I'm sorry, I'm not getting this. Can you explain how you can "legitimately" complain about something Adobe does or doesn't do?
Sure, I can explain free software to you. At the very least, Adobe is forcing you to duplicate their work if you want to co-operate with them or their users. Can you tell me why they would want to do that? Can you then explain how a company that operates that way would not be tempted to introduce spurious features and make other changes that intentionally waste their customer's efforts? Non free software must keep users helpless and divided if it's owners want to keep their position. They divide their customers from one another and they divide their customers from the rest of the world. These are evil things that free software avoids.
Adobe has not been as bad as other companies, but they still require you to push an "I agree" button that signals your willingness to do as you are told instead of as you would like.
Worse, you are wrong. You can avoid IE because it's embedded in many applications and it's far from the only hole you need to worry about. In most tests there is no operator, just a default install plugged to the net.
Free software is not perfect but it's much better than windows. While windows takes 12 minutes on average to become part of someone's botnet, GNU/Linux systems typically take months. Even if this is only due to the "popularity effect" it's not likely to change because there are so many different GNU/Linux distributions that vary build options and order of software load. GNU/Linux will never be the kind of easy monoculture target that Windoze is and it's users will always be better off.
Adobe has done a nice job of releasing specs and porting software to the GNU/Linux world but they do not believe in software freedom. You can legitimately complain that their releases are late, non free and patent encumbered. The lack of freedom is most evident in their readers, which won't let you cut and paste if the author foolishly wishes to raise themselves above the already insane restrictions of copyright law. Until they liberate their code and repudiate software patents they should not pretend to be friends of free software and people are better off without them.
I use a 13kbps 100ms wireless voice link (cell phone) that lets me talk with my brother in Florida. By your logic, we should be just as happy recording everything we have to say on CDs and mailing them back and forth to each other
No, by my logic you would be happier doing both.
What should really make you happy, though, is the liberty to use your cable modem or fiber hook up to communicate with 128bps and exchange the other information in real time. More is better. Filters always provide less bandwith. People in Japan with their 10 mpps connections both up and down are laughing at your featureless cell phone and sorry internet connection.
When I pay for bandwith, I expect to be able to use it as a chose not as YOU or anyone else sees fit. I understand that this costs money and that is the source of my outrage.
Conversely, use of public servitude and spectrum are privileges not rights. Those that would use those public resources have obligations to the public. It can be argued that the current owners of spectrum and networks in this country have failed those obligations and should be removed from their position of privilege and jailed.
Well put, but perhaps not the best thing in mixed company.
The easy way to defeat "packet shaping" sophistry is to point out that value comes from bandwith and nothing but. Constricting bandwith through a filter always reduces the bandwith available, even if it favors a few "sensitive" packets. The only way out of bandwith problems is to spend the money on more bandwith. Money spent on other things is wasteful, even if honestly used.
Fiber == Future. Copper == Past. This is the idea of capitalism, we want an even playing field for companies so that they can edge out the competition with better prices/ideas. Verizon is doing that, and quiet well.
If things really were free, you would be right. They are not and you are selling yourself out. It was a sin for government to grant Ma Bell a monopoly. To undo that sin, the public servitude must be liberated and the Bell holdings must be dissolved. The other answer is to have a completely public network that everyone can use. Any combination of the two will favor one company over the others and this is why US networks have gone from world supremacy to third rate status. Verizon is doing what they are doing so that others won't be able to serve you. When they are finished robbing you of choice they will take your freedom.
... in some parts of the world it was ridiculously easy to pass OOXML.
In the US, the Wintel press has cranked up nonsense about how ooxml's demise was "political", which spins everything upside down. A company that owns it's own broadcast network, a sizeable number of newspapers, and spends a billion dollars a month in advertising does have it easy when it comes to blanketing the world with it's opinions.
The attack was also easy because there is little downside to it from their persective. They hate all reasonable standards so the controversy's damage to ISO is a win even if they lose. They also think that the only people who will notice are people who hate them anyway. That's a gamble they have been losing more often and the crowd of people turned off is growing because of it.
To quote Amnesty International's new campaign, "It's not happening here, but it's happening now."
There today, here tomorrow. That's what tracking dissidents is all about. The US government tried to blackmail MLK into suicide through an extensive program of wiretaps and bugs, and may have murdered him. Do you think the same government is any cleaner today? Do you think the US power structure will not resort to crimes to maintain power through the shift that electronic publishing is creating? Do you really think that the US government is any less an heir of the wars of Indian Extermination and the US Civil War and Reconstruction than it ever was? It's better to apply the law and stop domestic spying while the penalties are still minor problems with air flights and economic sabotage. Things can get much worse very quickly when government does not obey it's own laws.
In any case, my point was that it's wrong to help implement these things and individuals should avoid companies that help tyrants. The majority of the population should boycot Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Cisco and Google for the bad work they have already done in China. A hand in the current Burmese bloodshed will make this position crystal clear, and I'm not willing to dismiss the possibility as quickly as you do. Techs should refuse such work and blow whistles for any company that attempts this kind of tracking abroad or at home. Those that don't are building weapons for tyrants.
Or, better yet, perhaps the government of Burma has control of the only ISP and simply obtains logs through them?
Do you think Burma has better ability than China to do this? I don't and that means they are employing the same western firms that China did to do the dirty work of tracking dissidents.
Exactly who does the tracking is besides the point: YOU need to consider the results of YOUR actions when YOU take a job. Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Google should not be helping China but their moral failure does not excuse your own. None of US should take that kind of work because the end result of helping tyrants is the murder of innocents.
Have the usual suspects, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Google, been turning over information about these people? Remember this as you help put "intelligence" into the internet there at home. There is no free speech without anonymity. When push comes to shove, tyrants murder people like you and me.
I don't think the ISO organization will allow M$ to damage their reputation that way. The OOXML vote is an international scandal and the people who count are not going to forget it. The whole business has already been damaging to ISO and they would do better to bury ooxml.
Just the same, I don't feel smug about how easily they damaged ISO. When I want to feel smug, I contemplate Vista's failure and what that means for the whole next generation of M$ crap and lock in.
Vista is one of the best things that ever happened to free software. It's later, more restrictive more expensive and less functional than anyone could possibly have imagined. There is zero enthusiasm for it and a plenty of rejection.
Did you have anything to add to this discussion other than making snide remarks to cover your envy of Microsoft's better working practice, and linking to someone else's entry?
No. By selectively quoting the GP I completely changed the meaning of what he said from "M$ is teh best and did not have this problem" to "M$ users are suckers". Then I linked to someone else who shows mail threat posts saying that this is not a problem for Debian users who are subscribed to the "voletile" lists for updates. It's funny, you are supposed to laugh.
No, I don't have any envy of M$'s practice and you could not pay me to run their shit for anything where time was important. Windows does not understand GMT and use local time, which forces all applications to compute GMT and that forces errors. Their time and date functions are so rudimentary that vendors have to make their own. M$ users had a huge pain in the ass when the US decided to change daylight savings time, older versions were ignored and never recovered. Y2K was a major issue for their machines. Applications, such as Excel have functions that return wrong and contradictory answers. The list of M$ time and date cockups so long and so extensive that I have my doubts they did anything right in New Zealand. There's more than cost reasons that GPS device makers have turned to GNU/Linux.
[I enjoy] a good OSS flamewar [but] Give me something that works for 95% of the whole group and I'll happily support the remaining 5% rather than risk 100% of my user base's productivity on something that may collapse from internal quibbling in a few months.
The problem with closed source is that your 5% is just out of luck. You would be very lucky to have that 95% satisfaction without three year fork lift "upgrades" that will screw over your old work anyway.
Free software flame wars are downright civil next to what goes on in chair throwing, non free fiefdoms. Check out this nasty spat over Vista, aka "the biggest development failure ever", and something that's about to collapse after 9 months of failure. Want to risk your productivity on ME2? I don't think so, but the next version of Windoze is going to be more of the same.
managers with their shared email folders and their shared calendars and their popup meeting requests and reminders and their crackberries LOVE IT. They LOVE that it's all those things AT THE SAME TIME,
Kontact does all of those things and then some and all of it better. You get the shared calenders, birthday reminders, a first rate address book and so on and so forth but all with reasonable file formats and sftp support. There is no way in hell I'll ever go back to Outlook.
There's much more in the world than Wine, which is why I can dismiss everything you say about Linux as being about ten years out of date. Get out there and look at some of the commercial offerings before you shoot your mouth off again.
Wine works and that's why Crossover Office works. If all your customer needs is something dinky like Outlook or M$ Office and you want it to "look right", just sell them a copy of Crossover Office.
If you really need everything in the Windoze world, you can run Windoze in a virtual machine. It works like Windoze because it is Windoze. It works better than Windoze because Linux has better window managers. Parallels is just the start, but it works very well and does XP. There are others that work just as well. When you combine them with a desktop like Beryl, the result is beautiful. No client could possibly complain about running Windoze itself in a virtual window you can just flip a cube to get too. Any modern hardware should have no problem running this and it runs much better than Vista.
Vista is beat, 100%. There are better applications in the free software world and the non free software world of XP has just been contained and swallowed whole where it will work better and be easier to keep up.
To save money. For most companies, linux is too small of market to be worth devoting development time to.
They just wrote the interface in GPL'd code, so you know they already have devoted the development time and might be keeping someone on staff that knows what they are doing.
Their GPL'd code is already "supporting" the user. Using reasonable interfaces and releasing specs is a good first step. Sooner or later this will make it's way to the distribution of your choice and your distribution will have a better copy than anything you can put in a box with the product. One of the great things about free software is the ability to get away from physical distribution and all of the version incompatibilities that plague the non free world. That saves money too. The best support will eventually be telling the user what distribution will be able to use the device without further effort. Next best would be for them to tell you what packages you need to install. The very worst kind of support they could provide is a boxed binary that's obsolete by the time it's bought.
The tide has turned, it won't be long before you are swimming in good desktop interfaces.
On the other hand, any self-professed Ubuntu/Mac guy is not who I look to for advice about Windows.... I already USE Linux.
So, you'd rather the opinion of the M$ faithful who have no basis for comparison? Do you not trust yourself?
I don't think ANYONE is happy about the situation except irrational fanboys
You will be very happy when your allegiance shifts.
If I could use it to run all the software I need to run, I'd toss my Windows machine.
There are all sorts of emulation and virtual machine answers to your problems. They might not be free but they will deal with all the legacy problems you have except your attitude.
What you have to face is that people who actually need Windoze are a very small fraction of the general population. Even gamers have plenty to do with nvidia, ATI and Intel all supporting Linux. Everyone else will do just fine with nothing but free software. If you open your mind just a little and use free software to get things done, you will find that "the applications" are there along with tens of thousands of more specialized programs that do the job better.
Society will be better off when users really own their computers and we have better laws to protect what they send over networks. Windows is a tyrant's best friend, Vista was even worse. Free societies depend on free presses which need free software. Free Software, Free Society - you can't have one without the other.
These services don't "continue to fail". Virgin is the first such service that I know of that failed due to financial hardship.
There are no successful consumer rent-a-song services. Sony has failed and Microsoft abandoned it's entire "Plays for Sure" market when it launched the Zune, which is another failure. Every college service paid for by student fees is neglected and many have been withdrawn.
Broadcast radio in your area must be very remarkable because never in my entire life has my radio played exactly (or any) of what I want to here without commercials when I want to hear it.
No, it's awful everywhere, but your rent-a-song service will be too when they have people hooked. It's not like the industry will do anything different once they have things locked up again. If everyone was on some kind of rental program, they would continue to limit variety and sell you the difference separately. That's the way the RIAA model works. It's not about promoting talent, it's about creating scarcity.
Truth comes from independent news organizations and citizen journalists. These are typically funded by advertisements but they can be subscriber funded. There were one thousands of these organizations in the US because every town had one or two printed newspapers. The role is now being taken up by independent organizations on the internet.
Corporate controlled media is what broadcast monopolies have given us. The major broadcasters are owned by big companies like GE, Westinghouse, Disney and Microsoft. Control has been extended over most newspapers as well through purchase and consolidation. These interests have dominated US opinion for more than fifty years, but their power has peaked. Just the same, the way corporate controlled media is run makes any kind of truth difficult to get out and scientific reporting impossible. The owners are not interested in their contractual and moral obligations to educate the public.
This issue is just one of the many imperatives to a free internet. Restrictions on internet freedom will drive us right back into the corporate controlled world of 1970.
Don't you mean that honest (science) journalism just doesn't sell well?
It's more like corporate controlled news aims to indoctrinate, not educate. It's not because they don't have the money or the time. It's not that their broadcast grants does not require them to eat the cost of educational broadcast, so that IT SHOULD NOT BE MADE INTO ENTERTAINMENT AND BE FOR PROFIT IN THE FIRST PLACE. It's that they have an agenda and won't train and pay people to violate it. Truth and information rarely come from corporate controlled media. Instead of information, you will be repeatedly bombarded with nonsense.
The march to war in Afganistan, Iraq and now Iran present tremendous media news failures. Even the most harried reporter knows they were lied to in Iraq but they still pump out the party line.
The charade of "press conferences" is another example of people playing along. Everyone sits in a room and raises their hand, knowing the questions and questioners have been approved in advance. Anyone who would dare to ask an unapproved question would get themselves and their news organization banned and harassed.
Corporate controlled, government censored media is not free and little truth comes out of it.
Or worse yet for your readers, even the studies that do exist are locked behind a pay-to-read model of electronic publishing- so they can't tell assumption from fact. My suggestion: Make everything explicit.
Peer reviewed is one thing, journalism is another. In peer review literature you have to make everything explicit and checkable. Journalism comes from judgment and is based on opinion. If you discover something and it has far reaching implications, you need to present your findings to the general public as an opinion. People need that opinion, because they only have an average of 15 minutes a day for news. Ideally, all of the information will be accessible so that anyone, including your peers, can dig further. Electronic publication promises to reduce barriers to knowledge but it's not a time machine.
Recently, Slashdot reported that the German government was paying scientists to edit Wikipedia. That is nearly ideal because it can link to sources directly and the contents can be edited to eliminate confusion in a way that traditional news never could.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, I can explain free software to you. At the very least, Adobe is forcing you to duplicate their work if you want to co-operate with them or their users. Can you tell me why they would want to do that? Can you then explain how a company that operates that way would not be tempted to introduce spurious features and make other changes that intentionally waste their customer's efforts? Non free software must keep users helpless and divided if it's owners want to keep their position. They divide their customers from one another and they divide their customers from the rest of the world. These are evil things that free software avoids.
Adobe has not been as bad as other companies, but they still require you to push an "I agree" button that signals your willingness to do as you are told instead of as you would like.
That you have to know such details is evidence of the complete security failure of non free software vendors.
Worse, you are wrong. You can avoid IE because it's embedded in many applications and it's far from the only hole you need to worry about. In most tests there is no operator, just a default install plugged to the net.
Free software is not perfect but it's much better than windows. While windows takes 12 minutes on average to become part of someone's botnet, GNU/Linux systems typically take months. Even if this is only due to the "popularity effect" it's not likely to change because there are so many different GNU/Linux distributions that vary build options and order of software load. GNU/Linux will never be the kind of easy monoculture target that Windoze is and it's users will always be better off.
Adobe has done a nice job of releasing specs and porting software to the GNU/Linux world but they do not believe in software freedom. You can legitimately complain that their releases are late, non free and patent encumbered. The lack of freedom is most evident in their readers, which won't let you cut and paste if the author foolishly wishes to raise themselves above the already insane restrictions of copyright law. Until they liberate their code and repudiate software patents they should not pretend to be friends of free software and people are better off without them.
No, by my logic you would be happier doing both.
What should really make you happy, though, is the liberty to use your cable modem or fiber hook up to communicate with 128bps and exchange the other information in real time. More is better. Filters always provide less bandwith. People in Japan with their 10 mpps connections both up and down are laughing at your featureless cell phone and sorry internet connection.
When I pay for bandwith, I expect to be able to use it as a chose not as YOU or anyone else sees fit. I understand that this costs money and that is the source of my outrage.
Conversely, use of public servitude and spectrum are privileges not rights. Those that would use those public resources have obligations to the public. It can be argued that the current owners of spectrum and networks in this country have failed those obligations and should be removed from their position of privilege and jailed.
Well put, but perhaps not the best thing in mixed company.
The easy way to defeat "packet shaping" sophistry is to point out that value comes from bandwith and nothing but. Constricting bandwith through a filter always reduces the bandwith available, even if it favors a few "sensitive" packets. The only way out of bandwith problems is to spend the money on more bandwith. Money spent on other things is wasteful, even if honestly used.
Fiber == Future. Copper == Past. This is the idea of capitalism, we want an even playing field for companies so that they can edge out the competition with better prices/ideas. Verizon is doing that, and quiet well.
If things really were free, you would be right. They are not and you are selling yourself out. It was a sin for government to grant Ma Bell a monopoly. To undo that sin, the public servitude must be liberated and the Bell holdings must be dissolved. The other answer is to have a completely public network that everyone can use. Any combination of the two will favor one company over the others and this is why US networks have gone from world supremacy to third rate status. Verizon is doing what they are doing so that others won't be able to serve you. When they are finished robbing you of choice they will take your freedom.
In the US, the Wintel press has cranked up nonsense about how ooxml's demise was "political", which spins everything upside down. A company that owns it's own broadcast network, a sizeable number of newspapers, and spends a billion dollars a month in advertising does have it easy when it comes to blanketing the world with it's opinions.
The attack was also easy because there is little downside to it from their persective. They hate all reasonable standards so the controversy's damage to ISO is a win even if they lose. They also think that the only people who will notice are people who hate them anyway. That's a gamble they have been losing more often and the crowd of people turned off is growing because of it.
Balls!
Are you outraged by what I've said?
To quote Amnesty International's new campaign, "It's not happening here, but it's happening now."
There today, here tomorrow. That's what tracking dissidents is all about. The US government tried to blackmail MLK into suicide through an extensive program of wiretaps and bugs, and may have murdered him. Do you think the same government is any cleaner today? Do you think the US power structure will not resort to crimes to maintain power through the shift that electronic publishing is creating? Do you really think that the US government is any less an heir of the wars of Indian Extermination and the US Civil War and Reconstruction than it ever was? It's better to apply the law and stop domestic spying while the penalties are still minor problems with air flights and economic sabotage. Things can get much worse very quickly when government does not obey it's own laws.
In any case, my point was that it's wrong to help implement these things and individuals should avoid companies that help tyrants. The majority of the population should boycot Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Cisco and Google for the bad work they have already done in China. A hand in the current Burmese bloodshed will make this position crystal clear, and I'm not willing to dismiss the possibility as quickly as you do. Techs should refuse such work and blow whistles for any company that attempts this kind of tracking abroad or at home. Those that don't are building weapons for tyrants.
Or, better yet, perhaps the government of Burma has control of the only ISP and simply obtains logs through them?
Do you think Burma has better ability than China to do this? I don't and that means they are employing the same western firms that China did to do the dirty work of tracking dissidents.
Exactly who does the tracking is besides the point: YOU need to consider the results of YOUR actions when YOU take a job. Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Google should not be helping China but their moral failure does not excuse your own. None of US should take that kind of work because the end result of helping tyrants is the murder of innocents.
Have the usual suspects, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Google, been turning over information about these people? Remember this as you help put "intelligence" into the internet there at home. There is no free speech without anonymity. When push comes to shove, tyrants murder people like you and me.
I don't think the ISO organization will allow M$ to damage their reputation that way. The OOXML vote is an international scandal and the people who count are not going to forget it. The whole business has already been damaging to ISO and they would do better to bury ooxml.
Just the same, I don't feel smug about how easily they damaged ISO. When I want to feel smug, I contemplate Vista's failure and what that means for the whole next generation of M$ crap and lock in.
Vista is one of the best things that ever happened to free software. It's later, more restrictive more expensive and less functional than anyone could possibly have imagined. There is zero enthusiasm for it and a plenty of rejection.
It'll be interesting to see what happens here, since it isn't uncommon for companies to refuse warranty for "unauthorized" use.
How about warranty for stuff Apple broke trying to lock down other people's iPhones? iPhone is a beautiful device, crippled by non free software and ATT. One is bad enough but the combination is unworkable and unbearable.
An AC with a low IQ asks:
Did you have anything to add to this discussion other than making snide remarks to cover your envy of Microsoft's better working practice, and linking to someone else's entry?
No. By selectively quoting the GP I completely changed the meaning of what he said from "M$ is teh best and did not have this problem" to "M$ users are suckers". Then I linked to someone else who shows mail threat posts saying that this is not a problem for Debian users who are subscribed to the "voletile" lists for updates. It's funny, you are supposed to laugh.
No, I don't have any envy of M$'s practice and you could not pay me to run their shit for anything where time was important. Windows does not understand GMT and use local time, which forces all applications to compute GMT and that forces errors. Their time and date functions are so rudimentary that vendors have to make their own. M$ users had a huge pain in the ass when the US decided to change daylight savings time, older versions were ignored and never recovered. Y2K was a major issue for their machines. Applications, such as Excel have functions that return wrong and contradictory answers. The list of M$ time and date cockups so long and so extensive that I have my doubts they did anything right in New Zealand. There's more than cost reasons that GPS device makers have turned to GNU/Linux.
Microsoft users on Automatic Updates rolled over without even knowing anything
That's the truth!
Selective quoting is fun.
[I enjoy] a good OSS flamewar [but] Give me something that works for 95% of the whole group and I'll happily support the remaining 5% rather than risk 100% of my user base's productivity on something that may collapse from internal quibbling in a few months.
The problem with closed source is that your 5% is just out of luck. You would be very lucky to have that 95% satisfaction without three year fork lift "upgrades" that will screw over your old work anyway.
Free software flame wars are downright civil next to what goes on in chair throwing, non free fiefdoms. Check out this nasty spat over Vista, aka "the biggest development failure ever", and something that's about to collapse after 9 months of failure. Want to risk your productivity on ME2? I don't think so, but the next version of Windoze is going to be more of the same.
managers with their shared email folders and their shared calendars and their popup meeting requests and reminders and their crackberries LOVE IT. They LOVE that it's all those things AT THE SAME TIME,
Kontact does all of those things and then some and all of it better. You get the shared calenders, birthday reminders, a first rate address book and so on and so forth but all with reasonable file formats and sftp support. There is no way in hell I'll ever go back to Outlook.
What emulation? WINE?
There's much more in the world than Wine, which is why I can dismiss everything you say about Linux as being about ten years out of date. Get out there and look at some of the commercial offerings before you shoot your mouth off again.
Wine works and that's why Crossover Office works. If all your customer needs is something dinky like Outlook or M$ Office and you want it to "look right", just sell them a copy of Crossover Office.
If you really need everything in the Windoze world, you can run Windoze in a virtual machine. It works like Windoze because it is Windoze. It works better than Windoze because Linux has better window managers. Parallels is just the start, but it works very well and does XP. There are others that work just as well. When you combine them with a desktop like Beryl, the result is beautiful. No client could possibly complain about running Windoze itself in a virtual window you can just flip a cube to get too. Any modern hardware should have no problem running this and it runs much better than Vista.
Vista is beat, 100%. There are better applications in the free software world and the non free software world of XP has just been contained and swallowed whole where it will work better and be easier to keep up.
WiMAX uses licensed spectrum. Cities looking to provide WiMAX service need an FCC license to do anything.
The spectrum must be liberated or the internet will be owned.
To save money. For most companies, linux is too small of market to be worth devoting development time to.
They just wrote the interface in GPL'd code, so you know they already have devoted the development time and might be keeping someone on staff that knows what they are doing.
Their GPL'd code is already "supporting" the user. Using reasonable interfaces and releasing specs is a good first step. Sooner or later this will make it's way to the distribution of your choice and your distribution will have a better copy than anything you can put in a box with the product. One of the great things about free software is the ability to get away from physical distribution and all of the version incompatibilities that plague the non free world. That saves money too. The best support will eventually be telling the user what distribution will be able to use the device without further effort. Next best would be for them to tell you what packages you need to install. The very worst kind of support they could provide is a boxed binary that's obsolete by the time it's bought.
The tide has turned, it won't be long before you are swimming in good desktop interfaces.
SatanicPuppy exposes his closed mind:
On the other hand, any self-professed Ubuntu/Mac guy is not who I look to for advice about Windows. ... I already USE Linux.
So, you'd rather the opinion of the M$ faithful who have no basis for comparison? Do you not trust yourself?
I don't think ANYONE is happy about the situation except irrational fanboys
You will be very happy when your allegiance shifts.
If I could use it to run all the software I need to run, I'd toss my Windows machine.
There are all sorts of emulation and virtual machine answers to your problems. They might not be free but they will deal with all the legacy problems you have except your attitude.
What you have to face is that people who actually need Windoze are a very small fraction of the general population. Even gamers have plenty to do with nvidia, ATI and Intel all supporting Linux. Everyone else will do just fine with nothing but free software. If you open your mind just a little and use free software to get things done, you will find that "the applications" are there along with tens of thousands of more specialized programs that do the job better.
Society will be better off when users really own their computers and we have better laws to protect what they send over networks. Windows is a tyrant's best friend, Vista was even worse. Free societies depend on free presses which need free software. Free Software, Free Society - you can't have one without the other.
These services don't "continue to fail". Virgin is the first such service that I know of that failed due to financial hardship.
There are no successful consumer rent-a-song services. Sony has failed and Microsoft abandoned it's entire "Plays for Sure" market when it launched the Zune, which is another failure. Every college service paid for by student fees is neglected and many have been withdrawn.
Broadcast radio in your area must be very remarkable because never in my entire life has my radio played exactly (or any) of what I want to here without commercials when I want to hear it.
No, it's awful everywhere, but your rent-a-song service will be too when they have people hooked. It's not like the industry will do anything different once they have things locked up again. If everyone was on some kind of rental program, they would continue to limit variety and sell you the difference separately. That's the way the RIAA model works. It's not about promoting talent, it's about creating scarcity.
Truth comes from independent news organizations and citizen journalists. These are typically funded by advertisements but they can be subscriber funded. There were one thousands of these organizations in the US because every town had one or two printed newspapers. The role is now being taken up by independent organizations on the internet.
Corporate controlled media is what broadcast monopolies have given us. The major broadcasters are owned by big companies like GE, Westinghouse, Disney and Microsoft. Control has been extended over most newspapers as well through purchase and consolidation. These interests have dominated US opinion for more than fifty years, but their power has peaked. Just the same, the way corporate controlled media is run makes any kind of truth difficult to get out and scientific reporting impossible. The owners are not interested in their contractual and moral obligations to educate the public.
This issue is just one of the many imperatives to a free internet. Restrictions on internet freedom will drive us right back into the corporate controlled world of 1970.
Don't you mean that honest (science) journalism just doesn't sell well?
It's more like corporate controlled news aims to indoctrinate, not educate. It's not because they don't have the money or the time. It's not that their broadcast grants does not require them to eat the cost of educational broadcast, so that IT SHOULD NOT BE MADE INTO ENTERTAINMENT AND BE FOR PROFIT IN THE FIRST PLACE. It's that they have an agenda and won't train and pay people to violate it. Truth and information rarely come from corporate controlled media. Instead of information, you will be repeatedly bombarded with nonsense.
The march to war in Afganistan, Iraq and now Iran present tremendous media news failures. Even the most harried reporter knows they were lied to in Iraq but they still pump out the party line.
The charade of "press conferences" is another example of people playing along. Everyone sits in a room and raises their hand, knowing the questions and questioners have been approved in advance. Anyone who would dare to ask an unapproved question would get themselves and their news organization banned and harassed.
Corporate controlled, government censored media is not free and little truth comes out of it.
Or worse yet for your readers, even the studies that do exist are locked behind a pay-to-read model of electronic publishing- so they can't tell assumption from fact. My suggestion: Make everything explicit.
Peer reviewed is one thing, journalism is another. In peer review literature you have to make everything explicit and checkable. Journalism comes from judgment and is based on opinion. If you discover something and it has far reaching implications, you need to present your findings to the general public as an opinion. People need that opinion, because they only have an average of 15 minutes a day for news. Ideally, all of the information will be accessible so that anyone, including your peers, can dig further. Electronic publication promises to reduce barriers to knowledge but it's not a time machine.
Recently, Slashdot reported that the German government was paying scientists to edit Wikipedia. That is nearly ideal because it can link to sources directly and the contents can be edited to eliminate confusion in a way that traditional news never could.