If that link doesn't work, try Thomas, put "spam" in the search field and click on "Can SPAM act of 2001".
The bill suggests that "Opt-Out" is a remedy. This is extreme social ignorance of the type that is common among politicians. For support for this view, see the comment #128 above, "Opt-Out is a game like Whack-a-Mole." Or, possibly the bill was actually written by lobbyists for spam-friendly ISPs. As John McCain says, the U.S. government is quite corrupt.
However, be careful when you think about this issue. The First Amendment has pulled us out of a lot of big messes in the past. It is possible that it would be difficult to write anti-spam legislation that does not interfere with the First Amendment. If it is not possible to outlaw spam without abridging the first amendment, then it is actually better to have spam.
Opt-Out is like the Whack-a-Mole game, only far worse.
When you opt out, you tell the sender that they have a responsive person. That makes you more valuable to them. They take your name off the one list to which you opted out, but they sell your name to at least 1,000 other lists to which you have not opted out.
If you were to opt out of each of the 1000 lists, they would sell your name each time to 1000 others, so you would eventually be on 1,000,000 lists. These numbers are an estimate, but are not far wrong.
Opt-out is an invitation to spending your whole life as an opt-outer.
A woman I met here told me the same story. She bought a computer, signed up for AOL, and immediately began getting about 30 porno messages a day.
So, the first thing she did every day was delete everything pornographic. To her, it was obvious that everything from Hotmail was x-rated spam, so she deleted it without reading it. She learned of her mistake when a friend called her and asked why she never responded to his e-mail.
I suggest that Microsoft should go all the way and call its new product HotBox . That way Microsoft could get back the 29 cents it spent for the name X-Box.
Microsoft has a difficult time hiring good marketing talent, apparently.
X is a name you use when you mean, "I don't know what." It is a symbol for the unknown. It's use as the name of a product causes the reader momentary confusion, not something you want in a trademark.
Besides, X-Box sounds like it is X-rated. There will be people who will think it is a porno appliance.
Comment #467 about installers gives a clear explanation about why users
would upgrade: If they upgraded, they would get a base of good DLLs. If they
still had problems with an application, they could report the problems to the
manufacturer, and the manufacturer would be obligated to fix it.
So, by allowing this problem to occur, Microsoft put users in the position of
having to upgrade their operating system every year, or face difficulties that
would be very expensive to cure any other way.
Microsoft Windows has thus been a subscription system, but it was a hidden
subscription.
Note that this problem occurred only for people who installed new
applications. People who didn't try new things would not have this particular
trouble.
In this particular conflict of interest, this is the kind of effect desired by
a monopoly, because people who never installed new software would probably be
the kind of people who would not pay more anyway.
Certainly, if you and I understood this, Microsoft did also. The problem may have originated from sloppiness (suckyness), but not fixing it was deliberate.
Thanks for your reply. Your comment is the first seriously pro-Microsoft
information I've ever read on Slashdot. I think that's good. I'm not
anti-Microsoft. I think I'm more pro-Microsoft than Bill Gates.
Right now Slashdot readers have a general sense that something is wrong with
Microsoft; I think that readers would benefit from a more complete
understanding.
Notice that you don't refute what I said; in a way you strengthen it. You say
that, after 5 years of sheer hell for its customers, Microsoft is fixing DLL
hell in Windows 2000.
The people at Microsoft are not dumb. They knew about the problems. As you and
other readers point out, there was always a way to solve the problem of DLL
hell.
Looking at the SDK, as you suggested, does not solve the DLL hell problem
because it is a social problem, not a technical one.
There has always been a way for each Microsoft Windows user to solve the
problem of DLL hell, as you point out: It takes a week of work after you have
spent many months attaining the knowledge necessary to understand what you
read during that week.
My comments are just my opinions. My opinion is that, in the transition from
Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, Microsoft achieved something the company wanted.
In Windows 3, the files for each program were largely segregated. That made it
possible for a user to copy a program by copying its files.
In Windows 95, the registry and the mixing of DLLs created copy protection. It
was still possible to copy a program by copying its files, but now it took
serious understanding.
My opinion is that the problems with Microsoft Windows 95, 95B, 98, 98SE, and
ME have been deliberate, on some level. There is a deliberate 64k or 2
megabyte memory limitation on what Microsoft calls GDI resources and USER
resources; this is what causes most of the crashes, even when the user has 256
megabytes of memory.
My opinion is that DLL hell is deliberate in the sense that Microsoft knew
about the problems, and waited 5 years to solve them. During that 5 years many
users upgraded 5 times, providing a huge amount of money to Microsoft. If
Microsoft had delivered a good operating system in the beginning, many users
would not have upgraded.
There is a conflict of interest for a commercial company in the business of
making operating systems. A company with a monopoly will make more money if
there are more bugs. The bugs have to be carefully managed; they must not be
too discouraging; they must be discouraging enough to make people enthusiastic
about upgrading.
That's why Linux is a brilliant social innovation. The GNU GPL removes the
social conflict. Linux is solely an attempt to make a good operating system;
the conflict of interest is gone.
We have Richard Stallman and others to thank for that social innovation. Soon
we will have an operating system that the whole world can use, and that has
none of the problems created by conflict of interest.
Linux is a gift from programmers and writers to all people. We have a way to
go in achieving the ultimate goal, but it looks like it won't be many years
before
Independence Linux,
RedHat,
Mandrake,
and others solve the problems of making Linux easy to use. Then there can be
just one mainstream operating system, available to all and usable by all,
without the problems caused by hidden adversarial behavior.
There seems to be a HUGE misunderstanding. Yes, there is a problem with shared
libraries. But the problem with shared libraries is minor compared to DLL
hell. Shared libraries are a sunburn. DLL hell is hell.
Microsoft DLL hell is largely caused by a deliberate attempt to create copy
protection by obscuring how the operating system works. You can't fix the
problem because you have no reasonable way of getting the information you
need.
This class of problem just doesn't exist with Open Source software. Yes there
may be difficulties, but all the information necessary is available. The
people who write Open Source software are smart and are solely motivated by
the desire to do a good job. You can be sure that they will find ways of
solving the problems. See comments #56, #165, #59, and #17 above for ways of
solving the problems.
On the other hand, to a commercial monopoly like Microsoft, DLL hell is an
advantage. It gets people to upgrade quickly in the hope of having
fewer problems.
See #53: "DLL hell would be if gnucash blew away the libs that gnumeric
needs, and then reinstalling gnumeric screwed up the libs that nautilus wants,
etc."
The licensing of intellectual property is quite complicated when all possible issues are considered.
The GPL is a work of legal art. Richard Stallman had lawyers write the provisions so that development of free software can proceed efficiently, without hidden hassles.
Most of the people who criticise Mr. Stallman do not understand the issues. For example, the length of a license is not a reason to think negatively about it.
Writing a good contract is as intellectually sophisticated as writing a good computer program. The provisions of the GPL are necessary to promote the sharing and re-use of software.
Stop and consider why there are 1,500,000 programmers using a trash language like Basic:
Microsoft put many fancy features into Visual Basic, and kept them out of Visual C and C++. So, to get speed of development, people were led into using Visual Basic.
Microsoft's real opinion of Basic is clear from the fact that Visual Basic is written in C and C++. (Someone at Microsoft told me this.).
Apparently Microsoft wants everyone else to use a poor language. Apparently Microsoft doesn't just want customers, the company wants inferiors.
In my opinion, the 207 pages of descriptions of abuses listed by the U.S. Justice Department in the Court's Findings of Fact are just a small part of the company's total abusiveness. This anti-trust case focuses mostly on Microsoft's mistreatment of large companies, but it is the abusiveness toward small companies and individuals that is most destructive.
Criticism of RMS -- Many people who have not taken the time to understand the issues criticize Richard Stallman. The fact that he is criticized a lot should not make you think that the criticism is valid.
Richard Stallman does the community a great benefit by making sure the movement doesn't drift off course. This requires a serious effort because most people don't take the time to understand the finer points of the law.
Sharing -- The GNU GPL license represents the efforts of many smart people to enforce a simple idea: I will share with you if you will share with me.
It doesn't matter how many clauses it takes to accomplish that result; the number of clauses required and the length of the contract is unimportant. What is important is the very simple result.
See Tony's excellent comment #87 for more about this.
Radical Idea? I Think Not. -- Anyone who is logical and patient and careful enough to write good code and debug it is capable of understanding the law.
Programmers should not take a passive attitude toward the law. You can understand the issues discussed here in far less time than it takes to learn how to program in C++. The fact that you are a programmer shows that you have the mental ability to be logical.
Yes, the law is not always logical. But programs are not always bug-free. If you can deal with bugs in programs you can deal with bugs in the law.
It might be possible under some circumstances, for example, to prepare a case yourself, and then take it to a lawyer to catch any shortcomings in what you wrote. Arguing a case yourself is allowed by the courts.
There is a useful comparison between GNU free software and do-it-yourself free litigation. Programmers pay for their hardware and give their time freely to produce an excellent product. Litigation requires the payment of court costs, and the same attention and intelligence might also produce similarly excellent results.
Note that those who make money from litigation might criticize this idea the way Microsoft's Steve Ballmer criticizes the GNU GPL and free software. Also note that I am not saying that prosecuting a case yourself would be easy. But since you already do difficult things every day, you are prepared for difficult efforts.
Thanks Dan -- I thought that Dan Ravicher's comments were excellent and extremely well written.
Great Comments -- See gmhowell's comment #110 for thoughts about damages.
See benenglish's comment #32 for an example of creative litigation.
Just for Fun is an excellent book. If you wonder about the
thoughts and feelings surrounding the beginning of Linux, this book will
satisfy your interest.
The contrast between Torvald's Book and the book by Bill Gates, The Road
Ahead, is huge.
Apparently Bill Gates does nothing for you unless you give him money. The
Road Ahead is a series of cliches. It reads as though someone went through
it and removed anything that might be of value. I think anyone deliberately
trying to write something so boring would probably accidentally say something
interesting.
The feeling of interacting with Microsoft and Microsoft products is a feeling
of constantly having to defend yourself against abuse. The products and the
company reflect the adversarial personality behind them.
For example, a lot of people don't realize that Windows 95, Windows 98, and
Windows ME crash because of deliberate limitations in the availability of
memory available for what Microsoft calls "User Resources" and "GDI
Resources". Anyone who doubts this should run the program called "Resource Meter" to verify one cause of the crashes.
People who inhabit the idealistic brotherhood of GNU free software find it
amazing that Microsoft deliberately did a poor job, apparently so users would
have a reason to upgrade. Think of all the lost work and lost time caused by
the crashing. That is deliberate! Microsoft deliberately causes people grief
so the company can make more money!
The feeling of interacting with Linux is a peaceful feeling that reflects the
peacefulness of the creators. Even someone who doesn't want to know anything about computers might read
Just for Fun to know more about one of the most important social
revolutions in the world today.
No one involved with Linux claims it is perfect. Linus Torvalds in his book
points out many of his own shortcomings. But both are remarkably free of
adversarial behavior.
This seems to be fiction invented by a writer who is well-educated in nuclear physics, and who is depending on the fact that his readers aren't.
For example, this paragraph from the story cannot be right:
"It was slow going until one day, driving through Clinton Township to visit his girlfriend, Heather, he noticed that his Geiger counter went wild as he passed Gloria's Resale Boutique/Antique. The proprietor, Gloria Genette, still recalls the day when she was called at home by a store employee who said that a polite young man was anxious to buy an old table clock with a tinted green dial but wondered if she'd come down in price."
This doesn't make sense. Geiger counters are not very sensitive because they depend on the ability of an energetic particle or photon to ionize gas molecules. This takes a lot of energy.
To detect the radiation on the street using a geiger counter, the radiation near where the source was stored would have to be so intense that the workers in the store would become sick.
Read message #173 above, by Kierthos (Kierthos@aol.com):
"And as I recall, the radioactive particles emitted by Uranium are alpha (okay, it's been a long time, so I'm guessing), which can be stopped by a stout pair of pants."
That's true. Beta radiation (fast electrons) doesn't travel far either. Another kind of radiation emitted by radioactive substances is gamma rays. Gamma rays are photons more energetic than X-rays. Gamma rays can penetrate easily. However, consider that the article quote implies that the distance over which the radiation was detected was from inside the store to the street. I'm guessing that would be at least 6 meters, or 20 feet.
Gamma radiation from a radioactive substance is omni-directional. The energy radiates the same way in all directions. As radiation spreads into a volume, its intensity is divided proportional to the square of the distance. This means that someone working in the store would be exposed to a far higher intensity of radiation than would be detectable in the street.
Also, the amount of radium (radioactive material) in luminous clock dials was extremely small. Radium was, and is, extremely expensive, so there never would have been very much in one place. Radium-226, the most common isotope, decays to half its original intensity in 1600 years. So there would never have been a reason to include an extra sample of radium with a clock.
Conclusion: This story is, at least partly, a hoax.
Never cooperate with abusers. Cooperation encourages abuse.
Once Microsoft delivers a real, working operating system (maybe Windows XP?), most people will never buy another one. To prevent the collapse of its business, Microsoft is trying to enter another business entirely.
But this time, more people know how abusive Microsoft is. This time, there are more users who understand computers. Hopefully, people are smart enough to know that they should not cooperate.
We Slashdot readers can help. If 100,000 of us each tell one non-technical person each day, at the end of a year we will have told 36,500,000 people not to cooperate with Microsoft's plans to dominate. we can make a significant difference in preventing abuse.
If you go to a chiropractor or other body work practitioner, beware of fraud.
In my experience, they say things designed to make you think they are doing something positive, while they are actually acting to make the problem continue, giving only temporary relief, because that is the way they make money.
In my experience, ALL of them have said things that are not founded in what they have reason to think is true. They say things designed to give themselves control over you, that they have found a patient is likely to accept.
The profession does not seem to attract logically-minded people.
Yoga is excellent, but stay away from the unfounded statements surrounding yoga.
The common kind of back pain is not directly related to "hunching over a keyboard and coding away". It is caused by pushing yourself too much, and being disconnected from other parts of your life.
Back pain is associated with weak abdominal muscles. If you strengthen your abdominal muscles, the most common kind of back pain will go away.
Slashdot Mirror
Representative Ron Wyden's number is 503-326-7525. I called his office and expressed my views.
The legislation is called the CAN SPAM Act of 2001.
If that link doesn't work, try Thomas, put "spam" in the search field and click on "Can SPAM act of 2001".
The bill suggests that "Opt-Out" is a remedy. This is extreme social ignorance of the type that is common among politicians. For support for this view, see the comment #128 above, "Opt-Out is a game like Whack-a-Mole." Or, possibly the bill was actually written by lobbyists for spam-friendly ISPs. As John McCain says, the U.S. government is quite corrupt.
However, be careful when you think about this issue. The First Amendment has pulled us out of a lot of big messes in the past. It is possible that it would be difficult to write anti-spam legislation that does not interfere with the First Amendment. If it is not possible to outlaw spam without abridging the first amendment, then it is actually better to have spam.
Opt-Out is like the Whack-a-Mole game, only far worse.
When you opt out, you tell the sender that they have a responsive person. That makes you more valuable to them. They take your name off the one list to which you opted out, but they sell your name to at least 1,000 other lists to which you have not opted out.
If you were to opt out of each of the 1000 lists, they would sell your name each time to 1000 others, so you would eventually be on 1,000,000 lists. These numbers are an estimate, but are not far wrong.
Opt-out is an invitation to spending your whole life as an opt-outer.
"The license will create FUD in the minds of it's recipients as to what tools they can use."
That is my opinion, also. Microsoft seems to be trying to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
It is interesting that Microsoft often acts like an emotionally disturbed 5-year-old: "Does not play well with others."
Sometimes organizations become so abusive that they destroy themselves.
We have a right to expect honest, open behavior.
Before we buy a product, we have a right to understand anything that might make us change our minds.
Maybe we should put some plans together for saving Slashdot, just in case...
A woman I met here told me the same story. She bought a computer, signed up for AOL, and immediately began getting about 30 porno messages a day.
So, the first thing she did every day was delete everything pornographic. To her, it was obvious that everything from Hotmail was x-rated spam, so she deleted it without reading it. She learned of her mistake when a friend called her and asked why she never responded to his e-mail.
I suggest that Microsoft should go all the way and call its new product HotBox . That way Microsoft could get back the 29 cents it spent for the name X-Box.
Need a marketing consultant?
I'll help you avoid foolishness like this.
Microsoft has a difficult time hiring good marketing talent, apparently.
X is a name you use when you mean, "I don't know what." It is a symbol for the unknown. It's use as the name of a product causes the reader momentary confusion, not something you want in a trademark.
Besides, X-Box sounds like it is X-rated. There will be people who will think it is a porno appliance.
Hidden Microsoft Windows Subscription System
Comment #467 about installers gives a clear explanation about why users would upgrade: If they upgraded, they would get a base of good DLLs. If they still had problems with an application, they could report the problems to the manufacturer, and the manufacturer would be obligated to fix it.
So, by allowing this problem to occur, Microsoft put users in the position of having to upgrade their operating system every year, or face difficulties that would be very expensive to cure any other way.
Microsoft Windows has thus been a subscription system, but it was a hidden subscription.
Note that this problem occurred only for people who installed new applications. People who didn't try new things would not have this particular trouble.
In this particular conflict of interest, this is the kind of effect desired by a monopoly, because people who never installed new software would probably be the kind of people who would not pay more anyway.
Interesting.
Certainly, if you and I understood this, Microsoft did also. The problem may have originated from sloppiness (suckyness), but not fixing it was deliberate.
Thanks for your reply. Your comment is the first seriously pro-Microsoft information I've ever read on Slashdot. I think that's good. I'm not anti-Microsoft. I think I'm more pro-Microsoft than Bill Gates.
Right now Slashdot readers have a general sense that something is wrong with Microsoft; I think that readers would benefit from a more complete understanding.
Notice that you don't refute what I said; in a way you strengthen it. You say that, after 5 years of sheer hell for its customers, Microsoft is fixing DLL hell in Windows 2000.
The people at Microsoft are not dumb. They knew about the problems. As you and other readers point out, there was always a way to solve the problem of DLL hell.
Looking at the SDK, as you suggested, does not solve the DLL hell problem because it is a social problem, not a technical one.
There has always been a way for each Microsoft Windows user to solve the problem of DLL hell, as you point out: It takes a week of work after you have spent many months attaining the knowledge necessary to understand what you read during that week.
My comments are just my opinions. My opinion is that, in the transition from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, Microsoft achieved something the company wanted. In Windows 3, the files for each program were largely segregated. That made it possible for a user to copy a program by copying its files.
In Windows 95, the registry and the mixing of DLLs created copy protection. It was still possible to copy a program by copying its files, but now it took serious understanding.
My opinion is that the problems with Microsoft Windows 95, 95B, 98, 98SE, and ME have been deliberate, on some level. There is a deliberate 64k or 2 megabyte memory limitation on what Microsoft calls GDI resources and USER resources; this is what causes most of the crashes, even when the user has 256 megabytes of memory.
My opinion is that DLL hell is deliberate in the sense that Microsoft knew about the problems, and waited 5 years to solve them. During that 5 years many users upgraded 5 times, providing a huge amount of money to Microsoft. If Microsoft had delivered a good operating system in the beginning, many users would not have upgraded.
There is a conflict of interest for a commercial company in the business of making operating systems. A company with a monopoly will make more money if there are more bugs. The bugs have to be carefully managed; they must not be too discouraging; they must be discouraging enough to make people enthusiastic about upgrading.
That's why Linux is a brilliant social innovation. The GNU GPL removes the social conflict. Linux is solely an attempt to make a good operating system; the conflict of interest is gone.
We have Richard Stallman and others to thank for that social innovation. Soon we will have an operating system that the whole world can use, and that has none of the problems created by conflict of interest.
Linux is a gift from programmers and writers to all people. We have a way to go in achieving the ultimate goal, but it looks like it won't be many years before Independence Linux, RedHat, Mandrake, and others solve the problems of making Linux easy to use. Then there can be just one mainstream operating system, available to all and usable by all, without the problems caused by hidden adversarial behavior.
There seems to be a HUGE misunderstanding. Yes, there is a problem with shared libraries. But the problem with shared libraries is minor compared to DLL hell. Shared libraries are a sunburn. DLL hell is hell.
Microsoft DLL hell is largely caused by a deliberate attempt to create copy protection by obscuring how the operating system works. You can't fix the problem because you have no reasonable way of getting the information you need.
This class of problem just doesn't exist with Open Source software. Yes there may be difficulties, but all the information necessary is available. The people who write Open Source software are smart and are solely motivated by the desire to do a good job. You can be sure that they will find ways of solving the problems. See comments #56, #165, #59, and #17 above for ways of solving the problems.
On the other hand, to a commercial monopoly like Microsoft, DLL hell is an advantage. It gets people to upgrade quickly in the hope of having fewer problems.
See #53: "DLL hell would be if gnucash blew away the libs that gnumeric needs, and then reinstalling gnumeric screwed up the libs that nautilus wants, etc."
The licensing of intellectual property is quite complicated when all possible issues are considered.
The GPL is a work of legal art. Richard Stallman had lawyers write the provisions so that development of free software can proceed efficiently, without hidden hassles.
Most of the people who criticise Mr. Stallman do not understand the issues. For example, the length of a license is not a reason to think negatively about it.
Writing a good contract is as intellectually sophisticated as writing a good computer program. The provisions of the GPL are necessary to promote the sharing and re-use of software.
Resolution is everything, and these monitors don't have as much resolution as a 19 inch monitor you can buy for $350.
So what if it is large. If you get close, it's grainy.
I wasn't able to get Speak Freely to operate with an echo server. There is no evidence of a connection.
The local echo loopback feature works fine.
Could it be that there are problems being behind a NAT firewall?
Stop and consider why there are 1,500,000 programmers using a trash language like Basic:
Microsoft put many fancy features into Visual Basic, and kept them out of Visual C and C++. So, to get speed of development, people were led into using Visual Basic.
Microsoft's real opinion of Basic is clear from the fact that Visual Basic is written in C and C++. (Someone at Microsoft told me this.).
Apparently Microsoft wants everyone else to use a poor language. Apparently Microsoft doesn't just want customers, the company wants inferiors.
In my opinion, the 207 pages of descriptions of abuses listed by the U.S. Justice Department in the Court's Findings of Fact are just a small part of the company's total abusiveness. This anti-trust case focuses mostly on Microsoft's mistreatment of large companies, but it is the abusiveness toward small companies and individuals that is most destructive.
Bill Gates does not want you to be a customer, he wants you to be an inferior.
Thoughts:
Criticism of RMS -- Many people who have not taken the time to understand the issues criticize Richard Stallman. The fact that he is criticized a lot should not make you think that the criticism is valid.
Richard Stallman does the community a great benefit by making sure the movement doesn't drift off course. This requires a serious effort because most people don't take the time to understand the finer points of the law.
Sharing -- The GNU GPL license represents the efforts of many smart people to enforce a simple idea: I will share with you if you will share with me.
It doesn't matter how many clauses it takes to accomplish that result; the number of clauses required and the length of the contract is unimportant. What is important is the very simple result.
See Tony's excellent comment #87 for more about this.
Radical Idea? I Think Not. -- Anyone who is logical and patient and careful enough to write good code and debug it is capable of understanding the law.
Programmers should not take a passive attitude toward the law. You can understand the issues discussed here in far less time than it takes to learn how to program in C++. The fact that you are a programmer shows that you have the mental ability to be logical.
Yes, the law is not always logical. But programs are not always bug-free. If you can deal with bugs in programs you can deal with bugs in the law.
It might be possible under some circumstances, for example, to prepare a case yourself, and then take it to a lawyer to catch any shortcomings in what you wrote. Arguing a case yourself is allowed by the courts.
There is a useful comparison between GNU free software and do-it-yourself free litigation. Programmers pay for their hardware and give their time freely to produce an excellent product. Litigation requires the payment of court costs, and the same attention and intelligence might also produce similarly excellent results.
Note that those who make money from litigation might criticize this idea the way Microsoft's Steve Ballmer criticizes the GNU GPL and free software. Also note that I am not saying that prosecuting a case yourself would be easy. But since you already do difficult things every day, you are prepared for difficult efforts.
Thanks Dan -- I thought that Dan Ravicher's comments were excellent and extremely well written.
Great Comments -- See gmhowell's comment #110 for thoughts about damages.
See benenglish's comment #32 for an example of creative litigation.
Just for Fun is an excellent book. If you wonder about the thoughts and feelings surrounding the beginning of Linux, this book will satisfy your interest.
The contrast between Torvald's Book and the book by Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, is huge.
Apparently Bill Gates does nothing for you unless you give him money. The Road Ahead is a series of cliches. It reads as though someone went through it and removed anything that might be of value. I think anyone deliberately trying to write something so boring would probably accidentally say something interesting.
The feeling of interacting with Microsoft and Microsoft products is a feeling of constantly having to defend yourself against abuse. The products and the company reflect the adversarial personality behind them.
For example, a lot of people don't realize that Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME crash because of deliberate limitations in the availability of memory available for what Microsoft calls "User Resources" and "GDI Resources". Anyone who doubts this should run the program called "Resource Meter" to verify one cause of the crashes.
People who inhabit the idealistic brotherhood of GNU free software find it amazing that Microsoft deliberately did a poor job, apparently so users would have a reason to upgrade. Think of all the lost work and lost time caused by the crashing. That is deliberate! Microsoft deliberately causes people grief so the company can make more money!
The feeling of interacting with Linux is a peaceful feeling that reflects the peacefulness of the creators. Even someone who doesn't want to know anything about computers might read Just for Fun to know more about one of the most important social revolutions in the world today.
No one involved with Linux claims it is perfect. Linus Torvalds in his book points out many of his own shortcomings. But both are remarkably free of adversarial behavior.
This seems to be fiction invented by a writer who is well-educated in nuclear physics, and who is depending on the fact that his readers aren't.
For example, this paragraph from the story cannot be right:
"It was slow going until one day, driving through Clinton Township to visit his girlfriend, Heather, he noticed that his Geiger counter went wild as he passed Gloria's Resale Boutique/Antique. The proprietor, Gloria Genette, still recalls the day when she was called at home by a store employee who said that a polite young man was anxious to buy an old table clock with a tinted green dial but wondered if she'd come down in price."
This doesn't make sense. Geiger counters are not very sensitive because they depend on the ability of an energetic particle or photon to ionize gas molecules. This takes a lot of energy.
To detect the radiation on the street using a geiger counter, the radiation near where the source was stored would have to be so intense that the workers in the store would become sick.
Read message #173 above, by Kierthos (Kierthos@aol.com):
"And as I recall, the radioactive particles emitted by Uranium are alpha (okay, it's been a long time, so I'm guessing), which can be stopped by a stout pair of pants."
That's true. Beta radiation (fast electrons) doesn't travel far either. Another kind of radiation emitted by radioactive substances is gamma rays. Gamma rays are photons more energetic than X-rays. Gamma rays can penetrate easily. However, consider that the article quote implies that the distance over which the radiation was detected was from inside the store to the street. I'm guessing that would be at least 6 meters, or 20 feet.
Gamma radiation from a radioactive substance is omni-directional. The energy radiates the same way in all directions. As radiation spreads into a volume, its intensity is divided proportional to the square of the distance. This means that someone working in the store would be exposed to a far higher intensity of radiation than would be detectable in the street.
Also, the amount of radium (radioactive material) in luminous clock dials was extremely small. Radium was, and is, extremely expensive, so there never would have been very much in one place. Radium-226, the most common isotope, decays to half its original intensity in 1600 years. So there would never have been a reason to include an extra sample of radium with a clock.
Conclusion: This story is, at least partly, a hoax.
"Such a thing could never exist in the U.S. for longer than it took to load up the tear gas grenade launchers."
He seems to be saying that the U.S. government prefers violent rather than socially sophisticated solutions.
Never cooperate with abusers. Cooperation encourages abuse.
Once Microsoft delivers a real, working operating system (maybe Windows XP?), most people will never buy another one. To prevent the collapse of its business, Microsoft is trying to enter another business entirely.
But this time, more people know how abusive Microsoft is. This time, there are more users who understand computers. Hopefully, people are smart enough to know that they should not cooperate.
We Slashdot readers can help. If 100,000 of us each tell one non-technical person each day, at the end of a year we will have told 36,500,000 people not to cooperate with Microsoft's plans to dominate. we can make a significant difference in preventing abuse.
Beware of Fraud.
If you go to a chiropractor or other body work practitioner, beware of fraud.
In my experience, they say things designed to make you think they are doing something positive, while they are actually acting to make the problem continue, giving only temporary relief, because that is the way they make money.
In my experience, ALL of them have said things that are not founded in what they have reason to think is true. They say things designed to give themselves control over you, that they have found a patient is likely to accept.
The profession does not seem to attract logically-minded people.
Yoga is excellent, but stay away from the unfounded statements surrounding yoga.
See my comment number seventy-six above.
The common kind of back pain is not directly related to "hunching over a keyboard and coding away". It is caused by pushing yourself too much, and being disconnected from other parts of your life.
Back pain is associated with weak abdominal muscles. If you strengthen your abdominal muscles, the most common kind of back pain will go away.