...and be done with it. No need for going all ga-ga about naming it something new every two weeks because the 'Geeks that Be' don't bother doing a simple Google Search to make certain they aren't trouncing on someone else's software product name...
Yeah, OpenSourceBrowser isn't very 'sexy', neither is OpenOffice.org, but that seems to work for them...
...and other publications of their ilk. Top management people read those and actually base some of their decisions upon what they read in those publications.
It's not like top executives do nothing all day but scoot around the Internet reading sites like/. a good number of them are so busy that they only have a chance to take in the information that is most readily available to them.
That's when you craft the policy in such a way to show how protective the policy is to the company. Unless the Legal and Accounting departments are filled with complete morons or people whose ethics were surgically removed a properly crafted policy will show the wonderful benefits of protecting the company from lawsuits and from unanticipated costs from said lawsuits.
Illegal software and Virus infections cost companies thousands to millions of dollars each year. Having a solid policy in place that significantly cuts down on that happening is probably the most important job that an IT department head can institute.
First off, it is the IT Department's fault if the users are able to install Bonzai Buddy onto their computers and it hoses the system.
Secondly, it is ALSO the IT Deparment's fault if the network is hit with ANY of those Email worms. I am the entire IT Deparment at the company I work for and you know what?
We haven't had ONE single case of any of the recent Email worms making their way into our network. You know why? Because I have done my friggin' job. All of our corporate Email is sent to our mail servers from an outside 'mail scrubbing/spam stomping' outsource company. Due to my forsight, we haven't seen a SINGLE copy of those worms enter our network even ONCE!
If I worked as head of IT at any other corporation, I would find it COMPLETELY unacceptable that the users could do anything to install applications onto their PCs. I would find it entirely unacceptable, if our users were compromised by an Email virus. I am not exactly saying that friggin' heads would roll, but it would be pretty darn close to that.
...I mean, if we can't make it possible within OUR lifetimes, we better not try. Even if what we do would provide those that have yet to be born, something to grow and build upon...
We might as well go back to wearing simple robes, stop using all this high-falutin' technocrap and go back to being 'mindless' peasants serving our Glorious Lord!
American corporations have ALWAYS been short-sited and always will be. There are extremely few individuals leading any corporation that think out past the next quarter or two.
Don't you recall history?
Didn't the president of IBM or some other high-level executive say that there was and would only ever be a market for something like 5 computers the world over?
I am sure that many other executives at many other businesses the world over thought and think the same way as well...
Oh, wait. Ford Motor Company has had a history of that as well... Look up all the information regarding the Pinto and all of the short-sited remarks about safety at Ford during that time period. I believe you will find something regarding a REALLY inexpensive piece of plastic that could have been added to the Pinto that would have significantly cut down on the explosion problem those vehicles had during rear end collisions.
Anyway, Corporations always have been and always will be sgort-sited.
...when you boot a computer equipped with this new BIOS you get the following:
POST
BIOS initialization
Nag Screen Asking you if you want to read your email or continue to boot.
Nag Screen Asking you if you want to read your email or continue to boot.
Nag Screen Asking you if you want to read your email or continue to boot.
Nag Screen Asking you if you want to read your email or continue to boot.
Then you come back to your new computer with your cup of coffee expecting to see your Windows desktop...
You hit the NO key, which is a combination of CTRL-SHIFT-N-Enter keys.
Nag Screen Asking you if you are really sure you want to boot into the OS, because you can read your email from the BIOS.
You confirm by contorting your hands and hitting the combination of keys confirming that you really want to boot into the OS.
The comptuer boots and you enter Windows, check a few web sites and then check your email.
Who the heck is going to use this? This seems like that 'wonderful' push technology that MS pushed so many years ago that turned out to be something nobody wanted.
It's like the new "2-Stroke Gasoline Engine Powered Toothbrush". Sure, it might be more powerful then a plain old battery powered toothbrush, but nobody wants that stinky gasoline exhaust smell in the morning, plus it brushes to 'well' that the enamel on your teeth is removed after one use...
...Google for "Pinky and the Brain", it was as series of shorts in the 'Animaniacs' cartoon show.
It's a story about some laboratory mice, that weren't very nice...
One of my favorites was the "Billy-Bo-Bub-Brain" episode... Very funny stuff.
Animaniacs was 'for kids' but had so many strong adult references that most of the jokes would have completely missed by anyone younger then around 20 when the show originally aired.
...a moment. This is really an example of Anti-Union reporting if I ever did see it. First, the 'reporter' talks about how all of this happened because of scab workers.
Would this have happened if there weren't any scab workers at the facility? Probably not.
However, it seems that like most dopeheads the author seems confused as he attacks the heck out of the scabs by defaming them more then a few times through the article. Of course, he also defames the union members as well by implying quite heavily of potential sabotage.
All in all, this article seems to be a really strong case for keeping unions out of places that could cause a public health crisis.
...and sensationalist writing style spit out by this 'reporter'?
Where's the objectivity?
I understand that New York, is really close to Detroit in having some of largest populations of people from the Middle East. It is EXTREMELY possible that someone that visited the Nile area and then returned to their home in New York could have brought that virus into the US with them. There are so many scenarios possible it's plain silly...
This article smacks of the scare-mongering tactics used in such 'reputable' news sources like 'The Metro Times' in Detroit, as well as any number of left/right-wing 'news' sources used to further someone's political agenda.
It carries just enough facts to seem credible and then adds so much personal opinion and bias that the credibility should be tossed out by any reasonable person. Unfortunately, it is designed to cater to highly emotionally charged people that want to have something to constantly rail against.
Someone was complaining about how silly it was that the Enterprise-D computer would know 'immediately' where to send Captain Picard's voice when he was going to ask for the bridge and why there was an 'immediate' response from Riker, Data or whomever...
This is why!
While the current version might require being connected directly to your head, future versions might 'read' you from afar to be able to anticipate the next words out of your mouth!
Apparently, it seems that you can complain about the impossibility of a Science Fiction show one day and then Slashdot will provide you some answers leading to the technology you griped about previously...
...Apple computer uses IBM Microprocessors, of course, that wasn't a statement made by someone that knows much of anything regarding the PC industry...
Secondly, patents, which are likely applied all over those 'fuel injectors' would protect them from being mass produced by outside sources.
The auto industry is simply spouting half-truths in order to protect its illegal business practices.
Pot can make you paranoid. Pot often gives people bizarre ideas that make perfect sense to them, but are seen as out of touch with reality to anyone not stoned. Pot makes people forgetful, even lazy to the point that they sit around ALL day long and do pretty much nothing. (Granted there are a few rare individuals that aren't affected as thus and NO, you aren't one of those people...)
LSD completely screws with reality. People can lay comatose on the ground. Reality can melt away into nothingness permanently destroying someone's mind. It doesn't let anyone see 'good and evil' in people. It warps the mind into smelling color, hearing the scent of flowers and other oddities by causing the brain to radically misfire. While rare, these effects can last permanently; destroying any chance of a future beyond sitting in a mental institution or under adult foster care for the rest of someone's life. The danger of this drug is way to high to be protrayed as some short-term effect in a videogame.
Why does any videogame need to address this subject as this game apparently is going to?
I know a bit myself, but have no interest in really sharing anything as my memory might not be perfect on all matters detailing some of the things this 'sheriff' has been involved in.
Needless to say, I am certain that one could find something searching goole, The Detroit News or Detroit Free Press and other Michigan, Detroit Area publications.
...I would rather wait it out not have a war myself. Unfortunately, I am not GOD in heaven. So, that is something that I don't have the opportunity to control, affect or slightly alter.
When did flowers and nice sentiments stop someone from being attacked as well?
If the US wasn't the most powerful nation in the world at the time of the WTC Sept. 11th attacks, then those attacks would have happened against another nation with a similar societal view...
Hmmm.. Let me think for a second... Ahhhh... yes, it would be Canada that would have been attacked.
See, this 'War on Terror' is a war against Islamic Fundamentalist Extremists. The closest correllation to that group in Christianity, as an example, is the KKK. Any government providing true freedom to its people are the sworn enemies of groups like Al-Qaeda.
From what I understand, Canada allows women to dress as they wish, talk back to their men and even run for public office! That is the antithesis of Islamic Fundamentalist Extremists. That is what makes the United States and any other nation with a similar political/social ground the 'Great Satan' to those people.
If it wasn't the WTC Sep. 11th Attack, it could very well have been the Sep. 11th Big Ben Attack, or the Sep. 11th CN Tower Toronto Attack.
Those kind of attacks will likely be impossible to forever eradicate from humanity. However, with aggressive military research and development ending up with the creation of powered armor suits and weapon systems, the chances of a full-scale world war are greatly decreased.
The side with that technology, thus cutting down considerably on the losses of your armed forces or the side that this technology would be used to defend against?
Personally, one would imagine that faced with the possibility of fighting such a foe that most governments would most likely reconsider any potentially hostile activity towards such an equipped government.
Of course, such is the march of human progress. One could argue forever that military forces and armed conflict do nothing but ill for all of humanity, yet at the same time someone else can point out the near endless series of side benefits that have been brought to humanity because of humanity's propensity towards killing eachother.
For instance, the computers that you and I are both sitting in front are the progeny of now 'ancient' military computer systems built during WWII. We may never have had RADAR systems developed if not for war. Same goes with rocket and jet engine technology...
Sure, war sucks. Sure, people die from armed conflict. However, without war, we would most assuredly not have the technology that we have today as artists, philosophers and pacifists aren't as prone to push forward the march of technology as much as those that have been put into desperate situations that need a radical new way of thinking to achieve a goal do.
...to having technology seen only in science fiction stories happen right in front of our eyes.
This technology could easily make it possible for soldiers to carry very heavy armor that could possibly protect them from most all small arms fire and possibly even some heavy fire. All the while carrying heavy machine guns and small autoloading cannons that these days require crews to move and operate.
...boss that will deploy RH or SuSe and not Debian is simply covering the corporation's rear and is making a sound business decision.
All Linux distributions are not created identically, if they were, then there would be only one. Instead, every distro has its own unique way of handling particular issues. Some are painfully annoying and others and are ingenious solutions to issues.
Going with a distro that holds a strong commercial support structure provides a serious back-up is something were to happen to the in-house support teams and also provides the possibility of holding a support contract holding corporation a reasponsible party to fall back on.
AFAIK, Debian by itself does not provide a support contract for major corporations. I do believe that for Debian to do so, they would be going against their non-corporate, community only driven distribution system.
...Sun is attempting to buy some time and save face by stating that they will look into it with IBM, rather then ignore IBM and the OSS community by continuing their existing party-line.
What they may attempt is to persuade IBM to understand their side and perhaps even join them in keeping Java a closed environment.
It will be interesting to see how this will all turn out in the end.
Seriously. I know it would suck in many ways to have some legacy programs break, but sometimes those are the breaks.
In other areas of society, when we find problems that can easily be exploited we fix those issues, why don't we do that with computer science as well?
Keeping gets() around is akin to police departments issuing police cruisers with two doors, no partitions between the officer(s) and the person(s) riding in the back seat. That was stopped in the 70's from my understanding, when it was discovered that you really couldn't trust a number of the people riding in the back seat of a police cruiser.
I say break the old applications and bring some application of logic to computer programming for a change.
...the 70+ year old grandmother and her friends that were beaten and tied up with duct tape to point that they dies of suffocation...
Oh wait, you can't tell them, because they are dead...
Face it, you can get killed for absolutely no reason at all. Whether you are perceived as a threat or not, someone, somewhere will kill you for no reason at all and still be considered 'sane' by the majority of society. Definately evil and worthy of The Death Penalty, but not insane one bit.
What threat was Sharon Tate to Charles Manson? Did she wave a gun at him and threaten to kill him? Nope. She and the rest of those murdered people were simply slaughtered by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Any crime specialist should tell you that for the most part, you are pretty safe since it is statistically fairly low that some person will walk into the bank you are at and start shooting people to get the attention of the tellers in order to rob the place, or that the next time you are in a convenience store paying the cashier that someone with a gun will walk in, shoot you in the back of the head to make a point to the cashier in order to steal the 30 dollars in the drawer. Statistically, that's pretty low, but it does happen.
The Cold War was fun (very mild sarcasm BTW). It gave us wonderful games like 'Paranoia' the RPG, it provided us with hours of entertainment through the 'Wasteland' computer Role-Playing Game. It gave us 'Wargames' the movie and also in a way taught us that the world is more then just one country. It is a global community that can easily ruin life for most all of humanity by raining hot nuclear death upon one another.
Without the Cold War, I doubt that we as human beings would have learned some of those lessons.
...have given enough information to support your claims...
Let's talk of those laptops.
I am the head of IT for a corporation and I make the decisions regarding computer technology. Currently, we have a three (3) year plan for replacing laptop computer systems. At a previous employer, they were replacing laptops on a 2 to 2.5 year regimen. They did so, like we do so, in order to stay within the manufacturer's 'arbitrary' warranty, extended or otherwise, period.
Since we are replacing laptops every three years, that means that every three years we will have the 'latest and greatest' supported hardware for our needs. We don't have to worry about a laptop 5 to 10 years old that we might want to put Linux on someday in the far future. What we 'guarantee' is that our people will be able to use the current hardware and software combinations to keep the speed at which they use the computer at a reasonable speed.
If you have anyone still using a 486 or early Pentium as their primary laptop and they are attempting to use any modern business software, I know that they aren't as efficient as they could be with a much more current laptop system.
The only thing that I can say about Enterprise hardware is that when you buy said hardware your contracts often involve the vendor providing you support on the hardware/OS combination. This is far from inexpensive, but you have significant recourse if said vendor fails to live up to their end of the bargain.
If you are talking about using commodity hardware for Enterprise computing, well the good thing about commodity hardware is that such hardware is often so inexpensive that it would often be much less costly for you to purchase a replacement network card then to fight and battle for even half a day, based on average salaries for such a position, if said network card was no longer supported under your OS of choice.
So, why is it a huge deal again? If they stop supporting your network card tomorrow, does that mean that the network card suddenly stops functioning? Does that mean that you have to buy a new card tomorrow? Don't be so asinine as to suggest such a thing.
You would still have your current drivers that still work, you would have a significant amount of time, at least 3 months and as much as a few years before you really would have to replace that piece of hardware. If you don't have time to research how that would affect you, then you either need more assistants or need to spend less time on Slashdot.
Your arguements here have no weight or meat on their bones.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, OpenSourceBrowser isn't very 'sexy', neither is OpenOffice.org, but that seems to work for them...
It's not like top executives do nothing all day but scoot around the Internet reading sites like
That's when you craft the policy in such a way to show how protective the policy is to the company. Unless the Legal and Accounting departments are filled with complete morons or people whose ethics were surgically removed a properly crafted policy will show the wonderful benefits of protecting the company from lawsuits and from unanticipated costs from said lawsuits.
Illegal software and Virus infections cost companies thousands to millions of dollars each year. Having a solid policy in place that significantly cuts down on that happening is probably the most important job that an IT department head can institute.
First off, it is the IT Department's fault if the users are able to install Bonzai Buddy onto their computers and it hoses the system.
Secondly, it is ALSO the IT Deparment's fault if the network is hit with ANY of those Email worms. I am the entire IT Deparment at the company I work for and you know what?
We haven't had ONE single case of any of the recent Email worms making their way into our network. You know why? Because I have done my friggin' job. All of our corporate Email is sent to our mail servers from an outside 'mail scrubbing/spam stomping' outsource company. Due to my forsight, we haven't seen a SINGLE copy of those worms enter our network even ONCE!
If I worked as head of IT at any other corporation, I would find it COMPLETELY unacceptable that the users could do anything to install applications onto their PCs. I would find it entirely unacceptable, if our users were compromised by an Email virus. I am not exactly saying that friggin' heads would roll, but it would be pretty darn close to that.
We might as well go back to wearing simple robes, stop using all this high-falutin' technocrap and go back to being 'mindless' peasants serving our Glorious Lord!
Shut your pie hole, you hack.
American corporations have ALWAYS been short-sited and always will be. There are extremely few individuals leading any corporation that think out past the next quarter or two.
Don't you recall history?
Didn't the president of IBM or some other high-level executive say that there was and would only ever be a market for something like 5 computers the world over?
I am sure that many other executives at many other businesses the world over thought and think the same way as well...
Oh, wait. Ford Motor Company has had a history of that as well... Look up all the information regarding the Pinto and all of the short-sited remarks about safety at Ford during that time period. I believe you will find something regarding a REALLY inexpensive piece of plastic that could have been added to the Pinto that would have significantly cut down on the explosion problem those vehicles had during rear end collisions.
Anyway, Corporations always have been and always will be sgort-sited.
POST
BIOS initialization
Nag Screen Asking you if you want to read your email or continue to boot.
Nag Screen Asking you if you want to read your email or continue to boot.
Nag Screen Asking you if you want to read your email or continue to boot.
Nag Screen Asking you if you want to read your email or continue to boot.
Then you come back to your new computer with your cup of coffee expecting to see your Windows desktop...
You hit the NO key, which is a combination of CTRL-SHIFT-N-Enter keys.
Nag Screen Asking you if you are really sure you want to boot into the OS, because you can read your email from the BIOS.
You confirm by contorting your hands and hitting the combination of keys confirming that you really want to boot into the OS.
The comptuer boots and you enter Windows, check a few web sites and then check your email.
Who the heck is going to use this? This seems like that 'wonderful' push technology that MS pushed so many years ago that turned out to be something nobody wanted.
It's like the new "2-Stroke Gasoline Engine Powered Toothbrush". Sure, it might be more powerful then a plain old battery powered toothbrush, but nobody wants that stinky gasoline exhaust smell in the morning, plus it brushes to 'well' that the enamel on your teeth is removed after one use...
It's a story about some laboratory mice, that weren't very nice...
One of my favorites was the "Billy-Bo-Bub-Brain" episode... Very funny stuff.
Animaniacs was 'for kids' but had so many strong adult references that most of the jokes would have completely missed by anyone younger then around 20 when the show originally aired.
...a moment. This is really an example of Anti-Union reporting if I ever did see it. First, the 'reporter' talks about how all of this happened because of scab workers.
Would this have happened if there weren't any scab workers at the facility? Probably not.
However, it seems that like most dopeheads the author seems confused as he attacks the heck out of the scabs by defaming them more then a few times through the article. Of course, he also defames the union members as well by implying quite heavily of potential sabotage.
All in all, this article seems to be a really strong case for keeping unions out of places that could cause a public health crisis.
...and sensationalist writing style spit out by this 'reporter'?
Where's the objectivity?
I understand that New York, is really close to Detroit in having some of largest populations of people from the Middle East. It is EXTREMELY possible that someone that visited the Nile area and then returned to their home in New York could have brought that virus into the US with them. There are so many scenarios possible it's plain silly...
This article smacks of the scare-mongering tactics used in such 'reputable' news sources like 'The Metro Times' in Detroit, as well as any number of left/right-wing 'news' sources used to further someone's political agenda.
It carries just enough facts to seem credible and then adds so much personal opinion and bias that the credibility should be tossed out by any reasonable person. Unfortunately, it is designed to cater to highly emotionally charged people that want to have something to constantly rail against.
Someone was complaining about how silly it was that the Enterprise-D computer would know 'immediately' where to send Captain Picard's voice when he was going to ask for the bridge and why there was an 'immediate' response from Riker, Data or whomever...
This is why!
While the current version might require being connected directly to your head, future versions might 'read' you from afar to be able to anticipate the next words out of your mouth!
Apparently, it seems that you can complain about the impossibility of a Science Fiction show one day and then Slashdot will provide you some answers leading to the technology you griped about previously...
Secondly, patents, which are likely applied all over those 'fuel injectors' would protect them from being mass produced by outside sources.
The auto industry is simply spouting half-truths in order to protect its illegal business practices.
How could they give those effects to those drugs?
Pot can make you paranoid. Pot often gives people bizarre ideas that make perfect sense to them, but are seen as out of touch with reality to anyone not stoned. Pot makes people forgetful, even lazy to the point that they sit around ALL day long and do pretty much nothing. (Granted there are a few rare individuals that aren't affected as thus and NO, you aren't one of those people...)
LSD completely screws with reality. People can lay comatose on the ground. Reality can melt away into nothingness permanently destroying someone's mind. It doesn't let anyone see 'good and evil' in people. It warps the mind into smelling color, hearing the scent of flowers and other oddities by causing the brain to radically misfire. While rare, these effects can last permanently; destroying any chance of a future beyond sitting in a mental institution or under adult foster care for the rest of someone's life. The danger of this drug is way to high to be protrayed as some short-term effect in a videogame.
Why does any videogame need to address this subject as this game apparently is going to?
I know a bit myself, but have no interest in really sharing anything as my memory might not be perfect on all matters detailing some of the things this 'sheriff' has been involved in.
Needless to say, I am certain that one could find something searching goole, The Detroit News or Detroit Free Press and other Michigan, Detroit Area publications.
...I would rather wait it out not have a war myself. Unfortunately, I am not GOD in heaven. So, that is something that I don't have the opportunity to control, affect or slightly alter.
When did flowers and nice sentiments stop someone from being attacked as well?
If the US wasn't the most powerful nation in the world at the time of the WTC Sept. 11th attacks, then those attacks would have happened against another nation with a similar societal view...
Hmmm.. Let me think for a second... Ahhhh... yes, it would be Canada that would have been attacked.
See, this 'War on Terror' is a war against Islamic Fundamentalist Extremists. The closest correllation to that group in Christianity, as an example, is the KKK. Any government providing true freedom to its people are the sworn enemies of groups like Al-Qaeda.
From what I understand, Canada allows women to dress as they wish, talk back to their men and even run for public office! That is the antithesis of Islamic Fundamentalist Extremists. That is what makes the United States and any other nation with a similar political/social ground the 'Great Satan' to those people.
If it wasn't the WTC Sep. 11th Attack, it could very well have been the Sep. 11th Big Ben Attack, or the Sep. 11th CN Tower Toronto Attack.
Those kind of attacks will likely be impossible to forever eradicate from humanity. However, with aggressive military research and development ending up with the creation of powered armor suits and weapon systems, the chances of a full-scale world war are greatly decreased.
The side with that technology, thus cutting down considerably on the losses of your armed forces or the side that this technology would be used to defend against?
Personally, one would imagine that faced with the possibility of fighting such a foe that most governments would most likely reconsider any potentially hostile activity towards such an equipped government.
Of course, such is the march of human progress. One could argue forever that military forces and armed conflict do nothing but ill for all of humanity, yet at the same time someone else can point out the near endless series of side benefits that have been brought to humanity because of humanity's propensity towards killing eachother.
For instance, the computers that you and I are both sitting in front are the progeny of now 'ancient' military computer systems built during WWII. We may never have had RADAR systems developed if not for war. Same goes with rocket and jet engine technology...
Sure, war sucks. Sure, people die from armed conflict. However, without war, we would most assuredly not have the technology that we have today as artists, philosophers and pacifists aren't as prone to push forward the march of technology as much as those that have been put into desperate situations that need a radical new way of thinking to achieve a goal do.
...to having technology seen only in science fiction stories happen right in front of our eyes.
This technology could easily make it possible for soldiers to carry very heavy armor that could possibly protect them from most all small arms fire and possibly even some heavy fire. All the while carrying heavy machine guns and small autoloading cannons that these days require crews to move and operate.
All Linux distributions are not created identically, if they were, then there would be only one. Instead, every distro has its own unique way of handling particular issues. Some are painfully annoying and others and are ingenious solutions to issues.
Going with a distro that holds a strong commercial support structure provides a serious back-up is something were to happen to the in-house support teams and also provides the possibility of holding a support contract holding corporation a reasponsible party to fall back on.
AFAIK, Debian by itself does not provide a support contract for major corporations. I do believe that for Debian to do so, they would be going against their non-corporate, community only driven distribution system.
...Sun is attempting to buy some time and save face by stating that they will look into it with IBM, rather then ignore IBM and the OSS community by continuing their existing party-line.
What they may attempt is to persuade IBM to understand their side and perhaps even join them in keeping Java a closed environment.
It will be interesting to see how this will all turn out in the end.
Seriously. I know it would suck in many ways to have some legacy programs break, but sometimes those are the breaks.
In other areas of society, when we find problems that can easily be exploited we fix those issues, why don't we do that with computer science as well?
Keeping gets() around is akin to police departments issuing police cruisers with two doors, no partitions between the officer(s) and the person(s) riding in the back seat. That was stopped in the 70's from my understanding, when it was discovered that you really couldn't trust a number of the people riding in the back seat of a police cruiser.
I say break the old applications and bring some application of logic to computer programming for a change.
gets() be deprecated already?
I mean, if it is inherently unsafe, why keep such a function around?
...the 70+ year old grandmother and her friends that were beaten and tied up with duct tape to point that they dies of suffocation...
Oh wait, you can't tell them, because they are dead...
Face it, you can get killed for absolutely no reason at all. Whether you are perceived as a threat or not, someone, somewhere will kill you for no reason at all and still be considered 'sane' by the majority of society. Definately evil and worthy of The Death Penalty, but not insane one bit.
What threat was Sharon Tate to Charles Manson? Did she wave a gun at him and threaten to kill him? Nope. She and the rest of those murdered people were simply slaughtered by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Any crime specialist should tell you that for the most part, you are pretty safe since it is statistically fairly low that some person will walk into the bank you are at and start shooting people to get the attention of the tellers in order to rob the place, or that the next time you are in a convenience store paying the cashier that someone with a gun will walk in, shoot you in the back of the head to make a point to the cashier in order to steal the 30 dollars in the drawer. Statistically, that's pretty low, but it does happen.
The Cold War was fun (very mild sarcasm BTW). It gave us wonderful games like 'Paranoia' the RPG, it provided us with hours of entertainment through the 'Wasteland' computer Role-Playing Game. It gave us 'Wargames' the movie and also in a way taught us that the world is more then just one country. It is a global community that can easily ruin life for most all of humanity by raining hot nuclear death upon one another.
Without the Cold War, I doubt that we as human beings would have learned some of those lessons.
...truth means that someone is a Troll to you.
You provided a number of 'strawman' arguments and I succinctly showed the glaring holes that you left in your arguments.
That's far from 'trolling' in even the loosest use of the word 'Troll'.
Let's talk of those laptops.
I am the head of IT for a corporation and I make the decisions regarding computer technology. Currently, we have a three (3) year plan for replacing laptop computer systems. At a previous employer, they were replacing laptops on a 2 to 2.5 year regimen. They did so, like we do so, in order to stay within the manufacturer's 'arbitrary' warranty, extended or otherwise, period.
Since we are replacing laptops every three years, that means that every three years we will have the 'latest and greatest' supported hardware for our needs. We don't have to worry about a laptop 5 to 10 years old that we might want to put Linux on someday in the far future. What we 'guarantee' is that our people will be able to use the current hardware and software combinations to keep the speed at which they use the computer at a reasonable speed.
If you have anyone still using a 486 or early Pentium as their primary laptop and they are attempting to use any modern business software, I know that they aren't as efficient as they could be with a much more current laptop system.
The only thing that I can say about Enterprise hardware is that when you buy said hardware your contracts often involve the vendor providing you support on the hardware/OS combination. This is far from inexpensive, but you have significant recourse if said vendor fails to live up to their end of the bargain.
If you are talking about using commodity hardware for Enterprise computing, well the good thing about commodity hardware is that such hardware is often so inexpensive that it would often be much less costly for you to purchase a replacement network card then to fight and battle for even half a day, based on average salaries for such a position, if said network card was no longer supported under your OS of choice.
So, why is it a huge deal again? If they stop supporting your network card tomorrow, does that mean that the network card suddenly stops functioning? Does that mean that you have to buy a new card tomorrow? Don't be so asinine as to suggest such a thing.
You would still have your current drivers that still work, you would have a significant amount of time, at least 3 months and as much as a few years before you really would have to replace that piece of hardware. If you don't have time to research how that would affect you, then you either need more assistants or need to spend less time on Slashdot.
Your arguements here have no weight or meat on their bones.