we defaulted to a hardware device that you would carry with you (quite possibly a PDA), then when you log into a machine, would have your preferences wirelessly available. Not just a desktop, but your cell phoen could wirelessly use teh address book for making calls, etc. I personally like the hardware solution best because then no one owns the cetral store of your personal data & preferences but you.
Like you can trust your machine at work! Where I work we click through the most outrageous agreements before we log in to the NT network. Essentialy all our data is our boss's, no personal use, that kind of thing.
Surely Microsoft could give it a stab, and then extend it beyond usefulness.
Most things Microsoft does are beyond usefulness and into rapicious. Have you read your EULA? Neither has my boss, or he would have realized that M$ owns all the data he thinks he owns.
All my information is available through ssh and ftp. Sensitive stuff gets no where near a computer at work, regardless of protocal.
your "idle speculation" had many silly comercial components. My post should have answered you third concern, "3. Figure out some reasonable way to do traffic shaping first or some yahoo will put you out of business by sucking up all your bandwidth. I'm not an expert on this sort of thing but maybe withholding TCP ACKs from abusers as a throttle would help."
I'm the yahoo, as in "You Always Have Other Options." Don't bother trying to make money as a toll taking troll. Someone like me will be happy to provide access at no cost and I'll fight for my right to do so. What you propose can only be accomplished by perverting the structure of the internet, which was designed to prevent people from doing what you would.
... yes, I want to see Linux out perform Windows...
It happens every day! All you have to do to see it is take whatever M$ junk you are using and replace the software. All the PitA you see on a desktop with poor security and stability, obscure and changing protocals, propriatory data formats, unmodifiable applications, ad nauseum, translate.
We have at least one multi-processor Dell "server" where I work and the folks responsible for it are not happy. Keeping it up has been a quality of life killer. The problem is not in the hardware.
The question was, "Would you use a... (free wireless access point) that covered a large downtown area (3-4 blocks of restaurants, coffee bars, an iceskating rink, a small park, and general hangout) if you had to have a framed banner ad at the top of every page you visited while on the network?"
The simple answer is a resounding no. You are asking me if I would accept the internet as a push media simply because you make it available by air. I expect, and will do what I can, to keep the air free. If we go down the advert path, it won't be long before the FCC revamps it's obsolete mandate with licenses and all that for "internet broadcasts" and the media becomes the same push shit we see on TV and hear on the radio where you and I are not welcome. I'd rather go down the free co-operative path that the internet was designed for.
At a forum organized by EngSoc, UW President Johnston said that mistakes were made in the announcement of a partnership with Microsoft Canada Co. "In retrospect, it was a mistake to announce an agreement in principle with respect to the curriculum initiatives, a mistake for which I take responsibility."...
Johnston described what will happen in the coming weeks. "What we will have to do over the next few weeks is ensure that the [sic] necessary for any curriculum change occurs, and that those committees, and, ultimately, the Senate that oversees them, are satisfied that the principles that we always must observe when external funding is involved in anything are followed in this case."
That looks like a few weeks, not a year, and it sounds like he wants a rubber stamp:
The MS-UW deal will be talked about at Monday's meeting of Senate, the the university's highest academic body. In early September, the President of UW's faculty association requested a "full airing" of the issue at Senate.
Additionally, MS Candada President Frank Clegg was specific about what the deal means to all 300 incoming freshmen:
The Microsoft Canada Co. sponsorship does require C# to be taught on a platform based on the Windows® operating system.
Replacing C++ for C# in freshmen courses should be worth the entire reputation of the school, far more than $5,000,000. My reputation is worth more than that!
Why not use the power of GNU/Linux to give users real accounts? You know, so they can save their work and eventualy retrieve it? Keep user accounts hidden from other users and make a little script that can be run by guest guest to create a real non privalidged account. Have the log outs kill all user applications and have an inactivity kill. Further steps might be needed to keep people from doing nasty things but they are SO much easier with a system that was set up multiuser from the very begining with compilers and everything else available.
The sooner people realize how easy this stuff is, the sooner they will use it and discover how easy it is.
Leaking information about interception methods is a federal crime punishable by imprisonment.
How long till speculating on the means are punishable? This shit's not rocket science. Get the fiber, make a tiny scratch in the suface. Focus a detector on the scratch as it reflects the signals. You are done. As for the polarized gadget, it looks like you might have to set up a beam splitter and figure out how many angles they have set up. It's more complicated by not impossible.
Of course, all of this has the ring of Big Brother's underground mole invasion device. Why would you go for a calble under the sea when you could just tap a silly desktop or phone line of interest instead? Kind of like traveling underground when you could just fly. Your tax dollars at work! Buy your 2.4 billion dollar submarine and tap cables today.
Suppose he had quit without telling anyone. Then he spends a few weeks and poof, has this great idea all worked out because he's had it in his head for 25 years. Does the company then sue, saying that he developed it on "their" time because he could not make himself not think of it? Does Exxon own my ideas because I once used one of their fine porcelin thinking podiums on a road trip?
...the few choosen employees who get to sit around and dream up these things.
That's a bad attitude. First, just about everyone has to sign one of these odius things. Second, a company that does not expect it's employess to think is doomed to fail. Third a company that's so rapicious about what it's employees comes up with, but does not expect them to think is likely to get what it expects: zero employee participation. Companies that act this way are going to thwart their best thinkers who will respond in kind.
I've got several ten year old PCs. One of which, a 486, runs my ftp site. It's never down and runs great. Would I trade it for an old Spark? Sure, but I'm not going to throw the old PC out anytime soon. I've got stacks of cheap old IDE disks to replace the one's that burn out. That's not the case for any 10 year old unix box. Yes, I've seen plenty of burnt 10 year old SCSI disks from workstations. Wear happens, and while some PC hardware sucks much of it is fine.
thought the biggest users of filters were clueless parents who heard some horror story of the internet, bought a filter and installed it just so they could be 'hands-off' parents. Parents don't want the responsibilly of monitoring the net usage of their kid.
Lots of people seem to be missing the point of publishing the list. You don't know until you try to go. The librarian, the clueless parent, the kids with the fr33POrn password won't know what they are missing until they try to look at it and get blocked, inhouse or upstream. The damage filters, especially in public libraries, can do is NOT to block porn and other prolefeed. The damage is to block real news and thought. The BSA counts free software as "pirate" software, you can bet your bottom dollar they would like to block the fsf website. A published list would give you a way to test out your ISP, library, or kid brother. If nothing else, the website with the list would be a good test.
It's a scandal, worthy of the widest reporting right? Your going to look so clever when your recognize the BRAND-NAME pushers at a tourist attraction near you. You might even go out of your way but you will remember those two names togetether won't you? Oh my, they just built brand name recognition. I wonder if the WSJ charged them that blatant piece of product placeent.
The net result of this kind of marketing will be to make people suspicious of each other. It is evil. As someone else pointed out, normal demos would do better, except they might be run off by park officials for soliciting.
It's not a question of better or worse, it's a question of what the Malaysion people will spend their time and energy doing. They might decide that it's counter productive to spend tax dollars enforcing copyright laws against schools, as we here in the US see fit to do. Remember the BSA slapping the LA school district for a quarter million dollars? Philidelphia for the same ammount? A country that has trouble feeding and educating it's people might think twice before spending tax money on laws, courts, inspectors and enforcers to then give tax monnies collected for schools to a foreign corporation. We here in the US might think twice about it as well.
By the way, what great propriatory software do you know of that you would replace Linux with if you could afford to? Let me assure you that money has nothing to do with my abandonment of M$ junk. Me thinks I smell a troll looking for someone to justify "stealing" or coppying M$ O$.
Training people to use M$ toys is a bad thing to do. The API, formats, and the system itself are all unstable. The time spent learning little left hand tricks would be better spent learning something real or more stable, like good comunity supported free code. The only thing worse than encouraging people to do study M$ trash is paying the M$ tax to do it.
Sorry if that sounds a little hard on Microsoft, but they broke my trust a long time ago. Far from assuring the world that they would mend their ways, they have justified their behavior and gone on to such abuses that the federal government noticed. Never deal with dishonest people. Free yourself from M$ today.
It's obvious that an indictment was not sought because of actual damages caused by the defendant. This case went to a grand jury because officials didn't want a newspaper story about how the Civil Courts Building decided to open their computer network to the whole world.
Makes sense. Instead of quietly taking the network down and fixing it, they make a martyr.
The biggest debate in the group at the moment is which distributions to recommend to the newbies who bring their computers to the booth. I argue that since we're installing it for them, those who live on-campus and are on the university's network should use Debian because of the ease of maintenance. Others claim that Mandrake/RedHat/SuSE are more user friendly in general, and so they should be advocated instead.
Bring both determine the choice based on user needs. Just make sure you have enough experts to support the choices you offer and that you come to a basic agreement of what kinds of users can best be served by which distro. Have demonstrations of the setups that the user can see. There's no accounting for taste!
To maximize the number of people you serve, distribute the effort as widely as possible. Leave your best installers at the desk with cell phones, network if possible, and offer to send people out to install. Those that run off to help install should have demonstrated basic understanding, but don't have to be experts if they can call for help.
So, I could either lug a boxen, keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc... all the way across campus to get an OS installed and then lug all of that PLUS my coursebooks for the semester back to my room. Or, I could walk out of there with a few simple to install MS CDs and my books.... Until Linux doesn't have to be installed by a bunch of "DeCSS Code On A T-Shirt" wearing nerds it will never be able to supplant MS on the desktop.
What are you talking about? The last time I tried to install M$ it took me four freaking hours of reboots and other BS. About two years ago I wanted to build my last M$ box for talking to cameras, scanners and other legacy hardware cruft I have. It was a 450MHz k6/2 with 128MB ram and 15GB hard disk. First I tried a nice shiny new w2k disk. It took about two hours to fail misserably on, of all things, disk partition. I tried it three times with different options. NO GO. So then I followed the win98 ritual for two hours or so of rebooting for all the devices to be seen and "work". Oh yeah, none of the common hardware would have worked without sepcial hardware driver disks provided by the vendor of each device. I also had to know that certian motherboard drivers should not be installed, and about a hundred other rather geeky pieces of arcane M$ cruft to get the box working. So, I'd suggest you bring your box to the M$ folks if you would like to have it worked over. I'd also suggest you invest in a new hard disk for them to install too, just in case you don't like what they do.
Debian installs on the same hardware in 30 minutes. I'll admit that I don't know how to make it see the sound cards and the other hardware goodies, but that does not give me perpetual problems like a broken M$ install does.
I can't believe they think that yet another uber patch is going to fix Windoze. We all know the answers, and we all know that the ablsolute worst freaking securtity possible will come from a monoculture of M$ junk. This is NOT an honest move and it indicates that someone is serious about nationalizing computing through M$.NET, Paladium/dongle hell.
(Oh, and if the government buys Linux or OpenBSD, should it fine Linus or Theo whenever it finds a bug?)
I'm sure Linus will give the US government Double Plus all the money it gave him for any insecure kernels it got from him. I'm not
I think you have missed the point, however. This is the nationalization of computing. Like income taxes it will start off voluntary. It is without doubt the most serious threat to freedom in the world today.
We are talking about the most massively unAmerican activity since voluntary compliance income taxes. The government wants me to install software on my computer, specific to a certian insecure comercial operating system I don't trust to begin with. No fucking way.
At any rate, I happen to work for the government, and I've also held a few commercial jobs, and speaking on a reletivity scale, the government network has a much better security model than any place I've ever worked
They got M$? They are incompetent, fanatical or not because they can not possibly autit all of M$'s massive core of crap, nor can they trust the tools M$ provides them. M$ has no security at all.
This new uberpatch will NEVER accomplish it's stated goal. IT WILL BE A CARNIVORE that uses your machine's cycles to do it's dirty work. There's an obvious cure for this, the use of free audited operating systems. If they would come out and advise that I'd be much much happier, and NO I don't need your stinking secret patch.
Remember the fourth amendment? You know, security in your personal papers and effects? This is NOT the kind of security the the bill of rights had in mind.
Mr. Ashcoft, I call on you to remember your oath of office to uphold the constitution of the United States of America. Let me remind you exacly what you swore to uphold:
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.
Whatever your view of each operating system, the end marker is that they are tools. And when you're selecting the right one you need to be independent, you need to consider all the alternatives, and most of all you need to be unbiased.
Perfect! Because you have two choices they must be equal, right? It would be "biased" to express a preference for one based on previous experience, reading licenses, and common senese? Poop.
That's the one thing that Jamie Harrison did not mention in his article. I would not recomend XP or any of the newer M$ offerings to anyone and neither would any honest and informed person. Being able to see this does not make me an "RMS wannabe" nor will it make my business fail, unless of course my business is M$ dependent. It is not, I am not and no one I know is.
Business users must object to the unilateral change clauses, complete lack of control over their computers, licensed inforced "right" of M$ to review all information on any XP system, and to the outrageous total cost of ownership of M$ systems. My experience with w2k here at work has been bad enough for me to not ever recomend it.
Home users must object to the same total lack of control and privacy as well as the increasing instability and decreasing perfomance of M$ systems. If we look at the last two years or so of dismal computer sales, it looks like I'm not alone in my dissapointment. It is there that Linux, BSD, Mac and others are stepping, not just the server room. A much larger percentage than 10 of the web groups my wife belongs too are Linux users. Normal stuff, stay at home mom stuff, not technical pages or groups are filling with linux users.
The sad fact is that we should anticipate a fall off of linux users. M$ has made computing so bad that many people are simply giving up. Instead of buying their third or fourth new fancy coputer, they are just leaving the old one broken and putting their time and resources elsewhere. This is the bite of the "dot com bomb". Bitterly disapointed people are shouting at the world, "All that shit I did not like I do not need." Those people will not move to Linux and might not ever have needed a computer to begin with. They will do without email at home and buy a set top box to watch digital TV. As the overall pool of computer users shrinks, the percentage of Linux may rise but the numbers will grow slowly if at all. M$ will continue to trumpet "Linux is Dead", or at least their dependents in PC world etc will. Advocacy will help, but I'm prepared for a complete lack of interest in all things computer for years to come.
My form of advocacy is simple. I carry a laptop with Debian on it and use it when I actually need a computer. It's an ancient P150 thinkpad with 16M of ram and a 6GB hard disk. I doubt it would even run XP, but it does what I want flawlessly and looks great. People ask and I'm happy to show and offer a free install for them. Next I need to get a bumper sticker or two.
M$ gauges the sucess of OSX by the number of $300 M$ Office boxes sold for that "fixed" platform. When Mac users spend their money more wisely, M$ feels a little burnt.
many people record shows and skip the commercials, having pop up ads would effectively force you to watch ads no matter what, as long as it was a part of the broadcast signal.
This must be the reason for HDTV. As the screen narrows down squashed on my conventionals TV, I know that someone somewhere is seeing more pixels. More real estate to polute. When the old fashion barker appears on those shiny new screens in home theaters all over the country, I'm sure that the Booming stereo or quoad will have enough space for his voice to be heard clearly underneath the bigger placement advert that is the program. Wonderful! E-U-Toe-Peeeeee-Ahhhhhhhh! ha ha ha.
TV is an advert in the UK, for the powers that be. The closest analogy for USAsian is NPR owning all broadcasting and charging you a yearly fee to own a telivision.
Back to topic - Are these corner ads are going to have a BLINK tag? Will they be more amusing than the product placement ad they cover up? Who watches TV anymore anyway? If nobody watches, is it still television?
Using a computerized database of information to research the very complex organisms we are is just common sense and is perhaps why computers became popular in the first place.
The day computers have common sense they will make great doctors.
Consider the task, millions of diseases with a few dozen symptoms. The problem is over determined and does not yet compute. In the best of all worlds, the computer will have to do exactly what the doctor does: treat the most probable problem and watch out for the most severe consequences. It too will make mistakes, but won't know till someone types in a big long form. It's just not there yet.
Now quit trolling the doctors. They will tell us when they see an improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
Like you can trust your machine at work! Where I work we click through the most outrageous agreements before we log in to the NT network. Essentialy all our data is our boss's, no personal use, that kind of thing.
Surely Microsoft could give it a stab, and then extend it beyond usefulness.
Most things Microsoft does are beyond usefulness and into rapicious. Have you read your EULA? Neither has my boss, or he would have realized that M$ owns all the data he thinks he owns.
All my information is available through ssh and ftp. Sensitive stuff gets no where near a computer at work, regardless of protocal.
I'm the yahoo, as in "You Always Have Other Options." Don't bother trying to make money as a toll taking troll. Someone like me will be happy to provide access at no cost and I'll fight for my right to do so. What you propose can only be accomplished by perverting the structure of the internet, which was designed to prevent people from doing what you would.
Clear?
It happens every day! All you have to do to see it is take whatever M$ junk you are using and replace the software. All the PitA you see on a desktop with poor security and stability, obscure and changing protocals, propriatory data formats, unmodifiable applications, ad nauseum, translate.
We have at least one multi-processor Dell "server" where I work and the folks responsible for it are not happy. Keeping it up has been a quality of life killer. The problem is not in the hardware.
The simple answer is a resounding no. You are asking me if I would accept the internet as a push media simply because you make it available by air. I expect, and will do what I can, to keep the air free. If we go down the advert path, it won't be long before the FCC revamps it's obsolete mandate with licenses and all that for "internet broadcasts" and the media becomes the same push shit we see on TV and hear on the radio where you and I are not welcome. I'd rather go down the free co-operative path that the internet was designed for.
At a forum organized by EngSoc, UW President Johnston said that mistakes were made in the announcement of a partnership with Microsoft Canada Co. "In retrospect, it was a mistake to announce an agreement in principle with respect to the curriculum initiatives, a mistake for which I take responsibility."...
Johnston described what will happen in the coming weeks. "What we will have to do over the next few weeks is ensure that the [sic] necessary for any curriculum change occurs, and that those committees, and, ultimately, the Senate that oversees them, are satisfied that the principles that we always must observe when external funding is involved in anything are followed in this case."
That looks like a few weeks, not a year, and it sounds like he wants a rubber stamp:
The MS-UW deal will be talked about at Monday's meeting of Senate, the the university's highest academic body. In early September, the President of UW's faculty association requested a "full airing" of the issue at Senate.
Additionally, MS Candada President Frank Clegg was specific about what the deal means to all 300 incoming freshmen:
The Microsoft Canada Co. sponsorship does require C# to be taught on a platform based on the Windows® operating system.
Replacing C++ for C# in freshmen courses should be worth the entire reputation of the school, far more than $5,000,000. My reputation is worth more than that!
The sooner people realize how easy this stuff is, the sooner they will use it and discover how easy it is.
As the hawk said to the hare, "Don't struggle like that, you will only bring yourself more pain."
How long till speculating on the means are punishable? This shit's not rocket science. Get the fiber, make a tiny scratch in the suface. Focus a detector on the scratch as it reflects the signals. You are done. As for the polarized gadget, it looks like you might have to set up a beam splitter and figure out how many angles they have set up. It's more complicated by not impossible.
Of course, all of this has the ring of Big Brother's underground mole invasion device. Why would you go for a calble under the sea when you could just tap a silly desktop or phone line of interest instead? Kind of like traveling underground when you could just fly. Your tax dollars at work! Buy your 2.4 billion dollar submarine and tap cables today.
That's a bad attitude. First, just about everyone has to sign one of these odius things. Second, a company that does not expect it's employess to think is doomed to fail. Third a company that's so rapicious about what it's employees comes up with, but does not expect them to think is likely to get what it expects: zero employee participation. Companies that act this way are going to thwart their best thinkers who will respond in kind.
I've got several ten year old PCs. One of which, a 486, runs my ftp site. It's never down and runs great. Would I trade it for an old Spark? Sure, but I'm not going to throw the old PC out anytime soon. I've got stacks of cheap old IDE disks to replace the one's that burn out. That's not the case for any 10 year old unix box. Yes, I've seen plenty of burnt 10 year old SCSI disks from workstations. Wear happens, and while some PC hardware sucks much of it is fine.
Lots of people seem to be missing the point of publishing the list. You don't know until you try to go. The librarian, the clueless parent, the kids with the fr33POrn password won't know what they are missing until they try to look at it and get blocked, inhouse or upstream. The damage filters, especially in public libraries, can do is NOT to block porn and other prolefeed. The damage is to block real news and thought. The BSA counts free software as "pirate" software, you can bet your bottom dollar they would like to block the fsf website. A published list would give you a way to test out your ISP, library, or kid brother. If nothing else, the website with the list would be a good test.
The net result of this kind of marketing will be to make people suspicious of each other. It is evil. As someone else pointed out, normal demos would do better, except they might be run off by park officials for soliciting.
By the way, what great propriatory software do you know of that you would replace Linux with if you could afford to? Let me assure you that money has nothing to do with my abandonment of M$ junk. Me thinks I smell a troll looking for someone to justify "stealing" or coppying M$ O$.
Training people to use M$ toys is a bad thing to do. The API, formats, and the system itself are all unstable. The time spent learning little left hand tricks would be better spent learning something real or more stable, like good comunity supported free code. The only thing worse than encouraging people to do study M$ trash is paying the M$ tax to do it.
Sorry if that sounds a little hard on Microsoft, but they broke my trust a long time ago. Far from assuring the world that they would mend their ways, they have justified their behavior and gone on to such abuses that the federal government noticed. Never deal with dishonest people. Free yourself from M$ today.
Makes sense. Instead of quietly taking the network down and fixing it, they make a martyr.
Bring both determine the choice based on user needs. Just make sure you have enough experts to support the choices you offer and that you come to a basic agreement of what kinds of users can best be served by which distro. Have demonstrations of the setups that the user can see. There's no accounting for taste!
To maximize the number of people you serve, distribute the effort as widely as possible. Leave your best installers at the desk with cell phones, network if possible, and offer to send people out to install. Those that run off to help install should have demonstrated basic understanding, but don't have to be experts if they can call for help.
Good Luck!
What are you talking about? The last time I tried to install M$ it took me four freaking hours of reboots and other BS. About two years ago I wanted to build my last M$ box for talking to cameras, scanners and other legacy hardware cruft I have. It was a 450MHz k6/2 with 128MB ram and 15GB hard disk. First I tried a nice shiny new w2k disk. It took about two hours to fail misserably on, of all things, disk partition. I tried it three times with different options. NO GO. So then I followed the win98 ritual for two hours or so of rebooting for all the devices to be seen and "work". Oh yeah, none of the common hardware would have worked without sepcial hardware driver disks provided by the vendor of each device. I also had to know that certian motherboard drivers should not be installed, and about a hundred other rather geeky pieces of arcane M$ cruft to get the box working. So, I'd suggest you bring your box to the M$ folks if you would like to have it worked over. I'd also suggest you invest in a new hard disk for them to install too, just in case you don't like what they do.
Debian installs on the same hardware in 30 minutes. I'll admit that I don't know how to make it see the sound cards and the other hardware goodies, but that does not give me perpetual problems like a broken M$ install does.
OpenBSD
I can't believe they think that yet another uber patch is going to fix Windoze. We all know the answers, and we all know that the ablsolute worst freaking securtity possible will come from a monoculture of M$ junk. This is NOT an honest move and it indicates that someone is serious about nationalizing computing through M$ .NET, Paladium/dongle hell.
Yes, now is the time for hysteria.
I'm sure Linus will give the US government Double Plus all the money it gave him for any insecure kernels it got from him. I'm not
I think you have missed the point, however. This is the nationalization of computing. Like income taxes it will start off voluntary. It is without doubt the most serious threat to freedom in the world today.
We are talking about the most massively unAmerican activity since voluntary compliance income taxes. The government wants me to install software on my computer, specific to a certian insecure comercial operating system I don't trust to begin with. No fucking way. At any rate, I happen to work for the government, and I've also held a few commercial jobs, and speaking on a reletivity scale, the government network has a much better security model than any place I've ever worked
They got M$? They are incompetent, fanatical or not because they can not possibly autit all of M$'s massive core of crap, nor can they trust the tools M$ provides them. M$ has no security at all.
This new uberpatch will NEVER accomplish it's stated goal. IT WILL BE A CARNIVORE that uses your machine's cycles to do it's dirty work. There's an obvious cure for this, the use of free audited operating systems. If they would come out and advise that I'd be much much happier, and NO I don't need your stinking secret patch.
Remember the fourth amendment? You know, security in your personal papers and effects? This is NOT the kind of security the the bill of rights had in mind.
Mr. Ashcoft, I call on you to remember your oath of office to uphold the constitution of the United States of America. Let me remind you exacly what you swore to uphold:
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.
Perfect! Because you have two choices they must be equal, right? It would be "biased" to express a preference for one based on previous experience, reading licenses, and common senese? Poop.
That's the one thing that Jamie Harrison did not mention in his article. I would not recomend XP or any of the newer M$ offerings to anyone and neither would any honest and informed person. Being able to see this does not make me an "RMS wannabe" nor will it make my business fail, unless of course my business is M$ dependent. It is not, I am not and no one I know is.
Business users must object to the unilateral change clauses, complete lack of control over their computers, licensed inforced "right" of M$ to review all information on any XP system, and to the outrageous total cost of ownership of M$ systems. My experience with w2k here at work has been bad enough for me to not ever recomend it.
Home users must object to the same total lack of control and privacy as well as the increasing instability and decreasing perfomance of M$ systems. If we look at the last two years or so of dismal computer sales, it looks like I'm not alone in my dissapointment. It is there that Linux, BSD, Mac and others are stepping, not just the server room. A much larger percentage than 10 of the web groups my wife belongs too are Linux users. Normal stuff, stay at home mom stuff, not technical pages or groups are filling with linux users.
The sad fact is that we should anticipate a fall off of linux users. M$ has made computing so bad that many people are simply giving up. Instead of buying their third or fourth new fancy coputer, they are just leaving the old one broken and putting their time and resources elsewhere. This is the bite of the "dot com bomb". Bitterly disapointed people are shouting at the world, "All that shit I did not like I do not need." Those people will not move to Linux and might not ever have needed a computer to begin with. They will do without email at home and buy a set top box to watch digital TV. As the overall pool of computer users shrinks, the percentage of Linux may rise but the numbers will grow slowly if at all. M$ will continue to trumpet "Linux is Dead", or at least their dependents in PC world etc will. Advocacy will help, but I'm prepared for a complete lack of interest in all things computer for years to come.
My form of advocacy is simple. I carry a laptop with Debian on it and use it when I actually need a computer. It's an ancient P150 thinkpad with 16M of ram and a 6GB hard disk. I doubt it would even run XP, but it does what I want flawlessly and looks great. People ask and I'm happy to show and offer a free install for them. Next I need to get a bumper sticker or two.
OK, Citizens of the United States of America.
Barf on M$.
This must be the reason for HDTV. As the screen narrows down squashed on my conventionals TV, I know that someone somewhere is seeing more pixels. More real estate to polute. When the old fashion barker appears on those shiny new screens in home theaters all over the country, I'm sure that the Booming stereo or quoad will have enough space for his voice to be heard clearly underneath the bigger placement advert that is the program. Wonderful! E-U-Toe-Peeeeee-Ahhhhhhhh! ha ha ha.
TV provides nothing of value.
Back to topic - Are these corner ads are going to have a BLINK tag? Will they be more amusing than the product placement ad they cover up? Who watches TV anymore anyway? If nobody watches, is it still television?
umount /dev/tv
sixty thrills per second is just too much for me.
The day computers have common sense they will make great doctors.
Consider the task, millions of diseases with a few dozen symptoms. The problem is over determined and does not yet compute. In the best of all worlds, the computer will have to do exactly what the doctor does: treat the most probable problem and watch out for the most severe consequences. It too will make mistakes, but won't know till someone types in a big long form. It's just not there yet.
Now quit trolling the doctors. They will tell us when they see an improvement.