At the big Microsoft manufacturing plant in... where was that again, oh yeah, it doesn't exist. Microsoft makes operating systems which may or may not be your cup of tea, but they aren't making the computer itself.
It's true that the overwhelming majority of Americans prefer to fix their computers than to buy new.
They do? How do you know? And if they do, what's the problem?
When my friends have computer problems I'm powerless to help them. How do I get rid of lurking programs that pop up advertisements? How do fix there computer if something screwed up their registry? Sometimes I am able to find help online but most of the time I'm not.
Sounds like you haven't made any effort to learn anything about the product. My personal opinion of Microsoft is frequently "What the fsck were they thinking when they did foo?!" but that doesn't stop me from finding an answer, because I study their products and information. It's my job to help users with their problems, so I bite my lip and learn what I need to, not just what I like.
Microsoft software is fragile, undocumented, unpredictable and unfixable. It's not just end users who are frustrated using Microsoft products; techincal people get frustrated and angry too.
Dude, switch to decaf. If you set it up right and pay reasonable attention to it, Microsoft software works just fine. If you aren't willing to do the work, it'll break, just like every other thing out there.
the survey was of Americans and their attitudes. And no, the "problem" might be world-wide but the survey can't simply be extended to those living outside the US, which is after all, the subject of Katz's meandering discourse.
What we need is a similar survey of other nations, so we CAN start to draw the conclusions about how people in general are dealing with this issue.
What we don't need is another bitc^H^H^H^Hcomment about how/. is anti-international. Relax and get back to the real issue, my friend, which is how we can get the banal and annoying Mr. Katz to STFU and go away.
Re:This is a sign of some sort of cultural deficie
on
Goodbye, "Majestic"
·
· Score: 1
Yes! It was called "TAG:The Assassination Game", and featured a player who went off the deep end when he was "killed out" of the game. He snapped and began killing the other players. The killer then confessed to the guy running the game, who completely misunderstood that he was serious, and complimented him on the great job he was doing, encouraging him to keep up the good work!
How do I know? It was based on a game by Steve Jackson, called "Killer", which I was running on my college campus at the same time the movie came out. You signed up and received a name, while that person had another name, etc, in a round-robin hunt. Once you got your target, you inherited his/her target. Last person "alive" won a prize, in our game half of all the entry fees.
Paintball guns were few and far between back then, although they did appear in the movie. We made do with dart and "saucer-guns", as well as more obviously-inert weapons. One of my players (Hi, Carmen!) shot her man down with a banana, then ate the evidence.
We DID have to institute a rules change to prohibit bodily contact, after a player with a rubber knife attempted to stab a Vietnam-veteran with really fast reflexes. No injury except to his pride, but not good PR for the game.
Alas, you couldn't ask for a less-PC game... I doubt it's being played anywhere anymore...
Again, don't confuse the ruling in this particular law with the general principle being laid down. That principle is the state gets to define that you are acting in the state because you sent E-mail there, even if you didn't know you were sending E-mail there.
No, you need to step back and look at the "general principle being laid down." The ruling applies only to companies that email California residents with UCE/SPAM/cr@p AND and use their own equipment located in California to do it.
What the ruling DOES do to spammers is simply this: it increases THEIR costs by requiring THEM to verify a location for your email address before they SPAM it. That expense will drive out some fly-by-night advertising companies, as it should. Spammers have gotten by on the cheap for long enough!
You list several straw-man cases of potential harm, none of them relevant to this issue because the court rulings cited by the judges in this decision would clearly disallow each one. Read it and see. As for your last point, that it's not even a good spam law, what more do you want? Monetary damages? As calculated elsewhere in this thread, few individuals lose enough time or money to get anything back. The only people who'd get anything would be ISPs and other entities who deal with thousands and tens of thousands of UCEs.
This is NOT a loss of precious freedom, it is a rare and lovely example of common sense in the law. Would that such were more common!
You have summed this up perfectly. Most companies do not and will not pay their employees to learn software at work. (And SHOULD NOT, remember the people counting on company profits to cover their paychecks, much less the stockholders, who are all too frequently employees as well.)
Most workers are not programmers, techs, or geeks. They don't NEED to know how their OfficePackage(tm) works, or how to make it work with AnotherOfficePackage(tm). And they don't WANT to know, they just want to be able to do their job. In 5 years of desktop support, I've never had a user ask for permission to change their software to a freeware option, even my friend the office LinuxLovingPowerUser. They want tools that let them finish their work faster, so they can go home to their families, not software that makes their life more complicated.
Linux and OSS may be free (as in speech), but they're free (as in beer) ONLY when the user's time is worth nothing.
Try Glen Cook. His "Black Company" novels take place in a LARGE but internally consistant world, one big enough to have many different countries, peoples, and religions. His characters aren't empty puppets, they act like people. There are several ultimate bad guys, some of them among the protagonists. Many items, some important and some just magical McGuffins, and much less reliance on the mystical-power-of-the-week.
He also has a realistic slant on the average life expectancies of mercenary soldiers, and how a military unit would act to remain viable.
He DOES share one thing with Tolkien, though: he evokes a true sense of history. The characters remember their world's history the way you do, as part of daily life.
Damn, now I've got to go dig them all out and read them again . . . Enjoy!
Hey, wipe the OpenSourceHappyDust(tm) out of your eyes, you're missing the point. The esteemed AC wants an appliance!
AC said: Do you really think having the source would improve the product?... I want to buy something that plugs in and works. I don't want something I can buy and fix myself. They should just make it work right in the first place.
Your reply assumes that everything will be addressable in software. What about hardware changes? How will Open Source software make a difference if I what I want is a way to control the box using Bertrol Rays? It's irrelevant, isn't it?
More importantly, is it too much to ask for a finished product, that doesn't require tweaking of ANY part, just to perform when purchased?
Jeremi said: Contrast that with the open-source product. You buy one, and it works as advertised.
If you read the review, in this case, the device doesn't work as advertised (that is, simply, easily, and correctly, given it's relatively high price.) That's why it wasn't recommended for purchase.
Well, I've never been a fan of the Journal or Notes, but I use the Calendar & Tasks every diddly-damn-day, so this fix just doesn't cut it for me.
I also REALLY LIKE using Contacts! It's your own little CRM database, if you take the time to use it. Have you?
Oh sure, I could probably find a shareware database app that let me enter/find/sort/etc but it wouldn't tie into my email system, would it? And no, writing one or paying you to write one is not an option. This one works NOW, and ties in seamlessly with the email system. Could you do that for the price I paid for Office?
For pity's sake, let's stop stroking each other about how program(foo) can easily substitute for M$program(bar). If it could, people would be buying it!
The nice folks at CRN who wrote the article are geeks like you & I, not the average Office user. They don't have the faintest idea what the average Office user thinks/feels/wants. They know too much about the software to make the fumbling choices of the average user, as do damn near all/. readers. They don't have the blind faith in "the program that writes the reports I need on Friday, you know the one I mean."
In the end, this is just another "feel-good" article by linux-lovers with a job in journalism. There's no news here. Move along now, nothing to see, move along...
The really sad thing is, that only the minority are thinking. In a democracy, the majority decides, and that's how you get a country where thinking is outlawed.
How the fsck is this insightful?!
In America, the majority votes, and a minority (Electoral College) then votes based on that majority, but only in ONE election. Why? The system was designed to prevent Presidential candidates from running only in the biggest East Coast cities, getting the urban votes while ignoring the rural and smaller-town voters.
All the other elections are straight votes, where the winner is the candidate with the most votes. As for actual laws, they are voted on by another minority (those few people elected to the House and Senate), then signed or vetoed by the President (a minority of one!), and finally ruled on by 9 Supreme Court Justices. Sounds like a minority sweep to me, bucko!
As for thinking being outlawed, maybe you could give us an example?
The minority of which you speak is thinking all right, thinking about their OS and not their work! Wake up, TeknoHog, the important thing about work is getting it done, not the platform on which you do it. Microsoft has spent years studying and improving their user interface. Most people can sit down at a Windows machine and start working within minutes. That's WORKING, not tweaking, not recompiling, not reading the MAN pages. THAT'S why purchasing departments buy Microsoft products, not the freeware flavor of the day.
They may not (and frequently are not) the best products, but they are easy-to-use, and until Linux (or something else) is easier, they'll stay popular.
But if I grab it, and I *completely duplicate* the content of the original site, that wouldn't be abuse by your book. Because, after all, it would have real content: it's not just a redirection.
Then, obviously, you are a thief, and a poser. Mirroring a website without permission does NOT provide any actual content, it just repeats the content provided by the first website. Your notional "walmartsucks.com" site DOES provide real content, even if it's just opinions.
ding! Thanks for playing. Come back real soon now, y'hear?
Your comment epitomises the all too common/. attitude that the opinions and efforts of others are useful only as targets for nitpicking attacks and intellectual scorn. Maybe Dennis Miller can make a living at it, but you, FFFish, are no Dennis Miller.
More troubling than your attitude is the section of the WIPO report covering the possible prohibitions against using tradenames in domain names. Your already extant "walmartsucks.com" could be summarily removed if the new rules are applied retroactively, as suggested. "Free Speech" rights don't mean a lot in international govenmental and/or commercial circles, compared to the compedium of laws protecting those with the moolah.
In fact, I voted for a number of candidates that lost, including Vice-President Gore.
Me too, except I voted for GW.
In fact, I believe he actually had 300,000+ more votes than the guy who is getting the office.
Which equalled approximately 0.36% of the entire vote (see http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/US2000/200 0-12/splash141200.shtml for the numbers I used.) Hardly a ringing endorsement, eh?
My vote did not count. I live in a conservative state that went 60-70% to Bush. My vote couldn't have counted under our electoral system, which is intended to give low population areas disproportionate say compared to high population areas.
My vote was meaningless. However, it was not as bad as it could've been. If you live in North Dakota, your vote counts nearly 3 times as much as the vote of someone in California. You vote for 1 representative + 2 senators worth of electoral seats while a Californian (with about 57 or so electoral votes) votes for 1 and 2/57ths of an electoral seat when you spread it all out. Look at a map, by county, of which candidate won. High population areas voted for Gore, while the vast geographic majority or the nation, low-population rural areas, went to Bush. Pity, then, the minority voice of any state, for it is mute.
Yeah, and my state (California) went the other way, so my vote didn't help GW get any electoral votes either. What you missed, however, is that the system you are decrying is designed to do just what you are crying for: provide a voice for a minority.
The Electoral College was created to prevent the highly-populated states from running-roughshod over the less-populated states. When it was passed the north-eastern states held a huge majority of the population of the United States, which could allow a candidate to win an election by winning in only a few, maybe only one, key states. The Electoral College gave votes to each state, requiring candidates to address voters in every state.
Al Gore ran his campaign on the "Few-Large Electoral Count" scheme, avoiding investments of time and money in the "Many-Small Electoral Count" states. He lost those states, and therefore lost the election.
In essence, country bumpkins who probably don't follow politics unless its dictated to them by conservative talk radio shows shape the future of the nation far more than me, an educated college student living in a high-population area.
Get off your high-horse. I'm an educated college-graduate living in a high-population/high-tech area who gets his opinions from a great variety of sources, from/. to NPR to Rush Limbaugh & G. Gordon Liddy as well as newspapers, magazines, personal contact with officials and campaign staff. And there are lots more like me, conservatives and liberals alike, who just couldn't make ourselves vote for Al.
People don't care about facts anymore. It's not without irony that our next president is quoted as saying the following about his opponent: "The fact that he relies on facts--says things that are not factual--are going to undermine his campaign." --New York Times, March 4, 2000. We laugh at it when we take it at face value, but GWB was absolutely right. Al Gore was hurt by the non-factual things in the campaign...
Yep, if only Al hadn't kept claiming to have done things/invented things/been places he never actually did, he might have gotten elected. (Yeah, that's sarcastic, but it's true.)
I can't bring myself to quote or paraphrase your last two paragraphs. I'm sorry you feel so betrayed by the system. Then again, that's the same way I felt when all the Democrats in the House and Senate voted to let Bill Clinton off the hook, and you know, I got over it. So can you. But if you'd rather move to another country, I wish you farewell and Godspeed! Write us from your new politically-perfect home. Where exactly will that be?
This is a relatively old technology called Tempest that doesn't even require them to break into your house or have a back door into your system.
Uh, no, it's not. Tempest is a certification scheme which is designed to prevent your computer from EMITTING rf signals, which could otherwise be intercepted by those guys in the van across from your house. It makes your computer a bit heavier, due to the shielding materials, but much less likely to affect your TV and cordless phones.
for christs sake, GWB got elected with about 20% of the eligible voters voting for him? does that sound like the MAJORITY of people want this guy to lead... its a minority... a very small minority is running this country, and selling the people out for the dollar...
I was with you until you tried to lay this off on GW. Did you not read the original post? CONGRESS (including Joe "NOT-the-Vice-President" Lieberman in the Senate, which also signed off on this bill) voted to gut the bill put forward by the FCC.
Exactly what part did Texas Governor/Presidential Candidate Bush play in that?! Did I somehow miss his efforts, or are you just dragging him in as your target de jour?
I agree that our national turnout was pitiful. (Despite the fact that each of the candidates received more votes than the winner of the last such election.)
Personally, I'm most saddened by the fact that low-power enthusiasts were so inadequate at lobbying their respective Representatives and Senators. The only buzz I remember hearing about this issue was on NPR a couple of months ago. I got no mailings on this issue, saw no articles in other media, and saw no people trying to support the FCC in making these new frequency allocations available.
I guess the reason a few powerful (well-financed) groups & companies were able to get their way was because only a few non-powerful (poorly-financed & not connected politically) people stood in opposition.
Just saying "that OS/programming language/choice-of-nearly-identical-political-cand idates/etc sucks!" is NOT an arguement, it's just a flame. (Monty Python sketches not withstanding.)
I enjoy a good arguement, where opposing sides can attempt to show that their choice is the best. Those who just want to denigrate all other choices are just wasting my time.
Case in point, those in this thread who say "PERL sux!" without giving examples of a better choice, that is, examples which show WHY another language is better.
Further case: I have found many things about Linux that I like better than their equivalent in MS Windows. (Why is there no sort command in NotePad or WordPad?) That makes me like Linux more than Windows, but it doesn't make me hate Windows. (Their licensing schemes do that:^P)
You 'win' an arguement by changing the minds of the other folks arguing with you, not by calling them names ("Only an idiot would think/use/code that!")
Jason Garon, who entered his guilty plea Friday, faces up to seven years in prison.
*UP TO* 7 years.
Right!
This is IBM, too, they've been around for a while. They should realize that they have a big name in the industry and need to be careful.
Wrong! If you go back and read the original article, he used a third party's server while forging a header that made the spam appear to originate at IBM. IBM is not a fault, they're another victim of this newly convicted felon.
No, I'm willing to sentence this particular loser* for the fraud and theft of service that HE committed. That he did it to Spam computer users is irrelevant (except for making it interesting to/. readers.)
Besides, we still don't know how long he'll actually get. He can get UP TO 7 years, but that's just the maximum, not his actual sentence. Let's wait and see what the judge decides before complaining about the length of sentence, eh!
*Why 'loser'? Doesn't sound like it was very hard for Johnny Law to track down the perp. Just like most COPS episodes...
Slashdot Mirror
What we need is a similar survey of other nations, so we CAN start to draw the conclusions about how people in general are dealing with this issue.
What we don't need is another bitc^H^H^H^Hcomment about how /. is anti-international. Relax and get back to the real issue, my friend, which is how we can get the banal and annoying Mr. Katz to STFU and go away.
How do I know? It was based on a game by Steve Jackson, called "Killer", which I was running on my college campus at the same time the movie came out. You signed up and received a name, while that person had another name, etc, in a round-robin hunt. Once you got your target, you inherited his/her target. Last person "alive" won a prize, in our game half of all the entry fees.
Paintball guns were few and far between back then, although they did appear in the movie. We made do with dart and "saucer-guns", as well as more obviously-inert weapons. One of my players (Hi, Carmen!) shot her man down with a banana, then ate the evidence.
We DID have to institute a rules change to prohibit bodily contact, after a player with a rubber knife attempted to stab a Vietnam-veteran with really fast reflexes. No injury except to his pride, but not good PR for the game.
Alas, you couldn't ask for a less-PC game ... I doubt it's being played anywhere anymore ...
What the ruling DOES do to spammers is simply this: it increases THEIR costs by requiring THEM to verify a location for your email address before they SPAM it. That expense will drive out some fly-by-night advertising companies, as it should. Spammers have gotten by on the cheap for long enough!
You list several straw-man cases of potential harm, none of them relevant to this issue because the court rulings cited by the judges in this decision would clearly disallow each one. Read it and see. As for your last point, that it's not even a good spam law, what more do you want? Monetary damages? As calculated elsewhere in this thread, few individuals lose enough time or money to get anything back. The only people who'd get anything would be ISPs and other entities who deal with thousands and tens of thousands of UCEs.
This is NOT a loss of precious freedom, it is a rare and lovely example of common sense in the law. Would that such were more common!
Most workers are not programmers, techs, or geeks. They don't NEED to know how their OfficePackage(tm) works, or how to make it work with AnotherOfficePackage(tm). And they don't WANT to know, they just want to be able to do their job. In 5 years of desktop support, I've never had a user ask for permission to change their software to a freeware option, even my friend the office LinuxLovingPowerUser. They want tools that let them finish their work faster, so they can go home to their families, not software that makes their life more complicated.
Linux and OSS may be free (as in speech), but they're free (as in beer) ONLY when the user's time is worth nothing.
He also has a realistic slant on the average life expectancies of mercenary soldiers, and how a military unit would act to remain viable.
He DOES share one thing with Tolkien, though: he evokes a true sense of history. The characters remember their world's history the way you do, as part of daily life.
Damn, now I've got to go dig them all out and read them again . . . Enjoy!
Your reply assumes that everything will be addressable in software. What about hardware changes? How will Open Source software make a difference if I what I want is a way to control the box using Bertrol Rays? It's irrelevant, isn't it?
More importantly, is it too much to ask for a finished product, that doesn't require tweaking of ANY part, just to perform when purchased?
If you read the review, in this case, the device doesn't work as advertised (that is, simply, easily, and correctly, given it's relatively high price.) That's why it wasn't recommended for purchase.I also REALLY LIKE using Contacts! It's your own little CRM database, if you take the time to use it. Have you?
Oh sure, I could probably find a shareware database app that let me enter/find/sort/etc but it wouldn't tie into my email system, would it? And no, writing one or paying you to write one is not an option. This one works NOW, and ties in seamlessly with the email system. Could you do that for the price I paid for Office?
For pity's sake, let's stop stroking each other about how program(foo) can easily substitute for M$program(bar). If it could, people would be buying it!
The nice folks at CRN who wrote the article are geeks like you & I, not the average Office user. They don't have the faintest idea what the average Office user thinks/feels/wants. They know too much about the software to make the fumbling choices of the average user, as do damn near all /. readers. They don't have the blind faith in "the program that writes the reports I need on Friday, you know the one I mean."
In the end, this is just another "feel-good" article by linux-lovers with a job in journalism. There's no news here. Move along now, nothing to see, move along...
How the fsck is this insightful ?!
In America, the majority votes, and a minority (Electoral College) then votes based on that majority, but only in ONE election. Why? The system was designed to prevent Presidential candidates from running only in the biggest East Coast cities, getting the urban votes while ignoring the rural and smaller-town voters.
All the other elections are straight votes, where the winner is the candidate with the most votes. As for actual laws, they are voted on by another minority (those few people elected to the House and Senate), then signed or vetoed by the President (a minority of one!), and finally ruled on by 9 Supreme Court Justices. Sounds like a minority sweep to me, bucko!
As for thinking being outlawed, maybe you could give us an example?
The minority of which you speak is thinking all right, thinking about their OS and not their work! Wake up, TeknoHog, the important thing about work is getting it done, not the platform on which you do it. Microsoft has spent years studying and improving their user interface. Most people can sit down at a Windows machine and start working within minutes. That's WORKING, not tweaking, not recompiling, not reading the MAN pages. THAT'S why purchasing departments buy Microsoft products, not the freeware flavor of the day.
They may not (and frequently are not) the best products, but they are easy-to-use, and until Linux (or something else) is easier, they'll stay popular.
Then, obviously, you are a thief, and a poser. Mirroring a website without permission does NOT provide any actual content, it just repeats the content provided by the first website. Your notional "walmartsucks.com" site DOES provide real content, even if it's just opinions.
ding! Thanks for playing. Come back real soon now, y'hear?
Your comment epitomises the all too common /. attitude that the opinions and efforts of others are useful only as targets for nitpicking attacks and intellectual scorn. Maybe Dennis Miller can make a living at it, but you, FFFish, are no Dennis Miller.
More troubling than your attitude is the section of the WIPO report covering the possible prohibitions against using tradenames in domain names. Your already extant "walmartsucks.com" could be summarily removed if the new rules are applied retroactively, as suggested. "Free Speech" rights don't mean a lot in international govenmental and/or commercial circles, compared to the compedium of laws protecting those with the moolah.
Go RTFR!
Me too!
In fact, I voted for a number of candidates that lost, including Vice-President Gore.
Me too, except I voted for GW.
In fact, I believe he actually had 300,000+ more votes than the guy who is getting the office.
Which equalled approximately 0.36% of the entire vote (see http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/US2000/200 0-12/splash141200.shtml for the numbers I used.) Hardly a ringing endorsement, eh?
My vote did not count. I live in a conservative state that went 60-70% to Bush. My vote couldn't have counted under our electoral system, which is intended to give low population areas disproportionate say compared to high population areas. My vote was meaningless. However, it was not as bad as it could've been. If you live in North Dakota, your vote counts nearly 3 times as much as the vote of someone in California. You vote for 1 representative + 2 senators worth of electoral seats while a Californian (with about 57 or so electoral votes) votes for 1 and 2/57ths of an electoral seat when you spread it all out. Look at a map, by county, of which candidate won. High population areas voted for Gore, while the vast geographic majority or the nation, low-population rural areas, went to Bush. Pity, then, the minority voice of any state, for it is mute.
Yeah, and my state (California) went the other way, so my vote didn't help GW get any electoral votes either. What you missed, however, is that the system you are decrying is designed to do just what you are crying for: provide a voice for a minority.
The Electoral College was created to prevent the highly-populated states from running-roughshod over the less-populated states. When it was passed the north-eastern states held a huge majority of the population of the United States, which could allow a candidate to win an election by winning in only a few, maybe only one, key states. The Electoral College gave votes to each state, requiring candidates to address voters in every state.
Al Gore ran his campaign on the "Few-Large Electoral Count" scheme, avoiding investments of time and money in the "Many-Small Electoral Count" states. He lost those states, and therefore lost the election.
In essence, country bumpkins who probably don't follow politics unless its dictated to them by conservative talk radio shows shape the future of the nation far more than me, an educated college student living in a high-population area.
Get off your high-horse. I'm an educated college-graduate living in a high-population/high-tech area who gets his opinions from a great variety of sources, from /. to NPR to Rush Limbaugh & G. Gordon Liddy as well as newspapers, magazines, personal contact with officials and campaign staff. And there are lots more like me, conservatives and liberals alike, who just couldn't make ourselves vote for Al.
People don't care about facts anymore. It's not without irony that our next president is quoted as saying the following about his opponent: "The fact that he relies on facts--says things that are not factual--are going to undermine his campaign." --New York Times, March 4, 2000. We laugh at it when we take it at face value, but GWB was absolutely right. Al Gore was hurt by the non-factual things in the campaign ...
Yep, if only Al hadn't kept claiming to have done things/invented things/been places he never actually did, he might have gotten elected. (Yeah, that's sarcastic, but it's true.)
I can't bring myself to quote or paraphrase your last two paragraphs. I'm sorry you feel so betrayed by the system. Then again, that's the same way I felt when all the Democrats in the House and Senate voted to let Bill Clinton off the hook, and you know, I got over it. So can you. But if you'd rather move to another country, I wish you farewell and Godspeed! Write us from your new politically-perfect home. Where exactly will that be?
Uh, no, it's not. Tempest is a certification scheme which is designed to prevent your computer from EMITTING rf signals, which could otherwise be intercepted by those guys in the van across from your house. It makes your computer a bit heavier, due to the shielding materials, but much less likely to affect your TV and cordless phones.
And it cooks rice perfectly every time.
I was with you until you tried to lay this off on GW. Did you not read the original post? CONGRESS (including Joe "NOT-the-Vice-President" Lieberman in the Senate, which also signed off on this bill) voted to gut the bill put forward by the FCC.
Exactly what part did Texas Governor/Presidential Candidate Bush play in that?! Did I somehow miss his efforts, or are you just dragging him in as your target de jour?
I agree that our national turnout was pitiful. (Despite the fact that each of the candidates received more votes than the winner of the last such election.)
Personally, I'm most saddened by the fact that low-power enthusiasts were so inadequate at lobbying their respective Representatives and Senators. The only buzz I remember hearing about this issue was on NPR a couple of months ago. I got no mailings on this issue, saw no articles in other media, and saw no people trying to support the FCC in making these new frequency allocations available.
I guess the reason a few powerful (well-financed) groups & companies were able to get their way was because only a few non-powerful (poorly-financed & not connected politically) people stood in opposition.
I enjoy a good arguement, where opposing sides can attempt to show that their choice is the best. Those who just want to denigrate all other choices are just wasting my time.
Case in point, those in this thread who say "PERL sux!" without giving examples of a better choice, that is, examples which show WHY another language is better.
Further case: I have found many things about Linux that I like better than their equivalent in MS Windows. (Why is there no sort command in NotePad or WordPad?) That makes me like Linux more than Windows, but it doesn't make me hate Windows. (Their licensing schemes do that :^P)
You 'win' an arguement by changing the minds of the other folks arguing with you, not by calling them names ("Only an idiot would think/use/code that!")
They toiled to build a system that integrated the ideas of Douglas Engelbart for a graphical user interface ...
They quote Bob Taylor, but I don't see him claiming to be the creator. And when did magazine retrospectives become "proof" of anything, anyway? :^P
Right!
Wrong! If you go back and read the original article, he used a third party's server while forging a header that made the spam appear to originate at IBM. IBM is not a fault, they're another victim of this newly convicted felon.
Besides, we still don't know how long he'll actually get. He can get UP TO 7 years, but that's just the maximum, not his actual sentence. Let's wait and see what the judge decides before complaining about the length of sentence, eh!
*Why 'loser'? Doesn't sound like it was very hard for Johnny Law to track down the perp. Just like most COPS episodes ...