What I usually find is that the anti-America world is jealous of America
Typical brainwashed American. LEt me tell you about real life.
Since 1980, developing countries have paid 2.9 trillion dollars of interest on their foreign debts. 2.9 trillion just like that. Without getting anything in return. Now, if someone starves to death because this money is going to you, so you could have a bigger car, I'd say it is a pretty good reason to hate you.
Or another example. I come from a small country in Eastern Europe. US government applied strong political pressure to our government to sell our power plants dirt cheap to a US corporation. Many of our people hate US because of that.
I could give you hundreds of examples like this.
And then you say:
Do you think that 3,000+ Americans and people from 80 different countries deserved to die
Do you think the 2 million Vietnamese deserved to die? Do you think the 100,000 children who have died because they don't have most common medications deserved to die? etc. etc.
Does Gate really think people will swallow that ? I mean, holy crap, hell will freeze over before I send any of my files to a remote storage volume owned by Microsoft (or owned by anybody else for that matter).
So what? The fact of life is that there is a market for this service and many people would use it. I have tons of stuff myself (e.g. selfmade pics and music) that aren't sensitive but for which I could use a convenient backup solution (I don't consider tapes etc. convenient or safe). Providing this service doesn't make Microsoft evil, thinking that anyone can force you to use it is just silly (opposed to chilly as you put it). But of course, excessive paranoia gets always modded up on slashdot;-)
Why in the world would you *volunteer* for this no-thanks sort of job?
How about having unlimited staff and resources? Because that's exactly what these guys are going to get according to the settlement terms. Not a bad deal for any job in the world.
One of my co-workers was telling me that NASA is also actively researching the possible drilling for petroleum on other planets (Mercury comes to mind, IIRC).
What kind of nonsense is that? Oil in the nature is created by huge masses of organic stuff being under high pressure for a long time. Are you seriously saying that there were massive forests on Mercury once (because that's the reason we have oil on Earth)??
Re:Informative - More like criminal action actuall
on
Hotmail Hacked
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· Score: 1
Microsoft sends email to users' inboxes by going around the entire email system, circumventing all attempts to opt out, block, or filter the spam. These emails come from "staff@hotmail.com" and are clearly not normal messages, because they have to power to disable the Reply buttons.
Your hate is clearly blinding you. I have been a hotmail customer for about three years and I have received about 5 or 6 messages in this time from staff@hotmail.com, and they have always been about feature changes or other information that actually is relevant to the service. IMO this is a very low price to pay for a free service and it is EXTREMELY low compared to most of the other free services that usually spam you couple of times a week with totally non-relevant messages.
When Warcraft 3 comes out it will kick ass and I'll be playing it for years...heck I'm still playing warcraft2!
Just in case, don't be so sure about it. I used to be a huge fan of Civilization 2, one of the most ingenious games imho (in fact, I still play it sometimes), I was really waiting for the sequels but when they came out I was deeply disappointed. Take 'Call To Power', for example, it had a bunch of added animation and effects but the actual playability was really poor. The number of different approaches and strategies that one could try to win was just a fraction of what was available in Civ 2. So don't promise anything before you have actually seen it.
The converse is also true. Anyone or any company can be sued because another company or developer decided that someone's implementation looks a lot like theirs.
For some reason I believe that a big corporation is a much more attractive target than a lonely GPL developer. Also, a corporation has much more to lose by bad publicity.
.Net is, as far as i've read it, the M$ web services initiative. And as the poster above stated this new way of doing things includes the storage of both applications and data on M$ run servers.
You are confusing separate things here..Net in itself is a platform, like any API. Microsoft can build products on top of it and anybody else also can. The confusing aspect is that Microsoft is adding the ".Net" suffix also the products that it's developing on top of it. For example, Visual Studio.Net (aka VS 7) is a set of tools that you can use to create.Net applications. ASP.Net is the next version of ASP that takes advantage of.Net features. Office.Net is something that will include remote services and similar stuff etc.
Office.Net is perhaps the closest to the idea that MS will host all your stuff but I seriously doubt this would ever happen. It's much more probable that some ISV will get the technology from MS and then provide the service to end users.
Now him saying "The viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it" is just plain FUD. Sure, if you take the damn code and use it in your code, it affects you. If you just use GPL software as 'end-user' software, you have no problems.
Unfortunately, this issue is not that simple; I believe that you misunderstood some aspects of the speech.
For example, take a look at this Slashdot article. I happen to know that the accusation was FUD. But the point is that it's very easy to accuse any software company that they have broken GPL. You don't really need any proof, you can just say "hey, your implementation looks a little bit like ours, I bet you stole some of our stuff", and the software company doesn't really have any way to defend itself. As a result of this, Microsoft and some other companies have strictly forbidden their developers to even look at GPL software because it might lead to very nasty and unfair lawsuits.
This effectively creates a shield between GPL and proprietary software developers (and please, don't start saying that the latter are all evil), which I believe to be a very unhealthy thing. Closed-source developers are forced to fear everything that has to do with GPL to protect their company, this is the actual viral nature of GPL.
Now, I am not saying that GPL is bad, I'm just asking people to pay attention to some serious collateral damage it creates.
Do you see any company trusting M$ to hold all of their documents, and data?
What are you talking about?.Net is a programming platform, not a document repository. If you want to build a document repository on top of.Net, fine, you can do it. But this has never been Microsoft's main goal with it..Net is like a next generation Windows API, primarily targeted to 3rd party developers to create applications on it.
The question is actually very simple. It's about the meaning of life. Not the meaning of life of an individual but the meaning of existence of all mankind.
Do we want to be like a guy who lives his entire life in small village, works on his farm (or nowadays, watches TV), sees nothing, meets nobody and eventually dies after a boring life? Or de want to actually accomplish something in the Universe and be like Marco Polo or Christopher Columbus even if it will be hard and many of our crew will die during the voyage? Do we want to discover something new, do we want to create something extraordinary?
For me, the answer is clear. I'd much rather be like Marco Polo than this guy in his little village even if it means a high chance that I will fail and/or die.
Yahoo's decision not to sell porn is a victory for freedom: consumers' freedom to boycott businesses whose moralities they do not share and whose ethics they cannot abide.
Are you kidding? Who boycotted Yahoo? Certainly not me. Did millions of Yahoo customers suddenly start using alternative service providers? I don't think so. Yahoo didn't make this decision because people stopped using their services, Yahoo did so in fear of fanatical puritans who would have caused harm to the company otherwise.
I am very disappointed by this decision. In a democracy, minorities can not enforce their will upon majority. And listen carefully - there are way more people out there who like or at least tolerate porn than those who hate it. Well, so much about the democracy in the US.
Corporations have to respect the bottom line. We the people sign the bottom line.
Gimme a break. Yahoo wanted to start selling porn because it would have been profitable. Market research was showing it. It is the fanatics like you whom everybody in the US is forced to respect and fear.
Halliburton is the #1 oil drilling company, 93k employees, worldwide operations. As big as Du Pont, not worse than the others.
Eli Lilly is a major drug producer but I doubt they would need a class A.
I don't understand Bolt, Beranek and Newman. They had a role in creating ARPANet but I don't know if they do anything nowadays. And THREE As? Strange.
Does being allowed to settle such a suit with rebates worth less than the cost of a zipdrive strike anyone as a little odd?
Um, why should it be so odd? My understanding is that not all the drives were defective, and defects were not making the drives totally unusable (if they had been unusable, it would have been covered by a warranty). So why should the company give you back all the money (essentially giving you the drive free)? Of course, I understand the desire of an average/. guy to receive everything free but consider these two facts, for example:
1) All software will never be free
2) It is virtually impossible to create absolutely bug-free software.
Does that mean that we should ask the price of a software package back every time we see a bug and make all software companies go bankrupt this way? Of course not. Then why should it be different in this case?
Your culture of drug and prostitution legalization, your sprawling "red light districts" and your seedy side-streets, are "sick" to people that at least have some semblance of a moral compass.
You forget one fact. Vast majority of the red-light district visitors (in Amsterdam, for example) are foreigners, especially Americans:P
Most of the "sex tourists" in Thailand are also Americans. Interesting, huh?
It's hard to believe that society feels the need for this sort of site to rate women.
Being an immigrant from Europe, I don't find it so hard to believe at all. Here is a logical sequence of facts (WARNING: this comment might be offensive to some people. If you are easily offended, please don't read on):
Fact 1: Majority of US Women use Prozac and similar drugs. Why do they do it is a different story but they do it.
Fact 2: These drugs significantly reduce interest in sex. Established scientific fact.
Conclusion 1: Most US men get laid quite rarely (on birthdays and so), especially when compared to people in other countries.
Conclusion 2: Most US men are obsessed with sex.
Fact 3: Someone obsessed with sex is more likely to turn to extremes in sexual relations.
Conclusion 3: There are more sexually motivated crimes.
Fact 4: Society becomes more defensive, bans everything that has anything to do with sex (just compare the US puritanism with European lifestyle). Young girls are being warned that they should in no circumstances get into situations where they might have sex with someone.
Fact 5: US has one of the highest rates of 20-year-old virgins in the world (Unfortunately I don't remember the source but it was a result of some scientific research).
Conclusion 4: Even young men find it hard to get laid in the US.
Conclusion 5: People are even more obsessed with sex.
Final conclusion: When an average US man sees a (half)naked woman, he forgets anything else. This should explain the hotornot fenomenon.
Of course, I know that I simplify the situation here and not all people are like that. Remember, I am not talking about you, I am talking about your neighbor:-)
But it's true statistically. It's obvious when you open your eyes and look at things clearly.
Trust me they have seen worse times, especially after WWII. I realize you didn't learn it in school, but the whole european part of the country laid in ruins. 20 million people were killed. In 13 years they went out to space for the first time in history of mankind.
The important difference is that in all these times birth rates were more than 2 children per woman. Now it's way below. Demographical reasons have taken down nations before and they certainly are doing it now. Also, there wasn't a place to leave for, people were pretty much forced to stay and build up the society again.
I just love this cold-war-style "we are the best system" approach. I was educated in Ukraine. I've been working in the U.S. for 3 years now. Do I plan to return?
My friend, I am also from the former Soviet Union, I know what it's like:-) And I totally share your reasons. I am from Estonia and I will go back. And most of my fellow Estonians here will go back. But most of the Russians I know here are NOT going back.
So you are implying that a 15MT bomb would kill 100 million people or what? C'mon.
The actual destructive power of a bomb from a certain distance is proportional to the cube root of the TNT-equivalent. Therefore the range of destruction wouln't be that big. And since population density isn't usually so high when you get farther from the epicenter, you could probably kill million people or so when hitting a large city with a single bomb but probably no more. So bigger bombs aren't really that much scarier.
The same goes about radiation, it will be pretty much localized and not cause much damage if you are farther away from the explosion.
And also remember that all people don't live in big cities. To wipe out an entire population of a country you would actually need to cover all of the area of the country with nuclear explosions. But that certainly cannot be done with the current weapons when we talk about countries like US or China.
Go visit St. Petersburg for example, you will see more beggars than anywhere else in the world, men with loudspeakers preaching how good the life was in Joseph Stalin's time etc. And this is one of the richest cities in Russia. When you go to the country you would find it unbelievable that such life can exist in 21st century.
I agree that societies have come over hard times before but they have had something to create new stuff on. But in this case:
- The demographic situation is catastrophic. Russian population is dropping very fast, the drop rate is one of the highest in the world. Millions of Chinese are illegally pouring into emptied Russian towns in South-East right now.
- Everybody is jumping the ship. Do you know how many of the graduates of Russian elite universities are going abroad (and most of them never return)? 60%. Enough said.
The weird thing is that you (and most of the others) take CNN and other US sources as absolute truth. I'm not saying that they are lying right now, I don't know that. But I cannot be convinced that they are telling the truth either.
I come from the former Soviet Union and live in the US temporarily. When I check the news about incidents that took place during the cold war era, I find it unbelievable how biased and twisted the US news agencies were. It looks like someone from the government was telling them exactly what to say and write and it was very often way off the actual situation. Free country and free journalism, my ass.
Of course, exactly the same was true about the Soviet news, the picture that it painted of the US was pretty weird to say it mildly;-)
But my point is that to remain objective, one should never trust the news agencies of an interested party. Try to find someone neutral, European news, for example, and base your opinions on that.
The fact is that the majority of the world views this incident as the US poking its nose where it doesn't belong and bullying its militarily weaker neighbors. I don't necessarily agree with that opinion because I understand the reasons why the US is doing stuff like that (especially since I'm living in Seattle, one of the closest major US cities to China), but this is the way how an average, neutral, non-biased world citizen sees the situation. And it would be very useful and sobering for the US people to think about that, too.
For some reason,/. folks seem to view this as the end of the world. They make an assumption that anything that contains the word "Microsoft" is auomatically totally insecure and evil. Here are some facts of how things actually look like. In the real world, right now.
1) People are already giving away all this information. There are thousands of websites that ask you where you live, what is your credit card number and what you eat for breakfast.
2) People in general are not very concerned about giving away this information. In fact, life in the US (I am originally from Europe but live in the US right now) is totally firghtening from the privacy point of view. One can get tons of private data about you from government institutions, knowing your SSN and/or driver's license number, and people are giving them away everywhere. But real people in real life don't seem to worry.
3) Microsoft servers (I mean the servers that MS manages, not the products) are actually one of the most secure ones in the world. Absolutely every week someone tries to DoS www.microsoft.com or www.msn.com, they are the #1 target for every hacker. But the availability of these remains very high because MS is actually utilizing very strong security procedures (both computer and physical security) around these servers.
4) Most of the web sites around the world where people give out their personal information and credit card numbers are significantly less secure. Just read the news or visit the IRC channels that script kiddies use. The same goes about your medical histories etc. Computers in your doctor's office are most probably way easier to hack than Microsoft.
5) Nobody is forcing you to give out anything that you don't want to. If you are really concerned that someone would harm you then just don't give them that info or give wrong information or whatever. Opinions that Microsoft would use any sanctions if you don't do it are just silly. MS is not police, MS is a software company.
6) I repeat it once more: Microsoft is a software company. MS is not interested in who do you date and what you eat. MS is creating Hailstorm primarily as a platform for 3rd party vendors who would then create 95% of the solutions running on it. It's doing it to compete with other similar platforms from other software companies. Exactly like Windows is competing with Linux. And Microsoft's primary concern is not to sell Windows to customers but to sell it to other software developers who would create applications for it and thus leverage the system. It will be exactly the same business plan with Hailstorm.
Therefore - this is not the end of the world, it's not even going to restructure the society. Everything in Hailstorm is already existing in our current society, Hailstorm would just create another platform to help people do some stuff more conveniently.
Paul Allen is still on Microsoft's board of directors.
Yes, but I don't think he has any active role there or any real influence over the company. As far as I know, he is rather distanced.
I wouldn't call Transmeta anti-Microsoft at all.
Well, I happen to remember stories (including/.) from a few years ago where people were hoping that Transmeta would finally invent the silver bullet to take down Microsoft;-)
Paul Allen left Microsoft in 1983, that's a long long time ago. Among the reasons were serious disagreements with Bill Gates about the direction of the company.
Since then he has been mostly playing (not very successfully) with the capital gained by owning Microsoft stock, including investing in companies that are rather anti than pro Microsoft. For example, he is one of the main investors behind Transmeta.
Microsoft tilted, indeed... But hey, anything goes when we are talking about MS, right?
And I am convinced taking off your pink-colored shades would give you a much needed view on realism.
It's not about pink color, it's about common sense. Trying to enforce something like this would be a nonsense, MS is not so stupid to do something like that intentionally.
Slashdot Mirror
For example you say:
What I usually find is that the anti-America world is jealous of America
Typical brainwashed American. LEt me tell you about real life.
Since 1980, developing countries have paid 2.9 trillion dollars of interest on their foreign debts. 2.9 trillion just like that. Without getting anything in return. Now, if someone starves to death because this money is going to you, so you could have a bigger car, I'd say it is a pretty good reason to hate you.
Or another example. I come from a small country in Eastern Europe. US government applied strong political pressure to our government to sell our power plants dirt cheap to a US corporation. Many of our people hate US because of that.
I could give you hundreds of examples like this.
And then you say:
Do you think that 3,000+ Americans and people from 80 different countries deserved to die
Do you think the 2 million Vietnamese deserved to die? Do you think the 100,000 children who have died because they don't have most common medications deserved to die? etc. etc.
So what? The fact of life is that there is a market for this service and many people would use it. I have tons of stuff myself (e.g. selfmade pics and music) that aren't sensitive but for which I could use a convenient backup solution (I don't consider tapes etc. convenient or safe). Providing this service doesn't make Microsoft evil, thinking that anyone can force you to use it is just silly (opposed to chilly as you put it). But of course, excessive paranoia gets always modded up on slashdot
How about having unlimited staff and resources? Because that's exactly what these guys are going to get according to the settlement terms. Not a bad deal for any job in the world.
What kind of nonsense is that? Oil in the nature is created by huge masses of organic stuff being under high pressure for a long time. Are you seriously saying that there were massive forests on Mercury once (because that's the reason we have oil on Earth)??
Microsoft sends email to users' inboxes by going around the entire email system, circumventing all attempts to opt out, block, or filter the spam. These emails come from "staff@hotmail.com" and are clearly not normal messages, because they have to power to disable the Reply buttons.
Your hate is clearly blinding you. I have been a hotmail customer for about three years and I have received about 5 or 6 messages in this time from staff@hotmail.com, and they have always been about feature changes or other information that actually is relevant to the service. IMO this is a very low price to pay for a free service and it is EXTREMELY low compared to most of the other free services that usually spam you couple of times a week with totally non-relevant messages.
Just in case, don't be so sure about it. I used to be a huge fan of Civilization 2, one of the most ingenious games imho (in fact, I still play it sometimes), I was really waiting for the sequels but when they came out I was deeply disappointed. Take 'Call To Power', for example, it had a bunch of added animation and effects but the actual playability was really poor. The number of different approaches and strategies that one could try to win was just a fraction of what was available in Civ 2. So don't promise anything before you have actually seen it.
For some reason I believe that a big corporation is a much more attractive target than a lonely GPL developer. Also, a corporation has much more to lose by bad publicity.
You are confusing separate things here. .Net in itself is a platform, like any API. Microsoft can build products on top of it and anybody else also can. The confusing aspect is that Microsoft is adding the ".Net" suffix also the products that it's developing on top of it. For example, Visual Studio.Net (aka VS 7) is a set of tools that you can use to create .Net applications. ASP.Net is the next version of ASP that takes advantage of .Net features. Office.Net is something that will include remote services and similar stuff etc.
Office.Net is perhaps the closest to the idea that MS will host all your stuff but I seriously doubt this would ever happen. It's much more probable that some ISV will get the technology from MS and then provide the service to end users.
Unfortunately, this issue is not that simple; I believe that you misunderstood some aspects of the speech.
For example, take a look at this Slashdot article. I happen to know that the accusation was FUD. But the point is that it's very easy to accuse any software company that they have broken GPL. You don't really need any proof, you can just say "hey, your implementation looks a little bit like ours, I bet you stole some of our stuff", and the software company doesn't really have any way to defend itself. As a result of this, Microsoft and some other companies have strictly forbidden their developers to even look at GPL software because it might lead to very nasty and unfair lawsuits.
This effectively creates a shield between GPL and proprietary software developers (and please, don't start saying that the latter are all evil), which I believe to be a very unhealthy thing. Closed-source developers are forced to fear everything that has to do with GPL to protect their company, this is the actual viral nature of GPL.
Now, I am not saying that GPL is bad, I'm just asking people to pay attention to some serious collateral damage it creates.
What are you talking about? .Net is a programming platform, not a document repository. If you want to build a document repository on top of .Net, fine, you can do it. But this has never been Microsoft's main goal with it. .Net is like a next generation Windows API, primarily targeted to 3rd party developers to create applications on it.
Do we want to be like a guy who lives his entire life in small village, works on his farm (or nowadays, watches TV), sees nothing, meets nobody and eventually dies after a boring life? Or de want to actually accomplish something in the Universe and be like Marco Polo or Christopher Columbus even if it will be hard and many of our crew will die during the voyage? Do we want to discover something new, do we want to create something extraordinary?
For me, the answer is clear. I'd much rather be like Marco Polo than this guy in his little village even if it means a high chance that I will fail and/or die.
Are you kidding? Who boycotted Yahoo? Certainly not me. Did millions of Yahoo customers suddenly start using alternative service providers? I don't think so. Yahoo didn't make this decision because people stopped using their services, Yahoo did so in fear of fanatical puritans who would have caused harm to the company otherwise. I am very disappointed by this decision. In a democracy, minorities can not enforce their will upon majority. And listen carefully - there are way more people out there who like or at least tolerate porn than those who hate it. Well, so much about the democracy in the US.
Corporations have to respect the bottom line. We the people sign the bottom line.
Gimme a break. Yahoo wanted to start selling porn because it would have been profitable. Market research was showing it. It is the fanatics like you whom everybody in the US is forced to respect and fear.
Eli Lilly is a major drug producer but I doubt they would need a class A.
I don't understand Bolt, Beranek and Newman. They had a role in creating ARPANet but I don't know if they do anything nowadays. And THREE As? Strange.
Um, why should it be so odd? My understanding is that not all the drives were defective, and defects were not making the drives totally unusable (if they had been unusable, it would have been covered by a warranty). So why should the company give you back all the money (essentially giving you the drive free)? Of course, I understand the desire of an average /. guy to receive everything free but consider these two facts, for example:
1) All software will never be free
2) It is virtually impossible to create absolutely bug-free software.
Does that mean that we should ask the price of a software package back every time we see a bug and make all software companies go bankrupt this way? Of course not. Then why should it be different in this case?
You forget one fact. Vast majority of the red-light district visitors (in Amsterdam, for example) are foreigners, especially Americans :P
Most of the "sex tourists" in Thailand are also Americans. Interesting, huh?
Being an immigrant from Europe, I don't find it so hard to believe at all. Here is a logical sequence of facts (WARNING: this comment might be offensive to some people. If you are easily offended, please don't read on):
Fact 1: Majority of US Women use Prozac and similar drugs. Why do they do it is a different story but they do it.
Fact 2: These drugs significantly reduce interest in sex. Established scientific fact.
Conclusion 1: Most US men get laid quite rarely (on birthdays and so), especially when compared to people in other countries.
Conclusion 2: Most US men are obsessed with sex.
Fact 3: Someone obsessed with sex is more likely to turn to extremes in sexual relations.
Conclusion 3: There are more sexually motivated crimes.
Fact 4: Society becomes more defensive, bans everything that has anything to do with sex (just compare the US puritanism with European lifestyle). Young girls are being warned that they should in no circumstances get into situations where they might have sex with someone.
Fact 5: US has one of the highest rates of 20-year-old virgins in the world (Unfortunately I don't remember the source but it was a result of some scientific research).
Conclusion 4: Even young men find it hard to get laid in the US.
Conclusion 5: People are even more obsessed with sex.
Final conclusion: When an average US man sees a (half)naked woman, he forgets anything else. This should explain the hotornot fenomenon.
Of course, I know that I simplify the situation here and not all people are like that. Remember, I am not talking about you, I am talking about your neighbor :-)
But it's true statistically. It's obvious when you open your eyes and look at things clearly.
The important difference is that in all these times birth rates were more than 2 children per woman. Now it's way below. Demographical reasons have taken down nations before and they certainly are doing it now. Also, there wasn't a place to leave for, people were pretty much forced to stay and build up the society again.
I just love this cold-war-style "we are the best system" approach. I was educated in Ukraine. I've been working in the U.S. for 3 years now. Do I plan to return?
My friend, I am also from the former Soviet Union, I know what it's like :-) And I totally share your reasons. I am from Estonia and I will go back. And most of my fellow Estonians here will go back. But most of the Russians I know here are NOT going back.
The actual destructive power of a bomb from a certain distance is proportional to the cube root of the TNT-equivalent. Therefore the range of destruction wouln't be that big. And since population density isn't usually so high when you get farther from the epicenter, you could probably kill million people or so when hitting a large city with a single bomb but probably no more. So bigger bombs aren't really that much scarier. The same goes about radiation, it will be pretty much localized and not cause much damage if you are farther away from the explosion.
And also remember that all people don't live in big cities. To wipe out an entire population of a country you would actually need to cover all of the area of the country with nuclear explosions. But that certainly cannot be done with the current weapons when we talk about countries like US or China.
Go visit St. Petersburg for example, you will see more beggars than anywhere else in the world, men with loudspeakers preaching how good the life was in Joseph Stalin's time etc. And this is one of the richest cities in Russia. When you go to the country you would find it unbelievable that such life can exist in 21st century.
I agree that societies have come over hard times before but they have had something to create new stuff on. But in this case:
- The demographic situation is catastrophic. Russian population is dropping very fast, the drop rate is one of the highest in the world. Millions of Chinese are illegally pouring into emptied Russian towns in South-East right now.
- Everybody is jumping the ship. Do you know how many of the graduates of Russian elite universities are going abroad (and most of them never return)? 60%. Enough said.
I come from the former Soviet Union and live in the US temporarily. When I check the news about incidents that took place during the cold war era, I find it unbelievable how biased and twisted the US news agencies were. It looks like someone from the government was telling them exactly what to say and write and it was very often way off the actual situation. Free country and free journalism, my ass.
Of course, exactly the same was true about the Soviet news, the picture that it painted of the US was pretty weird to say it mildly ;-)
But my point is that to remain objective, one should never trust the news agencies of an interested party. Try to find someone neutral, European news, for example, and base your opinions on that.
The fact is that the majority of the world views this incident as the US poking its nose where it doesn't belong and bullying its militarily weaker neighbors. I don't necessarily agree with that opinion because I understand the reasons why the US is doing stuff like that (especially since I'm living in Seattle, one of the closest major US cities to China), but this is the way how an average, neutral, non-biased world citizen sees the situation. And it would be very useful and sobering for the US people to think about that, too.
1) People are already giving away all this information. There are thousands of websites that ask you where you live, what is your credit card number and what you eat for breakfast.
2) People in general are not very concerned about giving away this information. In fact, life in the US (I am originally from Europe but live in the US right now) is totally firghtening from the privacy point of view. One can get tons of private data about you from government institutions, knowing your SSN and/or driver's license number, and people are giving them away everywhere. But real people in real life don't seem to worry.
3) Microsoft servers (I mean the servers that MS manages, not the products) are actually one of the most secure ones in the world. Absolutely every week someone tries to DoS www.microsoft.com or www.msn.com, they are the #1 target for every hacker. But the availability of these remains very high because MS is actually utilizing very strong security procedures (both computer and physical security) around these servers.
4) Most of the web sites around the world where people give out their personal information and credit card numbers are significantly less secure. Just read the news or visit the IRC channels that script kiddies use. The same goes about your medical histories etc. Computers in your doctor's office are most probably way easier to hack than Microsoft.
5) Nobody is forcing you to give out anything that you don't want to. If you are really concerned that someone would harm you then just don't give them that info or give wrong information or whatever. Opinions that Microsoft would use any sanctions if you don't do it are just silly. MS is not police, MS is a software company.
6) I repeat it once more: Microsoft is a software company. MS is not interested in who do you date and what you eat. MS is creating Hailstorm primarily as a platform for 3rd party vendors who would then create 95% of the solutions running on it. It's doing it to compete with other similar platforms from other software companies. Exactly like Windows is competing with Linux. And Microsoft's primary concern is not to sell Windows to customers but to sell it to other software developers who would create applications for it and thus leverage the system. It will be exactly the same business plan with Hailstorm.
Therefore - this is not the end of the world, it's not even going to restructure the society. Everything in Hailstorm is already existing in our current society, Hailstorm would just create another platform to help people do some stuff more conveniently.
Yes, but I don't think he has any active role there or any real influence over the company. As far as I know, he is rather distanced.
I wouldn't call Transmeta anti-Microsoft at all.
Well, I happen to remember stories (including /.) from a few years ago where people were hoping that Transmeta would finally invent the silver bullet to take down Microsoft ;-)
He left MS 18 years ago :P Really a good news to associate with MS ;-)
Paul Allen left Microsoft in 1983, that's a long long time ago. Among the reasons were serious disagreements with Bill Gates about the direction of the company.
Since then he has been mostly playing (not very successfully) with the capital gained by owning Microsoft stock, including investing in companies that are rather anti than pro Microsoft. For example, he is one of the main investors behind Transmeta.
Microsoft tilted, indeed... But hey, anything goes when we are talking about MS, right?
It's not about pink color, it's about common sense. Trying to enforce something like this would be a nonsense, MS is not so stupid to do something like that intentionally.