Not to make any scuses, but totalitarianism may have been the most efficient way to manage a country of that size. For example, they've had this one child per family cap. As a side-effect many girl babies have beened abandoned or killed,
but from a big picture kind of view, the chinese may have saved the planet from a population explosion crisis.
A country the size of china need to reform very slowly. Just imagine what would happen if they went cold turkey to liberal human rights and market economy. The chinese mafia would take over the world before you could say uncle, and they'd make the russian mafia look like toddlers.
Apart from that, it seems U.S lawmakers and government are very keen on having other countries' citizens speek freely, but are not quite as enthusiastic about americans doing so.
Debain has 3 release paths, and if you did not get as far as recognizing that, your attention span is too short. At any given time,debian has production, test, and unstable.
Consider it 3 different distros.
Potato, the most rock solid distro there ever was, with lightning fast security updates.
Woody - more solid than most other linux distro's, at least the red hat kind.
Sid - bleeding edge.
Redhat on the other hand has no such consept. They'll slap together something and call it release 6,6.1,7.0 or something. But these releases won't even be properly tested. Red Hat out of the box used to be so full of root-exploits. A typical honey pot redhat system only lasted a few minutes before they were 0wn3d.
That's bad if their market is the linux newbie: a linux newbie is not expected to know how to lock down a system before plugging in the cable modem.
There is no possible compromise between stability, reliability and bleeding edge. You see the same thing elsewhere. Windows NT was available only for limited hardware choices, while 95 and 98 was supposed to support everything. NT was supposed to be reliable, and 95/98 was expected to crash.
To achieve good reliability, features have to be introduced with care, and regression testing must be extensive. If you can come up with a method that provides the highest reliability without sacrificing new features, you'll be a very wealthy man one day.
Debian is doing the right thing by maintaining these branches. In fact, that's the way the best commercial software shops do things, except they allow the end user to see only the stable version.
The moral: Don't buy any new and fancy HW for a production system. The HW is not production proven yet, and you won't be able to find a stable OS for it.
If you want the latest and greatest HW and SW, make do with less than optimal reliability, but don't go whining like a baby if something breaks or crashes.
Maybe it's harder to access slashdot, and taking care of your personal correspondence, play some game, surf around for news, etc. if you're a construction worker on the clock? Something that makes the estimation much easier for a contruction boss.
When making estimates, people tend to sweep under the carpet, or simplify the things they don't know, but can be quite accurate estimate the things they've built before. That's why really large project fail so badly, because every single person involved im the project has many more unknowns than known things to deal with.
So, never say "How hard can that be?" before having coded up a small working prototype.
Although SF now seems like a narrow genre, time tends to wipe out such notions. Jules Verne comes to mind. His books are read by all sorts of people, not just the lame star trek crowd. The best work of any genre will eventually become part of the classic litterature.
Asimov's books on robots will always be relevant. The authors who use SF to illuminate the human character will be relevant. Orwell will be relevant. All the Star Wars/Star Trek offspring will sonn be forgotten. Most of the dragon and knight sort of fantasy will soon be gone. Too much of the SF/Fantasy litterature is like Barabara Cartland for people who don't care for bodice rippers. Just replace bodice for space suit, and horse-cart with space ship.
Another factor I would include in this, is how much read the author is today.
An old favorite of mine is Dickens. He was wildly popular in his time, but not considered very fine litterature. However, his penny novels have stood the test of time much better than his contemporary's, who wrote flat, boring pieces about the dilemmas of the upper classes. So when trying to pick out the classics of the future, one might want to look for similarities with Dickens.
Agatha Christie is another one. There are better mystery writers out there, but her name might be the only one remembered 300 years from now.
If I have to pick the Dickens of this century, it'll be Stephen King. His short stories are excellent. He writes pure fiction, and is not afraid to break some laws of nature. He is extremely productive, and a best-seller. Teh best-seller part is what surprises me a bit, since I usually try to stay away from the unwashed masses reading habits. I guess sometimes the unwashed masses are right. Or maybe they buy the books for the flashy ingredients, not realizing what gems they are. Some of his books dig deep into the human character. He does not try to please the literature critics and besser-wissers. He just wites and writes. Some of his books have a strange ending, but that was also the case for Dickens.
The fact remains that they've lied to the American consumer. I think they need to be forced to amend their advertising.
Excelent point.
Not that we'd be able read or hear such amendments, but it still might affect the consumer. Having Microsoft ads sound like a drug ad or "used car sale mega blowout" ad with those rumbling fast-mouths at the end might persuade the consumer to think twice before swollowing the MS pill.
The researchers tested Vikia
out on passers-by. The robot would sense a person, turn its
face towards them and ask
them to stop and answer a
question.
Wonder how they did that, focus on the person being adressed. From my experience, as long as the face on the TV screen looks into the camera,
it appears to be looking stratight at you, even i you stand to the very side of the screen.
So, it'll be like in the old days, when I had a cross-eyed professor. Whenever he asked a question to the audience, he got more than one answer.
Even if both VA and Linux disappears, Linux as such will always have a prominent place in the corporate world.
Linux experts will still be in demand. Linux will still be the preferred platform for doing software development for many organisations. Some companies think it's OK to fork out $10K+ in licences for developer seats, and insist on using only MS tools, or other even more expensive solutions. A frugal software shop would develop on Linux, and deploy on whichever platform the customer wants.
The only thing that's changing is the rock star mentality . Tomorrow's Linux professionals will not expect to retire when they're 30, they'll expect to retire at a normal age. The days of "Money for nothing, chicks for free" are no more,
except if you're singing in one of those boy bands, that is.
There are a millions reasons developers can not work on a locked-down system .
1) Developers need to learn and try new tools and technologies. If not, they'll be obsolete and eventually worthless to the company.
2) Every project has different needs for technologies. The overall development management may offer coding standards, and chose some tools over others, but that will never cover everything.
3) The receptionist may be OK with letting the IT group have full control on his computer. Programmers, who often run circles around IT support staff will fight, whine, and gripe if subjected to a heavy handed IT department.
4) IT support staff does not have the skill to perform installation and configuration of necessary developer infrastructure. A short list:
-integrated development environments
-compilers, patches to compilers
-web servers, exotic features of same
-Databases, oracle, sybase, postgres,mysql, access
-middleware
-specialized hardware and drivers
5) Then you have the occasional oddball document in some format that can not be handled by whatever is preinstalled on your system. That problem can be solved in many ways, but a locked down environment will waste a lot of time:
-developer finds and installs a conversion utility of viewer, takes 15 minutes at most
-developer must ask IT support to install such tool. Support staff asks IT manager for permission, developer must argue his case. It manager says no.
-developer hands document off to tech writer or someone else with the peoper software.
6) Then there is trust. If you can't trust your developers to manage their workstation, you shouldn't trust them to write code either.
Testing
-------
The only place a locked down environment is a big help, is for testing. However, an IT support group is not the proper organisation to deal with that. Testing and code release must be responsible for the test configuration and environments. And the locking down here means locking down configurations and changes into source code control, so that the proper environment can be recreated. An MIS nazi with
a bunch of desktop monkeys would not be the right way to solve that problem. By using source code control, test environments would also be available to developers.
I've seen too often that some piece of software only could work on the developers machine and nowhere else, because of the combination of middleware, compilers, configuration and runtime environment was different from the statdard build environment and the official test environment. But locking down the systems does nothing to help with that. Rather the opposite.
Usually a good litmus test for any policy is to ask: "What problem are you trying to solve?"
If the it group comes up with a non-problem, or they can not address the consequential problems, you're in trouble.
Around the middle of the article he mentions why he chose windows, and at the bottom he lists what the system costs, but said nothing about Windows licence.
Wondering what the thiefs that stole his first stereo were thinking though, and how good they were at writing bat files?
Self-rating does not work well. The comic book industry started doing that after pressure from WALmart. The comic artists hated it. It lead to a walmartization of the whole industry, and made it impossible to sell anything except archie and superman.
Self-rating on the web will have the same effect. Serious content and art will become unavailable to the unwashed masses. The power of the web is that anyone can be his own publisher, and works as a media outlet that is not available elsewhere.
The self-rating will not eliminate this outlet, but reduces the audience. AOL, MSN is the Walmart in this system.
I doubt there is anything one can do with this trend, though. Everybody hates Walmart, but it's still growing like a cancer. AOL, MSN will work the same way.
I never use any other search angines than google anymore.
In order to reach popularity, the url for a site has to be really short. In the beginning, to use altavista, you had to type altavista.digital.com,
way too much. In those days I used hotbot (inktomi/wired) for searches, and whenever I drew a blank I would go to altavista.
When google came around, there was no need to use another site, since google is comprehensive, short to type, almost free from clutter, and the results seems to have fewer duplicates and irrelevant info.
I also remember not too long ago another search engine, with a horribly long name. Northernlight or something like that. What were they thinking?
Moral is:
get a REALLY short domain name, and deliver a good product and people will come. Fail on any of these 2 requirements, and you're a fucked company. It doen't matter how good your search engine is, if I have to type somegitnamedthiscompanywithoutthinking.com
I only bookmark specific information, not home pages.
According to this laws have been passed to ban manufactoring of any guns that can not be spotted on x-ray. However, I can imagine any handy man a la mcgyver could construct a gun concealed as a working cigarette lighter, working ballpoint pen, and bottle of sugar coated vitamin pills for bullets.
Granted june 2001. They must be joking, or we are looking at another case of "standard group members takes notes on meetings and writes stupid patent that is accepted by the patent office".
I don't care how fair and square they enforce their RAND policy. A high tech company, especially one that has INNOVATE as their slogan, should be ashamed by filing such patents. Shows total lack of quality control.
But not to worry. Fiorentina will run them to the ground with the Compaq merger, so some geek could buy the patents at the firesale, and then we could have a patent BBQ?
Now, what if some skript kiddie attacks the VISA web site, and steals thousands of credit card
numbers. VISA's profits plummet as people cut their cards, because they didn't like having $1000
charged to all of their accounts by this skript kiddie.
What you describe is a serious crime, not an act of terrorism. We have laws and law enforcement to deal with these kinds of crimes, which is my whole point. What we don't need is to label cybersabotage as terrorism. When it's called terrorism, law enforcement and spooks are given carte blanche in dealing with it. And less concern is given to protecting the innocent. When there's terrorism in town, you are expected to submit to all kinds of harassment, in the interest of public safety, whether you're a criminal or not. When dealing with terrorism, it's considered OK to have some casualties.
So, should US go to war against Indonesia the next time some kid comes up with a nasty email virus?
Should US freeze all Russian assets (for harboring companies selling circumvention devices)?
Any law that's created at the spur of the moment, riding on a wave of current public outrage is going to be flawed. And politicians have a hard time opposing these konds of draconian laws, because of the argumentation: "You have to vote yes to the law, or you're not being patriotic, you're not protecting the children, or you're helping the terrorists, how can you think of the first amendment in times like these?"
It's part of a secret plan by microsoft to sell more windows licences. The xbox will burn down your house. Each house has 2-3 windows boxes, and unless you've kept your retail bought MS software in a bank box, they'll need to be bought again. Look forward for brisk MS business after the holidays.
Hm, maybe because after the initial euphoria is over, the party will quickly balkanize. The geezers will vote for the Mainframe party, there will be violent riots between Windows and Linux parties, the Mac party will think different, and run the coolest campaign, but end up with few votes. The republicans will migrate to the Luddite party, and hope to ban all competition by outlawing computers. The democrats will pay lip service to the Linux and Mac parties, but will be bribed by the Windows party.
Eventually we gather a congress, and will use the 3 first terms to pick a format for congress documents. Election procedures will be reengineered, untill they're near perfect. The president invites all geek friends to a LAN pary in the oval room. There is an international incident after the Russian ambassador is caught cheating in doom.
The luddites launches a massive counteroffensive before the next campaign, turning to the 'net(If you can't beat them, join them). Their new streaming multimedia media applications revolutionize everything. 50 years after people have forgotten the old meaning of the word, most people use the word luddite to describe a 'super-geek'
Personally, I think virus writers should face prison time.
Which is what they face when they're caught. Hacking (by means of virus or other) is a federal crime, and if damages are above a certain dollar amount, FBI is on the case.
What's different with MS approach, is that they want to slap a terrorist tag on the crime. Which means that as soon as they have a suspect, 20 armed spooks will storm your house, law enforment is given carte blanche to do phone taps, and they don't even need proof before they jail you.
It probably means that skate boarders with baggy pants and some piercings, and a computer will be profiled and automatically thrown in jail when teh next virus breaks out, pretty much as what happened to any arabs showing their face after september 11th.
That's why not. To use a silly metaphor, it'll be like having a swat team opening fire on you for a parking violation committed by someone purloaning your car. When it comes to terrorism, you shoot first and ask later.
That's why not. "Why not?" can be a clever phrase in many situations, but in this case it's stupidity in it's purest form.
Computer viruses is a form of vandalism and sabotage. But that does not make it terrorism.
I think it is sad that large corporations show no moral restraints, and are doing their best to make a quick profit on other people's tragedy, which is exactly what Microsoft is doing in this case.
Other companies are shamelessly running large ad campaigns using the american flag to promote products, something that is illegal.
Also, Microsoft is in large part responsible for many of these viruses, in the form of neglect and recklessness when building products that are so harmful. If MS expects legislation to pave their way, they must also expect to be made responsible for poor quality control, just like Ford and Firestone was for the rollong explorers. The axe swings both ways, or at least it should.
According to websters:
Main Entry: terrorism
Pronunciation: 'ter-&r-"i-z&m
Function: noun
Date: 1795
: the systematic use of terror especially as
a means of coercion
- terrorist/-&r-ist/ adjective or noun
- terroristic/"ter-&r-'is-tik/ adjective
Slashdot Mirror
So what's next, we have to attend in the nude?
Unfortunately not. That would fall under the "we must protect the children" excuse.
Not to make any scuses, but totalitarianism may have been the most efficient way to manage a country of that size. For example, they've had this one child per family cap. As a side-effect many girl babies have beened abandoned or killed,
but from a big picture kind of view, the chinese may have saved the planet from a population explosion crisis.
A country the size of china need to reform very slowly. Just imagine what would happen if they went cold turkey to liberal human rights and market economy. The chinese mafia would take over the world before you could say uncle, and they'd make the russian mafia look like toddlers.
Apart from that, it seems U.S lawmakers and government are very keen on having other countries' citizens speek freely, but are not quite as enthusiastic about americans doing so.
Debain has 3 release paths, and if you did not get as far as recognizing that, your attention span is too short. At any given time,debian has production, test, and unstable.
Consider it 3 different distros.
Potato, the most rock solid distro there ever was, with lightning fast security updates.
Woody - more solid than most other linux distro's, at least the red hat kind.
Sid - bleeding edge.
Redhat on the other hand has no such consept. They'll slap together something and call it release 6,6.1,7.0 or something. But these releases won't even be properly tested. Red Hat out of the box used to be so full of root-exploits. A typical honey pot redhat system only lasted a few minutes before they were 0wn3d.
That's bad if their market is the linux newbie: a linux newbie is not expected to know how to lock down a system before plugging in the cable modem.
There is no possible compromise between stability, reliability and bleeding edge. You see the same thing elsewhere. Windows NT was available only for limited hardware choices, while 95 and 98 was supposed to support everything. NT was supposed to be reliable, and 95/98 was expected to crash.
To achieve good reliability, features have to be introduced with care, and regression testing must be extensive. If you can come up with a method that provides the highest reliability without sacrificing new features, you'll be a very wealthy man one day.
Debian is doing the right thing by maintaining these branches. In fact, that's the way the best commercial software shops do things, except they allow the end user to see only the stable version.
The moral: Don't buy any new and fancy HW for a production system. The HW is not production proven yet, and you won't be able to find a stable OS for it.
If you want the latest and greatest HW and SW, make do with less than optimal reliability, but don't go whining like a baby if something breaks or crashes.
Maybe it's harder to access slashdot, and taking care of your personal correspondence, play some game, surf around for news, etc. if you're a construction worker on the clock? Something that makes the estimation much easier for a contruction boss.
When making estimates, people tend to sweep under the carpet, or simplify the things they don't know, but can be quite accurate estimate the things they've built before. That's why really large project fail so badly, because every single person involved im the project has many more unknowns than known things to deal with.
So, never say "How hard can that be?" before having coded up a small working prototype.
Although SF now seems like a narrow genre, time tends to wipe out such notions. Jules Verne comes to mind. His books are read by all sorts of people, not just the lame star trek crowd. The best work of any genre will eventually become part of the classic litterature.
Asimov's books on robots will always be relevant. The authors who use SF to illuminate the human character will be relevant. Orwell will be relevant. All the Star Wars/Star Trek offspring will sonn be forgotten. Most of the dragon and knight sort of fantasy will soon be gone. Too much of the SF/Fantasy litterature is like Barabara Cartland for people who don't care for bodice rippers. Just replace bodice for space suit, and horse-cart with space ship.
Another factor I would include in this, is how much read the author is today.
An old favorite of mine is Dickens. He was wildly popular in his time, but not considered very fine litterature. However, his penny novels have stood the test of time much better than his contemporary's, who wrote flat, boring pieces about the dilemmas of the upper classes. So when trying to pick out the classics of the future, one might want to look for similarities with Dickens.
Agatha Christie is another one. There are better mystery writers out there, but her name might be the only one remembered 300 years from now.
If I have to pick the Dickens of this century, it'll be Stephen King. His short stories are excellent. He writes pure fiction, and is not afraid to break some laws of nature. He is extremely productive, and a best-seller. Teh best-seller part is what surprises me a bit, since I usually try to stay away from the unwashed masses reading habits. I guess sometimes the unwashed masses are right. Or maybe they buy the books for the flashy ingredients, not realizing what gems they are. Some of his books dig deep into the human character. He does not try to please the literature critics and besser-wissers. He just wites and writes. Some of his books have a strange ending, but that was also the case for Dickens.
The fact remains that they've lied to the American consumer. I think they need to be forced to amend their advertising.
Excelent point.
Not that we'd be able read or hear such amendments, but it still might affect the consumer. Having Microsoft ads sound like a drug ad or "used car sale mega blowout" ad with those rumbling fast-mouths at the end might persuade the consumer to think twice before swollowing the MS pill.
Sounds like the most insanely expensive method to do the equivalent of a network boot I ever heard.
Is there a reason they couldn't just go with diskless machines?
The researchers tested Vikia
out on passers-by. The robot would sense a person, turn its
face towards them and ask
them to stop and answer a
question.
Wonder how they did that, focus on the person being adressed. From my experience, as long as the face on the TV screen looks into the camera,
it appears to be looking stratight at you, even i you stand to the very side of the screen.
So, it'll be like in the old days, when I had a cross-eyed professor. Whenever he asked a question to the audience, he got more than one answer.
Even if both VA and Linux disappears, Linux as such will always have a prominent place in the corporate world.
Linux experts will still be in demand. Linux will still be the preferred platform for doing software development for many organisations. Some companies think it's OK to fork out $10K+ in licences for developer seats, and insist on using only MS tools, or other even more expensive solutions. A frugal software shop would develop on Linux, and deploy on whichever platform the customer wants.
The only thing that's changing is the rock star mentality . Tomorrow's Linux professionals will not expect to retire when they're 30, they'll expect to retire at a normal age. The days of "Money for nothing, chicks for free" are no more,
except if you're singing in one of those boy bands, that is.
I can smell a troll from miles away. Good try luser.
There are a millions reasons developers can not work on a locked-down system .
1) Developers need to learn and try new tools and technologies. If not, they'll be obsolete and eventually worthless to the company.
2) Every project has different needs for technologies. The overall development management may offer coding standards, and chose some tools over others, but that will never cover everything.
3) The receptionist may be OK with letting the IT group have full control on his computer. Programmers, who often run circles around IT support staff will fight, whine, and gripe if subjected to a heavy handed IT department.
4) IT support staff does not have the skill to perform installation and configuration of necessary developer infrastructure. A short list:
-integrated development environments
-compilers, patches to compilers
-web servers, exotic features of same
-Databases, oracle, sybase, postgres,mysql, access
-middleware
-specialized hardware and drivers
5) Then you have the occasional oddball document in some format that can not be handled by whatever is preinstalled on your system. That problem can be solved in many ways, but a locked down environment will waste a lot of time:
-developer finds and installs a conversion utility of viewer, takes 15 minutes at most
-developer must ask IT support to install such tool. Support staff asks IT manager for permission, developer must argue his case. It manager says no.
-developer hands document off to tech writer or someone else with the peoper software.
6) Then there is trust. If you can't trust your developers to manage their workstation, you shouldn't trust them to write code either.
Testing
-------
The only place a locked down environment is a big help, is for testing. However, an IT support group is not the proper organisation to deal with that. Testing and code release must be responsible for the test configuration and environments. And the locking down here means locking down configurations and changes into source code control, so that the proper environment can be recreated. An MIS nazi with
a bunch of desktop monkeys would not be the right way to solve that problem. By using source code control, test environments would also be available to developers.
I've seen too often that some piece of software only could work on the developers machine and nowhere else, because of the combination of middleware, compilers, configuration and runtime environment was different from the statdard build environment and the official test environment. But locking down the systems does nothing to help with that. Rather the opposite.
Usually a good litmus test for any policy is to ask: "What problem are you trying to solve?"
If the it group comes up with a non-problem, or they can not address the consequential problems, you're in trouble.
No big brother here. Move along...
Thanks for your comforting words. However, you're an idiot.
Around the middle of the article he mentions why he chose windows, and at the bottom he lists what the system costs, but said nothing about Windows licence.
Wondering what the thiefs that stole his first stereo were thinking though, and how good they were at writing bat files?
We already knew that their software is lobotomized, so I am not at all surprised that their webmonkeys can be outwitted by an asparus.
Self-rating does not work well. The comic book industry started doing that after pressure from WALmart. The comic artists hated it. It lead to a walmartization of the whole industry, and made it impossible to sell anything except archie and superman.
Self-rating on the web will have the same effect. Serious content and art will become unavailable to the unwashed masses. The power of the web is that anyone can be his own publisher, and works as a media outlet that is not available elsewhere.
The self-rating will not eliminate this outlet, but reduces the audience. AOL, MSN is the Walmart in this system.
I doubt there is anything one can do with this trend, though. Everybody hates Walmart, but it's still growing like a cancer. AOL, MSN will work the same way.
I never use any other search angines than google anymore.
In order to reach popularity, the url for a site has to be really short. In the beginning, to use altavista, you had to type altavista.digital.com,
way too much. In those days I used hotbot (inktomi/wired) for searches, and whenever I drew a blank I would go to altavista.
When google came around, there was no need to use another site, since google is comprehensive, short to type, almost free from clutter, and the results seems to have fewer duplicates and irrelevant info.
I also remember not too long ago another search engine, with a horribly long name. Northernlight or something like that. What were they thinking?
Moral is:
get a REALLY short domain name, and deliver a good product and people will come. Fail on any of these 2 requirements, and you're a fucked company. It doen't matter how good your search engine is, if I have to type somegitnamedthiscompanywithoutthinking.com
I only bookmark specific information, not home pages.
According to this laws have been passed to ban manufactoring of any guns that can not be spotted on x-ray. However, I can imagine any handy man a la mcgyver could construct a gun concealed as a working cigarette lighter, working ballpoint pen, and bottle of sugar coated vitamin pills for bullets.
Other multimedia coming up:
smell the crapflooders
get 2.d degree fire wounds from flames.
Granted june 2001. They must be joking, or we are looking at another case of "standard group members takes notes on meetings and writes stupid patent that is accepted by the patent office".
I don't care how fair and square they enforce their RAND policy. A high tech company, especially one that has INNOVATE as their slogan, should be ashamed by filing such patents. Shows total lack of quality control.
But not to worry. Fiorentina will run them to the ground with the Compaq merger, so some geek could buy the patents at the firesale, and then we could have a patent BBQ?
Now, what if some skript kiddie attacks the VISA web site, and steals thousands of credit card
numbers. VISA's profits plummet as people cut their cards, because they didn't like having $1000
charged to all of their accounts by this skript kiddie.
What you describe is a serious crime, not an act of terrorism. We have laws and law enforcement to deal with these kinds of crimes, which is my whole point. What we don't need is to label cybersabotage as terrorism. When it's called terrorism, law enforcement and spooks are given carte blanche in dealing with it. And less concern is given to protecting the innocent. When there's terrorism in town, you are expected to submit to all kinds of harassment, in the interest of public safety, whether you're a criminal or not. When dealing with terrorism, it's considered OK to have some casualties.
So, should US go to war against Indonesia the next time some kid comes up with a nasty email virus?
Should US freeze all Russian assets (for harboring companies selling circumvention devices)?
Any law that's created at the spur of the moment, riding on a wave of current public outrage is going to be flawed. And politicians have a hard time opposing these konds of draconian laws, because of the argumentation: "You have to vote yes to the law, or you're not being patriotic, you're not protecting the children, or you're helping the terrorists, how can you think of the first amendment in times like these?"
It's part of a secret plan by microsoft to sell more windows licences. The xbox will burn down your house. Each house has 2-3 windows boxes, and unless you've kept your retail bought MS software in a bank box, they'll need to be bought again. Look forward for brisk MS business after the holidays.
Why not make it a real political party?????
Hm, maybe because after the initial euphoria is over, the party will quickly balkanize. The geezers will vote for the Mainframe party, there will be violent riots between Windows and Linux parties, the Mac party will think different, and run the coolest campaign, but end up with few votes. The republicans will migrate to the Luddite party, and hope to ban all competition by outlawing computers. The democrats will pay lip service to the Linux and Mac parties, but will be bribed by the Windows party.
Eventually we gather a congress, and will use the 3 first terms to pick a format for congress documents. Election procedures will be reengineered, untill they're near perfect. The president invites all geek friends to a LAN pary in the oval room. There is an international incident after the Russian ambassador is caught cheating in doom.
The luddites launches a massive counteroffensive before the next campaign, turning to the 'net(If you can't beat them, join them). Their new streaming multimedia media applications revolutionize everything. 50 years after people have forgotten the old meaning of the word, most people use the word luddite to describe a 'super-geek'
Personally, I think virus writers should face prison time.
Which is what they face when they're caught. Hacking (by means of virus or other) is a federal crime, and if damages are above a certain dollar amount, FBI is on the case.
What's different with MS approach, is that they want to slap a terrorist tag on the crime. Which means that as soon as they have a suspect, 20 armed spooks will storm your house, law enforment is given carte blanche to do phone taps, and they don't even need proof before they jail you.
It probably means that skate boarders with baggy pants and some piercings, and a computer will be profiled and automatically thrown in jail when teh next virus breaks out, pretty much as what happened to any arabs showing their face after september 11th.
That's why not. To use a silly metaphor, it'll be like having a swat team opening fire on you for a parking violation committed by someone purloaning your car. When it comes to terrorism, you shoot first and ask later.
That's why not. "Why not?" can be a clever phrase in many situations, but in this case it's stupidity in it's purest form.
Computer viruses is a form of vandalism and sabotage. But that does not make it terrorism.
/-&r-ist/ adjective or noun
/"ter-&r-'is-tik/ adjective
I think it is sad that large corporations show no moral restraints, and are doing their best to make a quick profit on other people's tragedy, which is exactly what Microsoft is doing in this case.
Other companies are shamelessly running large ad campaigns using the american flag to promote products, something that is illegal.
Also, Microsoft is in large part responsible for many of these viruses, in the form of neglect and recklessness when building products that are so harmful. If MS expects legislation to pave their way, they must also expect to be made responsible for poor quality control, just like Ford and Firestone was for the rollong explorers. The axe swings both ways, or at least it should.
According to websters:
Main Entry: terrorism
Pronunciation: 'ter-&r-"i-z&m
Function: noun
Date: 1795
: the systematic use of terror especially as
a means of coercion
- terrorist
- terroristic