if Bush had followed his election winning platform of 2000 I don't think we would be in the war right now. Bush's http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/biography.html platform was almost as libertarian as Ron Paul's (and Alan Keyes' who was running in 2000 too).
What the fuck happen to the Republican Party and being conservative? What a Bass Ackwards platform reversal this turned out to be. It's been thrown out the window. Even decent men (Ronald Reagan http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/rr40.html was an honorable and decent man) go bad. It was the Reagan administration that brought us civil forfeiture in the pursuit of the War on Drugs. William Howard Taft http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/wt27.html probably the greatest US president ever, couldn't get reelected a second term and ushered in Woody Wilson http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/ww28.html probably the most evil US president ever.
All of the worst things the Clinton http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/bc42.html administration tried to throw at us were defeated again and again until they were all passed in a heartbeat in the so-called Patriot Act.
The track record is clear. The only losers in the upcoming election are going to be the American people and the hapless victims of whomever the powers that be decide shall be the next target of war.
On FreeRepublic.com, repeatedly. Americans, particularly the Democratic Party, are not ready to elect a black man as president. (I do not believe US allies would accept a black president either, but that is a separate issue. Hatred of the self-designated black leadership runs very deep). A black woman might have had a chance, but the only possible candidate was Condaleeza Rice and she (and the Republican Party - she should have been groomed as an electable VP replacement for Cheney for the last presidential election) blew it.
And to all the losers on FreeRepublic who called me an idiot for writing that Dick Cheney would never be elected President, I just want to say Ack Thhhpppuuut.
Given how a seemingly clear cut reason to war (WMD) has been undercut, I think no democrats and few republicans would fund another pre-emptive war. Sadly, that's not the sense I'm getting. Of the candidates still running, only Ron Paul is anti-war and the Republicans appear to have successfully placed the meme that the preemptive war in Iraq is necessary for "safety".
Obama is never going to be nominated, for reasons I posted eight years ago on another forum. He is being advised in foreign affairs by Zbignew Brzezinski (if I spelled that right, w00t!) and even if he is nominated and wins will be pro-war. Hillary! must prove she has a bigger strap-on than any of her peers with real ones. Mccain, of course, has publicly stated that he will keep the war going in Iraq for a hundred years. Who knows what Romney thinks? He changes his mind so often it's difficult to keep up with him. Bah.
I would vote for Hillary! solely on the basis that I think she can do the least damage as President because she's a devisive personality (gridlock is Good!), except that I'm afraid that she'll be more likely to go to war than any other candidate.
Bad and difficult times ahead for anyone with a blue passport. Take great care when traveling.
It's called filters and it works great on Usenet. Unfortunately it takes work. Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen's scoring mode in Gnus was a great idea at the time, but even with work it didn't work all that well in real life (sorry Lars).
Google seems to do a little better with gmail, but it's far from perfect and is getting worse over time as SPAMmers get more sophisticated. I regularly have mailing list mail misfiled as SPAM and get SPAM in my inbox. I also have a decade+ old email address that I've used to post to Usenet.
Any company[microsoft.com] that keeps it's customers must be doing something right. Ouch. You win (except for the grammar - it's "its" not "it's"). I guess I'll stop reading and post my Slashdot account on Ebay for sale.
I spell it SPAM to avoid infringing on the trademark of Hormel. UCE - Unsolicited Commercial Email never caught on. Your mileage obviously does vary. Actually, I don't really like to call it SPAM, I prefer calling it tofu. I despise tofu, however it is cooked.
Spam and pork in the USA is a problem, but it is a very different discussion.
Sometimes it's really hard to find the wheat amongst the chaff. Yeah, but so what? That's always been true anywhere, well except for moderated newsgroups on Usenet.
Moderation sucks and slashdot moderations suck harder. Read at -1, ignore the moderation and skim past the offensive posts.
There's a lot of entertaining material here, you just have to get past the moderation to see most of it. I'm not the only low 5-digit or less Slashdot ID who still reads and posts here. Any web site that keeps readers for over a decade is doing something right.
Since most people are apparently too stupid to notice how the greedy bastards are taking away their freedoms My taste for American football has been seriously dampened by the TV broadcasting rules. For awhile I was able to listen to Miami Dolphins football on the radio via internet (when the TV market for southern California was ruined by the Oakland Raiders and the Rams), but then I moved overseas and although I've missed it, I haven't missed it enough to jump through whatever hoops they want you jump through to see the teams you really want to see.
Geographic based broadcasting sucks, big time. Borders and geography are like so 20th century... Miami Dolphins/Yakult Swallows ftw!
It has been year of the Linux desktop for 10 years now over here. Going on 13 years[1] here and I've always had Unix boxes for desktops. I prefer serious systems.
Are you the Daniel Phillips who posts patches to lkml?
[1] But I've been participating in open source development for much, much longer than that.
For those of us still running Windows XP Statistics show that the preferred botnot OS of choice is Microsoft Windows XP. You are part of the problem, not solution. Upgrade your OS to Linux, Mac OS X, or Vista, I don't care which. Just upgrade it.
I don't quite get the spam thing anymore. It's solved. I'll bet that you've never had an important message bounced or misfiled as SPAM and I'm sure you have never run a mail server.
SPAM is the biggest internet problem and has been for a long time and just keeps getting bigger. Whether you see it or not, I guarantee you, you are paying for it.
When spyware started coming out people didn't didn't know about it to much. So they were under the impression the more software installed the better, still thinking like in the DOS days that software doesn't run in the background until you really want to use it. But then spyware was still relatively rare most people were using dial-up so making spyware wasn't effective it slowed down the internet connection enough to be noticed, also during the time Microsoft felt the need to Compete with Sun Microsystems Java Platform by making activeX, Which is faster then Java but without any security everything just ran natively in Windows, people and developers back then still haven't fully understood the advantage of making system independent code, started to use ActiveX for their stuff. Because a bunch of sites now require activeX to be installed everyone just went yea install without reading. That gets you an "F" from your friendly neighborhood spelling and grammar nazi, but I doubt you care.
The blame lies with Microsoft middle management. We (network aware people) already knew running code coming from off host was a Bad Idea - the unshar program was written for a reason, even though it was processing clear text. Although Bill Gates clearly didn't understand the internet, his middle management should have and they are responsible for signing off on ActiveX and the other Microsoft security disasters by design (executing code attached to email and documents by default).
Any clueful person should have known that the kinds of things "introduced" by Microsoft Windows 95 were stupid - they had been discredited for almost a decade. I can excuse Bill Gates because I don't expect very high management to be clueful, but I cannot excuse the minions^h^h^h^h^h^h^hpeople who signed off on it.
It was a gradual processes and people who have a life besides computers let it slip until it was too late. Back away from the keyboard very slowly and keep your hands up.
I am an equal opportunity blamer. I also blame Jamie Zawinski and the other idiots who introduced JavaScript as all-time evil people too.
I'll provide a translation here, since it seems not everyone is up to speed on older email technology.
I managed to miss out on:: in my e-mail address. Decnet... the horror, the horror.
My first company email address used those, but they did not route mail outside of the cluster.
boo!tweekco!alizard@pacbell.com . . . or alizard%tweekco%boo@pacbell.com . Or even pacbell.com!boo!tweekco!alizard Mixed UUCP and domain routing with a relay. Yes, once upon a time it was a friendly act to provide an open mail relay.
Once upon a time I hacked sendmail (and sendmail.cf without any support tools) into System V/R2 on a system one UUCP hop off the internet and had to deal with all those forms. That's the kind of thing that's a whole lot more fun saying you did than actually doing it.
I've had !'s in my email address. As was posted here not too long ago, I just happened to be working for one of the first companies on the internet at the time they got their domain name.
It used to be that you wanted to get email from strangers... Thank God Microsoft fixed that.
We need to remember that there's nothing magic about 'com', 'net', 'org', 'edu' and 'mil' (and the relatively few others that have subsequently been created). .edu and.mil (and.gov) are special. They are reserved for United States institutions for education (colleges), military and the federal government respectively.
Why is there no '.auto' TLD for car companies and automobile enthusiasts? Because the way domain naming was designed, all such domains would be assigned under.auto.com for automobile sellers or.auto.org for the enthusiasts. It worked when only a handful of (very large) organizations had registered domain names.
The mistake of flattening the tree (to name an example that I still have a valid email address under, the Japanese government should be.japan.gov, not.go.jp) was made and everyone followed it when internet access was unleashed on the masses. National domains were politically expedient, but a stupid idea. Almost as stupid as the TLD.us being assigned geographically.
How many of you young folk in the United States have ever had an email address with multiple dots in it? My record is <steve@romulus.sedd.trw.com> or <baur@venice.sedd.trw.com> in the 1980s.
I surely know that. It comes off a bit odd that most self styled "free market" guys don't seem to. I'm all for the free market, but it is not a free market when I can't walk into a store selling computers and buy one O/S-less. San Jose, California really pisses me off. I can do that in Manila, so which is more 3rd world, Manila or San Jose CA? Ah well, the current state of the US dollar may add another dimension to that discussion.
We seem to be arguing against separate issues and are probably on the same side. My apologies. I use Linux as my desktop of choice at work (versus a Solaris box and installed over Microsoft Windows). The one time I willingly purchased a Microsoft Windows license was for a computer (with Microsoft Windows XP Media edition[1]) for my wife (stupid, stupid me, I thought she would be able to get more support for it), when it crashed so much she gave it away to one of her younger sisters. I guess most people have a much higher definition of acceptable pain than my wife or I do.
[1] No crapware installed, so I absolutely paid in full for a license, sigh.
I know, but in a properly functioning market, I would have returned it for a refund as I indicated. Nothing about the consumer computer market is "properly functioning". Microsoft, like the tobacco companies, has built up an extraordinary business where it's best selling product is either not used, or best not to use. Businesses with an Enterprise Microsoft license are not going to use a preinstalled O/S, they are going to immediately replace it with the version used by their business. You have to love the fact that the Enterprise license requires a pre-installed Microsoft license on the target machine in order to be legal.
Nobody, not even the Microsoft fanboys here, recommends using a pre-installed Microsoft O/S, calling it "crapware laden", etc. But on the other hand, they also defend the sale of such at a lower price than an O/S-free system due to the subsidization of the "crapware".
It's an amazing situation. Microsoft has everyone conditioned to paying for the same software repeatedly and very few people see the problem with that. On the other hand s/Microsoft/RIAA/ and s/software/music/ and most folks have a problem.
So long as this model works, it will never be The Year for (Linux|Apple) on the desktop and it won't matter one way or the other. Microsoft still gets all its licensing fees and mindshare.
Then it would not have been counted. Of course. See the other post from some guy who boasted of having a whole department of computers where the pre-installed Microsoft O/S was never booted. None of it matters when Microsoft gets its licensing fees one way or the other.
The big winner is not likely to be somebody other than Microsoft. Maybe it will be the ReactOS guys, if instead of aiming at whatever the most recent version of Microsoft Windows is they aim instead at recreating Microsoft Windows XP. Microsoft still wins in the end because they own the "Windows standard" in a way that AT&T or its later licensees never managed to own a Unix standard.
And then there is that thing about December 21st, 2012 that's supposed to kill us all. I don't know about that, but there's definitely the End Of time(2) As We Now Know It coming to the 32-bit world in January 2038.
When an undersea trunk gets cut it's not a one day outage. Yeah. I was on assignment in China when this same thing happened. For most of the week we were there, we had to link to the main office in Tokyo via dialup over POTS. Ugh.
There's redundancy to some parts of the world, but not enough everywhere.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but if the program is done right (using sizeof instead of constants to determine object sizes and such) couldn't you just recompile your code (if even that's needed) to just work in a 64-bit environment since the only factor here is how much memory you can allocate and use? For most well-written userland programs, that might work. My experience in doing a 64-bit clean Turbolinux distro in 2000/2001 was a constant frustration of getting a package 64-bit clean and having it broken the next day when another developer upgraded the package.
So what would keep Microsoft from just recompiling the MS kernel to handle more memory? Because it wouldn't work. There are alignment issues to deal with besides a whole host of architectural issues like page size, etc. The Linux kernel until a few months ago had completely separate implementations of 32-bit -vs- 64-bit kernel mode on x86. Merging the two has been an immense amount of work and they're still not finished. The goal as I've read it on lkml is to try to get close, but that a total merge is impossible.
A specific example that came across today is the fact that x86-32 requires in-kernel software floating point emulation, but is close to impossible (and useless anyway) to implement for x86-64.
Get technical if you like. I'm not afraid to read. Google search on lkml, x86 merge and Ingo Molnar, Thomas Gleixner and H. Peter Anvin. I don't think a summary is written down anywhere, but there are megabytes of patches and (some) explanations to wade through.
So why do they count the forced bundled XP that came on my notebook and never even booted, being replaced by linux from the break as a windows sale? Microsoft got paid for it. Not counting it as a sale would constitute shady accounting practice.
All in all, I would say that Vista is not a better performer. But since when has a new Microsoft OS been faster than the old Microsoft OS that it intended to replace? Sure I am losing 1.5 to 2.5 FPS in games, but I feel that is acceptable given the newness of the OS. I find that an amazing summary.
I expect updates to software that it is intended to replace to run faster, take up less memory, have more features and have fewer bugs (like XEmacs 20.4 -vs- 19.16, KDE 4 -vs- 3, etc., etc.). Why should you settle for anything less?
the Linux kernel is one of the finest pieces of software to ever be built since the beginning of computers... I don't know if I would go that far, but it certainly has stood the test of time. I was hooked from day 1 when I found out that all of my favorite (at the time) software was already installed (Slackware February 1995 release with kernel 1.2.1).
What makes Linux successful (in the engineering sense) is the fact that everything is modularized and customizable, from userland components right down to the kernel. Linus' attitude certainly helps too. For all of the people out there struggling with Vista, how many have ever gotten a patch in the mail from Bill Gates to fix a problem? More than once I've gotten patches like that from Linus.
The microkernel "debate" isn't interesting. If existing userland plugs in and Just Works and runs with acceptable performance, I don't think anyone really cares.
If the true goal of a computer program for a school is to ready its students for the workplace Nope. The true goal of a computer program in school is to teach students how to program a computer.
Do you have any idea what Filipino schools are like? The private school I sent my stepson to for first grade had a "library" of five books, one of which was a college-level introduction to Shakespeare. (The local public was slightly better, but its library was still a sad, mostly empty room).
I hit the roof twice that first year. The first time was when their school-wide fundraising drive was to buy a tent. A bloody tent. The second time was when at the end of the year, my stepson was denied honors because of a less-than-enthusiastic donation to said tent.
(Bad experiences not-withstanding, I'm still going to keep my kids in school there, California schools are far, far worse).
Moving on to colleges, the only degrees available are 1 to 2 year "professional" programs designed specifically to export bodies to work overseas, usually at what most of you would consider slave wages. The most lucrative "career path" is to go somewhere like Japan or Singapore and get into the "entertainment" business.
Computer access is relatively available to almost everyone even in the jungle at numerous internet cafes. Young boys tend to be game players, young girls are heavily into the social network scene like Friendster. There is more of a problem keeping children away from computers. It is against the law for a child of school age to set foot inside an internet cafe during school hours.
The Philippines has made huge strides in understanding open source software economics in the time I've lived there. The profit margin on internet cafes is so low that necessarily every single seat you see is pirated (as are the available games). This program is indicative to the fact that the government is starting to figure out that teaching kids to steal Microsoft software when a reasonable alternative exists is Not A Good Thing.
This program is great and very badly needed. In my opinion as a parent with school children in Filipino schools.
This might be a cultural thing. In regions where mass transit is more frequently employed, such as Japan, people almost exclusively use text messages. SMS is popular in the Philippines, but not because of mass transit. An SMS text message costs 1 peso and you get around a hundred free messages when you purchase a 300 peso or higher prepaid card, an internet session costs 30-50 pesos per hour.
International text messages suck big time, but that's also economics.
Slashdot Mirror
All of the worst things the Clinton http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/bc42.html administration tried to throw at us were defeated again and again until they were all passed in a heartbeat in the so-called Patriot Act.
The track record is clear. The only losers in the upcoming election are going to be the American people and the hapless victims of whomever the powers that be decide shall be the next target of war.
On FreeRepublic.com, repeatedly. Americans, particularly the Democratic Party, are not ready to elect a black man as president. (I do not believe US allies would accept a black president either, but that is a separate issue. Hatred of the self-designated black leadership runs very deep). A black woman might have had a chance, but the only possible candidate was Condaleeza Rice and she (and the Republican Party - she should have been groomed as an electable VP replacement for Cheney for the last presidential election) blew it.
And to all the losers on FreeRepublic who called me an idiot for writing that Dick Cheney would never be elected President, I just want to say Ack Thhhpppuuut.
Obama is never going to be nominated, for reasons I posted eight years ago on another forum. He is being advised in foreign affairs by Zbignew Brzezinski (if I spelled that right, w00t!) and even if he is nominated and wins will be pro-war. Hillary! must prove she has a bigger strap-on than any of her peers with real ones. Mccain, of course, has publicly stated that he will keep the war going in Iraq for a hundred years. Who knows what Romney thinks? He changes his mind so often it's difficult to keep up with him. Bah.
I would vote for Hillary! solely on the basis that I think she can do the least damage as President because she's a devisive personality (gridlock is Good!), except that I'm afraid that she'll be more likely to go to war than any other candidate.
Bad and difficult times ahead for anyone with a blue passport. Take great care when traveling.
Google seems to do a little better with gmail, but it's far from perfect and is getting worse over time as SPAMmers get more sophisticated. I regularly have mailing list mail misfiled as SPAM and get SPAM in my inbox. I also have a decade+ old email address that I've used to post to Usenet. Any company[microsoft.com] that keeps it's customers must be doing something right. Ouch. You win (except for the grammar - it's "its" not "it's"). I guess I'll stop reading and post my Slashdot account on Ebay for sale.
I spell it SPAM to avoid infringing on the trademark of Hormel. UCE - Unsolicited Commercial Email never caught on. Your mileage obviously does vary. Actually, I don't really like to call it SPAM, I prefer calling it tofu. I despise tofu, however it is cooked.
Spam and pork in the USA is a problem, but it is a very different discussion.
Moderation sucks and slashdot moderations suck harder. Read at -1, ignore the moderation and skim past the offensive posts.
There's a lot of entertaining material here, you just have to get past the moderation to see most of it. I'm not the only low 5-digit or less Slashdot ID who still reads and posts here. Any web site that keeps readers for over a decade is doing something right.
How that can be moderated +5 "informative" is beyond me. Hey moderators, pass the crack pipe!
Geographic based broadcasting sucks, big time. Borders and geography are like so 20th century
Are you the Daniel Phillips who posts patches to lkml?
[1] But I've been participating in open source development for much, much longer than that.
SPAM is the biggest internet problem and has been for a long time and just keeps getting bigger. Whether you see it or not, I guarantee you, you are paying for it.
The blame lies with Microsoft middle management. We (network aware people) already knew running code coming from off host was a Bad Idea - the unshar program was written for a reason, even though it was processing clear text. Although Bill Gates clearly didn't understand the internet, his middle management should have and they are responsible for signing off on ActiveX and the other Microsoft security disasters by design (executing code attached to email and documents by default).
Any clueful person should have known that the kinds of things "introduced" by Microsoft Windows 95 were stupid - they had been discredited for almost a decade. I can excuse Bill Gates because I don't expect very high management to be clueful, but I cannot excuse the minions^h^h^h^h^h^h^hpeople who signed off on it. It was a gradual processes and people who have a life besides computers let it slip until it was too late. Back away from the keyboard very slowly and keep your hands up.
I am an equal opportunity blamer. I also blame Jamie Zawinski and the other idiots who introduced JavaScript as all-time evil people too.
My first company email address used those, but they did not route mail outside of the cluster. boo!tweekco!alizard@pacbell.com . . . or alizard%tweekco%boo@pacbell.com . Or even pacbell.com!boo!tweekco!alizard Mixed UUCP and domain routing with a relay. Yes, once upon a time it was a friendly act to provide an open mail relay.
Once upon a time I hacked sendmail (and sendmail.cf without any support tools) into System V/R2 on a system one UUCP hop off the internet and had to deal with all those forms. That's the kind of thing that's a whole lot more fun saying you did than actually doing it.
Ah, memories
I've had !'s in my email address. As was posted here not too long ago, I just happened to be working for one of the first companies on the internet at the time they got their domain name.
... Thank God Microsoft fixed that.
It used to be that you wanted to get email from strangers
The mistake of flattening the tree (to name an example that I still have a valid email address under, the Japanese government should be
How many of you young folk in the United States have ever had an email address with multiple dots in it? My record is <steve@romulus.sedd.trw.com> or <baur@venice.sedd.trw.com> in the 1980s.
We seem to be arguing against separate issues and are probably on the same side. My apologies. I use Linux as my desktop of choice at work (versus a Solaris box and installed over Microsoft Windows). The one time I willingly purchased a Microsoft Windows license was for a computer (with Microsoft Windows XP Media edition[1]) for my wife (stupid, stupid me, I thought she would be able to get more support for it), when it crashed so much she gave it away to one of her younger sisters. I guess most people have a much higher definition of acceptable pain than my wife or I do.
[1] No crapware installed, so I absolutely paid in full for a license, sigh.
Nobody, not even the Microsoft fanboys here, recommends using a pre-installed Microsoft O/S, calling it "crapware laden", etc. But on the other hand, they also defend the sale of such at a lower price than an O/S-free system due to the subsidization of the "crapware".
It's an amazing situation. Microsoft has everyone conditioned to paying for the same software repeatedly and very few people see the problem with that. On the other hand s/Microsoft/RIAA/ and s/software/music/ and most folks have a problem.
So long as this model works, it will never be The Year for (Linux|Apple) on the desktop and it won't matter one way or the other. Microsoft still gets all its licensing fees and mindshare. Then it would not have been counted. Of course. See the other post from some guy who boasted of having a whole department of computers where the pre-installed Microsoft O/S was never booted. None of it matters when Microsoft gets its licensing fees one way or the other.
The big winner is not likely to be somebody other than Microsoft. Maybe it will be the ReactOS guys, if instead of aiming at whatever the most recent version of Microsoft Windows is they aim instead at recreating Microsoft Windows XP. Microsoft still wins in the end because they own the "Windows standard" in a way that AT&T or its later licensees never managed to own a Unix standard.
There's redundancy to some parts of the world, but not enough everywhere.
A specific example that came across today is the fact that x86-32 requires in-kernel software floating point emulation, but is close to impossible (and useless anyway) to implement for x86-64. Get technical if you like. I'm not afraid to read. Google search on lkml, x86 merge and Ingo Molnar, Thomas Gleixner and H. Peter Anvin. I don't think a summary is written down anywhere, but there are megabytes of patches and (some) explanations to wade through.
I expect updates to software that it is intended to replace to run faster, take up less memory, have more features and have fewer bugs (like XEmacs 20.4 -vs- 19.16, KDE 4 -vs- 3, etc., etc.). Why should you settle for anything less?
What makes Linux successful (in the engineering sense) is the fact that everything is modularized and customizable, from userland components right down to the kernel. Linus' attitude certainly helps too. For all of the people out there struggling with Vista, how many have ever gotten a patch in the mail from Bill Gates to fix a problem? More than once I've gotten patches like that from Linus.
The microkernel "debate" isn't interesting. If existing userland plugs in and Just Works and runs with acceptable performance, I don't think anyone really cares.
Do you have any idea what Filipino schools are like? The private school I sent my stepson to for first grade had a "library" of five books, one of which was a college-level introduction to Shakespeare. (The local public was slightly better, but its library was still a sad, mostly empty room).
I hit the roof twice that first year. The first time was when their school-wide fundraising drive was to buy a tent. A bloody tent. The second time was when at the end of the year, my stepson was denied honors because of a less-than-enthusiastic donation to said tent.
(Bad experiences not-withstanding, I'm still going to keep my kids in school there, California schools are far, far worse).
Moving on to colleges, the only degrees available are 1 to 2 year "professional" programs designed specifically to export bodies to work overseas, usually at what most of you would consider slave wages. The most lucrative "career path" is to go somewhere like Japan or Singapore and get into the "entertainment" business.
Computer access is relatively available to almost everyone even in the jungle at numerous internet cafes. Young boys tend to be game players, young girls are heavily into the social network scene like Friendster. There is more of a problem keeping children away from computers. It is against the law for a child of school age to set foot inside an internet cafe during school hours.
The Philippines has made huge strides in understanding open source software economics in the time I've lived there. The profit margin on internet cafes is so low that necessarily every single seat you see is pirated (as are the available games). This program is indicative to the fact that the government is starting to figure out that teaching kids to steal Microsoft software when a reasonable alternative exists is Not A Good Thing.
This program is great and very badly needed. In my opinion as a parent with school children in Filipino schools.
International text messages suck big time, but that's also economics.