SPAM is annoying because it's for products that you don't want, that you have no interest in. I'd have though popping up a coupon for me for a product that's in the aisle I'm already in would be a GOOD thing.
Just because it's in the same aisle dosn't mean you want it. Phones going off has the potential to annoy other customers, both from the noise and pricing which is dependent on if someone is carrying XYZ type of phone or not.
Re:Bluejacking : a growing problem in taxis ...
on
Spammed by Bluetooth
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· Score: 1
At least in Copenhagen this phenomenon is quite common. It seems, every other time I get in a taxi I get a bluetooth transmitted business card from the company or sometimes specifically the driver of the taxi.
By the sound of things the device doing this is built into the taxi.
The first time this happened it was a slightly novel new thing I didn't mind much - but now I find myself cursing the people who implemented this standard for not doing it like on Palm where you have to 'accept' the infrared beamed cards. On the Nokia cellphones it's just stored without question so if this practice gets more widespread, soon your address book will be seriously burdened with unwanted business cards.
Is the problem with BT or Nokia's interpretation of the BT specs. One possible downside of such automatic acceptance is that someone could set up some kind of denial of service "bomb". Which would send out random junk in the appropriate format with the intention of filling up the memory of the phone.
Non-geeks will use increasingly more Bluetooth enable devices. Do you think they will have any idea what "discoverable" is? Do you think they will want to wade through software menus to turn Bluetooth on and off?
Or have a clue about what half the options do in the first place.
More sophisticated methods will be discovered to take advantage of people who unwittingly leave the Bluetooth window open. This includes spam or viruses and other as-yet undiscovered threats. This means it will become increasingly important to be able to *quickly* and *efficiently* turn off Bluetooth when required (ie. not through some crappy menu).
If someone can work out a way to rewrite the firmware they can render a menu option non functional anyway. Problem is even if the user interface actually has an explicit switch you can't be sure that the switch dosn't simply signal a processor of your intentions, as opposed to electrically disconnecting part of the device. Which would also have the handy side effect of increasing battery life.
it's not part of the BT spec, and i don't remember ever seeing a device that had this. you turn it off in "software" which phone designers like as you don't have to clutter the already cluttered keypad with a button just to babysit idiots...
With the the result that an already overloaded interface becomes even more overloaded. Together with the possibility that there may be other ways to change the configuration of the phone.
I mean really, let's think about this: If you're walking in front of my coffee shop and I "bluejack" you with a coupon for a half-price latte, are you gonna come in and beat the crap out of me because I made your phone beep?
There are plenty of other ways in which you could make that offer, put up a sign, pay for an advertisment, mail out coupons, partner with some other business so that their receipt acts as a coupon, etc, etc. By making someone's phone beep you are accosting them. In much the same way as if you physically stopped them walking past whilst you explained your great offers.
Bluetooth has a range of about 15 feet (5 meters). If someone Bluetooth spams you then you look around for the dick with a Sony Ericsson T68i in his hand pushing the buttons and you walk over and beat the shit out of him.
Nothing requires the spamming device to be manually operated. The actual range of Bluetooth is 10m in any direction. But that's just from a mobile device, which is restricted in what power levels it can use so as to still have a decent battery life.
In the rest of the world where the recipient is not paying for incoming calls or text messages, there are no special laws that make cell phones less attractive to spam than landlines. Since bluetooth spam is not costing you anything to receive in the US either, expect it to take off like SMS spam has in Europe.
It dosn't cost anything to send either, SMS spam is likely to end up costing the spammer actual money.
But you could expect store entrances and subway station entrances to have such devices.
As soon as you walk in, you phone spams you with specials at this or that store.
Or they could dot "trigger points" at random places around the store. If someone is already in the store they are less likely to walk straight out again.
Large amount being a relative term. It is an exceedingly strong poison, and the reason why it was tolerated for so long was that the quantities in cigarettes were so low.
As well as cigarettes being a rather inefficent way to ingest the drug. Most likely nicotine being such a potent neurotoxin is also why it is so addictive.
This, however, shouldn't be used to suggest it isn't dangerous. The drug is also thought, for example, to act as a catalyst with other carceogens, encouraging the growth of tumours. Cigarettes are probably uniquely dangerous because of the combination of carceogens and nicotine.
Any kind of cigarettes, regardless of the plant(s) used, are hardly exactly healthy.
None are no-risk. Society's goal should be to MINIMIZE risk. We cannot eliminate it, and we should not recoil from lowering risk simply because we cannot eliminate it.
Actually things arn't so simple. Place people in a situation where they feel "too safe" and they will behave recklessly.
Besides, do you really think that guns and rifles would do anything against tanks and aircraft? If push comes to shove, an armed militia attempting to rebel would be classified as a "terrorist cell" and picked off by snipers or incinerated with an air-fuel bomb.
This dosn't appear to be the case in Iraq where militiamen have killed an average of one US soldier a day since the war supposedly ended. Some of these Iraqi militias have anti-aircraft weapons, want to bet that none of them have anti-tank weapons...
You're suffering under the misconception that the constitution grants rights. It doesn't. What it does, is enjoin the government from infringing on our rights.
The only entity the US Constitution grants rights to is the US Government. In several places it explicitally says that the US government has no right to do specific thngs.
The Second amendment says that, because of the need for the militia, the government will not infringe on our pre-existing right to keep and bear arms. It does not grant the right to self-defense, it acknowledges the right and states one reason for not infringing it.
Also the only part of the text mentioning "regulation" is that refering to "a well regulated militia". Which can be interpreted as "a militia who know how to shoot straight".
It's very simple really. Gun ownership is a topic of political debate in this country. If one side of the debate is blocked, that debate is hampered. In the U.S. we believe that even a lunatic is entitled to vioce an opinion in a civil manner. While having all of the facts doesn't guarantee a good decision, willful ignorance is a fairly good guarantee of a bad decision.
Possibly the most important thing is that political biases within such software are often undeclared. Also there are topics where the Internet the major, sometimes only, forum for debate. The number of such topics is likely to increase as ownership of other media winds up in fewer hands.
The GPL applies until actual statute or case law says it dosn't.
the code is copyrighted, and nobody can distribute without permission from the author. It just so happens that the GPL outlines what constitutes getting permission (agreeing to the terms of the license)
Disagreeing with a distribution licence does not grant permission and it certainly does not transfer ownership of copyright. If SCO's argument were accepted it would void the entire concept of copyright.
If they invalidate the GPL in this manner and get away with it, won't they just have the effect of providing legel precedent for throwing out ALL software licenses and EULAs?
EULA's are probably a different "kettle of fish". But as for distribution licences why stop with software? Would this not be a perfectly good precedent for killing off things like DVD region codes...
I should mention that by asking a judge to put any GPLd code into the public domain, instead of letting it revert to standard copyright, SCO is asking the courts to, effectively, write a new IP law.
Not all of the copyright holders are from the US, but their copyright is accepted there because of various treaties. Notably Bern and WIPO. So they are not only asking the court to drastically ammend statutes they are also asking it to break treaties. N.B. these are recipricol treaties, break them and any US produced copyright works become public domain over most of the planet. Which would be to the disadvantage of a great many parties, including SCO.
Current American IP law specifically states that a work cannot enter public domain until either the author's life plus 70 years passes, or until the author explicitly places their work into the public domain.
There is even some reason to suspect that a copyright holder placing something in the public domain is actually revokable, under current laws.
SCO is asking the court to place entire bodies of work into the public domain without the consent of the copyright holders
Indeed against the copyright holders explicit wishes. SCO are attempting to use a principle applicable to willing property to charities. Even though the vast majority of the copyright holders are alive and perfectly capable indicating their wishes. AFAIK no GPL copyright has been willed to a charity. Any which might have been willed having been willed to a person or corporation.
The problem with a distributed community of developers is that we are distributed. Almost no single entity could take on this corporation directly (not with their $50M warchest). So a group effort would be required to do so.
Is this actually a problem. Whilst their "warchest" might be very useful for fighting a big case. either against IBM or some kind of class action suit. How useful would it be against hundreds (or even thousands) of small cases. Where it would cost SCO more to put in a defence than the damages claimed.
Oh, and, distributing it under a different license is basically the equivalent of me taking the latest Metallica album / Harry Potter book, selling / giving away copies of it, and telling the recipients of these copies that they're permitted to use the material in a way not permitted under its original copyright
Actually SCO are going rather further than this. To complete the analogy the person distributing the copies would be claiming that they (by a reasoning incomprehensible to the sane) were the copyright holders and Metallica/J K Rowling were not.
The more lawsuits now, the better their plan works. Remember, they are pursuing a plan of FUD, stock price manipulation and legal mudwrestling.
I'm not sure of the logic here. They can't easily fight that many lawsuits at the same time. How many judgements against them would their stock price survive?
They are not really interested in creating anything other than a sharkfest feeding frenzy over the code within Linux...trying to create an atmosphere around Linux that rivals their own sorded and utterly confusing legal past.
What's so bad about wanting to them to the sharks.
Do not allow them to change the subject. Their initial claim is "IBM put SCO's code in Linux"...make them prove that first!...Anything else is changing the subject. I do not beleve that there should be additional suits UNTIL the original suit is settled. There will be plenty of time to file after the IBM/SCO cage-match gets started.
How does the IBM case affect the industrial scale copyright infringment they are now enguaged in? If anything waiting would weaken any copyright infringement actions, because they could use a "you knew on 31st October 2003, but did nothing until now" kind of defence.
For all of SCO's claims that the GPL is anti-copyright and unconstitutional, the licence itself makes clear that if the conditions can't be fulfilled or the licence is found to be unenforceable, standard copyright law applies--which means, unfortunately for SCO, the code they're trying to distribute is not automatically public domain, and thus they have no right to distribute any code they can't claim direct ownership for.
They certainly can't attempt to put their own licence on their distribution. Unless their licence is endorsed by all of the actual copyright holders then it is totally null and void. One thing to remember is that SCO's bogus licence does not destroy the GPL anyway. It dosn't matter how someone may have recieved GPL code they still have permission from the copyright holders to redistribute in accordance with the stated conditions.
It just means the authors would have to come up with another way to licence their code, either collectively or individually--and SCO would be in no position to make demands.
The copyright holders don't have to do anything, they could ignore SCO, they could offer SCO alternative licence conditions, they could initiate civil and/or criminal procedings against SCO. Most likely they have done this on a Friday so as to give them the weekend's extra "piracy time" before the likes of DMCA takedown notices start arriving.
Yes. SCO seems to be under the delusion that assertions made in court are TRUE until proven FALSE.
Never mind the "Twilight Zone" we now have the "SCO (and crossbones) Zone".
That, for example, if a license is declared invalid the item falling under the license is immediately in the public domain.
Using this "logic" just about every copyright work would "fall" into the public domain within a short period of time.
Or that a company which has allegedly been wronged is entitled to payments during the discovery phase of the trial, rather than after a ruling has been made.
In which case it is up to the judge to set the level and scope of any payments, they form part of the ruling.
Or that claiming copyright infringement is the equivalent of proving copyright infringement.
Nice of SCO to prove that they are software pirates. Now what do they intend to offer me and the rest of the copyright holders who's work they have distributed illegally?
You seem to think 'office' equates to large scale corporations with an IT department and everyone running the same hardware. Clearly this is not the case, for the vast army of SOHO workers, legal firms, accountants, estate agents, shop keepers, electricians, printers, architects etc.
Would a green grocer act as his or her own shop fitter, plumber, electrician, carpet layer, estate agent, lawyer, accountant, car mechanic, etc? Yet it's expected to be possible for them to administer and maintain a complex machine.
Unless Linux can install out of the box, either with the drivers or prompt them where to find them, and provide useful context sensitive help, and hide the advanced options and provide wizards for the everyday tasks, I would not consider Linux ready to replace Windows at all.
Why do you think it makes sense for a non computer literate person to be messing around with the internals of computer operating systems or applications in the first place? Do people demand cars which can be serviced by anyone who can drive? Even if they did would it be sensible to attempt to do this.
As for your UT2003 remark, I see you have missed the point. Certain apps won't run without tinkering on Linux because the target OS was not installed in an adequate state in the first place to support them. UT2003 was simply an example of an app which won't run because no dist sees fit to ship a proper 3D enabled Xfree display driver. You could replace UT2003, with a video conferencing suite, or a CAD/CAM application, or a interior decorating app.
Installing drivers or apps is not really a "user level" task in the first place. Would you ask the average user to take a soldering iron to a piece of electronics?
If Windows can do it, then so can Linux.
In a great many situations Windows can't do it. Windows users end up having to ask an expert to set up their machines. If the "wizard" messes up the results can be worst than if nothing had been tried. An unwanted side effect of this user administered paradigm is to make things much easier for all sorts of malware.
But the point is that Linux can be used in a business setting quite easily, as everything will be pre-configured and you won't want users installing/configuring things themselves.
Which is that vast majority of computers anyway. Here the ability of end users to install software or mess around with settings goes in the "cons" column.
The only problem I see right now is that someone might want to install something like a new digital camera,
How many *new* cameras don't act as USB mass storage devices?
but according to Mac "switcher" commercials, Windows users need to call in the nerds too, right?:)
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The tax is easy to avoid, build your computer instead of having it pre-built.
Kind of hard to do that with a laptop...
SPAM is annoying because it's for products that you don't want, that you have no interest in. I'd have though popping up a coupon for me for a product that's in the aisle I'm already in would be a GOOD thing.
Just because it's in the same aisle dosn't mean you want it. Phones going off has the potential to annoy other customers, both from the noise and pricing which is dependent on if someone is carrying XYZ type of phone or not.
At least in Copenhagen this phenomenon is quite common. It seems, every other time I get in a taxi I get a bluetooth transmitted business card from the company or sometimes specifically the driver of the taxi.
By the sound of things the device doing this is built into the taxi.
The first time this happened it was a slightly novel new thing I didn't mind much - but now I find myself cursing the people who implemented this standard for not doing it like on Palm where you have to 'accept' the infrared beamed cards. On the Nokia cellphones it's just stored without question so if this practice gets more widespread, soon your address book will be seriously burdened with unwanted business cards.
Is the problem with BT or Nokia's interpretation of the BT specs.
One possible downside of such automatic acceptance is that someone could set up some kind of denial of service "bomb". Which would send out random junk in the appropriate format with the intention of filling up the memory of the phone.
Non-geeks will use increasingly more Bluetooth enable devices. Do you think they will have any idea what "discoverable" is? Do you think they will want to wade through software menus to turn Bluetooth on and off?
Or have a clue about what half the options do in the first place.
More sophisticated methods will be discovered to take advantage of people who unwittingly leave the Bluetooth window open. This includes spam or viruses and other as-yet undiscovered threats. This means it will become increasingly important to be able to *quickly* and *efficiently* turn off Bluetooth when required (ie. not through some crappy menu).
If someone can work out a way to rewrite the firmware they can render a menu option non functional anyway. Problem is even if the user interface actually has an explicit switch you can't be sure that the switch dosn't simply signal a processor of your intentions, as opposed to electrically disconnecting part of the device. Which would also have the handy side effect of increasing battery life.
it's not part of the BT spec, and i don't remember ever seeing a device that had this. you turn it off in "software" which phone designers like as you don't have to clutter the already cluttered keypad with a button just to babysit idiots...
With the the result that an already overloaded interface becomes even more overloaded. Together with the possibility that there may be other ways to change the configuration of the phone.
I mean really, let's think about this: If you're walking in front of my coffee shop and I "bluejack" you with a coupon for a half-price latte, are you gonna come in and beat the crap out of me because I made your phone beep?
There are plenty of other ways in which you could make that offer, put up a sign, pay for an advertisment, mail out coupons, partner with some other business so that their receipt acts as a coupon, etc, etc.
By making someone's phone beep you are accosting them. In much the same way as if you physically stopped them walking past whilst you explained your great offers.
Bluetooth has a range of about 15 feet (5 meters). If someone Bluetooth spams you then you look around for the dick with a Sony Ericsson T68i in his hand pushing the buttons and you walk over and beat the shit out of him.
Nothing requires the spamming device to be manually operated. The actual range of Bluetooth is 10m in any direction. But that's just from a mobile device, which is restricted in what power levels it can use so as to still have a decent battery life.
In the rest of the world where the recipient is not paying for incoming calls or text messages, there are no special laws that make cell phones less attractive to spam than landlines. Since bluetooth spam is not costing you anything to receive in the US either, expect it to take off like SMS spam has in Europe.
It dosn't cost anything to send either, SMS spam is likely to end up costing the spammer actual money.
But you could expect store entrances and subway station entrances to have such devices.
As soon as you walk in, you phone spams you with specials at this or that store.
Or they could dot "trigger points" at random places around the store. If someone is already in the store they are less likely to walk straight out again.
Large amount being a relative term. It is an exceedingly strong poison, and the reason why it was tolerated for so long was that the quantities in cigarettes were so low.
As well as cigarettes being a rather inefficent way to ingest the drug. Most likely nicotine being such a potent neurotoxin is also why it is so addictive.
This, however, shouldn't be used to suggest it isn't dangerous. The drug is also thought, for example, to act as a catalyst with other carceogens, encouraging the growth of tumours. Cigarettes are probably uniquely dangerous because of the combination of carceogens and nicotine.
Any kind of cigarettes, regardless of the plant(s) used, are hardly exactly healthy.
None are no-risk. Society's goal should be to MINIMIZE risk. We cannot eliminate it, and we should not recoil from lowering risk simply because we cannot eliminate it.
Actually things arn't so simple. Place people in a situation where they feel "too safe" and they will behave recklessly.
IIRC, nicotine is among some of the most poisonous substances known. It is used as the active ingredient in some insecticides.
Nicotine is one of a large group of plant produced chemicals known as alkaloids. The reason plants produce these chemicals is to protect themselves.
Besides, do you really think that guns and rifles would do anything against tanks and aircraft? If push comes to shove, an armed militia attempting to rebel would be classified as a "terrorist cell" and picked off by snipers or incinerated with an air-fuel bomb.
This dosn't appear to be the case in Iraq where militiamen have killed an average of one US soldier a day since the war supposedly ended. Some of these Iraqi militias have anti-aircraft weapons, want to bet that none of them have anti-tank weapons...
You're suffering under the misconception that the constitution grants rights. It doesn't. What it does, is enjoin the government from infringing on our rights.
The only entity the US Constitution grants rights to is the US Government. In several places it explicitally says that the US government has no right to do specific thngs.
The Second amendment says that, because of the need for the militia, the government will not infringe on our pre-existing right to keep and bear arms. It does not grant the right to self-defense, it acknowledges the right and states one reason for not infringing it.
Also the only part of the text mentioning "regulation" is that refering to "a well regulated militia". Which can be interpreted as "a militia who know how to shoot straight".
It's very simple really. Gun ownership is a topic of political debate in this country. If one side of the debate is blocked, that debate is hampered. In the U.S. we believe that even a lunatic is entitled to vioce an opinion in a civil manner. While having all of the facts doesn't guarantee a good decision, willful ignorance is a fairly good guarantee of a bad decision.
Possibly the most important thing is that political biases within such software are often undeclared. Also there are topics where the Internet the major, sometimes only, forum for debate. The number of such topics is likely to increase as ownership of other media winds up in fewer hands.
Whether or not the GPL applies,
The GPL applies until actual statute or case law says it dosn't.
the code is copyrighted, and nobody can distribute without permission from the author. It just so happens that the GPL outlines what constitutes getting permission (agreeing to the terms of the license)
Disagreeing with a distribution licence does not grant permission and it certainly does not transfer ownership of copyright. If SCO's argument were accepted it would void the entire concept of copyright.
If they invalidate the GPL in this manner and get away with it, won't they just have the effect of providing legel precedent for throwing out ALL software licenses and EULAs?
EULA's are probably a different "kettle of fish". But as for distribution licences why stop with software? Would this not be a perfectly good precedent for killing off things like DVD region codes...
I should mention that by asking a judge to put any GPLd code into the public domain, instead of letting it revert to standard copyright, SCO is asking the courts to, effectively, write a new IP law.
Not all of the copyright holders are from the US, but their copyright is accepted there because of various treaties. Notably Bern and WIPO. So they are not only asking the court to drastically ammend statutes they are also asking it to break treaties. N.B. these are recipricol treaties, break them and any US produced copyright works become public domain over most of the planet. Which would be to the disadvantage of a great many parties, including SCO.
Current American IP law specifically states that a work cannot enter public domain until either the author's life plus 70 years passes, or until the author explicitly places their work into the public domain.
There is even some reason to suspect that a copyright holder placing something in the public domain is actually revokable, under current laws.
SCO is asking the court to place entire bodies of work into the public domain without the consent of the copyright holders
Indeed against the copyright holders explicit wishes. SCO are attempting to use a principle applicable to willing property to charities. Even though the vast majority of the copyright holders are alive and perfectly capable indicating their wishes. AFAIK no GPL copyright has been willed to a charity. Any which might have been willed having been willed to a person or corporation.
The problem with a distributed community of developers is that we are distributed. Almost no single entity could take on this corporation directly (not with their $50M warchest). So a group effort would be required to do so.
Is this actually a problem. Whilst their "warchest" might be very useful for fighting a big case. either against IBM or some kind of class action suit. How useful would it be against hundreds (or even thousands) of small cases. Where it would cost SCO more to put in a defence than the damages claimed.
Oh, and, distributing it under a different license is basically the equivalent of me taking the latest Metallica album / Harry Potter book, selling / giving away copies of it, and telling the recipients of these copies that they're permitted to use the material in a way not permitted under its original copyright
Actually SCO are going rather further than this. To complete the analogy the person distributing the copies would be claiming that they (by a reasoning incomprehensible to the sane) were the copyright holders and Metallica/J K Rowling were not.
The more lawsuits now, the better their plan works. Remember, they are pursuing a plan of FUD, stock price manipulation and legal mudwrestling.
I'm not sure of the logic here. They can't easily fight that many lawsuits at the same time. How many judgements against them would their stock price survive?
They are not really interested in creating anything other than a sharkfest feeding frenzy over the code within Linux...trying to create an atmosphere around Linux that rivals their own sorded and utterly confusing legal past.
What's so bad about wanting to them to the sharks.
Do not allow them to change the subject. Their initial claim is "IBM put SCO's code in Linux"...make them prove that first!...Anything else is changing the subject. I do not beleve that there should be additional suits UNTIL the original suit is settled. There will be plenty of time to file after the IBM/SCO cage-match gets started.
How does the IBM case affect the industrial scale copyright infringment they are now enguaged in? If anything waiting would weaken any copyright infringement actions, because they could use a "you knew on 31st October 2003, but did nothing until now" kind of defence.
For all of SCO's claims that the GPL is anti-copyright and unconstitutional, the licence itself makes clear that if the conditions can't be fulfilled or the licence is found to be unenforceable, standard copyright law applies--which means, unfortunately for SCO, the code they're trying to distribute is not automatically public domain, and thus they have no right to distribute any code they can't claim direct ownership for.
They certainly can't attempt to put their own licence on their distribution. Unless their licence is endorsed by all of the actual copyright holders then it is totally null and void. One thing to remember is that SCO's bogus licence does not destroy the GPL anyway. It dosn't matter how someone may have recieved GPL code they still have permission from the copyright holders to redistribute in accordance with the stated conditions.
It just means the authors would have to come up with another way to licence their code, either collectively or individually--and SCO would be in no position to make demands.
The copyright holders don't have to do anything, they could ignore SCO, they could offer SCO alternative licence conditions, they could initiate civil and/or criminal procedings against SCO.
Most likely they have done this on a Friday so as to give them the weekend's extra "piracy time" before the likes of DMCA takedown notices start arriving.
Yes. SCO seems to be under the delusion that assertions made in court are TRUE until proven FALSE.
Never mind the "Twilight Zone" we now have the "SCO (and crossbones) Zone".
That, for example, if a license is declared invalid the item falling under the license is immediately in the public domain.
Using this "logic" just about every copyright work would "fall" into the public domain within a short period of time.
Or that a company which has allegedly been wronged is entitled to payments during the discovery phase of the trial, rather than after a ruling has been made.
In which case it is up to the judge to set the level and scope of any payments, they form part of the ruling.
Or that claiming copyright infringement is the equivalent of proving copyright infringement.
Nice of SCO to prove that they are software pirates. Now what do they intend to offer me and the rest of the copyright holders who's work they have distributed illegally?
You seem to think 'office' equates to large scale corporations with an IT department and everyone running the same hardware. Clearly this is not the case, for the vast army of SOHO workers, legal firms, accountants, estate agents, shop keepers, electricians, printers, architects etc.
Would a green grocer act as his or her own shop fitter, plumber, electrician, carpet layer, estate agent, lawyer, accountant, car mechanic, etc? Yet it's expected to be possible for them to administer and maintain a complex machine.
Unless Linux can install out of the box, either with the drivers or prompt them where to find them, and provide useful context sensitive help, and hide the advanced options and provide wizards for the everyday tasks, I would not consider Linux ready to replace Windows at all.
Why do you think it makes sense for a non computer literate person to be messing around with the internals of computer operating systems or applications in the first place? Do people demand cars which can be serviced by anyone who can drive? Even if they did would it be sensible to attempt to do this.
As for your UT2003 remark, I see you have missed the point. Certain apps won't run without tinkering on Linux because the target OS was not installed in an adequate state in the first place to support them. UT2003 was simply an example of an app which won't run because no dist sees fit to ship a proper 3D enabled Xfree display driver. You could replace UT2003, with a video conferencing suite, or a CAD/CAM application, or a interior decorating app.
Installing drivers or apps is not really a "user level" task in the first place. Would you ask the average user to take a soldering iron to a piece of electronics?
If Windows can do it, then so can Linux.
In a great many situations Windows can't do it. Windows users end up having to ask an expert to set up their machines. If the "wizard" messes up the results can be worst than if nothing had been tried.
An unwanted side effect of this user administered paradigm is to make things much easier for all sorts of malware.
But the point is that Linux can be used in a business setting quite easily, as everything will be pre-configured and you won't want users installing/configuring things themselves.
:)
Which is that vast majority of computers anyway. Here the ability of end users to install software or mess around with settings goes in the "cons" column.
The only problem I see right now is that someone might want to install something like a new digital camera,
How many *new* cameras don't act as USB mass storage devices?
but according to Mac "switcher" commercials, Windows users need to call in the nerds too, right?
In many cases even "home" Windows users do this.