hmm.. "If I worked for IBM, I'd consider using Valentine's memo in sales pitches to non-techie types as validation that Linux is a serious contender to W2K and not just a hacker's or script kiddie's toy."
--personally it would be a good thing to show to customers, but maybe there is some copyright issue.. or MS lawyers will eat you up for showing some "copyrighted material to steal customers" or similar. better watch out [IBM salesmen.. point your customers to slashdot instead:)}
it's too early to speculate about terrorist attack/accident/whatever. however, this won't change the facts: people will be afraid of flying for a long time. which means more plane companies layoffs. which means PERHAPS some troubles regarding economy..
..and THIS makes the terrorists' game. fear, and (as the name tells) terror is their play. solution? since you cannot run away from a plane crashing, nor from a virus spreading, keep doing whatever you do. if something happens, well, at least your job could have helped someone. and you cannot escape anyway.
and as my grandfather used to say, "a bomb never hits the same crater twice". So I figure that the 'most dangerous' places are now the most safe.. there are so many places to hit all over the world, the terrorist probably won't hit the most surveilled ones again, since the chances to succeed are few.
ok, I'm speculating again. but my idea is still the same: keep working, keep living, keep thinking with your brain. terrorist attack or just fear, what's the difference? you personally cannot fight either.
isn't that a great way to make people talk about you? doesn't matter how, or what they say. just as they did when they blocked non-ie browsers to their website, *exactly* when they were launching xp..
I refuse to believe that those 'memos' escape microsoft non-intentionally.. it just sounds suspect.
just my.02 euros
instead of printing it to a local/network printer, someone could redirect the print output to a file. it should come out a regular.ps file, which can be translated into plain ascii.
time spent in doing that: more or less 15 minutes.
reason: having a backup copy of the book that can be kept in a safe place, sure that one day it could be used platform-independently.
make conferencies about that, give interviews, talk about it in any public place where the argument may be of some interest. Don't be shy, if you're there to listen to someone else opinion, so are all the people sitting near you - and it's your opinion that they may consider.
I'm throwing in some thoughts of things that can be done on a worldwide scale or at least independently from the country you live in:
1. letters to newspapers. this can be the first, lowest-effort thing to do. the net is full of good examples of how crypto is good, first of all the writings of Phil Zimmermann, that could be at least inspiring. here's the link and a quote:
"You don't have to distrust the government to want to use cryptography. Your business can be wiretapped by business rivals, organized crime, or foreign governments. Several foreign governments, for example, admit to using their signals intelligence against companies from other countries to give their own corporations a competitive edge. Ironically, the United States government's restrictions on cryptography in the 1990's have weakened U.S. corporate defenses against foreign intelligence and organized crime."
2. for those of you who have good capabilities/reputation, start spreading the word. Not only among your friends (no matter how commputer-illiterate they are, public opinion is independent from tech skills, unfortunately), but also at work.
3. the main goal is to make the idea of 'banning crypto can make more damage to your business than give benefits to the country' reach the higher levels. letters to newspapers will perhaps lighten a few minds, but enlighten a CEO of a multinational or a big company will help things better. It may seem unreal, but if you think that anyone in the world is just seven hops away, why don't try it? Never underestimate the power of coffee-break gossiping.
4. all the 'geeks' and technician all over the world have a great power over "regular user". When a techie or a sysadmin talks, everybody is listening. Make good use of it. Be responsible, and be clear. Make people think.
5. talk to newspaper writers, friends working for the media, whoever you think can spread the world.
6. wait
7. repeat
8. listen to other ideas and possibly invite your "opponent" to post it somewhere, to publish it, basically don't treat who does not agree with you as a stupid.
that's what I'm doing with my friends, parents, et cetera. I'm posting opinions on public forums in newspapers, and although I cannot see an immediate feedback, I'm positive about it.
I've seen your comment about SOHO firewalling [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21454&cid=0&p id=0&startat=&threshold=3&mode=thread&commentsort= 1&op=Change], and I've seen that you couldn't figure out the whole OpenBSD-PPPoE stuff. A friend of mine had the same problem, and he solved it by removing the GRE stuff from the kernel. Perhaps it may help you, although it's kinda late and you may not be interested anymore.
Why am I writing you here? 'cause the other discussion has already been archived, and there's no mail on your userinfo, and I'd never trust a website. sorry for bothering you here, please moderate me down.
which is a good thing, so after few days of havoc they'll understand "our" value:)
[and pay to have us back, pay the gov't to remove the bill, blah blah:) ]
it may sound silly, but what about a strike if any of the SSSCA and similar bill will pass?
Something like "we all tech workers who care about privacy will stop working until such acts are dismissed".
there will be threats. dangers of being fired. people working anyway. but hey, weren't that the same issues that the factory workers faced since the first industrial revolution?
and at that time, it was normal to work all day with no days off, with kids working all day doing the same underpaid job of their fathers just to pay for living, while big corporations are enlarging their profits by passing laws to a government that don't care at all about the workers... hmm this reminds me something...
really, get out of the us.
scared about learning another language? good. so you'll see what it feels to be in a foreign country where people tease you for you accent. and you have to stay here to live.
but it's not that difficult. in most EU countries the state provides medical coverage, the lawyers aren't so powerful, nobody complains and blames and sues everybody because it's simply useless.
Yes, you cannot carry or own weapons. but don't tell me that ANYBODY of you who wants to own a weapon had to use it more than once since he/she owned it IN your house. beside shooting at the blue screen of death, of course.
finally, US passports/citizens are still accepted and wanted here in the EU, also because their technical knowledge.
isn't it time to get out and give your childrens new genes, so they'll be smarter?:)
if the FBI will end up tapping the US net, it will be a good thing, because all of you who are preaching to the chorus, blaming such-and-such, talking endlessly but rarely doing something active, will *finally* start moving on.
Let's try to be objective: if a politician or if the Congress pass laws that restrict privacy, it's not because they are old-closed minded people that don't understand how scary is Orwell's 1984. It's because the average US citizen wants it!
I don't think the politicians will talk in such a way, if there was nobody to follow them.
They created a public opinion about that, and now they are surfing on the top of this huge wave.
What do you want to do? Change everyone's mind to allow your "privacy"? That's dictatorship!
They want to tap the net? Good! So you'll start acrively fighting back. Use crypto. Use different routing paths. Remove the dust from your geekly brain, that have been idle too much, and start using it again!
Remember the old days? How many clever ideas were used to solve strict situations? Now isn't it time to start again?
Never mind about closed-minded politicians. If you want an easy life, join them and do what they tell. If you want to FIGHT for your freedom, well, who said it must be the easier path?
Being an european, also, I don't think why should I concern about laws effective in the US only. And if those laws were coming and applied to the EU, well, I will keep doing my business MY way. I can get caught and arrested because I used encryption - I don't care, I know what I'm doing, and I will keep doing it becaue I BELIEVE that it is right - and I'm not harming anybody with that.
...ok it's a rant..
you can moderate me but you cannot stop me thinking like that, unless you reply with a reasonable, objective and useful statement/thought.
I'm waiting for your suggestions.
no, not THAT kind of suggestions, those will >>/dev/null
"Open-source operates behind the scenes far more then it operates in the public eye, and it's hard to sell support to hackers who actually have *fun* trying to figure out a problem. In some respects Linux and the BSDs are poor commercialization candidates because they are *too* good... that they simply do not require the level of support that something like Windows-NT or Oracle might require in a back-office setting."
Excuse me? Windowses require much more support than their open source counterpart because
1. it takes less experience to be classified as a "windows administrator"
2. if there's something wrong in windows/oracle, either you are a microsoft/oracle developer and know where to put your hands, or you ask for support. On the other hand, in the open source world you CAN put your hands where you want to, and this reduces the need for support for those that know how to hack it..
In my opinion it's not a matter of being 'too' good, it's just a matter of state of mind of the admins. What do you think?
...are we sure that, given a new-standard of hydrongen-powered planes, there won't be any more gasoline/cherosene powered planes around? one of them, packed with some sort of explosive, could be enough.. are we going to make cherosene powered planes illegal? or to backdoor them?:)
I think the whole "free-music" community (everybody who wants to be able to download music for free) should stop worry about {RI|MP}AA lawsuits. The reasons:
1. no matter how they can protect audio cd, anybody can still play the cd on a cd reader and capture the audio stream with a computer.
2. if they develop a new technology, such as new cd player that can play only "approved" cd, see point one: if you can listen for the music, you can digitalize it and copy it.
3. distributed file sharing cannot be stopped. they can slow it down, close the main nodes, whatever. new versions of the programs used can be updated for better node search, and so on.
4. if they pursue the writers of such programs, they'll fail: a disclaimer is enough to avoid all that lawsuit stuff, according to the laws *they* are using
solutions: keep sharing music, keep writing peer-to-peer file sharing software, keep buying the music you like as a *tribute* to the artists you like.
consequences: improvement on the quality of the music [because today artists fill their albums with crappy music just to sell *one* song, admit it please], more power to the netizens, less power to the lawyers who wants to stop a system bigger than theirs.
keep doing what you want. they closed napster - we switched to morpheus. will they close morpheus? the community will adapt.
adapting is a sign of strength. enforcing old rules is a sign of quick death, as in all dictatorships.
how to stop free music on the internet: make connections > 28k8 illegal; force people all over the world to use new sound cards that cannot digitalize "protected" sound [good luck]; kill every artists on the face of earth. Chose one:)
biometrics, privacy and the idea of unix passwords
on
Biometrics in Airports
·
· Score: 1
here's the simplified idea: you want to take a flight, they take a picture of your face, and a computer does the biometrics checks on it. then a checksum of the data is compared with the checksum of the pictures of known terrorists in a database.
it's not a matter of comparing checksum of pictures (there are too many variables, such as light, shadows, colors, and so on to compare), but a matter of comparing checksums of biometric data - that should be the same, indipendently from the kind of light the picture is taken under. if I take a picture of my face under certain conditions of light, and then another one under other conditions, the pictures will probably be slightly different, but the checksums will be totally different. but once they are feed into a biometric system, the two pictures should return the same result [unless I got a plastic surgery on my face, but it's another issue]. better again, if I use the latter system, it isn't necessary to have the original picture to compare with the new one. The checksum does the same job, without me (or the government) having to have a picture that can be used to track me down for other purposes.
Let me explain better, if I can: with this checksum thing, like unix passwords, the 'system' doesn't know the password: it just compares it with some data calculated by some one-way function that cannot be easily reversed.
this could solve the problem of fearing that biometric pictures could be used for other purposes. the 'face' database can be stolen, but without a way to compare it with the real thing, nobody will know what to do with it.
now, the problems: the govn't could put cameras in pub and bars to check who's there, or maybe use our ID pictures to calculate checksums and know who has a checksum of what. but it's probably already done, so why bother? at least with the 'checksum' thing you could try to trust that the govn't had only the checksums of the terrorists, and not the pictures of all of us:)
just a thought. maybe I said a bunch of rant, but I'm posting here just to ask how it's done in reality.
..because even if US makes strong cryptography illegal/backdoored, what prevents other countries to let their people use it freely? I'm not talking about the Nato nations, but about other countries that wouldn't obey the US 'suggestions' anyway; those countries one day may keep up with technology.
Think about it: let's suppose that in the US strong crypto will be illegal/need to have backdoor(s). This is a HUGE break point: what prevents those backdoor to be discovered and used against the US one day?
Obviously it would be very difficult to do such a thing. Right. Will it be as difficult as crash four US planes, coming from within the US, into the four center of the US power (military, economic, and -almost- political)?
learn a new language, and go in another country (Europe is -as usual- slowly catching up with technology) to *start* a new market and use whatever you learned during those dot-com years to avoid the same mistakes, and create something useful.
I refuse to believe that all those people did not learn anything, and new nations *need* IT people.
Think about going to Africa, Europe, or another country. The world is big, there's room for everybody, and there are new markets to create. Move on, Americans!
in my humble opinion, everything Micrsoft could do with freebsd-style licence is perfectly legal.
who cares if they are doing what they aren't preaching? the won't loose any credibility. that's because a stroger licence -such as GPL- is needed in order to keep opensource software away from such companies which want to Embrace and Extend everything around them.
now, just a moment: what's wrong in Microsoft using open source software? if really what open source developers want is the quality, well, they shouldn't care. I'm just worried that we might risk to reinvent the wheel due to this 'closing' source code policy.
let's think about how many resources are wasted every year because of licensing and copyright issues. nobody has ever died of a violation of copyright, but everybody is suffering due to the lack of useful people, busy in trying to circumvent what business forces to do.
it may seem pathethic rethoric, but I think that the world could be a BAD place if Archimedes asked for a fee every time somebody used his theorem. surely some open-theorem zealot would have created a better way to express Archimede's Theorem, but it would have meant a huge waste of time during all human evolution.
oh well, just my 2c.
emergency data link, that's what it's useful for
on
DSLBlaster?
·
· Score: 1
as the website states, you can link up two pc using soundblasters, and even old ones. So, it can be a great emergency toolkit to carry around (instead of pcmcia ethernet, or null modem/printer cables). Better than a regular modem (max speed 115200bps), you can use it -for example- to link together old laptops with only one pcmcia and one floppy and no cdrom reader to install linux/bsd:)
Slashdot Mirror
hmm.. "If I worked for IBM, I'd consider using Valentine's memo in sales pitches to non-techie types as validation that Linux is a serious contender to W2K and not just a hacker's or script kiddie's toy."
:)}
--personally it would be a good thing to show to customers, but maybe there is some copyright issue.. or MS lawyers will eat you up for showing some "copyrighted material to steal customers" or similar. better watch out [IBM salesmen.. point your customers to slashdot instead
cheers
it's too early to speculate about terrorist attack/accident/whatever. however, this won't change the facts: people will be afraid of flying for a long time. which means more plane companies layoffs. which means PERHAPS some troubles regarding economy..
..and THIS makes the terrorists' game. fear, and (as the name tells) terror is their play. solution? since you cannot run away from a plane crashing, nor from a virus spreading, keep doing whatever you do. if something happens, well, at least your job could have helped someone. and you cannot escape anyway.
and as my grandfather used to say, "a bomb never hits the same crater twice". So I figure that the 'most dangerous' places are now the most safe.. there are so many places to hit all over the world, the terrorist probably won't hit the most surveilled ones again, since the chances to succeed are few.
ok, I'm speculating again. but my idea is still the same: keep working, keep living, keep thinking with your brain. terrorist attack or just fear, what's the difference? you personally cannot fight either.
thanks. I appreciated.
[sorry for bothering you here, couldn't figure it out by myself].
non-english speaker, so knee jerk makes little sense to me.
thanks
isn't that a great way to make people talk about you? doesn't matter how, or what they say. just as they did when they blocked non-ie browsers to their website, *exactly* when they were launching xp..
.02 euros
I refuse to believe that those 'memos' escape microsoft non-intentionally.. it just sounds suspect.
just my
instead of printing it to a local/network printer, someone could redirect the print output to a file. it should come out a regular .ps file, which can be translated into plain ascii.
time spent in doing that: more or less 15 minutes.
reason: having a backup copy of the book that can be kept in a safe place, sure that one day it could be used platform-independently.
..doesn't it? think about it: db-style os, 3d or text gui, such and such....
:)
..time to rewrite linux from scratch?
cheers
let me see if I got it right: am I wrong, or that happened in the same period of time that XP was launched?
No, I'm not thinking what I'm thinking, right?
make conferencies about that, give interviews, talk about it in any public place where the argument may be of some interest. Don't be shy, if you're there to listen to someone else opinion, so are all the people sitting near you - and it's your opinion that they may consider.
...any other idea?
1. letters to newspapers. this can be the first, lowest-effort thing to do. the net is full of good examples of how crypto is good, first of all the writings of Phil Zimmermann, that could be at least inspiring. here's the link and a quote:
"You don't have to distrust the government to want to use cryptography. Your business can be wiretapped by business rivals, organized crime, or foreign governments. Several foreign governments, for example, admit to using their signals intelligence against companies from other countries to give their own corporations a competitive edge. Ironically, the United States government's restrictions on cryptography in the 1990's have weakened U.S. corporate defenses against foreign intelligence and organized crime."
.2Euros :)
2. for those of you who have good capabilities/reputation, start spreading the word. Not only among your friends (no matter how commputer-illiterate they are, public opinion is independent from tech skills, unfortunately), but also at work.
3. the main goal is to make the idea of 'banning crypto can make more damage to your business than give benefits to the country' reach the higher levels. letters to newspapers will perhaps lighten a few minds, but enlighten a CEO of a multinational or a big company will help things better. It may seem unreal, but if you think that anyone in the world is just seven hops away, why don't try it? Never underestimate the power of coffee-break gossiping.
4. all the 'geeks' and technician all over the world have a great power over "regular user". When a techie or a sysadmin talks, everybody is listening. Make good use of it. Be responsible, and be clear. Make people think. 5. talk to newspaper writers, friends working for the media, whoever you think can spread the world.
6. wait
7. repeat
8. listen to other ideas and possibly invite your "opponent" to post it somewhere, to publish it, basically don't treat who does not agree with you as a stupid.
that's what I'm doing with my friends, parents, et cetera. I'm posting opinions on public forums in newspapers, and although I cannot see an immediate feedback, I'm positive about it.
Just my
I've seen your comment about SOHO firewalling [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21454&cid=0&p id=0&startat=&threshold=3&mode=thread&commentsort= 1&op=Change], and I've seen that you couldn't figure out the whole OpenBSD-PPPoE stuff. A friend of mine had the same problem, and he solved it by removing the GRE stuff from the kernel. Perhaps it may help you, although it's kinda late and you may not be interested anymore.
Why am I writing you here? 'cause the other discussion has already been archived, and there's no mail on your userinfo, and I'd never trust a website. sorry for bothering you here, please moderate me down.
cheers
which is a good thing, so after few days of havoc they'll understand "our" value :)
:) ]
[and pay to have us back, pay the gov't to remove the bill, blah blah
it may sound silly, but what about a strike if any of the SSSCA and similar bill will pass? ... hmm this reminds me something...
Something like "we all tech workers who care about privacy will stop working until such acts are dismissed".
there will be threats. dangers of being fired. people working anyway. but hey, weren't that the same issues that the factory workers faced since the first industrial revolution?
and at that time, it was normal to work all day with no days off, with kids working all day doing the same underpaid job of their fathers just to pay for living, while big corporations are enlarging their profits by passing laws to a government that don't care at all about the workers
really, get out of the us.
:)
scared about learning another language? good. so you'll see what it feels to be in a foreign country where people tease you for you accent. and you have to stay here to live.
but it's not that difficult. in most EU countries the state provides medical coverage, the lawyers aren't so powerful, nobody complains and blames and sues everybody because it's simply useless.
Yes, you cannot carry or own weapons. but don't tell me that ANYBODY of you who wants to own a weapon had to use it more than once since he/she owned it IN your house. beside shooting at the blue screen of death, of course.
finally, US passports/citizens are still accepted and wanted here in the EU, also because their technical knowledge.
isn't it time to get out and give your childrens new genes, so they'll be smarter?
if the FBI will end up tapping the US net, it will be a good thing, because all of you who are preaching to the chorus, blaming such-and-such, talking endlessly but rarely doing something active, will *finally* start moving on.
/dev/null
Let's try to be objective: if a politician or if the Congress pass laws that restrict privacy, it's not because they are old-closed minded people that don't understand how scary is Orwell's 1984. It's because the average US citizen wants it!
I don't think the politicians will talk in such a way, if there was nobody to follow them.
They created a public opinion about that, and now they are surfing on the top of this huge wave.
What do you want to do? Change everyone's mind to allow your "privacy"? That's dictatorship!
They want to tap the net? Good! So you'll start acrively fighting back. Use crypto. Use different routing paths. Remove the dust from your geekly brain, that have been idle too much, and start using it again!
Remember the old days? How many clever ideas were used to solve strict situations? Now isn't it time to start again?
Never mind about closed-minded politicians. If you want an easy life, join them and do what they tell. If you want to FIGHT for your freedom, well, who said it must be the easier path?
Being an european, also, I don't think why should I concern about laws effective in the US only. And if those laws were coming and applied to the EU, well, I will keep doing my business MY way. I can get caught and arrested because I used encryption - I don't care, I know what I'm doing, and I will keep doing it becaue I BELIEVE that it is right - and I'm not harming anybody with that.
...ok it's a rant..
you can moderate me but you cannot stop me thinking like that, unless you reply with a reasonable, objective and useful statement/thought.
I'm waiting for your suggestions.
no, not THAT kind of suggestions, those will >>
"Open-source operates behind the scenes far more then it operates in the public eye, and it's hard to sell support to hackers who actually have *fun* trying to figure out a problem. In some respects Linux and the BSDs are poor commercialization candidates because they are *too* good... that they simply do not require the level of support that something like Windows-NT or Oracle might require in a back-office setting."
.
Excuse me? Windowses require much more support than their open source counterpart because
1. it takes less experience to be classified as a "windows administrator"
2. if there's something wrong in windows/oracle, either you are a microsoft/oracle developer and know where to put your hands, or you ask for support. On the other hand, in the open source world you CAN put your hands where you want to, and this reduces the need for support for those that know how to hack it.
In my opinion it's not a matter of being 'too' good, it's just a matter of state of mind of the admins. What do you think?
...are we sure that, given a new-standard of hydrongen-powered planes, there won't be any more gasoline/cherosene powered planes around? one of them, packed with some sort of explosive, could be enough.. are we going to make cherosene powered planes illegal? or to backdoor them? :)
I think the whole "free-music" community (everybody who wants to be able to download music for free) should stop worry about {RI|MP}AA lawsuits. The reasons:
:)
1. no matter how they can protect audio cd, anybody can still play the cd on a cd reader and capture the audio stream with a computer.
2. if they develop a new technology, such as new cd player that can play only "approved" cd, see point one: if you can listen for the music, you can digitalize it and copy it.
3. distributed file sharing cannot be stopped. they can slow it down, close the main nodes, whatever. new versions of the programs used can be updated for better node search, and so on.
4. if they pursue the writers of such programs, they'll fail: a disclaimer is enough to avoid all that lawsuit stuff, according to the laws *they* are using
solutions: keep sharing music, keep writing peer-to-peer file sharing software, keep buying the music you like as a *tribute* to the artists you like.
consequences: improvement on the quality of the music [because today artists fill their albums with crappy music just to sell *one* song, admit it please], more power to the netizens, less power to the lawyers who wants to stop a system bigger than theirs.
keep doing what you want. they closed napster - we switched to morpheus. will they close morpheus? the community will adapt.
adapting is a sign of strength. enforcing old rules is a sign of quick death, as in all dictatorships.
how to stop free music on the internet: make connections > 28k8 illegal; force people all over the world to use new sound cards that cannot digitalize "protected" sound [good luck]; kill every artists on the face of earth. Chose one
here's the simplified idea: you want to take a flight, they take a picture of your face, and a computer does the biometrics checks on it. then a checksum of the data is compared with the checksum of the pictures of known terrorists in a database.
:)
it's not a matter of comparing checksum of pictures (there are too many variables, such as light, shadows, colors, and so on to compare), but a matter of comparing checksums of biometric data - that should be the same, indipendently from the kind of light the picture is taken under. if I take a picture of my face under certain conditions of light, and then another one under other conditions, the pictures will probably be slightly different, but the checksums will be totally different. but once they are feed into a biometric system, the two pictures should return the same result [unless I got a plastic surgery on my face, but it's another issue]. better again, if I use the latter system, it isn't necessary to have the original picture to compare with the new one. The checksum does the same job, without me (or the government) having to have a picture that can be used to track me down for other purposes.
Let me explain better, if I can: with this checksum thing, like unix passwords, the 'system' doesn't know the password: it just compares it with some data calculated by some one-way function that cannot be easily reversed.
this could solve the problem of fearing that biometric pictures could be used for other purposes. the 'face' database can be stolen, but without a way to compare it with the real thing, nobody will know what to do with it.
now, the problems: the govn't could put cameras in pub and bars to check who's there, or maybe use our ID pictures to calculate checksums and know who has a checksum of what. but it's probably already done, so why bother? at least with the 'checksum' thing you could try to trust that the govn't had only the checksums of the terrorists, and not the pictures of all of us
just a thought. maybe I said a bunch of rant, but I'm posting here just to ask how it's done in reality.
...and then voice over ip will shut the majority of phone companies down.
..because even if US makes strong cryptography illegal/backdoored, what prevents other countries to let their people use it freely? I'm not talking about the Nato nations, but about other countries that wouldn't obey the US 'suggestions' anyway; those countries one day may keep up with technology.
Think about it: let's suppose that in the US strong crypto will be illegal/need to have backdoor(s). This is a HUGE break point: what prevents those backdoor to be discovered and used against the US one day?
Obviously it would be very difficult to do such a thing. Right. Will it be as difficult as crash four US planes, coming from within the US, into the four center of the US power (military, economic, and -almost- political)?
learn a new language, and go in another country (Europe is -as usual- slowly catching up with technology) to *start* a new market and use whatever you learned during those dot-com years to avoid the same mistakes, and create something useful.
I refuse to believe that all those people did not learn anything, and new nations *need* IT people.
Think about going to Africa, Europe, or another country. The world is big, there's room for everybody, and there are new markets to create. Move on, Americans!
- have you seen my new quantum uber-laptop?
- no I cannot see it.
- of course. otherwise I won't have it.
---
- Where is my quantum computing?
- It's here. It isn't. It's here. It isn't. It's here. It isn't. It's here. It isn't.
in my humble opinion, everything Micrsoft could do with freebsd-style licence is perfectly legal.
who cares if they are doing what they aren't preaching? the won't loose any credibility. that's because a stroger licence -such as GPL- is needed in order to keep opensource software away from such companies which want to Embrace and Extend everything around them.
now, just a moment: what's wrong in Microsoft using open source software? if really what open source developers want is the quality, well, they shouldn't care. I'm just worried that we might risk to reinvent the wheel due to this 'closing' source code policy.
let's think about how many resources are wasted every year because of licensing and copyright issues. nobody has ever died of a violation of copyright, but everybody is suffering due to the lack of useful people, busy in trying to circumvent what business forces to do.
it may seem pathethic rethoric, but I think that the world could be a BAD place if Archimedes asked for a fee every time somebody used his theorem. surely some open-theorem zealot would have created a better way to express Archimede's Theorem, but it would have meant a huge waste of time during all human evolution.
oh well, just my 2c.
as the website states, you can link up two pc using soundblasters, and even old ones. So, it can be a great emergency toolkit to carry around (instead of pcmcia ethernet, or null modem/printer cables). Better than a regular modem (max speed 115200bps), you can use it -for example- to link together old laptops with only one pcmcia and one floppy and no cdrom reader to install linux/bsd :)