Why? Microsoft runs the show, no one else has any rights whatsoever to Windows. No one else can release an operating system with Windows in the name, and no one can use any Windows code to make any sort of a spiritual competitor. If Microsoft wants to sit on one Windows version for a decade like they did with XP and charge $300 a pop for new licenses just as they did when it was brand new, then what's stopping them? They are the sole provider of Windows and they still have a monopoly for the most part if you exclude ARM systems (which are generally totally different forms of computing systems to begin with). Sure, you'll have people like me jumping ship--but I only did that once I realized what a clusterfuck Vista was going to be. Still, the masses stuck around--and now it's Round 2 with Windows 8 being the dud.
'At the same time he warned that if the US kills his son, "all hell will break loose."' Oh, really? Is that a threat? Is this guy implying that it's okay for his son to go bomb another country, that he's a "little angel," so if the motherfucker gets killed papa's gonna send some fucking "Caucasus" army in and start a war with the U.S.?
What if the idiot attacks law enforcement officers again instead of surrendering and eventually gets himself killed, is the U.S. automatically at fault because this dick decides to keep playing with bombs? What if he in in fact wearing a suicide vest, and his death is a direct result of that--will all hell still break loose, or will they finally realize that the dipshit brought it on himself?
It's a trade-off between either the extra security of two-factor authentication, or the convenience of linking more than one account to be able to switch between them with ease. Why can't Microsoft follow Google's lead and give us the ability to both log in securely and stay logged in to multiple accounts at the same time? It's irritating enough to have to log out and then log back in with the other username/password, and the "stay logged in" check box is fucking useless when you have to log out every god damn day anyway to check something on your other account.
Apparently the cunt just gets off to forcing Slashdot visitors to either back out of the article or hold down the space bar for all eternity until the retarded spam message is finally past. I'm getting sick of it myself, it would be nice if they would add a spam filter that automatically flags all posts containing both the words "luser" and "hosts" that are posted by an AC. I usually go back and don't even consider reading any more comments if I come across one of these--but this time was the exception since I figured it's about time I join in and bitch about this douchebag spammer. Slashdot could really use a "block" feature to allow users to block this asshole without blocking all the "legitimate" Anonymous Cowards out there.
And of course, no anti-virus software will protect someone who is likely to get infected in the first place... so worrying about which one is the best to recommend every year is really pretty pointless.
You would be just as well off never running Genuine Microsoft Products. Don't run their OS, and you automatically can't run all the harmful crap written for it. Wine might allow some of it to run, but it probably won't get very far even if it does do anything.
Meh, who wants to keep checking the anti-virus reviews all the time and constantly switching, tossing money out here and there? These programs have the ability to cause enough problems on their own, and their effectiveness at "catching" things changes with the weather. You're better off just picking one and sticking with it, avoiding all the extra headaches. In the end, they're all pretty questionable (I wouldn't trust any of them over good old common sense), so you might as well get the one developed by the same people who make the OS to prevent any stupid little problems like what TFA is about. It just happens to be a nice bonus that Microsoft's product is free (well, beyond the Windows license fee at least...). IMO most of the "anti-virus industry" is just a bunch of whiny crooks themselves, and neither they or their software can really be trusted much more than the malware they claim to be fighting.
Did you ever *use* Windows ME? You have to be confusing Windows 98SE or something.
In my opinion, Windows ME's biggest problem was that it still just didn't have enough brake pedals. It just crashed and burned that much. It needed a few more on the sides and on the back.
Businesses have critical dependencies on specific software and business methods that tie into it. Such businesses, which comprise a HUGE market, are not going to switch from Windows to MacOS or anything else in the foreseeable future. To do so, they would require a full-on replacement for Windows that includes a full Windows API so every program can run just like it does on Windows, with the same access to hardware, system resources and other programs. And they are not going to go there without a GUARANTEE that whatever proposed replacement will run every program with no trouble.
Not even Microsoft guarantees these days that a new version of Windows will run virtually every program that the previous version of Windows was capable of running. Many DOS applications that traditionally always ran without a problem are now on life support (just watch what happens when Microsoft pulls the plug by discontinuing 32-bit versions of Windows). There are plenty of applications written for older versions of Windows that either don't run at all without some hacking, or have minor to serious problems in the latest Windows releases. Yes, even when enabling [insert-Windows-version-here] compatibility mode.
I'm not sure how much Wine's compatibility is improving, but at the rate Microsoft is starting to drop backwards compatibility they're just going to make it easier for Wine and even ReactOS to catch up. Never mind their forcing of Metro and its "apps" down everyone's throat, which people aren't exactly happy about.
The "organic" growers seem to get by just fine without GMOs. Well, as long as their seed supply is not contaminated by nearby plants of other farmers (hard to tell!). Not to mention, prices for fucking *everything* are already way up and only getting worse. And besides... it makes sense to me to spend a bit more for something as critical to life as, you know, food, so yes--if I could be 100% guaranteed to get non-GMO, non-contaminated groceries, then a slightly higher price would be a fair price to pay.
But that's not what I was talking about anyway, really... I was talking about, at the very least, the government making it MANDATORY that food companies clearly label whether their products are (or contain) genetic modifications. Is that really so hard to do? If you want to talk pesticides, here's one. Fucking legalize industrial hemp and kill the cotton lobbying groups. That wretched crop is just teeming with pesticide use, while its green herbaceous counterpart has nearly none of the problems and even some serious advantages in the textiles produced vs. those produced by cotton.
Simple: More and more people are putting literally EVERYTHING they do on Facebook, increasingly using *it* exclusively instead of having two or three potential methods of contact. It is very quickly getting to the point where it's either get on Facebook or forget about it. It's really not that hard to see this in action and figure out if you have any friends. Chances are, without Facebook, there would be a better chance that at least one (maybe even two) of those traditional methods would work. But no--people seem to think that as long as they're on that wretched site, nothing else matters.
The problem is the clueless masses, which are unfortunately the majority. And they gather into a black hole that, to be found, "outsiders" must create a god damn Facebook account. No thanks--I value my privacy.
Nice. Because that's the worst thing to do to a Lithium-ion, for example.
You tell that to my phone, which after a full year and a half is still capable of running as long as it could when I bought it. Actually, it was lasting a day or less when I first bought it (largely due to a battery-guzzling bug that I found out how to solve), but now a whopping seven days. Lots of tweaks to reduce power draining too, but it's still running the same stock OS on the same battery it came with.
By comparison, many of my friends leave their laptops and cell phones plugged in 100% of the time there in a nearby outlet... and then after a few months to a year they're having battery problem. It seems that the old "use down to 5-1% power before fully recharging" trick couldn't be working any better. Only rarely does the battery go 100% dead--I figure as rare as that in anyway, it can't hurt anything.
It pays to charge your batteries based on your instinct and tradition "just in case" instead of just believing and falling for claims that are only to be proven false later...
Well, I'm set, because I always let my phone nearly die before charging it. That's sure as hell not gonna change now.
Why? If you don't like patented organisms, you don't have to use them. Me, some of my favorite things exist because of patents, and humanity has gotten some great stuff out of patented organisms that in all likelihood would not exist if they could simply be reproduced.
What happens when a genetically-modified crop is so widely grown that it has spread its destructive, patented genes to all other nearby "non-GMO" crops? Does that mean that I need to avoid all products containing even a trace amount of that crop, because either I can't trust it to be non-GMO or even know for sure that there's a 99% chance that all of that crop IS GMO? Take corn for example... good luck finding even an ear of corn that hasn't been genetically borked, let alone a bottle of whiskey or cornbread or ever tortilla chips! Oh, does your loaf of bread or your ketchup or fruit punch have high-fructose corn syrup? Better put that down--it's contaminated. In this case, those people living in countries other than the U.S. at least have lower GMO usage by farmers overall. Of course, I don't live in one of those countries.
Soy is another one--I don't eat soy personally (at least not by choice...), but I swear you can hardly find anything in stores that doesn't have that damn thing listed as an ingredient. And, of course, the good ol' government doesn't think it's in our best interests to know that a food product on the shelves contains GMO ingredients, so it's usually not exactly easy to figure out. But by just eliminating anything that contain the big two--corn and soy based products--you'll end up with the problem of being unable to buy anything to eat. So much for choice.
And what happens that that gene is later found to exist somewhere in nature?
What about those "artificial" genes made in labs that make their way into organisms through 100% natural methods? Should some biotechnology company "own" all of our rice just because some farmer decided to use their seeds, and their crops then crossed with, thereby contaminating all nearby farmers' rice crops?
And it takes a virus or bacterium to transfer the gene into a plant... should humans really receive the patent for doing something that a lowly microorganism does itself?
Patenting living things is just a bad idea. Period.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? Microsoft runs the show, no one else has any rights whatsoever to Windows. No one else can release an operating system with Windows in the name, and no one can use any Windows code to make any sort of a spiritual competitor. If Microsoft wants to sit on one Windows version for a decade like they did with XP and charge $300 a pop for new licenses just as they did when it was brand new, then what's stopping them? They are the sole provider of Windows and they still have a monopoly for the most part if you exclude ARM systems (which are generally totally different forms of computing systems to begin with). Sure, you'll have people like me jumping ship--but I only did that once I realized what a clusterfuck Vista was going to be. Still, the masses stuck around--and now it's Round 2 with Windows 8 being the dud.
"My son is a true angel."
Sure he is...
'At the same time he warned that if the US kills his son, "all hell will break loose."'
Oh, really? Is that a threat? Is this guy implying that it's okay for his son to go bomb another country, that he's a "little angel," so if the motherfucker gets killed papa's gonna send some fucking "Caucasus" army in and start a war with the U.S.?
What if the idiot attacks law enforcement officers again instead of surrendering and eventually gets himself killed, is the U.S. automatically at fault because this dick decides to keep playing with bombs? What if he in in fact wearing a suicide vest, and his death is a direct result of that--will all hell still break loose, or will they finally realize that the dipshit brought it on himself?
It's a trade-off between either the extra security of two-factor authentication, or the convenience of linking more than one account to be able to switch between them with ease. Why can't Microsoft follow Google's lead and give us the ability to both log in securely and stay logged in to multiple accounts at the same time? It's irritating enough to have to log out and then log back in with the other username/password, and the "stay logged in" check box is fucking useless when you have to log out every god damn day anyway to check something on your other account.
Apparently the cunt just gets off to forcing Slashdot visitors to either back out of the article or hold down the space bar for all eternity until the retarded spam message is finally past. I'm getting sick of it myself, it would be nice if they would add a spam filter that automatically flags all posts containing both the words "luser" and "hosts" that are posted by an AC. I usually go back and don't even consider reading any more comments if I come across one of these--but this time was the exception since I figured it's about time I join in and bitch about this douchebag spammer. Slashdot could really use a "block" feature to allow users to block this asshole without blocking all the "legitimate" Anonymous Cowards out there.
And of course, no anti-virus software will protect someone who is likely to get infected in the first place... so worrying about which one is the best to recommend every year is really pretty pointless.
I agree, from now on it should be named after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. How about Dopey?
You would be just as well off never running Genuine Microsoft Products. Don't run their OS, and you automatically can't run all the harmful crap written for it. Wine might allow some of it to run, but it probably won't get very far even if it does do anything.
Meh, who wants to keep checking the anti-virus reviews all the time and constantly switching, tossing money out here and there? These programs have the ability to cause enough problems on their own, and their effectiveness at "catching" things changes with the weather. You're better off just picking one and sticking with it, avoiding all the extra headaches. In the end, they're all pretty questionable (I wouldn't trust any of them over good old common sense), so you might as well get the one developed by the same people who make the OS to prevent any stupid little problems like what TFA is about. It just happens to be a nice bonus that Microsoft's product is free (well, beyond the Windows license fee at least...). IMO most of the "anti-virus industry" is just a bunch of whiny crooks themselves, and neither they or their software can really be trusted much more than the malware they claim to be fighting.
That was a rhetorical question--you didn't have to answer it. :) I was just being sarcastic... I don't use TWM myself.
Did you ever *use* Windows ME? You have to be confusing Windows 98SE or something.
In my opinion, Windows ME's biggest problem was that it still just didn't have enough brake pedals. It just crashed and burned that much. It needed a few more on the sides and on the back.
What's wrong with TWM?
Businesses have critical dependencies on specific software and business methods that tie into it. Such businesses, which comprise a HUGE market, are not going to switch from Windows to MacOS or anything else in the foreseeable future. To do so, they would require a full-on replacement for Windows that includes a full Windows API so every program can run just like it does on Windows, with the same access to hardware, system resources and other programs. And they are not going to go there without a GUARANTEE that whatever proposed replacement will run every program with no trouble.
Not even Microsoft guarantees these days that a new version of Windows will run virtually every program that the previous version of Windows was capable of running. Many DOS applications that traditionally always ran without a problem are now on life support (just watch what happens when Microsoft pulls the plug by discontinuing 32-bit versions of Windows). There are plenty of applications written for older versions of Windows that either don't run at all without some hacking, or have minor to serious problems in the latest Windows releases. Yes, even when enabling [insert-Windows-version-here] compatibility mode.
I'm not sure how much Wine's compatibility is improving, but at the rate Microsoft is starting to drop backwards compatibility they're just going to make it easier for Wine and even ReactOS to catch up. Never mind their forcing of Metro and its "apps" down everyone's throat, which people aren't exactly happy about.
Hey, with something that crashes that much, you need all the brakes you can get!
The "organic" growers seem to get by just fine without GMOs. Well, as long as their seed supply is not contaminated by nearby plants of other farmers (hard to tell!). Not to mention, prices for fucking *everything* are already way up and only getting worse. And besides... it makes sense to me to spend a bit more for something as critical to life as, you know, food, so yes--if I could be 100% guaranteed to get non-GMO, non-contaminated groceries, then a slightly higher price would be a fair price to pay.
But that's not what I was talking about anyway, really... I was talking about, at the very least, the government making it MANDATORY that food companies clearly label whether their products are (or contain) genetic modifications. Is that really so hard to do? If you want to talk pesticides, here's one. Fucking legalize industrial hemp and kill the cotton lobbying groups. That wretched crop is just teeming with pesticide use, while its green herbaceous counterpart has nearly none of the problems and even some serious advantages in the textiles produced vs. those produced by cotton.
They do if they continue to run the bloated (yet increasingly dumbed down) garbage that Microsoft keeps churning out.
Fuck root, any user can just prop their cell phone camera or a real camcorder up to their screen and hit record...
They might as well just lock their crap in a vault and protect it from all of humanity.
Says the Anonymous Coward who seems to want to escape the possibility of his identity being known... ouch, the irony hurts.
Simple: More and more people are putting literally EVERYTHING they do on Facebook, increasingly using *it* exclusively instead of having two or three potential methods of contact. It is very quickly getting to the point where it's either get on Facebook or forget about it. It's really not that hard to see this in action and figure out if you have any friends. Chances are, without Facebook, there would be a better chance that at least one (maybe even two) of those traditional methods would work. But no--people seem to think that as long as they're on that wretched site, nothing else matters.
The problem is the clueless masses, which are unfortunately the majority. And they gather into a black hole that, to be found, "outsiders" must create a god damn Facebook account. No thanks--I value my privacy.
Nice. Because that's the worst thing to do to a Lithium-ion, for example.
You tell that to my phone, which after a full year and a half is still capable of running as long as it could when I bought it. Actually, it was lasting a day or less when I first bought it (largely due to a battery-guzzling bug that I found out how to solve), but now a whopping seven days. Lots of tweaks to reduce power draining too, but it's still running the same stock OS on the same battery it came with.
By comparison, many of my friends leave their laptops and cell phones plugged in 100% of the time there in a nearby outlet... and then after a few months to a year they're having battery problem. It seems that the old "use down to 5-1% power before fully recharging" trick couldn't be working any better. Only rarely does the battery go 100% dead--I figure as rare as that in anyway, it can't hurt anything.
It pays to charge your batteries based on your instinct and tradition "just in case" instead of just believing and falling for claims that are only to be proven false later...
Well, I'm set, because I always let my phone nearly die before charging it. That's sure as hell not gonna change now.
Why? If you don't like patented organisms, you don't have to use them. Me, some of my favorite things exist because of patents, and humanity has gotten some great stuff out of patented organisms that in all likelihood would not exist if they could simply be reproduced.
What happens when a genetically-modified crop is so widely grown that it has spread its destructive, patented genes to all other nearby "non-GMO" crops? Does that mean that I need to avoid all products containing even a trace amount of that crop, because either I can't trust it to be non-GMO or even know for sure that there's a 99% chance that all of that crop IS GMO? Take corn for example... good luck finding even an ear of corn that hasn't been genetically borked, let alone a bottle of whiskey or cornbread or ever tortilla chips! Oh, does your loaf of bread or your ketchup or fruit punch have high-fructose corn syrup? Better put that down--it's contaminated. In this case, those people living in countries other than the U.S. at least have lower GMO usage by farmers overall. Of course, I don't live in one of those countries.
Soy is another one--I don't eat soy personally (at least not by choice...), but I swear you can hardly find anything in stores that doesn't have that damn thing listed as an ingredient. And, of course, the good ol' government doesn't think it's in our best interests to know that a food product on the shelves contains GMO ingredients, so it's usually not exactly easy to figure out. But by just eliminating anything that contain the big two--corn and soy based products--you'll end up with the problem of being unable to buy anything to eat. So much for choice.
Now that is truly a sickening thought, and one I didn't even think of. Yikes. Now that would be bad.
And what happens that that gene is later found to exist somewhere in nature?
What about those "artificial" genes made in labs that make their way into organisms through 100% natural methods? Should some biotechnology company "own" all of our rice just because some farmer decided to use their seeds, and their crops then crossed with, thereby contaminating all nearby farmers' rice crops?
And it takes a virus or bacterium to transfer the gene into a plant... should humans really receive the patent for doing something that a lowly microorganism does itself?
Patenting living things is just a bad idea. Period.
They are in this fucked up country...
Come on... seriously now...
No.