I've just read every post on this topic. The serious ones are either for or against Forbes and Stallman all four ways that can happen, with not much support for Forbes. Fine, okay so far.
But this reminds me of a fundamentalist Christian having a conversation with a committed Atheist. Forbes and slashdot are two different worlds inhabited by people with completely different views on reality. It's not surprising Slashdot readers disagree with Forbes; it would be surprising if they did not. But by and large Forbes readers agree with Forbes. And by and large, Forbes readers run the companies slashdot readers work for.
Now this is just one editorial, but it reflects a point of view that will become, I would guess, more prevalent as companies begin to take a hard look at just what they've gotten themselves into. The one thing the editorial does well is lay out the case in a way that is understandable: Socialist engineering by a radical. Uh oh! That's all I need to know. Any company executive looking into this issue is likely to come away with the idea that Stallman and GPL are bad news and that the company cannot afford to get close to either. Without even getting into the idea of social engineering by software, the controversy alone makes the uncertainity of the GPL path more than just a niggling worry. It becomes a feduciary responsibility to avoid it. To knowingly jump into version three is grounds for heads to roll.
Many "people's revolutions" such as the French or the Russian, for example, wind up fragmenting as some people want to be more equal than others. Neither Trotsky or Robespierre survived the zealotry they helped create. It will be interesting to see if the "Open Source Revolution" can survive this, or whether it will shoot itself in the foot while people such as, oh, Microsoft, for example, stand on the sidelines with their arms folded, and big grins on their faces.
It seems to me that it is time for the Open Source "Community" to prove they can do it.
It doesn't really matter what the IT Department thinks about this issue, or whether people in general think it is a good idea or not. It doesn't matter that some slashdot readers get all emotional over this and criticize all managers as idiots no matter who they are or where they work. The only thing that matters is whether a company has a legal right to do so. There are some states where employees have certain legal rights and expectations, but I guarantee you slashdot readers are not the ones who will make this determination. If it's a matter of whether or not a company has a fixed "policy" for this sort of thing, okay--that's just an internal 'legal' matter, right? Courts have consistently ruled that if an employer makes up a policy and writes it down, they then must follow that policy. A lot of successful employee lawsuits are precisely because the employee can prove the company did not follow their own written policy. The reason policy manuals grow so thick and unwieldy is because when a situation comes up that isn't written down somewhere inevitably some 'sea lawyer' employee will say, "Well, it isn't written down that I can't so you can't tell me I can't." I have personally had that happen. My boss and I took it upon ourselves to take a trip to a client one week, and the next week an offical policy came down that said no one could go on a trip without official authorization from headquarters. So as a result policy manuals start to cover how many times an employee can take a potty break and how many breaths per minute are allowed. Nothing can be relegated to common sense because there isn't any--and it's not just managers. Anyone who has been a manager in today's modern corporations knows employees' concept of entitlement is such that they make up 'rights' that don't exist and can make any manager's life miserable to the point that it ain't worth it. Maybe not at Google, but the workforce is not made up of the world's brightest engineers. the average IQ is still 100 and half the employees are below that.
Now, the company provides a computer and internet access for an employee to do his or her job. It is not required to provide Internet access so an employee can surf around anywhere he or she wants, sit on slashdot, and manage their home life from work. It doesn't matter wherther an employee is on a "break" or not--it's still a company-owned computer in a company-provided location and the employee is still on paid time. The employee is still using company resources for private use, no matter how small. In government there is a well-established legal principle called a "gift of public funds." It's not allowed, period, and the reason is to prevent you the taxpayer, from getting ripped off.
It has been well established that companies DO have the right to monitor employee e-mail. A case in Washingtson State was when an employee used state-owned computer and email for union activities. She was fired. It was upheld. There was a similar case a few years back with Epson. The employee was fired. It was upheld. It has also been well established that employers have the right to monitor internet usage and they have the right to filter internet usage. In some cases, it is required by the government.
To reiterate: It does not matter whether you agree with this or whether you think this is a good idea. There are all kinds of reasons to disagree with this and all kinds of reasons that this isn't a good idea. I'M NOT SAYING IT IS A GOOD IDEA.
Now, the IT Department is not in charge of running the company. By and large, the IT Department does not make the widgits. IT's job is to support the people who make the widgits, the people who decide which widgits to make and how many of them to make, and the people who provide the opportunity for employees to be hired and paid to make the widgits. IT has no "right" to resist or push back, and if it does just out of principle, it is WAY out of line. If an IT Department did that after being told not to, they should be fired.
To the AC who said it reminds him of work: good point. Why did you AC that? Of course, work does provide you with funds for food and shelter, so there's a minor difference there. WoW is all outgo and no income, unlike some other online worlds which are providing real income for people.
Now, the most interesting question to me is: Is "real" life a simulation? For those who freak out, leave the god stuff out of this for the moment. Just take it at face value. In every age and civilization people start making models of the world, analogs of life. Whether it is a model railoroad enthusiast building a toy landscape or a Virtual Reality guy setting standards for online sex, it's the same deal, the same drive. VR is going to get to the point where there is effectively no difference the same way movies (another aspect of this: acting) are going to get so good at simulating human actors that they can all be made by Pixar. Read some of the stuff by Ray Kurzweil. He seriously thinks we'll be able to move ourselves into machines and dispense with physical bodies, thereby becoming immortal. What if we've already been down that road before? This life thing is a pretty good and complex virtual reality all by itself. Advanced physics would suggest that once you get past atoms, there's nothing there. It's all thought: You create reality yourself.
Eventually we'll all find out, but when you finally do know, don't forget you read it on slashdot first.
A typical "employee computer" costs less than $1000. They get replaced USUALLY about every three years. The warranty expires, and they're ready to leave, though there are exceptions. I've still got a 386 running a perfectly capable dBase program (It prints labels fast and easy). Sometimes we compress a buying cycle; sometimes we stretch it, depending on the application. But the point is that when we replace the boxes next year, they will come with Vista installed on them already. So we'll be supporting, 2000, XP, and Vista at the same time, with the 2000's falling off the end as we speak. It will take three to four years before everything is Vista--and whatever is post-Vista. On a larger scale, the same is true with the servers. Training costs for employees are minimal. They're not doing anything that different and we don't want them to. Our major apps "run on Windows" in Java. They go through a rev a year; I guarantee the next new rev will run on Vista. The company is already exploring that to see what they need to do to support it, if anything. We have to do the upgrade anyway, so it's no greater a cost. The rest of the stuff is just normal.
IF we decide we can't live without the next version of Office (unlikely, I think), then we'd be looking at some costs and training all around, of course, but that decision would be based on what the software could do for us and is independent of the hardware/OS issue, which is going to take care of itself automatically.
So, at least for our org, the figures are vastly inflated.
They retain FOREVER what books or other products you've purchased, and they retain all your amazon searches. They use this to 'recommend' other titles or products you might be interested in. Their internal data tells them exactly what percentage of people will "bite' on this method. If it gets any more sophisticated you won't have to order anything anymore. Just check the box that says, "Send me what I was going to order." This is not transparent. They tell you what they are doing, and you can even go to the trouble of modifying how the tracking system works. So, for example, if I buy a toy for my kid I can uncheck that item so I won't be innundated with "If you liked this toy you might like this other one, too."
So, if you decide to buy "The Anarchist's Cookbook," you better pay cash at a local physical bookstore and hope you don't have to sign for it, like you do with ammunition.
Same exact thing happens in the automotive industry. The after-market vendors get really used to selling chrome wheels, nerf bars, and fancy mega-watt stereos, then {Insert name of car here} comes out with a "tremor" edition with a woofer the width of the car, chrome wheels and nerf bars in the standard package in a vehicle that doesn't even need a tune-up for 100,000 miles. Even turn signals used to be an after-market item! So Mr. Tune-Up goes belly up. Shouldn't have hitched your wagon to that horse, methinks. And the chrome wheel guys can now sell spin-while-stopped-at-a-light and impress, I dunno: yourself, I guess, but they sell for a grand a wheel instead of $200. And guess what: that guy's still in business.
I used to write and sell some pretty fancy DOS programs in dBase, and my killer-ass Lotus 1-2-3 budget planner spreadsheet would knock an accountant's socks off, but it pretty well doesn't matter now. I hear the guys selling TurboTax are doing pretty well....
I just found my entire BBS, Quicksilver, in a cardboard box. It's on a 105MB Hard Card with an ISA bus. Not sure what to do with it, though I kind of hate to toss it. It's a FidoNet board complete with Binkleyterm and a horrednous batch file to make it all work--really taught me some batch tricks. Oh, well, a casualty of the Internet.
I believe the writer meant just the opposite. Most students don't give a shit about IP rights, therefore it is ironic they would bring up the issue in this case, particularly about a system that is at least attempting to catch their cheating ways. Let the original writer correct me if I'm wrong, but that's how I interpret what he wrote.
And THAT'S why redundant feeds from different providers is necessary for any peace of mind. By the time I left my last job I had two T-1's from different providers entirely (I checked to make sure the cables were physically different coming at us via different paths), plus a third fiber optic feed. I was close to adding cable as a fourth. If the Net went out at that place I would have literally hundreds of people pissed within ten seconds. So have redundant feeds, redundant routers, redundant servers, redundant backups. Did I mention that redundancy is important?
This is/., right? Since everyone here is so bright, why would anyone stoop so low as to run Windows anyway? Who would even want to run a hot copy of Windows? Just to up your quota of snorts, laughs, and derisions? Hardly. MS doesn't deserve to make any money off of Windblows anyway. Besides, Linux is taking over the world. I've got the proof! At my little ole web site that only gets about a million hits a month, Linux is clearly surging ahead! Last count it represents.41% of all OS used! (That's POINT four one percent: Mac is 7.2%) Clearly the fact that XP phones home (using all that PRECIOUS bandwidth needed for stolen music downloads) is irrlevant..41%! At last the monster is about to be slain!
My GPS put me down the wrong way on a one-way road once. Screech, into the parking lot to turn around. But I needed the wake-up call to not trust the damned thing implicitly. I love it when it disagrees with me and says, "Make U-turn immediately, if possible." Mine has a vaguely Asian female voice. I call her "Suni" and she's my girlfriend. We have a dialogue in the car. My wife doesn't like it.
Been there, actually. I ran an ISP with 30K+ customers, and the inevitable happened several times. One time a subscriber wound up murdered after wanting to become a police informer for drug deals. The cops called wanting access to the email account for leads. Another time a subscriber died I don't know how and the family wanted access to the email account so they could "inform his email correspondents." I got the impression it might have been a case of suicide. It wasn't any of my business to ask. They had no power of attorney in the second case, and no subpoena in the first case. And this was well before probate when you could make the case someone "inherited" the account. (So do who pays for the account for the year of probate? Am I required to keep it open just because they can't settle the estate? Yet our privacy policy CLEARLY stated e-mail was a privacy issue and nobody but the subscriber could gain access to the account.
So here people are yelling "PRIVACY is my RIGHT!!" out of one side of their mouth, then this happens and they say, "Well, no, we REALLY didn't mean it this time." out of the other side.
So, hypothetically, what if your dead person had a bunch of incriminating stuff stashed in email? How bout 'child porn,' for example, or details of a sordid affair. Do your rights stop because you're dead? (Well, they can't prosecute you at least, but maybe your estate.)
This issue is a little trickier that it may seem at first glance. Rock and a hard place if you ask me. It was probably the worst kind of policy issue I had to deal with. Thank goodness that ISP is gone now and I don't have to deal with it.
READ the article I cited, THEN decide who is smoking. If you think this is incorrect, then prove differently--and cite your sources.
Porn reduced sex crime in Denmark over 60%
on
Pr0n's Effect On Society
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
A long time ago, in the early seventies, politicians in several countries were concerned enough about pornography to commission studies to see just what was going on. These studies were commissioned in the USA, UK, Canada, and Denmark. There may have been others. In 1972 the President's Commission on Pornography issued its report, now nearly impossible to obtain (lots of good pictures), detailing thirty studies of the effects of pornography. 29 studies showed no correlation between pornography and aberrant behaviors, i.e.: crime. The Commission therefore recommended that laws against pornography be abolished. Though the study was commissioned before his term of office, Nixon was President at the time, and he totally rejected the conclusions of the study. The same conclusions were reached by the studies in the UK, Canada and Denmark. Canada and the UK reacted similar to the US. Denmark did not. Instead, they took the study results at face value and de-criminlaized pornography.
Then an odd thing happened. Within a single year sex-related crimes in Denmark went DOWN over 60%! See: "The effect of easy availability of pornography on the incidence of sex crimes: The Danish experience" Journal of Social Science, Vol 29:3 (1973), pp. 163-181. For a fuller accounting see "Porn Alley: Now at your local public library," by yours truly. Computers in Libraries, Vol 19:10, November-December, 1999, pp. 32-35. This may be available online.
There was a second commission on pornography in the US headed up by attorney general Meese. They had half the amount of money over ten years later, meant a few times, had some public meetings, went to some adult bookstores, and concluded that porn was bad. The history of this farscical commission is a real hoot to read. The commissioners in this case claimed exposure to pornography was damaging, but their year-long exposure to such somehow unaffected them. I wish I could cite the book that details this, but darned if I can find it. If only I had the software slashdot talked about a couple of days ago....
Now, if you have a moralistic issue about pornography, that is still valid, so all the folks who are posturing about porn treating women as objects and how unfair nature was to wire men and women differently, and how God doesn't like it, well, you just go for it. But if you're talking in scientific terms, the evidence would suggest that pornography does not create more crime, but it does create less crime. Nearly every study done suggests that is true and a whole country has proven it in real time. If you're going to assail the scientific evidence, you're going to have to do a lot more than just voice your opinion. That's not to say that a big political uproar cannot be made by rousing the ignorance and moral outrage of the populace, but the entire issue is based on nonsense.
Not trying to be critical or funny, but you're not normal. Your need to use Office or Windows isn't compelling enough for you to keep using them. Most people who buy Office and Windows don't see much of an alternative. Linux, Open Source, etc. are simply not on the radar screen. They don't read the EULAs either, by the way; they just use the products. When pushed to "validate" their product, they just go ahead and do it and don't worry about it. Where you can't be bothered with EULAs, they can't be bothered with DRM. After all, they're legit, so who cares? My point really is that the average customer for this software will go through the hoops as long as it amounts to a coupla clicks. You're a lot more sophisticated and you see the alternatives. But there's not a sufficient number of people like you to make a difference to the market.
Linux box using sendmail and Pine. 200 users. A few whiners on Outlook. It's the old 80/20 rule. Only a few users actually abuse the system and tend to keep thousands of messages with the ususal excuses. Slightly un-related: One fellow uploaded several hundred megs of MP3 files to the common directory, whereupon the backup tapes overflowed. Took awhile to discover why. I gave him 24 hours to get them off or face deletion, problem solved. For the packrats, disciplinary procedures are the only thing that make them comply. Also, rm -r/home/dumbass/mail works okay. Dunno what happened. Must've overflowed or something. Never seen it do that. Sorry. Mutsa been too much stuff in there.
This whole issue is predicated on the idea that Holy Blood Holy Grail was the first to come up with the idea. In fact, the Jesus/Magdalene marriage thing has been around for a long, long time. HBHG is not the first to come up with it; they just made it more popular. It's probably a moot point since the suit ought to be DOA anyway, but pretend it went forward for amoment: All Dan Brown has to do is cite the several dozen books prior to HBHG with the same idea.
I run both on XP Pro. They (and XP) are both completely updated. They both still "work." Microsoft did not flag NAV or any of its parts. NAV still "works." Yet another excuse to dump on MS. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. And the CIA invented and spread AIDS, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Big deal. Just another opportunity to bash Microsoft with no evidence or clue.
I've just read every post on this topic. The serious ones are either for or against Forbes and Stallman all four ways that can happen, with not much support for Forbes. Fine, okay so far.
But this reminds me of a fundamentalist Christian having a conversation with a committed Atheist. Forbes and slashdot are two different worlds inhabited by people with completely different views on reality. It's not surprising Slashdot readers disagree with Forbes; it would be surprising if they did not. But by and large Forbes readers agree with Forbes. And by and large, Forbes readers run the companies slashdot readers work for.
Now this is just one editorial, but it reflects a point of view that will become, I would guess, more prevalent as companies begin to take a hard look at just what they've gotten themselves into. The one thing the editorial does well is lay out the case in a way that is understandable: Socialist engineering by a radical. Uh oh! That's all I need to know. Any company executive looking into this issue is likely to come away with the idea that Stallman and GPL are bad news and that the company cannot afford to get close to either. Without even getting into the idea of social engineering by software, the controversy alone makes the uncertainity of the GPL path more than just a niggling worry. It becomes a feduciary responsibility to avoid it. To knowingly jump into version three is grounds for heads to roll.
Many "people's revolutions" such as the French or the Russian, for example, wind up fragmenting as some people want to be more equal than others. Neither Trotsky or Robespierre survived the zealotry they helped create. It will be interesting to see if the "Open Source Revolution" can survive this, or whether it will shoot itself in the foot while people such as, oh, Microsoft, for example, stand on the sidelines with their arms folded, and big grins on their faces.
It seems to me that it is time for the Open Source "Community" to prove they can do it.
It doesn't really matter what the IT Department thinks about this issue, or whether people in general think it is a good idea or not. It doesn't matter that some slashdot readers get all emotional over this and criticize all managers as idiots no matter who they are or where they work. The only thing that matters is whether a company has a legal right to do so. There are some states where employees have certain legal rights and expectations, but I guarantee you slashdot readers are not the ones who will make this determination. If it's a matter of whether or not a company has a fixed "policy" for this sort of thing, okay--that's just an internal 'legal' matter, right? Courts have consistently ruled that if an employer makes up a policy and writes it down, they then must follow that policy. A lot of successful employee lawsuits are precisely because the employee can prove the company did not follow their own written policy. The reason policy manuals grow so thick and unwieldy is because when a situation comes up that isn't written down somewhere inevitably some 'sea lawyer' employee will say, "Well, it isn't written down that I can't so you can't tell me I can't." I have personally had that happen. My boss and I took it upon ourselves to take a trip to a client one week, and the next week an offical policy came down that said no one could go on a trip without official authorization from headquarters. So as a result policy manuals start to cover how many times an employee can take a potty break and how many breaths per minute are allowed. Nothing can be relegated to common sense because there isn't any--and it's not just managers. Anyone who has been a manager in today's modern corporations knows employees' concept of entitlement is such that they make up 'rights' that don't exist and can make any manager's life miserable to the point that it ain't worth it. Maybe not at Google, but the workforce is not made up of the world's brightest engineers. the average IQ is still 100 and half the employees are below that.
Now, the company provides a computer and internet access for an employee to do his or her job. It is not required to provide Internet access so an employee can surf around anywhere he or she wants, sit on slashdot, and manage their home life from work. It doesn't matter wherther an employee is on a "break" or not--it's still a company-owned computer in a company-provided location and the employee is still on paid time. The employee is still using company resources for private use, no matter how small. In government there is a well-established legal principle called a "gift of public funds." It's not allowed, period, and the reason is to prevent you the taxpayer, from getting ripped off.
It has been well established that companies DO have the right to monitor employee e-mail. A case in Washingtson State was when an employee used state-owned computer and email for union activities. She was fired. It was upheld. There was a similar case a few years back with Epson. The employee was fired. It was upheld. It has also been well established that employers have the right to monitor internet usage and they have the right to filter internet usage. In some cases, it is required by the government.
To reiterate: It does not matter whether you agree with this or whether you think this is a good idea. There are all kinds of reasons to disagree with this and all kinds of reasons that this isn't a good idea. I'M NOT SAYING IT IS A GOOD IDEA.
Now, the IT Department is not in charge of running the company. By and large, the IT Department does not make the widgits. IT's job is to support the people who make the widgits, the people who decide which widgits to make and how many of them to make, and the people who provide the opportunity for employees to be hired and paid to make the widgits. IT has no "right" to resist or push back, and if it does just out of principle, it is WAY out of line. If an IT Department did that after being told not to, they should be fired.
However, if these requests ar
Kind of reminds me of reading slashdot.
To the AC who said it reminds him of work: good point. Why did you AC that? Of course, work does provide you with funds for food and shelter, so there's a minor difference there. WoW is all outgo and no income, unlike some other online worlds which are providing real income for people.
Now, the most interesting question to me is: Is "real" life a simulation? For those who freak out, leave the god stuff out of this for the moment. Just take it at face value. In every age and civilization people start making models of the world, analogs of life. Whether it is a model railoroad enthusiast building a toy landscape or a Virtual Reality guy setting standards for online sex, it's the same deal, the same drive. VR is going to get to the point where there is effectively no difference the same way movies (another aspect of this: acting) are going to get so good at simulating human actors that they can all be made by Pixar. Read some of the stuff by Ray Kurzweil. He seriously thinks we'll be able to move ourselves into machines and dispense with physical bodies, thereby becoming immortal. What if we've already been down that road before? This life thing is a pretty good and complex virtual reality all by itself. Advanced physics would suggest that once you get past atoms, there's nothing there. It's all thought: You create reality yourself.
Eventually we'll all find out, but when you finally do know, don't forget you read it on slashdot first.
Asking slashdot readers this question is like hiring the captain of the Titanic to head up your water safety program.
A typical "employee computer" costs less than $1000. They get replaced USUALLY about every three years. The warranty expires, and they're ready to leave, though there are exceptions. I've still got a 386 running a perfectly capable dBase program (It prints labels fast and easy). Sometimes we compress a buying cycle; sometimes we stretch it, depending on the application. But the point is that when we replace the boxes next year, they will come with Vista installed on them already. So we'll be supporting, 2000, XP, and Vista at the same time, with the 2000's falling off the end as we speak. It will take three to four years before everything is Vista--and whatever is post-Vista. On a larger scale, the same is true with the servers. Training costs for employees are minimal. They're not doing anything that different and we don't want them to. Our major apps "run on Windows" in Java. They go through a rev a year; I guarantee the next new rev will run on Vista. The company is already exploring that to see what they need to do to support it, if anything. We have to do the upgrade anyway, so it's no greater a cost. The rest of the stuff is just normal.
IF we decide we can't live without the next version of Office (unlikely, I think), then we'd be looking at some costs and training all around, of course, but that decision would be based on what the software could do for us and is independent of the hardware/OS issue, which is going to take care of itself automatically.
So, at least for our org, the figures are vastly inflated.
They retain FOREVER what books or other products you've purchased, and they retain all your amazon searches. They use this to 'recommend' other titles or products you might be interested in. Their internal data tells them exactly what percentage of people will "bite' on this method. If it gets any more sophisticated you won't have to order anything anymore. Just check the box that says, "Send me what I was going to order." This is not transparent. They tell you what they are doing, and you can even go to the trouble of modifying how the tracking system works. So, for example, if I buy a toy for my kid I can uncheck that item so I won't be innundated with "If you liked this toy you might like this other one, too."
So, if you decide to buy "The Anarchist's Cookbook," you better pay cash at a local physical bookstore and hope you don't have to sign for it, like you do with ammunition.
Don't save your cookies and you'll get signed out every time.
Same exact thing happens in the automotive industry. The after-market vendors get really used to selling chrome wheels, nerf bars, and fancy mega-watt stereos, then {Insert name of car here} comes out with a "tremor" edition with a woofer the width of the car, chrome wheels and nerf bars in the standard package in a vehicle that doesn't even need a tune-up for 100,000 miles. Even turn signals used to be an after-market item! So Mr. Tune-Up goes belly up. Shouldn't have hitched your wagon to that horse, methinks. And the chrome wheel guys can now sell spin-while-stopped-at-a-light and impress, I dunno: yourself, I guess, but they sell for a grand a wheel instead of $200. And guess what: that guy's still in business.
I used to write and sell some pretty fancy DOS programs in dBase, and my killer-ass Lotus 1-2-3 budget planner spreadsheet would knock an accountant's socks off, but it pretty well doesn't matter now. I hear the guys selling TurboTax are doing pretty well....
Actually, Schrodinger's cat.
I just found my entire BBS, Quicksilver, in a cardboard box. It's on a 105MB Hard Card with an ISA bus. Not sure what to do with it, though I kind of hate to toss it. It's a FidoNet board complete with Binkleyterm and a horrednous batch file to make it all work--really taught me some batch tricks. Oh, well, a casualty of the Internet.
I believe the writer meant just the opposite. Most students don't give a shit about IP rights, therefore it is ironic they would bring up the issue in this case, particularly about a system that is at least attempting to catch their cheating ways. Let the original writer correct me if I'm wrong, but that's how I interpret what he wrote.
And THAT'S why redundant feeds from different providers is necessary for any peace of mind. By the time I left my last job I had two T-1's from different providers entirely (I checked to make sure the cables were physically different coming at us via different paths), plus a third fiber optic feed. I was close to adding cable as a fourth. If the Net went out at that place I would have literally hundreds of people pissed within ten seconds. So have redundant feeds, redundant routers, redundant servers, redundant backups. Did I mention that redundancy is important?
This is /., right? Since everyone here is so bright, why would anyone stoop so low as to run Windows anyway? Who would even want to run a hot copy of Windows? Just to up your quota of snorts, laughs, and derisions? Hardly. MS doesn't deserve to make any money off of Windblows anyway. Besides, Linux is taking over the world. I've got the proof! At my little ole web site that only gets about a million hits a month, Linux is clearly surging ahead! Last count it represents .41% of all OS used! (That's POINT four one percent: Mac is 7.2%) Clearly the fact that XP phones home (using all that PRECIOUS bandwidth needed for stolen music downloads) is irrlevant. .41%! At last the monster is about to be slain!
What? You were expecting Cowboy Neal to be appointed?
My GPS put me down the wrong way on a one-way road once. Screech, into the parking lot to turn around. But I needed the wake-up call to not trust the damned thing implicitly. I love it when it disagrees with me and says, "Make U-turn immediately, if possible." Mine has a vaguely Asian female voice. I call her "Suni" and she's my girlfriend. We have a dialogue in the car. My wife doesn't like it.
Been there, actually. I ran an ISP with 30K+ customers, and the inevitable happened several times. One time a subscriber wound up murdered after wanting to become a police informer for drug deals. The cops called wanting access to the email account for leads. Another time a subscriber died I don't know how and the family wanted access to the email account so they could "inform his email correspondents." I got the impression it might have been a case of suicide. It wasn't any of my business to ask. They had no power of attorney in the second case, and no subpoena in the first case. And this was well before probate when you could make the case someone "inherited" the account. (So do who pays for the account for the year of probate? Am I required to keep it open just because they can't settle the estate? Yet our privacy policy CLEARLY stated e-mail was a privacy issue and nobody but the subscriber could gain access to the account.
So here people are yelling "PRIVACY is my RIGHT!!" out of one side of their mouth, then this happens and they say, "Well, no, we REALLY didn't mean it this time." out of the other side.
So, hypothetically, what if your dead person had a bunch of incriminating stuff stashed in email? How bout 'child porn,' for example, or details of a sordid affair. Do your rights stop because you're dead? (Well, they can't prosecute you at least, but maybe your estate.)
This issue is a little trickier that it may seem at first glance. Rock and a hard place if you ask me. It was probably the worst kind of policy issue I had to deal with. Thank goodness that ISP is gone now and I don't have to deal with it.
READ the article I cited, THEN decide who is smoking. If you think this is incorrect, then prove differently--and cite your sources.
A long time ago, in the early seventies, politicians in several countries were concerned enough about pornography to commission studies to see just what was going on. These studies were commissioned in the USA, UK, Canada, and Denmark. There may have been others. In 1972 the President's Commission on Pornography issued its report, now nearly impossible to obtain (lots of good pictures), detailing thirty studies of the effects of pornography. 29 studies showed no correlation between pornography and aberrant behaviors, i.e.: crime. The Commission therefore recommended that laws against pornography be abolished. Though the study was commissioned before his term of office, Nixon was President at the time, and he totally rejected the conclusions of the study. The same conclusions were reached by the studies in the UK, Canada and Denmark. Canada and the UK reacted similar to the US. Denmark did not. Instead, they took the study results at face value and de-criminlaized pornography.
Then an odd thing happened. Within a single year sex-related crimes in Denmark went DOWN over 60%! See: "The effect of easy availability of pornography on the incidence of sex crimes: The Danish experience" Journal of Social Science, Vol 29:3 (1973), pp. 163-181. For a fuller accounting see "Porn Alley: Now at your local public library," by yours truly. Computers in Libraries, Vol 19:10, November-December, 1999, pp. 32-35. This may be available online.
There was a second commission on pornography in the US headed up by attorney general Meese. They had half the amount of money over ten years later, meant a few times, had some public meetings, went to some adult bookstores, and concluded that porn was bad. The history of this farscical commission is a real hoot to read. The commissioners in this case claimed exposure to pornography was damaging, but their year-long exposure to such somehow unaffected them. I wish I could cite the book that details this, but darned if I can find it. If only I had the software slashdot talked about a couple of days ago....
Now, if you have a moralistic issue about pornography, that is still valid, so all the folks who are posturing about porn treating women as objects and how unfair nature was to wire men and women differently, and how God doesn't like it, well, you just go for it. But if you're talking in scientific terms, the evidence would suggest that pornography does not create more crime, but it does create less crime. Nearly every study done suggests that is true and a whole country has proven it in real time. If you're going to assail the scientific evidence, you're going to have to do a lot more than just voice your opinion. That's not to say that a big political uproar cannot be made by rousing the ignorance and moral outrage of the populace, but the entire issue is based on nonsense.
Actuallty, I retired before she could. Then SHE got fired!
Not trying to be critical or funny, but you're not normal. Your need to use Office or Windows isn't compelling enough for you to keep using them. Most people who buy Office and Windows don't see much of an alternative. Linux, Open Source, etc. are simply not on the radar screen. They don't read the EULAs either, by the way; they just use the products. When pushed to "validate" their product, they just go ahead and do it and don't worry about it. Where you can't be bothered with EULAs, they can't be bothered with DRM. After all, they're legit, so who cares? My point really is that the average customer for this software will go through the hoops as long as it amounts to a coupla clicks. You're a lot more sophisticated and you see the alternatives. But there's not a sufficient number of people like you to make a difference to the market.
Linux box using sendmail and Pine. 200 users. A few whiners on Outlook. It's the old 80/20 rule. Only a few users actually abuse the system and tend to keep thousands of messages with the ususal excuses. Slightly un-related: One fellow uploaded several hundred megs of MP3 files to the common directory, whereupon the backup tapes overflowed. Took awhile to discover why. I gave him 24 hours to get them off or face deletion, problem solved. For the packrats, disciplinary procedures are the only thing that make them comply. Also, rm -r /home/dumbass/mail works okay. Dunno what happened. Must've overflowed or something. Never seen it do that. Sorry. Mutsa been too much stuff in there.
This whole issue is predicated on the idea that Holy Blood Holy Grail was the first to come up with the idea. In fact, the Jesus/Magdalene marriage thing has been around for a long, long time. HBHG is not the first to come up with it; they just made it more popular. It's probably a moot point since the suit ought to be DOA anyway, but pretend it went forward for amoment: All Dan Brown has to do is cite the several dozen books prior to HBHG with the same idea.
I run both on XP Pro. They (and XP) are both completely updated. They both still "work." Microsoft did not flag NAV or any of its parts. NAV still "works." Yet another excuse to dump on MS. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. And the CIA invented and spread AIDS, too.
Nope. I tried a "d" and just got Drudge Report ( a fair hit)