if it wasn't for a set of special laws protecting the US Post Office [the government could plunder your post at will] - that same set of laws has NOT been passed for the Internet. If you want them- you need to write your congress critter.
The exact opposite is true, government needs to pass laws before they act. Moreover, you need to pass a very special kind of law to violate the US bill of rights. Wanting to do so makes you a traitor. People don't need laws to protect their rights and laws which do must be nullified by the supreme court.
Let's consider your postal analogy. If I give my physical post to a friend to deliver to someone else doesthe government has a right to read my mail? No, my friend has as much fourth amendment protection as I do. The government should no more have a right to read my email at the ISP than they have the right to read my email on my own computer. Any such "rights" have been invented by people who are ignorant of or hostile to the US Constitution.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
It's hard to argue with such simple language. Claims of "storage" or that my email is not a "paper" are second rate sophistry.
This is an economic as well as a human rights issue. A society that does not protect it's post can't do business and can not prosper.
Why do you care?... you clicked through to the discussion; why?
Because I hate Microsoft and the trolls who mess with Slashdot.
Yes, using discussion 2 I waded through the forrest of troll posts. It's not that hard to close up the treads that they pollute, though it does bury interesting comments. So goes the continued denial of service attack on Slashdot.
Why do I bother? I'm waiting on a data analysis. The machine I get the data from uses Windoze 2000, so connecting it to the net and automating the process is a no go. This gives me hours of time to contemplate. Despite the crap flood, I find amusing things to read and write about.
Contemplating the death of M$'s music venture and DRM is more pleasant than most things I've read this morning. There's not really much the apologists can say about this one. Like Xbox, Zune is inferior and a poor competitor. Music and games are all about sharing and fun - the exact opposite of the M$ way, which is more about screwing your "competitors" over. M$ has done so much harm to the US and world economies that the officers deserve jail time, but that's unlikely right now. In the mean time, I'm happy that they are not able to screw everyone in this one small way - they will not manage to further damage the market for music players. Enough reverses like this and they might finally lose their grip on the desktop and nothing could be nicer than that.
Without revenue, M$ will be unable to do the things required to keep their 1980's software model dominant:
corrupt technical standards for hardware operation and data exchange
corrupt network operations and limit the services people can offer each other
corrupt US copyright and patent law
sue public schools and anyone else who dares to make a copy of software required to read their secret formats
corrupt news reporting itself by purchasing local and national papers
Yes, I hate the things that Microsoft stands for and does.
So if I see a Microsoft enginner quoted I'm told he is an MS engie and when I see TurdFurgeson quoted I'm told he's Linux zealot.... The bias question was also material for an elective journalism course for me at college.*
"Linux zealot," What is that and why would you bother to interview one? I'm getting tired of seeing that meaningless insult slung around.
Of course, that's not what the NYT is complaining about. They are bothered by their sources pretending to be things they are not. Microsoft in particular has troubled them and this little tiff is about that.
You know it doesn't have to be new to be a security issue, right? There are mitigating controls, but at least 73% of companies don't actively control these protocols.
The problem is not the "firewall." The problem is needing one in the first place. The world will be a much better place when 73% of companies take the mitigating control of dumping Windoze.
... the bill is directed towards child pornography, not obscenity in general.
That will be the next bill if this one passes. They always go for the most emotional of issues to drive home the most odious of restrictions.
according to the bill there would be a duty to report if the administrator obtained actual knowledge that child pornography was posted online. I didn't read the bill over in great detail but I didn't see anything about an affirmative duty to monitor, just report when something is brought to your attention.
We can be sure the "negligent failure" section will be quickly abused that way. This bad concept bill will surely be modified before it is passed. I'm hoping it will be derided for the bad idea it is and tossed out.
I'm disappointed in McCain who I've always supported.
I'm disappointed too, but not because I know or care about McCain. I'm disappointed anyone in the US Senate would think of such a thing. It's better to judge the bill by what it says, not who presents it. The best intentions of your favorite legislator will quickly be overridden by the worst possible interpretion of any bill.
No more public discussion on American servers on the Internet. Seriously, who would risk running a public forum in the face of fines like that? Even major players like Amazon would most likely be forced to take down public comment sections lest something slip through. Slashdot, Fark, Kos, Pandagon, Redstate, LGF, whatever your online bitching kink is, it's going away.
The likely scenerio is to force everone into a two or three blanket carriers with the resources to deal with the paper work. All of these bloggers like truthout have been embarrassing to governments used to controlling three or four broadcasters. It won't put a stop to kiddie porn or the other four riders of the infopocalypse but it will make it next to impossible for forums in the world of ends. It is crap like this that will turn the internet into something that resembles webTV more than a flourishing free press.
Thanks, Zonk, for posting what I think is a very important issue, but I have a big correction to the summary. I made up the bit about "personal common carrier," and did not intentionally attribute it to the EFF. I was unable to find anything outside of the article about their stance on this and why they consider the bill unconstitutional. I'd love to hear more from them, but quoted everything I saw in the journal entry which I submitted. The part about "personal common carrier" comes from my own sense of justice, as expressed above, and views on freedom of press.
The article seems to have been updated, so I'll quote everything from the EFF here.
"This constitutionally dubious proposal is being made apparently mostly based on fear or political considerations rather than on the facts," said EFF's Bankston. Studies by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children show the online sexual solicitation of minors has dropped in the past five years, despite the growth of social-networking services, he said.... "I am concerned that there is a slippery slope here," said Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "Once you start creating categories of industries that must report suspicious or criminal behavior, when does that stop?"
Privacy is important and necessary for real free speech, but it's freedom of speech and press that is my primary concern. It's my opinion that recent obscenity laws have were made to crush porn sites through expensive reporting requirements because the authors were unable to directly outlaw what they consider objectionable material. Now that they have accomplished that goal, they are moving on to other content that bothers them. The obvious net result of this proposed law would be to run every forum off the net.
Others have pointed to my greatest fears: abuse by trolls and extortionists. Given the new Air Force mission to dominate cyberspace, various departments of missinformation and other funny business, I can also imagine government employees themselves abusing forums they want to shut down. No slippery slope is required for sites to be shut down this way. If this bill flies, it will be virtually impossible to host a site where people can post images and movies. The bill contains a "negligent failure" clause that's ripe for abuse.
Maybe it's just me, but I seem to find the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park a little less believable than a kid getting root.
What, cold blooded animals with scales, teeth and claws are unbelievable? It's the hot little furry ones that seem out of place to me, kind of like a run away finger snack. The world is full of big bad beasts.
Given recent findings of soft tissue in fossils and the fiendish pace of cloning research, you might live to see dinosaurs of an earlier vintage than these. Just think of it as the biological equivalent of running Windows 3.1 in dosbox.
Your independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child's computer...
Should I take it that they have no connection whatsoever to OLPC?
Who are they then? Their "People" link has nothing but advertisements.
Do I smell yet another M$ funded "independent study"? It has all the hallmarks, FUD from an unheard of source with a name very close to one you trust. It's no wonder that this story was submitted by an AC and I'm afraid we will be hearing more from them.
The bottom line is that OLPC is going to be cheaper and easier than textbooks, which also have a lot of "training," transportation, fragility and replacement issues and costs. Anyone who can't see that has completely missed the implications of electronic publications... another Microsoft trait.
This piece of information [6,000 M$ vrs 700 ODF pages] is of little use without comparing the supported *features* in both format and their implementation.
No, that order of magnitude difference is informative. I imagine 6,000 pages can buy you:
ODF, so I can tell you about it in text, spreadsheet and presentation with all of the same features M$ Office has.
PNG, to draw you a picture of a pig
OGG, so you can hear it squeal
a database to organize the pig stye
a computer language to implement it all
FTP, to get it to you
DICOM, so you have a place for the medical records generated by your heart attack on seeing the bill.
And then some because I'm only at seven.
300 pages is roughly two inches of shelf space. M$'s specification will take up 40 inches of your shelf and burden your floor with a hundred pound load. I don't even want to think of how log it would take to read 40 inches of XML specs.
For all that, it will be incomplete in a typical Microsoft way, rendering it useless outside of PHB relations.
I don't see the 'mischaracterizes' part of this whole story. From what I can tell, AOL matched one or more IPs directly to the defendant - name, street address, state and ZIP. If they didn't have an account with AOL how did they know that information?
You don't think the RIAA had such a claimed match to start this suit in the first place? It would not have existed without such information. Presenting it again, as if it were new information with sentence that implies AOL backing is clearly misleading.
All of these cases are bogus. The basis of the suit is that the RIAA says the defendant did something wrong. If that's all it takes to prove the wrong, I think I'm going to claim RIAA representatives stole my priceless Elvis wig set. I'll provide the license plate number of Warner CEO and a screen shot of my computer with that plate clearly visible driving down my street. It should be obvious, when the police confirm the identity, the CEO stole my wigs and owes me big time. Really, the RIAA stooge collecting IP numbers could be making them up at random to avoid real work. Why work eight hours when you could just run a random number generator for five minutes? What real, impartial evidence to the have of the actual infringement?
Microsoft has just taken a while to get it. See reason four.
If Microsoft is doing this to boost their next Office, they are going to be surprised by the number of people who migrate to Open Office. Really, these kinds of screw ups are nails in their coffin.
People selling "friends" would be very useful to the "guerilla marketing" crowd. It can destroy the credibility of the interaction group and that's a problem for everyone.
The goal of non free software makers is to take money from users for services they could easily provide themselves. To do this, they must convince users that they are incapable of helping themselves and do everything in their power to make it so. This is accomplished through billions of dollars in propaganda and legislation designed divide us all into helpless individuals. Microsoft can not put free software out of business, instead they must attack the community itself. This plan was outlined in the 1998 Halloween Document.
How appropriate for a brown music player that reviewers have advised people to "avoid". More appropriate is the speed with which sales fell to 20th and worse. Zune is a turd boosted only by enormous hype. It lasted a day or so then died. The only way Zune sales are going anywhere is if Microsoft buys their own production for the next few months. Given how M$ has stabbed all of their previous music partners in the back, the whole industry should hate it. This player has less hope of success than Dell's jukebox or any of the previous players - it costs more, has a shorter battery life and comes with a worse music deal than their now failed Plays for Sure initiative.
Why was this useless fanboy article posted? No one denied the initial sales squirt.
The biggest problem is C and all the other non-typesafe languages. Safe languages simply trade a certain amount of performance for the impossibility of buffer overflows, underflows, stack 'smashing', heap corruption, double-free's, pointer arithmetic errors, and all of the other low-level attacks. Everything at that level is toast in Java or in "managed" C# for instance.
Is it true that OpenBSD was written in C# and that's why it's so secure? I had no idea they had ported C# outside M$OS and i386 but there it is on sixteen different hardware platforms. Here I was thinking that Steve Balmer would have trouble naming more than two hardware platforms and would get them wrong, "Intel and AMD" - bzzzt, "Thanks for playing Steve!" C is so terrible to work with, it must be the root of all computer evil that does not exist outside the Windoze world.
The article doesn't have much to say outside of the world of Microsoft Windows.
Actually, he dismisses ALL things outside Microsoft and hypes Vista. "Get a Mac" is placed in his list of absurd recommendations along with manually typing links to your browser. Free software is is only implied as a passing part of his core thesis that "security" is so bad that you have to be a computer expert to do normal things with your computer. Putting that onto Mac use shows how absurd the omissions are. Paradoxically after showing just how bad M$ has made the world for us, he praises Vista as a potential savior of the masses.
That kind of advice is terrible and leads to more of the same. A diversity of strong and easy to use platforms is the ONLY solution to the problem. People can and should migrate to other platforms which are secure now and for the foreseeable future. If they don't migrate, M$ will continue to run the vast majority of the world's computers, something that's already a dissaster. If they don't migrate the other platforms will never be as easy and cheap as they should be and M$ will adjust their incompetence to match - they will never do more than they have to. In short, he's ignored viable options to hype one that's sure to fail. I'd call that an advertisement.
Sure, just try finding anybody outside of the/. readership that has the faintest idea what OGG (Vorbis or Theora, it's more fun if you name them by their codecs instead of the container) is.
Funny how the above might be interpreted as common sense.
Why is it that the cheapest and best sounding routine is the least used? You would think that a free market would grab it and promote it. The answer is that the market is not free and that the major players are a bunch of asses who want to promote their own little format at the cost of everyone else. WMA, the worst of the bunch, is paradoxically the most common format on players. Sony has their ATRAC and Apple has their AAC. MP3 is available to all for a slight fee. OGG is free for the taking yet few use it. How backward.
When you start to think of the world in less absolute, universal terms, you'll realize why a lot of businesses do make decisions for the sorts of reasons I mentioned before.
Oh come on, the universal absolute term of business is money. No smoke an mirror TCO "study" from Microsoft is going to change the bottom line for most companies. The very fact that Microsoft has to pay people to make these bogus statements should clue you in to the fact that they are full of shit. The sooner you get away from M$ the less good money you throw after bad.
Stop posting mature consideration of the whole MS Patent issue and get back to hysterical screaming about how MS plans to kill Linux with patents.
I can present you with a reasonable response when Microsoft presents something more than empty menace. When they present the first violated patent, I'll be happy to debate it's merits. Until then all there is is M$ BS, designed to FUD free software. They only hysteria is coming from a company in Redmond that's losing marketshare.
Because people seem worried, maybe some hyperventilating, and even some panicking.
That's the M$ plan, but I don't see any of it. What panic have you actually seen outside the Wintel press? This really is Microsoft's last gasp.
Microsoft won't actually do anything until Linux starts eating up Desktop Sales, and even then, I don't see it happening unless MS is really going the drain, ala SCO - which won't be for many many years.
No, this IS exactly the same thing they did with their SCO sock puppet and it's all they really have: an empty threat. They dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into SCO but they never had the first real infringement. This patent move is more of the same and just as empty. If they really had something, they would have laid it out.
Free software is making desktop inroads and is about to make more. Companies like Lowes have already kicked Microsoft completely out. Vista is going to push more companies in the same direction. People sitting on Windows 2000 are going to see even less of what they want in Vista than they did in XP and migrating to free software will be very attractive for them. The end will come swiftly.
the strife and discord its discovery created within the land of astronomers
The poet Hesiod noted in his Works and Days that there were two kinds of Eris and one of them good. The spirit of friendly competition and one-upsmanship on it's own are good for society. Those are the challenges which advance the state of the art. It's lawless harm to others that is dangerous and makes us all poorer. When a thing is destroyed, the world is that much poorer. When things are created, the world is richer. Those who would destroy so that they can own more of what belongs to others are criminals. For examples of evil, observe Microsoft. For examples of creative growth see GNU, BSD and most free software projects which all aim to do the same things excellently. The English words, strife and discord, don't do the concept justice. Strife is good.
If you were the one who did the "whistleblowing, site:faa.gov" search, two days before an anonymous person called that number, are you still going to believe it's anonymous?
Do the search from your corrupt boss's computer. The dumbass probably uses windoze, so it should not be too hard to get in there to do it. Good luck!
Reporting to authorities on your own employer - even if there was a serious wrongdoing - is certain to end your industry career.
If there was serious wrongdoing, your career is already over. Serious wrongdoing is defined as people dying because your company took a shortcut. Forging the engineer's signature is one such shortcut. After that, there's no real walking away. It's your signature on the approval. If things go wrong, it's your ass anyway. The mud from dissasters flies far and wide and many innocent people are often ruined as supply chains are changed in the wake of public perception.
This is why you should never work for people you don't trust. If you get a bad feeling about anything an employer does, get out. These kinds of things never end well.
I worked for 3 pharma companies. I would never openly challenge a company like this about their product. I would find a new employer first and then I would try to leak out what was going on - and I would be extra careful that my new and old employers would not find out it was me.
In US aviation, at least, there are anonymous hotlines to report violations. Calls can trigger an inspection to verify compliance.
"We do have a problem with people pirating information that is incorrect," he said.... So they don't want wrong info, and they will provide their own info for FREE soon.
I wonder if they have a problem with my 1997 "Let's Go USA." Information accuracy is a spurious issue, which casts doubt on their promise of their own "free" version. As others have pointed out, this is outrageous behavior for a quasi public agency.
If you outlaw the maps, only terrorists will have maps.
I thought the open source and decentralized eMule was the tool of choice for the eDonkey network, with Shareaza and other tools following closely behind.
The numbers don't matter. The point is that the RIAA has managed to shut down their competitors, regardless of actual copyright violations or intent. If you want to start a music distribution company and use the internet for user feedback, you are shit out of luck.
Slashdot Mirror
if it wasn't for a set of special laws protecting the US Post Office [the government could plunder your post at will] - that same set of laws has NOT been passed for the Internet. If you want them- you need to write your congress critter.
The exact opposite is true, government needs to pass laws before they act. Moreover, you need to pass a very special kind of law to violate the US bill of rights. Wanting to do so makes you a traitor. People don't need laws to protect their rights and laws which do must be nullified by the supreme court.
Let's consider your postal analogy. If I give my physical post to a friend to deliver to someone else doesthe government has a right to read my mail? No, my friend has as much fourth amendment protection as I do. The government should no more have a right to read my email at the ISP than they have the right to read my email on my own computer. Any such "rights" have been invented by people who are ignorant of or hostile to the US Constitution.
It's hard to argue with such simple language. Claims of "storage" or that my email is not a "paper" are second rate sophistry.
This is an economic as well as a human rights issue. A society that does not protect it's post can't do business and can not prosper.
Why do you care? ... you clicked through to the discussion; why?
Because I hate Microsoft and the trolls who mess with Slashdot.
Yes, using discussion 2 I waded through the forrest of troll posts. It's not that hard to close up the treads that they pollute, though it does bury interesting comments. So goes the continued denial of service attack on Slashdot.
Why do I bother? I'm waiting on a data analysis. The machine I get the data from uses Windoze 2000, so connecting it to the net and automating the process is a no go. This gives me hours of time to contemplate. Despite the crap flood, I find amusing things to read and write about.
Contemplating the death of M$'s music venture and DRM is more pleasant than most things I've read this morning. There's not really much the apologists can say about this one. Like Xbox, Zune is inferior and a poor competitor. Music and games are all about sharing and fun - the exact opposite of the M$ way, which is more about screwing your "competitors" over. M$ has done so much harm to the US and world economies that the officers deserve jail time, but that's unlikely right now. In the mean time, I'm happy that they are not able to screw everyone in this one small way - they will not manage to further damage the market for music players. Enough reverses like this and they might finally lose their grip on the desktop and nothing could be nicer than that.
Without revenue, M$ will be unable to do the things required to keep their 1980's software model dominant:
Yes, I hate the things that Microsoft stands for and does.
My data's done - gotta go for a while.
So if I see a Microsoft enginner quoted I'm told he is an MS engie and when I see TurdFurgeson quoted I'm told he's Linux zealot. ... The bias question was also material for an elective journalism course for me at college.*
"Linux zealot," What is that and why would you bother to interview one? I'm getting tired of seeing that meaningless insult slung around.
Of course, that's not what the NYT is complaining about. They are bothered by their sources pretending to be things they are not. Microsoft in particular has troubled them and this little tiff is about that.
You know it doesn't have to be new to be a security issue, right? There are mitigating controls, but at least 73% of companies don't actively control these protocols.
The problem is not the "firewall." The problem is needing one in the first place. The world will be a much better place when 73% of companies take the mitigating control of dumping Windoze.
That will be the next bill if this one passes. They always go for the most emotional of issues to drive home the most odious of restrictions.
according to the bill there would be a duty to report if the administrator obtained actual knowledge that child pornography was posted online. I didn't read the bill over in great detail but I didn't see anything about an affirmative duty to monitor, just report when something is brought to your attention.
We can be sure the "negligent failure" section will be quickly abused that way. This bad concept bill will surely be modified before it is passed. I'm hoping it will be derided for the bad idea it is and tossed out.
I'm disappointed in McCain who I've always supported.
I'm disappointed too, but not because I know or care about McCain. I'm disappointed anyone in the US Senate would think of such a thing. It's better to judge the bill by what it says, not who presents it. The best intentions of your favorite legislator will quickly be overridden by the worst possible interpretion of any bill.
No more public discussion on American servers on the Internet. Seriously, who would risk running a public forum in the face of fines like that? Even major players like Amazon would most likely be forced to take down public comment sections lest something slip through. Slashdot, Fark, Kos, Pandagon, Redstate, LGF, whatever your online bitching kink is, it's going away.
The likely scenerio is to force everone into a two or three blanket carriers with the resources to deal with the paper work. All of these bloggers like truthout have been embarrassing to governments used to controlling three or four broadcasters. It won't put a stop to kiddie porn or the other four riders of the infopocalypse but it will make it next to impossible for forums in the world of ends. It is crap like this that will turn the internet into something that resembles webTV more than a flourishing free press.
Thanks, Zonk, for posting what I think is a very important issue, but I have a big correction to the summary. I made up the bit about "personal common carrier," and did not intentionally attribute it to the EFF. I was unable to find anything outside of the article about their stance on this and why they consider the bill unconstitutional. I'd love to hear more from them, but quoted everything I saw in the journal entry which I submitted. The part about "personal common carrier" comes from my own sense of justice, as expressed above, and views on freedom of press.
The article seems to have been updated, so I'll quote everything from the EFF here.
Privacy is important and necessary for real free speech, but it's freedom of speech and press that is my primary concern. It's my opinion that recent obscenity laws have were made to crush porn sites through expensive reporting requirements because the authors were unable to directly outlaw what they consider objectionable material. Now that they have accomplished that goal, they are moving on to other content that bothers them. The obvious net result of this proposed law would be to run every forum off the net.
Others have pointed to my greatest fears: abuse by trolls and extortionists. Given the new Air Force mission to dominate cyberspace, various departments of missinformation and other funny business, I can also imagine government employees themselves abusing forums they want to shut down. No slippery slope is required for sites to be shut down this way. If this bill flies, it will be virtually impossible to host a site where people can post images and movies. The bill contains a "negligent failure" clause that's ripe for abuse.
Maybe it's just me, but I seem to find the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park a little less believable than a kid getting root.
What, cold blooded animals with scales, teeth and claws are unbelievable? It's the hot little furry ones that seem out of place to me, kind of like a run away finger snack. The world is full of big bad beasts.
Given recent findings of soft tissue in fossils and the fiendish pace of cloning research, you might live to see dinosaurs of an earlier vintage than these. Just think of it as the biological equivalent of running Windows 3.1 in dosbox.
Your independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child's computer ...
Should I take it that they have no connection whatsoever to OLPC?
Who are they then? Their "People" link has nothing but advertisements.
Do I smell yet another M$ funded "independent study"? It has all the hallmarks, FUD from an unheard of source with a name very close to one you trust. It's no wonder that this story was submitted by an AC and I'm afraid we will be hearing more from them.
The bottom line is that OLPC is going to be cheaper and easier than textbooks, which also have a lot of "training," transportation, fragility and replacement issues and costs. Anyone who can't see that has completely missed the implications of electronic publications ... another Microsoft trait.
This piece of information [6,000 M$ vrs 700 ODF pages] is of little use without comparing the supported *features* in both format and their implementation.
No, that order of magnitude difference is informative. I imagine 6,000 pages can buy you:
And then some because I'm only at seven.
300 pages is roughly two inches of shelf space. M$'s specification will take up 40 inches of your shelf and burden your floor with a hundred pound load. I don't even want to think of how log it would take to read 40 inches of XML specs.
For all that, it will be incomplete in a typical Microsoft way, rendering it useless outside of PHB relations.
Those with the skills to steal it have no use for it.
I don't see the 'mischaracterizes' part of this whole story. From what I can tell, AOL matched one or more IPs directly to the defendant - name, street address, state and ZIP. If they didn't have an account with AOL how did they know that information?
You don't think the RIAA had such a claimed match to start this suit in the first place? It would not have existed without such information. Presenting it again, as if it were new information with sentence that implies AOL backing is clearly misleading.
All of these cases are bogus. The basis of the suit is that the RIAA says the defendant did something wrong. If that's all it takes to prove the wrong, I think I'm going to claim RIAA representatives stole my priceless Elvis wig set. I'll provide the license plate number of Warner CEO and a screen shot of my computer with that plate clearly visible driving down my street. It should be obvious, when the police confirm the identity, the CEO stole my wigs and owes me big time. Really, the RIAA stooge collecting IP numbers could be making them up at random to avoid real work. Why work eight hours when you could just run a random number generator for five minutes? What real, impartial evidence to the have of the actual infringement?
Microsoft has just taken a while to get it. See reason four.
If Microsoft is doing this to boost their next Office, they are going to be surprised by the number of people who migrate to Open Office. Really, these kinds of screw ups are nails in their coffin.
People selling "friends" would be very useful to the "guerilla marketing" crowd. It can destroy the credibility of the interaction group and that's a problem for everyone.
The goal of non free software makers is to take money from users for services they could easily provide themselves. To do this, they must convince users that they are incapable of helping themselves and do everything in their power to make it so. This is accomplished through billions of dollars in propaganda and legislation designed divide us all into helpless individuals. Microsoft can not put free software out of business, instead they must attack the community itself. This plan was outlined in the 1998 Halloween Document.
How appropriate for a brown music player that reviewers have advised people to "avoid". More appropriate is the speed with which sales fell to 20th and worse. Zune is a turd boosted only by enormous hype. It lasted a day or so then died. The only way Zune sales are going anywhere is if Microsoft buys their own production for the next few months. Given how M$ has stabbed all of their previous music partners in the back, the whole industry should hate it. This player has less hope of success than Dell's jukebox or any of the previous players - it costs more, has a shorter battery life and comes with a worse music deal than their now failed Plays for Sure initiative.
Why was this useless fanboy article posted? No one denied the initial sales squirt.
The biggest problem is C and all the other non-typesafe languages. Safe languages simply trade a certain amount of performance for the impossibility of buffer overflows, underflows, stack 'smashing', heap corruption, double-free's, pointer arithmetic errors, and all of the other low-level attacks. Everything at that level is toast in Java or in "managed" C# for instance.
Is it true that OpenBSD was written in C# and that's why it's so secure? I had no idea they had ported C# outside M$OS and i386 but there it is on sixteen different hardware platforms. Here I was thinking that Steve Balmer would have trouble naming more than two hardware platforms and would get them wrong, "Intel and AMD" - bzzzt, "Thanks for playing Steve!" C is so terrible to work with, it must be the root of all computer evil that does not exist outside the Windoze world.
The article doesn't have much to say outside of the world of Microsoft Windows.
Actually, he dismisses ALL things outside Microsoft and hypes Vista. "Get a Mac" is placed in his list of absurd recommendations along with manually typing links to your browser. Free software is is only implied as a passing part of his core thesis that "security" is so bad that you have to be a computer expert to do normal things with your computer. Putting that onto Mac use shows how absurd the omissions are. Paradoxically after showing just how bad M$ has made the world for us, he praises Vista as a potential savior of the masses.
That kind of advice is terrible and leads to more of the same. A diversity of strong and easy to use platforms is the ONLY solution to the problem. People can and should migrate to other platforms which are secure now and for the foreseeable future. If they don't migrate, M$ will continue to run the vast majority of the world's computers, something that's already a dissaster. If they don't migrate the other platforms will never be as easy and cheap as they should be and M$ will adjust their incompetence to match - they will never do more than they have to. In short, he's ignored viable options to hype one that's sure to fail. I'd call that an advertisement.
Sure, just try finding anybody outside of the /. readership that has the faintest idea what OGG (Vorbis or Theora, it's more fun if you name them by their codecs instead of the container) is.
Funny how the above might be interpreted as common sense.
Why is it that the cheapest and best sounding routine is the least used? You would think that a free market would grab it and promote it. The answer is that the market is not free and that the major players are a bunch of asses who want to promote their own little format at the cost of everyone else. WMA, the worst of the bunch, is paradoxically the most common format on players. Sony has their ATRAC and Apple has their AAC. MP3 is available to all for a slight fee. OGG is free for the taking yet few use it. How backward.
When you start to think of the world in less absolute, universal terms, you'll realize why a lot of businesses do make decisions for the sorts of reasons I mentioned before.
Oh come on, the universal absolute term of business is money. No smoke an mirror TCO "study" from Microsoft is going to change the bottom line for most companies. The very fact that Microsoft has to pay people to make these bogus statements should clue you in to the fact that they are full of shit. The sooner you get away from M$ the less good money you throw after bad.
Stop posting mature consideration of the whole MS Patent issue and get back to hysterical screaming about how MS plans to kill Linux with patents.
I can present you with a reasonable response when Microsoft presents something more than empty menace. When they present the first violated patent, I'll be happy to debate it's merits. Until then all there is is M$ BS, designed to FUD free software. They only hysteria is coming from a company in Redmond that's losing marketshare.
Because people seem worried, maybe some hyperventilating, and even some panicking.
That's the M$ plan, but I don't see any of it. What panic have you actually seen outside the Wintel press? This really is Microsoft's last gasp.
Microsoft won't actually do anything until Linux starts eating up Desktop Sales, and even then, I don't see it happening unless MS is really going the drain, ala SCO - which won't be for many many years.
No, this IS exactly the same thing they did with their SCO sock puppet and it's all they really have: an empty threat. They dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into SCO but they never had the first real infringement. This patent move is more of the same and just as empty. If they really had something, they would have laid it out.
Free software is making desktop inroads and is about to make more. Companies like Lowes have already kicked Microsoft completely out. Vista is going to push more companies in the same direction. People sitting on Windows 2000 are going to see even less of what they want in Vista than they did in XP and migrating to free software will be very attractive for them. The end will come swiftly.
The poet Hesiod noted in his Works and Days that there were two kinds of Eris and one of them good. The spirit of friendly competition and one-upsmanship on it's own are good for society. Those are the challenges which advance the state of the art. It's lawless harm to others that is dangerous and makes us all poorer. When a thing is destroyed, the world is that much poorer. When things are created, the world is richer. Those who would destroy so that they can own more of what belongs to others are criminals. For examples of evil, observe Microsoft. For examples of creative growth see GNU, BSD and most free software projects which all aim to do the same things excellently. The English words, strife and discord, don't do the concept justice. Strife is good.
Do the search from your corrupt boss's computer. The dumbass probably uses windoze, so it should not be too hard to get in there to do it. Good luck!
If there was serious wrongdoing, your career is already over. Serious wrongdoing is defined as people dying because your company took a shortcut. Forging the engineer's signature is one such shortcut. After that, there's no real walking away. It's your signature on the approval. If things go wrong, it's your ass anyway. The mud from dissasters flies far and wide and many innocent people are often ruined as supply chains are changed in the wake of public perception.
This is why you should never work for people you don't trust. If you get a bad feeling about anything an employer does, get out. These kinds of things never end well.
I worked for 3 pharma companies. I would never openly challenge a company like this about their product. I would find a new employer first and then I would try to leak out what was going on - and I would be extra careful that my new and old employers would not find out it was me.
In US aviation, at least, there are anonymous hotlines to report violations. Calls can trigger an inspection to verify compliance.
I wonder if they have a problem with my 1997 "Let's Go USA." Information accuracy is a spurious issue, which casts doubt on their promise of their own "free" version. As others have pointed out, this is outrageous behavior for a quasi public agency.
If you outlaw the maps, only terrorists will have maps.
The numbers don't matter. The point is that the RIAA has managed to shut down their competitors, regardless of actual copyright violations or intent. If you want to start a music distribution company and use the internet for user feedback, you are shit out of luck.