Further, I do have a decent chemistry set, and it was once seen through a window by a police person. Due to the magic of profiling, I soon had a full dynamic entry from the DEA to add to my list of interesting experiences. That alone makes a real chemistry set dangerous as hell -- those guys were within a twitch of shooting us!
They looked and acted a lot more like the meth heads they thought they were there to "Take down" than any real meth head I've actually met. Maybe they were hoping for a free fix. Dunno, but that was scary, expensive, and uncalled for.
What was really fun is that what I was using it for at the time *was* making explosives, legally, for a patent I was working on for microexplosive welding of flat cables in flip top things (like laptops and cel phones). They were fine with that once they sent the BATF out to check. And weirdly enough, it was the BATF who were nice and polite, no drawn guns, we had a fun talk and all. Maybe, unlike the FBI/DEA/DHS, they bothered to actually look up my dossier and find out I was an ex-spook with a long record of exemplary government service -- for the "good guys", so they treated me with respect instead of disdain.
No one not caught red-handed in the act of a violent crime should EVER be treated like the DEA treated us. No one.
Machines, so it shouldn't be too hard to get permission. Who else has so many clueless users with great connections to the net all concentrated in one set of outfits?
You're totally correct. "The BruceS" has mentioned this many times as well. If you're only guarding a little value, the locks don't have to be so good to make it not worth an attacker's while to break in. But if what you're guarding is massive, there's a different cost-benefit tradeoff on both sides, and it behooves you to pay attention to that as things change. Or better yet, anticipate the change. Sony was surly (a typo that I left as it was better than what I planned) planning on being successful with PSN- so why did they not plan for such success and the negative attention that brings?
So on top of being more evil than most, they're also incompetent. I've always thought that perfect evil can't exist as "the devil breaks his own tools when they cease to serve him well".
This is precisely what I experience as well. I'm searching old physics in my case, finding low hanging fruit when the rush from merely atomic to subatomic took place and a lot of worthwhile studies were shelved. The abstracts always promise far more than the paper delivers. I can't afford a subscription to give access to past articles (more than I make a year, per year).
We need a pirate bay for this...or something. Why should some publishing house get 60k/year per user for doing essentially nothing but supposedly weeding out the crap, when they don't even really do that?
Hear hear. And more often than not the abstract promises things the paper doesn't deliver. Your $ are low, I checked into getting say access to RevSciIns -- and it's $60k a year, with all the discounts, in a bundle that would make the cable guys green with envy.
Trick - find students with access to a library that pays that money, and get them to download papers for you. You'll get some that aren't what you want, as they won't know how to follow *your* nose, but it's better than nothing.
If just once, there was a boycott big enough to make a major firm change its ways, or go broke, wouldn't that be cool?
Their power exceeds that of most governments -- we should make them broke and powerless for being evil.
Yeah, if you actually suck and are depending on paper qualifications to land a good paying sinecure job. If you've actually got the "stuff" you can skip right out of school before graduation and become a millionaire. I did.
I retired at age 53, a millionaire a few times over, because I had the stuff, learned what I missed in school on my own, and was productive as heck for my employers, until I hung out my own shingle in the '80s and REALLY started making money because companies were sick of guys with a ton of papers demanding good salaries but who couldn't produce like I could.
And that's what's wrong with science and a few other fields these days. No piece of crap collection of paper qualifications actually gives you "the right stuff". You have it, or you don't. You can get it if you weren't born with it, but you have to earn it. Sitting in school being whupped on and treated like crap for years just proves to most people you have no ability to take risks, and define your own path, much less able to innovate and get things done.
Ask a CEO of a major outfit if you don't believe me, I know a good number of them, they'll say the same.
Or as we said -- an engineer is a guy who solves multiple problems a week, and writes a report about them all weekly. A PhD takes 7 years to solve one problem and write one report. Who would you hire? And the old argument that at lest PhD's solve hard, unique problems is now an utter joke, just go read some dissertations about things -- and if you know history, a heck of a lot of them are about things known 30 years ago, and are either a minor refinement (at best) or the result of re-doing forgotten history.
So, yeah, if you want to be a wage slave, be a scientist, or be better paid at some other related thing, like engineering.
If you want to take chances and have them pay, start your own business -- which is much harder than either, which is why it pays better when you succeed.
Sadly, and as a scientist -- I have to agree. Most scientists aren't worth much, and often graduate with a high degree knowing less than I did in high school, in terms of actually having useful knowledge and the ability to apply it.
Further, the government funded big science system makes this worse, and self perpetuating. Back when at least some of it was privately funded, and therefore merit pay, the good scientists at least did well, and things progressed a lot faster than now.
All you have to do is remove the vote from anyone getting government money, which simply makes sense anyway, as they'll vote themselves bread and circuses till it DOES fall over, and have in every empire in history so far.
Of course, that's not going to be a popular idea, and one of the tricks of the left (and no, I'm not on the right, they're just as messed up, but differently) is to make sure that no one doesn't get some sort of support/bribe/dole so that can't ever happen as it would be end of game for them and their ideas.
I didn't think of this. Robert Heinlein did. It's the answer. It's obviously right that those who net-pay should decide what that money goes to. But try selling that idea to the huge percentage who are just takers -- but who have the vote.
Better yet -- I have 10 million. I put 9 of them into bonds/stocks (not risk free either), and one into research on high risk but high payoff stuff. It's called diversification.
And in fact, those numbers are true of myself, a retired successful inventor. I trade the markets for my income on the 90%, and put the other 10% into very risky but potentially high payoff fusion research, self directed, and done on the premises. And it's promising, but who knows? I do this not for the money, but because someone has to or the world is going to be a much sicker puppy than now, and no one else is really doing serious work on anything other than tokomaks in any other situation than "big, committee and politics driven science" which is doomed to failure even if one of those smart dudes has the crucial idea -- he'll just be voted down and things will go on making no progress until even governments decide it's a waste of money (like now).
Whereas a self-directed and self-funded researcher has no such problems. When I find a new thing, or an unexpected thing, I can change direction in less time than typing this sentence. No go in big science on that one.
Today, if someone had brought Fleming a contaminated petri dish, he'd toss it in the trash, yell at them to get it right next time, and write a downgrade on the lab assistants performance review. We'd not have penicillin if science then was like it is today.
Finns seem pretty cool (except some Nokia management) but I'd never be happy with not really knowing the language where I lived. Kind of fond of long warm days now and then, too.
I bet I could learn to speak British, Aussie, Kiwi, and other similar languages fine, though. Heck, one day I might learn Canadian, eh? I already speak American and Redneck, after all. Oh, that's it, I'll learn Hawaiian.
All ten or so of the above jokes are in your imagination. I didn't write them until after I read my post.
So you think a tiny amount of people are ethical? Wow, I guess refusing to allow schools to teach right from wrong worked out great!
And due to everything being everywhere these days, the threat of "I won't do any more business with you" isn't much of a threat anymore. I didn't realize y'all city boys were getting so degraded. Out here if you forget your money at the store, you just say so and pay next time. Still. Get away from that kind of "civilization" where ethics are unknown while you still can, is all I can say.
But here's what's evil. In two cases (both involving phone companies) I've been hit by collections people who try (but in my case failed) to make your life a living hell. No, they don't have to prove they own the debt unless you sue them -- which you can't do in your jurisdiction, so get out the wallet anyway.
And in both cases the phone companies had admitted I was right, they were wrong, I didn't owe them anything -- that's hard enough to get, anyone else here ever done that? But once that debt is sold, it's a Pyrrhic victory at best -- the calls keep coming.
One was from AT&T about tens of thousands of dollars of phone calls supposedly made to psychics -- on a dedicated line that had a modem on it 24/7 (remember those days?) -- this psychic setup owned its own collection agency. They're gone (jailed) now, but I still here from the agency that bought this "debt" a few times a year. Dream on, suckers -- I have logs from the sysadmin at my ISP, but it's too pita to take those suckers to court, I have a life.
The other was a cancellation fee Verizon admitted they didn't owe me, for allowing me to buy a phone in an area where they had exactly zero coverage within 25 miles of my house. Phone was nice at the store...and I paid for over a year for a phone I could only use about once a week while grocery shopping. That one is still calling and sending letters and threats, and DID mess up my credit rating.
If I wasn't rich -- I'd care -- have no use for credit, thanks. You should care though. How many people here could deal with a screwed credit rating by one of these guys. Yeah, a pragmatist would just pay them and forget it. I will never do that. Some of us do have principles. And it's not exactly like I'd be ripping off Mother Teresa, eh?
The laws are written such that correctness of the collector is assumed, in other words, you are by law, explicitly assumed guilty unless you prove otherwise, and in a court and jurisdiction of the other guy's choosing. Go check -- I'm not making this up, and paid a lawyer to find it out.
Sure, people who don't pay for what they get are a drag on everyone. I'm just upset that this is how they deal with it, since not everyone who is not paying is one of those -- some are being ripped off and extorted with "credit rating damage". That's not morally any different than some legal firm sending out thousands of "settle up or go to court" letters to random addresses for the RIAA -- no different at all.
Ok, I'll bite, though off topic. Sure it could. So could your average sniper (who are all above average).
That's murder, not killing (there is a difference, mr AC moralist). And once you start down that slippery slope and declare the technique usable, by example, guess who's next in the cross hairs? The politician who authorized it.
While they don't mind putting us on slippery slopes to our detriment, this is a little close to home for those asshats.
Yeah, it's where the intelligent people all live, but you'd not understand that, or why. Who wants to live jam packed like sardines with a bunch of politicians, lawyers, beltway bandits, and criminals? Evidently a lot of people in NOVA. You know, the ones MY tax dollars subsidize because you can't control your development, your road costs, and the general assholery of your local governments.
But shhhh - don't tell anyone. We like it here without y'all. West Virginia is only "almost heaven" after all.
Yeah, like my non-cloud network with 3-5 days of battery backup, generators, and solar PV power. Is that what you mean?
And I'm just a small time guy (only about 10 machines 24/7). They can't provision for their pro network servers? What a friggin joke.
Further, how do they prove it was you driving? The ticket goes to driver, not a vehicle. What if someone else was driving the car?
I once got off a fairly major one because they couldn't prove I was driving (they chased, but did not catch me, it was quite a hot rod). Did that change?
Can't top parent, but yes, I've actually done 100% of those things and more besides, and now do self funded fusion research, which I write about at the link in my sig.
Yes, I wrote my own opsys and drivers, and not for just one target either -- many embedded systems run my stuff.
Yes, I dug my own well, and the septic too.
Yes, I'm off the grid, on PV (corporate whore, the panels were made by Solarex now owned by BP) since 1980.
Bake my own bread, check. Grow a lot of my food, and hunt some of the rest, check. Gourmet cook, check.
And I wrote a book about Digital Audio Processing, and I too forget how it ends. I think with full industry adoption of the software I gave away with it.
Snarky? Yeah, a lot of people wish guys like me didn't exist, because we make THEM look so bad.
But actually, we're not all that rare...
But for another, winXP, as parent pointed out, might as well have been yesterday -- last time I hooked one (in Virtual box, of course) to the internet, it downloaded a gawd awful amount of brand new, not 10 year old, code.
So much it took an hour to get, and most of another to install during "shutdown".
The only reason they want it dead is to force sales of their even higher priced, but not really better, new stuff.
Actually, I gave vista an honest shot, but lost all possible future interest in MS right after that, and I'd actually given them a lot of slack before that when win 2k broke dos and invalidated quite a lot of my old, but very very expensive to replace CAD stuff. Fortunately, linux has a decent dos emulator, but that seems beyond what MS can achieve (!!??!!).
+5. Been there myself, and what Geo did was quite reasonable. It really was, in a sense, a win, since it was Sony who decided to offer settlement, and avoid setting a legal precedent that would be bad for US. I'd bet the limitations on him all involve only Sony, and the less anyone has to do with those jerks, the better.
The settlement did help Sony, as the line they were pushing int he GeoHot case to get the judge and jurisdiction they wanted, along with so much discovery they know more about you -- not just GeoHot, look at the other stuff they got, than the CIA knows about a "person of interest" -- that line was going to make them lose the class action suit for removing other OS, which was going to be a rather large monetary loss and precedent for them.
You can't get away with telling one court one thing, and another one a different thing, in these days of the internet (and Groklaw, sadly, going away-- hope something else springs up there as it's needed). That was the spot Sony found themselves in, and their corporate shell game wasn't good enough to pull it off. So, we should be looking at and supporting the class action suit so they lose both times, frankly.
In other words, move on -- there are more battles to fight, and this one wasn't really a loss at all, Sony might have learned a little something here, finally.
Because HCL tastes too much like lemonade and would clash with the other flavors in the chili?
In fact, the effect on skin (and tongue) is much less with the HCL. Now, if you were talking sulfuric or nitric....
But you wouldn't want to become flammable yourself - that's how you make guncotton.
As was pointed out on Groklaw, there were some very serious lies being told to one court or the other when comparing the two cases. They had to drop one or lose both and get caught lying (again), or just lose the GeoHot case anyway, after spending a lot more money. They were trying to play a corporate shell game. In one case, it's all SCEA, the other they claim it's all SCEI -- for the same stuff. Has to be one or the other, and Groklaw (those pesky kids) did the world yet another service by pointing that out.
Sony had to either give this one up or the class action against them for removing other OS. They were telling one court this, and another that -- and people like PJ were pointing out that both couldn't be true at once. If they'd continued to push their line on Geo, it would have devastated their defense in the class action.
Pure corporate calculation -- where do we have more to lose, won out. Again.
STill never going to do any business with Sony ever.
Slashdot Mirror
Further, I do have a decent chemistry set, and it was once seen through a window by a police person. Due to the magic of profiling, I soon had a full dynamic entry from the DEA to add to my list of interesting experiences. That alone makes a real chemistry set dangerous as hell -- those guys were within a twitch of shooting us! They looked and acted a lot more like the meth heads they thought they were there to "Take down" than any real meth head I've actually met. Maybe they were hoping for a free fix. Dunno, but that was scary, expensive, and uncalled for.
What was really fun is that what I was using it for at the time *was* making explosives, legally, for a patent I was working on for microexplosive welding of flat cables in flip top things (like laptops and cel phones). They were fine with that once they sent the BATF out to check. And weirdly enough, it was the BATF who were nice and polite, no drawn guns, we had a fun talk and all. Maybe, unlike the FBI/DEA/DHS, they bothered to actually look up my dossier and find out I was an ex-spook with a long record of exemplary government service -- for the "good guys", so they treated me with respect instead of disdain.
No one not caught red-handed in the act of a violent crime should EVER be treated like the DEA treated us. No one.
It's at least some benefit out of all that fear induced money they got rolled up into homeland security, rather than some other use of it.
Machines, so it shouldn't be too hard to get permission. Who else has so many clueless users with great connections to the net all concentrated in one set of outfits?
You're totally correct. "The BruceS" has mentioned this many times as well. If you're only guarding a little value, the locks don't have to be so good to make it not worth an attacker's while to break in. But if what you're guarding is massive, there's a different cost-benefit tradeoff on both sides, and it behooves you to pay attention to that as things change. Or better yet, anticipate the change. Sony was surly (a typo that I left as it was better than what I planned) planning on being successful with PSN- so why did they not plan for such success and the negative attention that brings?
So on top of being more evil than most, they're also incompetent. I've always thought that perfect evil can't exist as "the devil breaks his own tools when they cease to serve him well".
This is precisely what I experience as well. I'm searching old physics in my case, finding low hanging fruit when the rush from merely atomic to subatomic took place and a lot of worthwhile studies were shelved. The abstracts always promise far more than the paper delivers. I can't afford a subscription to give access to past articles (more than I make a year, per year).
We need a pirate bay for this...or something. Why should some publishing house get 60k/year per user for doing essentially nothing but supposedly weeding out the crap, when they don't even really do that?
What if you're looking for low hanging fruit missed in papers from the past, as I am? Solving it for new papers has no effect.
Hear hear. And more often than not the abstract promises things the paper doesn't deliver. Your $ are low, I checked into getting say access to RevSciIns -- and it's $60k a year, with all the discounts, in a bundle that would make the cable guys green with envy.
Trick - find students with access to a library that pays that money, and get them to download papers for you. You'll get some that aren't what you want, as they won't know how to follow *your* nose, but it's better than nothing.
If just once, there was a boycott big enough to make a major firm change its ways, or go broke, wouldn't that be cool? Their power exceeds that of most governments -- we should make them broke and powerless for being evil.
Yeah, if you actually suck and are depending on paper qualifications to land a good paying sinecure job. If you've actually got the "stuff" you can skip right out of school before graduation and become a millionaire. I did. I retired at age 53, a millionaire a few times over, because I had the stuff, learned what I missed in school on my own, and was productive as heck for my employers, until I hung out my own shingle in the '80s and REALLY started making money because companies were sick of guys with a ton of papers demanding good salaries but who couldn't produce like I could.
And that's what's wrong with science and a few other fields these days. No piece of crap collection of paper qualifications actually gives you "the right stuff". You have it, or you don't. You can get it if you weren't born with it, but you have to earn it. Sitting in school being whupped on and treated like crap for years just proves to most people you have no ability to take risks, and define your own path, much less able to innovate and get things done.
Ask a CEO of a major outfit if you don't believe me, I know a good number of them, they'll say the same.
Or as we said -- an engineer is a guy who solves multiple problems a week, and writes a report about them all weekly. A PhD takes 7 years to solve one problem and write one report. Who would you hire? And the old argument that at lest PhD's solve hard, unique problems is now an utter joke, just go read some dissertations about things -- and if you know history, a heck of a lot of them are about things known 30 years ago, and are either a minor refinement (at best) or the result of re-doing forgotten history.
So, yeah, if you want to be a wage slave, be a scientist, or be better paid at some other related thing, like engineering. If you want to take chances and have them pay, start your own business -- which is much harder than either, which is why it pays better when you succeed.
Sadly, and as a scientist -- I have to agree. Most scientists aren't worth much, and often graduate with a high degree knowing less than I did in high school, in terms of actually having useful knowledge and the ability to apply it.
Further, the government funded big science system makes this worse, and self perpetuating. Back when at least some of it was privately funded, and therefore merit pay, the good scientists at least did well, and things progressed a lot faster than now.
All you have to do is remove the vote from anyone getting government money, which simply makes sense anyway, as they'll vote themselves bread and circuses till it DOES fall over, and have in every empire in history so far.
Of course, that's not going to be a popular idea, and one of the tricks of the left (and no, I'm not on the right, they're just as messed up, but differently) is to make sure that no one doesn't get some sort of support/bribe/dole so that can't ever happen as it would be end of game for them and their ideas.
I didn't think of this. Robert Heinlein did. It's the answer. It's obviously right that those who net-pay should decide what that money goes to. But try selling that idea to the huge percentage who are just takers -- but who have the vote.
Better yet -- I have 10 million. I put 9 of them into bonds/stocks (not risk free either), and one into research on high risk but high payoff stuff. It's called diversification.
And in fact, those numbers are true of myself, a retired successful inventor. I trade the markets for my income on the 90%, and put the other 10% into very risky but potentially high payoff fusion research, self directed, and done on the premises. And it's promising, but who knows? I do this not for the money, but because someone has to or the world is going to be a much sicker puppy than now, and no one else is really doing serious work on anything other than tokomaks in any other situation than "big, committee and politics driven science" which is doomed to failure even if one of those smart dudes has the crucial idea -- he'll just be voted down and things will go on making no progress until even governments decide it's a waste of money (like now).
Whereas a self-directed and self-funded researcher has no such problems. When I find a new thing, or an unexpected thing, I can change direction in less time than typing this sentence. No go in big science on that one.
Today, if someone had brought Fleming a contaminated petri dish, he'd toss it in the trash, yell at them to get it right next time, and write a downgrade on the lab assistants performance review. We'd not have penicillin if science then was like it is today.
Finns seem pretty cool (except some Nokia management) but I'd never be happy with not really knowing the language where I lived. Kind of fond of long warm days now and then, too.
I bet I could learn to speak British, Aussie, Kiwi, and other similar languages fine, though. Heck, one day I might learn Canadian, eh? I already speak American and Redneck, after all. Oh, that's it, I'll learn Hawaiian.
All ten or so of the above jokes are in your imagination. I didn't write them until after I read my post.
Parse the title! Online delivery? Food->bits->food? Wow! Science really has moved on.
So you think a tiny amount of people are ethical? Wow, I guess refusing to allow schools to teach right from wrong worked out great! And due to everything being everywhere these days, the threat of "I won't do any more business with you" isn't much of a threat anymore. I didn't realize y'all city boys were getting so degraded. Out here if you forget your money at the store, you just say so and pay next time. Still. Get away from that kind of "civilization" where ethics are unknown while you still can, is all I can say.
But here's what's evil. In two cases (both involving phone companies) I've been hit by collections people who try (but in my case failed) to make your life a living hell. No, they don't have to prove they own the debt unless you sue them -- which you can't do in your jurisdiction, so get out the wallet anyway.
And in both cases the phone companies had admitted I was right, they were wrong, I didn't owe them anything -- that's hard enough to get, anyone else here ever done that? But once that debt is sold, it's a Pyrrhic victory at best -- the calls keep coming.
One was from AT&T about tens of thousands of dollars of phone calls supposedly made to psychics -- on a dedicated line that had a modem on it 24/7 (remember those days?) -- this psychic setup owned its own collection agency. They're gone (jailed) now, but I still here from the agency that bought this "debt" a few times a year. Dream on, suckers -- I have logs from the sysadmin at my ISP, but it's too pita to take those suckers to court, I have a life.
The other was a cancellation fee Verizon admitted they didn't owe me, for allowing me to buy a phone in an area where they had exactly zero coverage within 25 miles of my house. Phone was nice at the store...and I paid for over a year for a phone I could only use about once a week while grocery shopping. That one is still calling and sending letters and threats, and DID mess up my credit rating.
If I wasn't rich -- I'd care -- have no use for credit, thanks. You should care though. How many people here could deal with a screwed credit rating by one of these guys. Yeah, a pragmatist would just pay them and forget it. I will never do that. Some of us do have principles. And it's not exactly like I'd be ripping off Mother Teresa, eh?
The laws are written such that correctness of the collector is assumed, in other words, you are by law, explicitly assumed guilty unless you prove otherwise, and in a court and jurisdiction of the other guy's choosing. Go check -- I'm not making this up, and paid a lawyer to find it out.
Sure, people who don't pay for what they get are a drag on everyone. I'm just upset that this is how they deal with it, since not everyone who is not paying is one of those -- some are being ripped off and extorted with "credit rating damage". That's not morally any different than some legal firm sending out thousands of "settle up or go to court" letters to random addresses for the RIAA -- no different at all.
Ok, I'll bite, though off topic. Sure it could. So could your average sniper (who are all above average).
That's murder, not killing (there is a difference, mr AC moralist). And once you start down that slippery slope and declare the technique usable, by example, guess who's next in the cross hairs? The politician who authorized it.
While they don't mind putting us on slippery slopes to our detriment, this is a little close to home for those asshats.
Yeah, it's where the intelligent people all live, but you'd not understand that, or why. Who wants to live jam packed like sardines with a bunch of politicians, lawyers, beltway bandits, and criminals? Evidently a lot of people in NOVA. You know, the ones MY tax dollars subsidize because you can't control your development, your road costs, and the general assholery of your local governments.
But shhhh - don't tell anyone. We like it here without y'all. West Virginia is only "almost heaven" after all.
Yeah, like my non-cloud network with 3-5 days of battery backup, generators, and solar PV power. Is that what you mean? And I'm just a small time guy (only about 10 machines 24/7). They can't provision for their pro network servers? What a friggin joke.
Further, how do they prove it was you driving? The ticket goes to driver, not a vehicle. What if someone else was driving the car?
I once got off a fairly major one because they couldn't prove I was driving (they chased, but did not catch me, it was quite a hot rod). Did that change?
Can't top parent, but yes, I've actually done 100% of those things and more besides, and now do self funded fusion research, which I write about at the link in my sig.
Yes, I wrote my own opsys and drivers, and not for just one target either -- many embedded systems run my stuff.
Yes, I dug my own well, and the septic too.
Yes, I'm off the grid, on PV (corporate whore, the panels were made by Solarex now owned by BP) since 1980.
Bake my own bread, check. Grow a lot of my food, and hunt some of the rest, check. Gourmet cook, check.
And I wrote a book about Digital Audio Processing, and I too forget how it ends. I think with full industry adoption of the software I gave away with it.
Snarky? Yeah, a lot of people wish guys like me didn't exist, because we make THEM look so bad. But actually, we're not all that rare...
For one thing --
But for another, winXP, as parent pointed out, might as well have been yesterday -- last time I hooked one (in Virtual box, of course) to the internet, it downloaded a gawd awful amount of brand new, not 10 year old, code. So much it took an hour to get, and most of another to install during "shutdown".
The only reason they want it dead is to force sales of their even higher priced, but not really better, new stuff. Actually, I gave vista an honest shot, but lost all possible future interest in MS right after that, and I'd actually given them a lot of slack before that when win 2k broke dos and invalidated quite a lot of my old, but very very expensive to replace CAD stuff. Fortunately, linux has a decent dos emulator, but that seems beyond what MS can achieve (!!??!!).
+5. Been there myself, and what Geo did was quite reasonable. It really was, in a sense, a win, since it was Sony who decided to offer settlement, and avoid setting a legal precedent that would be bad for US. I'd bet the limitations on him all involve only Sony, and the less anyone has to do with those jerks, the better.
The settlement did help Sony, as the line they were pushing int he GeoHot case to get the judge and jurisdiction they wanted, along with so much discovery they know more about you -- not just GeoHot, look at the other stuff they got, than the CIA knows about a "person of interest" -- that line was going to make them lose the class action suit for removing other OS, which was going to be a rather large monetary loss and precedent for them.
You can't get away with telling one court one thing, and another one a different thing, in these days of the internet (and Groklaw, sadly, going away-- hope something else springs up there as it's needed). That was the spot Sony found themselves in, and their corporate shell game wasn't good enough to pull it off. So, we should be looking at and supporting the class action suit so they lose both times, frankly.
In other words, move on -- there are more battles to fight, and this one wasn't really a loss at all, Sony might have learned a little something here, finally.
Because HCL tastes too much like lemonade and would clash with the other flavors in the chili?
In fact, the effect on skin (and tongue) is much less with the HCL. Now, if you were talking sulfuric or nitric.... But you wouldn't want to become flammable yourself - that's how you make guncotton.
As was pointed out on Groklaw, there were some very serious lies being told to one court or the other when comparing the two cases. They had to drop one or lose both and get caught lying (again), or just lose the GeoHot case anyway, after spending a lot more money. They were trying to play a corporate shell game. In one case, it's all SCEA, the other they claim it's all SCEI -- for the same stuff. Has to be one or the other, and Groklaw (those pesky kids) did the world yet another service by pointing that out.
Pure corporate calculation -- where do we have more to lose, won out. Again.
STill never going to do any business with Sony ever.