movies that will only play once before turning into nothing but commercials. It would be a great way to justify feeding my kids until they manage to get some kind of job when they're fifty with three degrees and a load-debt that will put their children's children in therapy and would require them to move to another country in order to use.
I don't care about UFO's, because they don't pass bullshit laws and step on my neck--however, it's really humiliating to have to pay for the priviledge.
It's also humiliating to look at "Declassified" documents and be expected to take them seriously. Face it, if they really wanted us to know what went on, they wouldn't have the gall to black out/omit everything useful. A lie of omission is still a lie. Anyone who thinks the USGOV is going to release anything that doesn't represent exactly what they've been saying all along is obviously not being very realistic.
Government isn't about playing fair.
Releasing unmodified/unmasked, previously classified documentation would be fair.
"Government" is all about limiting competition, fostering concensus, and marginalizing the many to the benefit of the few. They could be talking about the yeast in a baking exercise, and you'd still have to wash your hands after leafing through the "de-classified" recipie because the only thing you'd see would be the date, the form number, and four words between the top and bottom of the sheet. None of the words would be over 4 characters in length.
Reminds me of "Apathy" by 10000 Homo-Dj's, damn that's good jam. Think I'll go "jam" out.
Cheers.
By mandating open-source/free software the government of Brazil has started down a path which provides a rich environment for opportunity--domestic and internationally. If the tools which are freely available cannot fully do the job, at least they have the source for those tools and a domestic labour force capable of picking up the slack and putting together solutions based on a working model. That domestic force also has ties to international sources of talent and software (community).
They can even hire abroad or take solutions from abroad as long as these solutions can be audited. That's just one of the things that makes this decision great. Think about this, why does a government like the United States pay lip service to M$ and permit them to go unpunished for monopolistic practices? Because it's in the interest of USGOV to see the majority of the world's domestic, business, and government networks running software which is easily crackable (easy to break at the TCP/IP stack-namespace and overflow/crack apps and kernels). Want a clue? Go check the Openbsd.org site's front page.
Now we have a government that can spend that money on hardening it's networks and liberating itself from long-term information retrival issues because some corporate clowns own their ass on document protocols. The USGOV also feels threatened when they have to view another government as a competitior (any government that can safeguard its information is no longer their bitch). Face it, we live in a world where secrets are like bombs. The more you don't share, the more chilly relations become. Imagine the NSA having actually create another specialized team to snoop Brazillian networks because they can't use the typical toolz which work almost everwhere else? The next thing you know, the State Department is sending icy messages, making 3am flights, sending mouthpieces with nasty little messages for face-to-face snarl and purr sessions, and dropping notes off at the IMF.
But even though these things will happen (and have probably been happening to some degree already) behind the scenes, this decision at a governmental level will have only as many teeth as is required to make the people in charge happy. Until we hear independent voices in the Open-source/Free software community talking at length about the trials and tribulations and the victories made towards freeing Brazil of closed-source/Lock-in solutions in government programs we should probably relax. Government is a lumbering beast, it can take a long time to turn it in any direction no matter what decision has been made, no matter what the desired outcome is.
Maybe what this topic needs is a good illumination of what happened with Mexico...anyone packing Free-software/open-source stories about Mexico?
I've been working with "Internet" companies since 1995 and I have a 9 year old son, and a 6 year old daughter. Neither of them are allowed on the computer to go browsing. Why? It's simple, the Internet is an anonymous medium, like a dark alley in the barrio at 0400hrs. Drop your kids off in the local ghetto at 0400hrs and tell them you'll be back to check on them in 30 minutes. That's how every parent should regard "Internet" usage. It doesn't take any time at all for some perp to tag your AIM id, hunt down your machine, attempt to exploit it, and ask your kids all sorts of interesting questions. Kids are kids...90% of them are dumber than dirt, prone to saying anything to anyone, and depending on how savvy (this really isn't a measure of intelligence or wisdom, I like to think of it as the "trained monkey quotient") your kids are, they can run software which makes your machines/networks even more susceptible to exploits at the behest of anyone who has quickly gained a measure of confidence with them.0
Until everyone has to have a license for Internet/Internet2 usage, and until we're all happily running IPV6 with identifier (CPUid tags, and license tags) information on packet headers and spam is a thing of the past, and M$ either goes away out of embarrassment or actually solves their OS woes, it's in the interest of every parent with Internet connectivity to just rely on other ways to keep their progeny entertained. I heartily recommend dead-tree reading, music, and outside activities until they're old enough to understand Pr0n. At the rate my kids are going, between "South Park", Shonen Jump, Anime (thankfully no tentacle Pr0n yet!!), and "The Man Show", they'll be able to laugh off and delete-without-bothering-to-look at questionable emails in about 5 years. It's in the interest of intelligent, understanding parents to unseal their emotional tupperware with regards to their kids and try to understand the homicidal sex-and-ultraviolent tendencies of the species. Sure, it's nice to think they're innocent, but then you're just putting off the inevitable. And what responsible Lord of their own personal hell would permit their demonic spawn to be weak in the face of all the wants and hungers this world can offer? Not me. Whenever they come mewling,
"But I want to go online!"
"I want to go to (some commerical site for a toy they saw on TV)!!"
I explain the situation and redirect them to doing something else. This isn't hard, and costs me just a few minutes of my time. I can't be the only parent that sees this as a viable option for stupid filtering software that extorts money from both sides of the fence?
As for parents who are surprised by the "Internet", maybe we need to adopt a new term which describes that whole "Deer in the headlamps" outrage thing...
"TIPPERISM", you know, from Tipper Gore, who had a horrific panty-wedging from some music lyrics and got a bunch of hypocritical and immature monied well-intentioned fools together under the banner of the PMRC.
Linux is about choice.
RH "Bluecurve" is about leveraging market influence to convince corporate shops that they're like M$ Windows-one look, one feel. They're also about increasing the relative value of their RedHat certification programs by making administration of their distro so different that you have to buy-in to their whole scheme.
RH feels too much like a path requiring "corporate blinders", and I've been too free for too long to want "Bluecurve" blinders and a RH bit and bridle.
YMMV...but the last time I played around with GTK apps under KDE it all worked, and vice-versa under GNOME...all the KDE stuff worked too. Gotta admire a distro that can get something like that to work, eh? Of course, RH could do the same but then someone would have to act like it was so unusual that instead of making it just work by including the libs for both GTK and Qt the would have to geld one desktop while favoring their old love and then give the whole thing a new name...why would anyone ever bother doing that? Oh, yeah. It's the money.
What everyone who runs SunOne under Linux has to be asking themselves is "How much sand in the Linux Sun Hourglass is left?". Nearly a year ago Sun had an epiphany which resulted in them porting Iplanet and other software over to Linux.
Now companies who are using Webservers running SunOne/Iplanet under Linux are probably running on borrowed time. The last service pack for SunOne for Linux was released Oct 2k2(I could be full of crap, I'm running off memory on this one)...and there's at least one serious problem with SunOne that they're not talking about which is causing people problems because exploits exist.
Now without their own version of Linux driving complimentary development on supported products under the Linux Kernel what's to keep them producing and support software for an OS which is hurting the core of their business,their hardware bottom-line? A desire for warm-fuzzies and thank you notes? Ha! Not a damn thing.
What's the "Linux Strategy" for a company facing bad margins because customers who would normally use their hardware and software are dancing with Dell (and for good reason, Dell isn't bending customers over and breaking off stuff in their nethers) and Tux? Invent better lock-in or discard support for a rival free operating system which is bleeding them dry?
I read the article and it read like a combination "political/stockmarket" filler piece designed to confuse the hell out of the casual reader and introduce the "renegade former developer" like he's something special for being a 37yr old suit-hippy while inviting other suit-hippy-insiders to send offers to the magazine/writer for future work on obfuscating other "black and white" issues for fun and profit. Isn't it so chic to have your professional photo accompanied by the kind of filler that would give a White-house press secretary the kind of erection that would result in them passing out from the overstimulation of the vegas nerve the next time they took a piss? It works at so many levels we shouldn't be surprised by the delays in EMT calls due to the sudden escalation in calls for young executives passing out in the latrine around the time weekly business magazines featuring such pap come sliding across the desks.
If someone at Sun could anonymously write something with a grounding in reality it sure would help. Personally, I think it could be summed up with a single line,
"If we can't embrace and extend Linux for our own benefit, maybe the guys who buy us can."
What SCO needs to do is setup a deal with Think Geek to put out source code posters with the offending code clearly marked in high-lighter yellow and arranged to mimic that famous Viet-Nam war photo of that poor chap getting shot in the head at point blank range. Draw the parallels. I would gladly make room on my utilitarian wallspace for one of those. SCO and Microsoft would be fools to turn their back on the potential to put their handiwork, clearly marked with their corporate logos in the margins, in the hands of sales reps and unit managers. Business is war, red in tooth and claw. Have lotsa fun.
I agree, the USGOV basically thwarted the judgement of brighter minds and capitulated...now M$ publishes its own money. Short of M$ being shoved out, like Germany did to Scientology, M$ is going to show up to play no matter what.
However, unless there's some kind of "ABSOLUTELY NO ALTERNATIVES" clause, we can still encourage the deployment of adjacent alternatives on both the desktop and the server space. You can bet that it's something that's happening in areas where a corp. or gov. has been given software from M$ because you're not going to put WinXP/2k3 server on a p2-350, which is still a good desktop for business under Linux...the newer M$ software still requires newer hardware; which is why a gift from M$ is rarely the gift it sounds like. When they say they are "purely a software company", they seem to leave out other key departments like "Driving computer industry", "Licensing enforcement (BSA)", and "Buying up the Competition".
What would be interesting is if anyone has information about what kind of restrictions are placed upon the recipients of Free M$ products. That would be the kind of juicy stuff that M$ would absolutely go apeshit over if it ever saw the light of day. I'm sure some governments would be interested in terms and conditions too.
It's one thing to seem benificent and an entirely different thing to bait and entrap. The real thing we should fear is the complacency of people who no longer need to strive for a good solution when the one handed to them is good-enough. And then, when they decide to roll their own solution they run into the true boundaries of the questionable gift (I wonder what M$ calls their server-cabinet inspectors..."Local Sales Reps?").
Even in the face of crushing famine and drought and starvation people in Africa saw through the efforts of the USGOV and Monsanto to proliferate low-to-no-cost GM seeds which would lock up the surviors in a no-win situation where they wouldn't be able to grow their own food from the harvest--and due to cross-pollination with unmodified crops everyone would suddenly come under Monsanto licensing and inspections. In many ways, (Free) M$ products are much the same thing...only you can't eat them...they eat you when M$ comes to harvest anything you've done to help yourself using their FREE kit. I can almost feel a "In Soviet Russia..." comment in there somewhere.
I program, admin, and plot out incredibly complicated schemes to waste my time while maintaining the careful semblance of productivity. Since it's not feasible to carry around a 10mx3m messy white-board, I prefer using legal pads. If they came with wings, it would be a bonus. I fill them. I file them, I throw them (without wings they just go nuts!) and when things are really fun I jump up and down on them in a cathartic rage while shaking the walls with formless screams of primal fury. Face it, aside from dealing with the dioxin problems caused by the processing (and one wicked smell!) paper has an incredibly high return value.
-Go ahead, fold your laptop into a dart or a glider. Hey, just throw it. Please?
-Crayons, ink, watercolor, pencil, tempra, chalk all work well on paper, try it with a laptop, but don't insult us by calling it a "case mod". It would be interesting to hear a tape of the support call though. Be sure to put it on a M$ personal webserver directly on said laptop and link it to an "Ask slashdot" article. Thank you.
-One word....Origami!!
-Another victim....cursive/calligraphy. We will all write like doctors, dammit!
-Write and solve complex "anything" on a computer while you deny yourself the rich medium that lets you doodle, scribble, jot, or work on your limerics in the margins while still giving you the kind of dynamic outline capabilities of paper. My guess is that you'll suffer a kind of claustrophobia. I know I do. I can't even stand computer day-planners. They're a complete waste of time to everyone except the rigidly controlled. There's just too much chaos in my day-to-day, hour-to-hour world.
And comming soon..."Digital Ink"! It's short for "Another costly M$ Monopoly we will impale you on PC user--pay up and quit whining thieves!". Could you imagine having to purchase site licenses for a floor of tablet-pc's and then suffer the indignity of having to purchase "Refills"?!! (more primal screaming and breaking things)
There's also the cluelessness of computer use in the classroom. K12 Schools that want to present themsevles as being forward and progressive are actually just making the fat-cats fatter. What about all the infrastructure costs? You don't network for free with laptops...or anything. K12 should be about something other than the bored smart kids helping the bored kids fix their laptops or use M$ products...because after some buttmunch tweaks the registry you'd probably be lucky to have a character mapper or even notepad accessible on one of those things.
What about licensing fees for software?! Does "Ichman Highschool" suddenly transform into "The DELL-Ichman-Microsoft Campus" Screw the whole "highschool" thing, they're not _just_ a provider of k12 education.
"Students...Parents...Please take the scalpel provided and while holding your forearm over the bloodletting tray, gently press and slice with the tip, just enough to get a good stream of blood started..."
On the upside, it's certainly easier to catalog and archive every deviant word, every unpleasant thought, computer doodles and website deviltry and sell access to it to the highest bidder, like PINKERTON, or to a Corporate Human Enslavement department. I'm sure everyone here would just love to know that their employer would be reading about a crush they had, or what they did some weekend tweleve years ago when they foolishly submitted some journal assignment. Of course the alternative is to have really savvy kids with such an entrenched reflexive mendacity that they would never write anything personal. I've already seen this kind of behavior in colleges where nobody ever really writes what they're thinking except for the former home-coming queens and class valedictorians who truly want whirrled peas and work with children.
"Do k12 students really need access to computers at all for anything other than entertainment?" The answer is a resounding "No." Even NASA would prefer that they just "write up" experiments and then scan in just the illustratio
I know I'm headed for the "Troll of the day" award for this, but doesn't the midwest have a pretty good "goddist" density? I figure anyone with some "faith" should be doing any one or combination of the following:
1) Having lots of unprotected sex...after all it could be your last day on the planet and if the females survive and of child-bearing age it's a good start on rebuilding their numbers. Remember, the papists want you chugging out children, by the litter if possible.
2) Praying. Sure it's just a feel-good measure for those involved, but face it, the survivors who did pray then will feel superior to the others in having survived. Feeling superior gives one group the license to exclude the inferior, and that's a prime "faith-building" opportunity.
3) Telling plenty of stories about how they survived the last big storm and how much good sex and service to their gods they provided. And remember, long-lasting infections are often caused by having whatever rags you clothe your disgusting soft bodies with litter wounds. If you're naked then it's just the surface bacteria and easily located and removed bits of whatever has wounded you.
And in closing remember that the harder you make it for your supreme-being to cash your meaty asses in the more likely you are to actually prevent yourselves from being granted access to whatever paradise you're promised. Of course you feel free to interpret the lack of deaths as the divine equivalent of "The silent treatment", but it feels more like the apathy felt at the loss of the great cypress forests in Summeria.
Nice run at "sophistry".
Earthlink is a service I value and gladly pay for. My email box has remained spam-free ever since I started with them. Of course I'm partly to blame for that because I simply don't give the address to any lists or do anything goofy with it. It's a valued resource. If more providers like Earthlink emphasised the importance of this and took active steps to secure it we wouldn't have the problems we have now.
We have an Internet culture of denial and over-reaction when it comes to how we have been dealing with email issues. RBL's are not the way to go for domestic providers with massive userbases like Earthlink. RBL's are ok for a private company, but an ISP has to be many things to many people.
Trying to force compliance between smaller companies and individuals with multi-homed private domains and international interests and RFC's is a pointless pissing contest. Some admins are unaware of the RFC's, or apathetic...in some cases it's not in their interest to fill in all the blanks and setup proper headers or within their ability.
I gladly applaud any move by a big provider to secure their services and give customers more protection. And since I'm an Earthlink customer I look forward to seeing how it all shakes out. I may pay more for Earthlink but I think it's money well spent if it keeps them around and keeps my email box from being stuffed with offers to grow my manhood, refinance my home, or join in some pyramid scheme. Contrary to belief's of email marketeers that people absolutely have a need to be informed of these things, if we ever need to find such information there are search engines...they should pay for their shingle and keep their pablum out of my filespace.
Thank you for the reply instead of a mod, but I know I walk a fine flame-bait line with a post that advocates the deaths of many...but the reason I posted was to draw attention to the ever growing number of consumers.
We have thumbs and shiny cars, terrifying weapons, and a proclivity to procreate like crazy and consume every resource on the planet with the kind of recklessness that goes far beyond just endangering our foolish selves. We're starting to aggressively modify crops in ways that are no longer self-sustaining (greedy monsanto idiots!) and will contaminate the food-supply...you can't stop bees or even the weirdness of life once it leaves the lab and happily does whatever it likes.
The problem is nobody looks at death like it's the tool the nature weilds to regulate life regardless of what perch/niche/or level an organism has within the food-chain. Governments with Death-Taxes view death as a great way to regulate competition and pay for their prosecutors and Windows Licenses. Life on this world guarantees Death. As a bicycle commuter, I live with DEATH tapping me on the shoulder for at least an hour every day. I fully expect to be road-kill before I'm old enough to die from all the crap I've been eating and drinking, and in a way, I'm looking forward to death instead of being butchered to stay alive later in life and give every dollar I've ever earned (and more) to pay for meds and doctors.
Of course we're sentient beings...thanks to Disney even Mice, Rabbits, Deer...Brooms, Dwarves, Tea-cups and Wardrobes are all happily self-aware but that doesn't remove Humanity from what our vast numbers are doing to everything.
What will our options as an eventual global civilization be?
A Larry Niven "Birth Lottery"?
Spoof Judgement Day World-Wide and pass the Koolaid?(oh man, I hope I'm alive to see that one!) Maybe James Cameron could be paid to do this and stop spanking over his Titanic Fetish.
Hope no amateur astronomers catch wind of "Project TOO DAMN NEAR" where a satellite influences the orbit of a comet over a long-long-time and in a brilliantly played game of interplanetary pool puts the 8-ball of Armageddon in our laps?
Pull a Piers Anthony "10 year moratoriumn on child-birth" and put contraceptives in the water and food?
So...where does that leave us when we pop the 10,20,or 30 Billion mark? That's only about 5 times the current estimate (http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html). Soylet Green? More War? Or maybe a little feigned and subsidized helplessness on the part of Governents and big business? I smell a potential conservation of effort, the kind that even Poe would enjoy, and when the producers of "24" are done torturing us with the current storyline they could run with something like a SARS outbreak. Plenty of drama for everyone.
Cheers.
SARS is one of those great biological opportunities that doesn't happen everyday. I'm surprised that there's not a "Hug a SARS Victim" campaign underway. It certainly shows a complete ignorance of the species which is really what underscores the fact that humanity may make nice toys, but it's still a collection of dumbfounded dipshits.
Humanity has no appreciation for a biological arms-race that will thin the herd and leave those who survive in a position of being able to cope with the new virus. Instead, the process is thwarted completely, leaving tens of billions of weak individuals where hundreds of millions of stronger individuals would be better off for having survived.
Sure this sounds silly or maybe even cruel, but in a hundred years at the current rate of population growth, if nature isn't producing a SARS-level outbreak of some kind you can bet your ass the governments of the world will. And then what will be the excuse?...profit shortfalls in some MEGA-PHARMA corp result in a 2 to 5 year moratorium on vaccine research...hand wringing, piles of dead bodies everywhere. It will be a wonderful time to ride a pale horse. Humanity is all about deferred suffering.
When it comes down to it, the evolution of everything on this planet is red in tooth and claw. Just because you can't see the critters, doesn't mean you're not prey.
We will be told to shut up, take our shots, and pay our insurance.
In effect, nothing is going to change unless someone screws up.
If every company that used GM foods in the United States had to label the genetic purity of their food sources on the packages there would be a public outcry that would not be in the interest of big agri-business. ADM, and companies like it have taken large $$$teps to ensure that such a thing will only happen if say, two million people die overnight from a product. Even then they'll deny everything, blame it on some Ergot variant, and business will continue as usual until a loophole shows up and then and only then will doublespeak labelling even hint at what's happening in the DNA/RNA of processed/fresh foods.
Given that kind of mass ignorance/apathy in the face of sweeping public apathy and well-stocked shelves, we should view the current level of declaration and demarcation in the food supply as an example of what to expect once we start dabbling.
Richard Dawkins, an eloquent scientists, has pointed out several times over that genetic mutations almost never produce anything which will survive. This is because nature doesn't subscribe to the goddist fairy-tales and political correctness that humanity does. So, the tests which do occur will be baby-steps. Accidental death, sudden death, immuno-suppresive outbursts and conflagrations of entire communities by super-bugs taking advantage of common-flaws in people with similar genetic modification will be news that will show up in the time of our great-grandchildren (assuming you're of child-bearing age now). If it happens any sooner, then someone probably let something escape.
Society will adapt to the technology if it doesn't wax too many people in a generation. We will accept the problems, and leaders/liars will evoke the fantasies which have always worked for the cattle. While the elites are going to tweak themselves for longevity, virility, and sheer smarts/physical prowess. As long as the elities confine it to themselves and the lab-rats/human trials pugilists, things will be fine.
Over generations those who are successfully modified will bear out the virtues of the changes, and these changes will be adopted en-mass just like we adopted polio and smallpox vaccinations. The changes will be small, but over time we will either thrive or die. Incremental and punctual change is not unprecedented in the evolution of species. That we can jump start the process is just another height-mark on the door-frame of our species' history.
Goddists/purists should feel free to form their communities where they don't accept such changes. Nobody in the general population is going to be left behind...changes in the environment are going to require changes in the majority. As long as nobody is kidnapping young men and women and using viral gene-manipulation to modify all of their reproductive genetics then things should be fine. However, life is the most pervasive technology on the planet. We cannot turn away from it when there are more crunchy humans on this planet than ever. When a hungry alien civilization shows up(thanks you stupid SETI assholes), or if we open the gates of Hell on Mars, we had better be able to either kick things up a notch and start taking trophies, or learn the manners necessary to introduce ourselves as dinner.
I'm sorry, but "microsoft.com" is synonymous with "mendacity". I don't belive them any more than I believe a street-corner preacher on his second fifth of Port.
...screams of agony omitted).
With code, anything's possible. The impossible just takes effort. If M$ isn't obligated to fix something, they're always willing to lube you up to take the upgrade (Wot?! That one didn't fit as well? Ok, here's something that will stay snug! --THOOP!
I belive there's a long line of M$ lock-in-licensees who will be walking funny after this procedure.
Cheers!
If we had more legislators who were interested in things that mattered, we would have labels clearly identifying which strains of corn/wheat/hybrid vegetables we were consuming. That way when little Timmy, or Sally suddenly develops a 104 deg. fever, practices projectile vomiting and sentences our asses to $1000+/6 hr. emergency room visits and useless prescriptions of overly proscribed anti-biotics (while doctors shrug and tell you that it isn't a virus) we have a good idea what happened and can take steps to see that it doesn't happen again.
/. and other online sites, where online buyers are likely to notice a row, and inform people the word will get out and music sales will drop.
Maybe people need to grow up a bit and start walking CD's back to the point of purchase and protest when the assholes won't take them back. I've let friends know of anything I've purchased that won't allow me to back it up--and I imagine the ripple effect works well. If you let the point-of-sale know there's a problem and inform customers that there's a problem at the POS, and get on
Sony Music is currently facing dark times. Good for them. Maybe it will make them more aware that there's a problem.
Music enriches our lives, but it doesn't cause health problems. It really isn't a sustenence item, is it? How important is music compared to food?
Legislators need to stop worrying about re-election funding and understand that this is a non-issue. Standing up to the processed food industry is a noble fight, a heroic battle. Blasting the RIAA is like picking on a surly 10 year old.
Anyone who had to mess with the wacky 9u Compaq server hardware of a couple of years ago and wanted to run Linux on knows that Compaq (before HP) and RedHat we're holding hands a long time before this announcement. Not kissing or petting, but there was a tacit agreement that Compaq supported the RedHat distros (6.x and 7.x series) and RedHat made sure to roll their SCSI array drivers into the mix. They were good friends, and probably even exchanged a couple of "partner" trinkets over the years.
Before this, Dell was the RedHat "Daddy". That was probably before Michael Dell and Steve Ballmer had a couple of meetings and came to the agreement that Linux was bad for Dell in the "consumer space", which somehow included their laptops, and their website. Anyone remember the "powerapp" boxen. They were good, and came with RH 6.2 and 7.0 distros. That was before "Red the Hat", decided to really mess up their distro.
This latest announcement is a "Stock market Ad" designed to make both HP and RedHat look better than usual (warty beasts with scrabbling claws and pale lidless eyes which cannot withstand the brilliant light of full-disclosure) and to signal that server clients and channel partners can "Have RedHat, we mean Linux, with that".
And after RedHat's 8.x they can eat their distro one mylar shard at a time...I'll be nice and let them choose which end they want it in, because it's never going to see my servers again. Ever.
Spammers aren't a complete waste of skin. I know this is hard to believe.
We just need to remember that when we strap their heads into the kill-device, that the bolt-gun sends the bolt crashing through their head, pulping their brains. After all, this does destroy the one rotten organ in their body, leaving the rest of the body harvest-worthy. This is much more humane that what they have planned for us, because unlike our daily RTS-inducing spam-deletion cycles and the stress of having to deal with bandwidth fees and inappropriate porn content we're just going to shoot them in the head _once_.
And think of how they could give back to the non-spamming populace; retinas, eyes, livers, heart/lung, and kidney transplants.
OTOH...treating them like war criminals wouldn't be a bad thing either. It's just the whole "normal" execution thing is such a waste.
The Chinese will submit any plans for economic development of moon to the UN. I believe it's covered under the laws of Sea and Space, a pack of accepted conventions for the use and mis-use of vast areas of the planet where we're not currently putting any embassies.
Of course anything printed about this subject is going to be a lightning rod, and everyone here should accept that as the only valid reason this article was submitted in the first place.
Hopefully the Chinese will send automated mining equipment which creates other robotic units that use the materials available on the moon to create a series of long-range "pushers" that survey, mark, and redirect valuable asteroids (not just clumps of aggregate junk rock, but high-yield heavy mineral content bodies) into an orbit which will allow them to be captured by earth over a period of years. That's serious technology which would pay off big-time, and give them a chance at long-range sustainability. It could be done today if it was a priority for NASA (rather than the hollow science of trying to get ugly-bags-of-mostly-water into space). Provided they can create the robot-factory and manage all the other programming, any country which could play that kind of golf shouldn't have any problem creating a free-form smelter which would use solar power to perform an on-the-fly smelting operation and extract the minerals from their efforts later. Maybe my children's children can look forward to such things. I have given up on the United States space program their mission is a sham (ISS), and a rat-hole--Joe Public isn't going to see _anything_ from the efforts of NASA and the ISS. If the chinese can make something, anything happen, then good for them. Maybe my children's children will be dreaming of being Taikonauts. I wouldn't hold it against them.
Hopefully this crap will never see mass-market.
Ahem...actually, that's the secret slashdot NERD handshake that you're talking about...you need to be careful whom you perform that feat around or you'll be single for life.
:-D
Remember, you've been warned.
Cheers!
Well, apparently they don't have a "Gungan" or "Otalla" translation for Google _yet_. If I had the time and stamina to endure either of the last two Starwars movies again I'd probably give it a go. I know it would be a hoot to have someone eavesdropping your google search and start laughing uncontrollably. And to really top it off, read an entry to them. Cheers.
Hey, that's great "Jar-Jar"! I hate the character but your post makes me want to see if Google has a "Jar-Jar" mode, and maybe someone should consider a "Jar-alyzer", like Opera, who can "Jar-alyze" entire websites like they so fittingly "Borked" MSN.
Cheers!