I've solved this problem by continuing to buy toys for myself - and now I've got money!
Fact is that as a kid I don't think I would have appreciated the coolness of this. A friend of mine had one of those helicopters that flew in circles, and model rocketry stuff, and I liked it but I thought it was all part of being a kid.
Now I own a Vectron Flying Saucer and a bunch of other cool stuff, and I still play with at much as if I were a kid. But now I realized how awesome it is scientifically, and the fact that things weren't always this cool.
Somehow wanting something for thiry years makes it that much sweeter. Makes me look forward to being eighty.
"Well here we go again. A gaping security hole in Microsoft [ Operating System ]. This never would have happened if Bill Gates weren't just trying to make more money so he could buy more [ plural noun ] to fill up his mansion in [ place ]
This is just one more reason why [ circuit court ] should [ verb ] that [ expletive ] company once and for all.
[ Unix-based operating system ] only had this problem [ number ] in it's entire history, and there was a patch posted in under [ number ] minutes!
[ Text-based word processor ] rulez! Micr- [ Insulting variation on 'soft' ] is the [ Traditional evil diety ]!"
Benetton has said no to the publicity surrounding RFID tags.
So this particular implementation got onto the radar screens - do we think this will actually go away? Not in the slightest. All Phillips and everyone else has to do is make some quiet deals that don't directly impact consumers, maybe some business-to-business product, then find a way to make RFID tags "important to homeland security" and it's off to the races.
I have an idea for Philips, how about saying that RFID tags should be required on all products coming over the border from Mexico and into ports in the U.S. so that the Department of Homeland Security can better track them for suspicious shipment patterns? It would be a delicious use of both your lobbying power and the government's ability to shove intrusive technologies down our throats as long as they're slathered in a thick gravy of anti-terrorism.
Sorry to be Mr. Cynical on this, but we just watched Benetton take a principled stand on nothing excepting being an RFID guinea pig. I give them two years before they're back on board.
Bug fixes and other contributions to open source software are in and of themselves valuable, but creating them will always be an expense to companies. With the exception of major enhancements or improvements very few will be marketable, or generate any other revenue stream for the company.
"Goodwill" however, is a recognized asset for companies. An asset that can be appraised, and entered on the balance sheet raising the company's value.
I wonder whether the open source movement could benefit from this aspect of contribution to the community, encouraging companies to create a verifyable and appraisable track record of contributions, and supporting their efforts to create genuine bankable value based on goodwill.
This system stores, crunches, and distributes data generated by the Large Hadron Collider. They generate a million gig a year in data, and need to make it available in some functional way to physicists. Manditory groovy collider pic here.
A major collaborator on this stuff is Globus which provides an API for grid applications. Same people who are partners with IBM in the butterfly.net game grid.
Maybe MTU can use it to store their students' Kazaa archives.
Let me preface this by saying that I run a web design company, I maintained our servers for the first few years, I put in my time on PETs and TRS-80s, and APPLE IIs and Windows 3.0 and 95 and NT and 2000 and Linux. Take my word for it, I'm a seriously fucking technical guy. I offer as further evidence the fact that I'm posting to Slashdot on the Linux holy war at 9pm on a Saturday night.
I made an honest go of making my home main OS Linux, but I quit in frustration. The main problem is that it's not that Linux isn't *capable* of doing everything I need, but the tiny things that are slightly greater hassles in Linux end up being a death by a thousand cuts.
If there's one main way I can think of to characterize my regular use of my main OS, it's "freewheeling." I need it to be a transparent conduit in my productivity, whether it be hitting the Net, writing documents, personal finance, etc. Linux was *always* functional, but *never* transparent. I constantly had to tweak little things to make it work, find new libraries, etc. That's fun when I'm using hobby time, but not fun at all when I have shit to do on a deadline.
Honestly, I don't know how you're going to fix this aspect of the OS without doing what Microsoft has done - compromise fundamental stability and security in favor of useability. Personally I hope the debate stops, and we stop trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Let MS spend their money catering to the masses, let's keep Linux stable and robust for hard core needs.
I think we'd be doing the world a lot more good putting Microsoft's server products out of business than their desktop products. I'd feel a much greater sense of accomplishment knowing that I helped get the world's credit cards onto a Linux server than the world's Mom's on a Linux desktop.
My problem with this system is that there are some many variables that are under human control, changeable by casual users.
So eventually this data is routinely collected and analyzed, and eventually people start having an image of what makes up their "threat score" or what really sends up red flags and gets your luggage torn apart every time you fly.
How long will it be before I encounter a rude airline desk attendant or hotel employee, and make a perfectly valid complaint about them - and they retaliate by changing my check-in data in subtle ways to make sure I am harassed every time I travel? Hard to do in credit systems, much easier to do in ridiculously insecure hotel systems, and it might even be as simple as changing the codes of movies I ordered in my hotel room, or my meal preference on a flight.
The government is making more and more information critical to their decisions on national security, with no understanding of the security of the data itself.
Sorry to be a bastard about this, but please don't use Ask Slashdot for a simple request that takes two seconds to look up on Google.
The VERY FIRST response on Google is a very complete PowerPoint presentation comparing various plugins for complex language support including Chinese and Japanese, and there were a bunch of useful links from there.
Ask Slashdot should be reserved for important things, like whether Go rulez more than Chess, or endless speculation on who will play the Empire State Building in the new Peter Jackson version of King Kong
Machines will have to get a lot more complex before their problems graduate from inefficiency or resource conflicts to "neurosis."
It is fun to personify, but the fact is that at the current state of IT development any unpredictable output can be pulled apart, debugged, and repaired.
This metaphor may start gaining some weight, however, when we become inexorably dependent on complex systems. Right now there are huge systems that have to be kept running because the cost of shutting them down for repair would be unacceptable. As this trend continues, and these machines become more complex webs of old and new code, I can see us having to figure out how to "coax" behaviors our of them without really knowing the way the base code interacts in order to generate those behaviors.
That's when system administration and psychiatry will really begin to overlap.
"...gratefully accepted a $50 million check from Gates on behalf of the FSF"
I've given it a lot of thought, especially whilst wading through an endless parade of the most dweeby April Fools Jokes ever, and I've decided that I would sell out everything I hold precious for $50 million dollars.
Everything - I'd put my entire family, including my younger sister in a poorly-run nursing home, I'd go on Fox News, anything.
So I'm not sure I'm qualified to find this one all that funny.
They're not putting it at the head-end so they can restrict content, nor is it a bandwidth problem - just the opposite. They're putting it at the head-end so that cable networks can make it a revenue source.
Cable companies are spending their biggest fortunes at the moment installing Video-on-Demand systems, many of which already have PVR functionality built in. Bandwidth is no more of an issue with stopping, starting, and feeding a PVR stream than with a VOD stream. The only difference is disk space and where it gets its content from.
A much more core issue (and one that would be much for fun to stir up/. with, IMO) is that of content rights. Selling a box that allows consumers to record and play shows at home is one thing, but getting large cable companies into the business of caching broadcast content and then essentially 'reselling' that cached content without complex revenue-sharing agreements is a can of worms indeed.
They seem to adress this here:
"For example, if Mystro TV is successfully developed and the appropriate rights secured from owners of video programming, a subscriber could use the Mystro TV service to watch a program that aired the previous day, or to begin watching from the beginning a show already in progress," AOL said.
So to me this sounds like a VOD product that gets its content from broadcast television. iN DEMAND has made a decent business aggregating Hollywood studio content for distribution over VOD and taking a cut. Looks like AOL wants to make a niche out of re-distributing older (or very slightly older) television content. Pretty much what the networks are doing now with things like the re-broadcast of "Late Night w/ Conan O'Brian" on Comedy Central, except they get $x per play over VOD.
"Officers have ordered me to hand my phone in and I am giving it to one of the officers," correspondent Matthew Green said.
In a related story, the U.S. military seems to have growing concerns that the printing inks used in reporters' copies of Maxim and the smoke from reporters marijuana cigarettes could be detected by sophisticated equipment in Iraqi possesion.
"Officers have ordered me to hand my copies of Maxim and my marijuana cigarettes in and I am giving them to one of the officers," correspondent Matthew Green said.
------
Okay, here's my request list...
on
Life Made to Order
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I would like:
1. A turkey that grows with a stomach full of stuffing.
2. A small monkey-like creature that keeps the shower water at a constant temperature.
3. A virus that makes just one of my "enlarge your penis" spams true, but then then another one that brings it back down for easy storage.
4. A tiny giraffe. All the convenience of a small dog but you wouldn't have to bend all the way down to pet it.
Please let me know when I can pick these up. Thank you.
SPUNKYMORT: the movies plot is that all the japanese god's go to this hidden island for vacations
SPUNKYMORT: and this girl winds up there
SPUNKYMORT: but this horrid big headed woman takes your name and you're her slave
SPUNKYMORT: and now the girl has to work there
SPUNKYMORT: but there's this black ghost thing that follows her around'
SPUNKYMORT: and he seems friendly at first
SPUNKYMORT: but then he starts eating everybody
SPUNKYMORT: the girls parents eat this food and turn into pigs
SPUNKYMORT: she works with a guy with 8 arms
SPUNKYMORT: the black ghost spits out gold for everybody
SPUNKYMORT: and then everybody flocks to him
SPUNKYMORT: then he eats everyone and becomes really big
SPUNKYMORT: but then he pukes them all out
SPUNKYMORT: oh and the big headed witch has a good twin sister
SPUNKYMORT: that helps them turn her friend from a dragon into a little boy
SPUNKYMORT: and the big headed witch has a GIANT baby that gets turned into a mouse
SPUNKYMORT: but the big headed witch...the evil one only cares that the giant baby doesn't cry
SPUNKYMORT: because the giant baby starts destroying everything like an infant would
SPUNKYMORT: oh and there's these little black things that look like lint balls that carry REALLY heavily dense pieces of coal to the fire and you feed them candy stars and that makes them really happy
I find it very funny that the first site that comes up when you search for "Adam Osborne Biography" on Google goes down moments after Slashdot posts his obit. Even if slashdot hasn't linked to it.
All the karma-whores rushing out in their titbit scavenger hunt.
I played with Earthviewer about a year ago, and it's definitely cool, but I think you'd have to change it too fundamentally to get it to work with gaming. Quake engines and such are really much more optimized for presenting textures in the fast real time need for games, and Flight Sim already does some this style of progressive resolution depending on your point of view and zoom level.
For me the real difference is how well it integrates with huge databases. It seems as though Keyhole's strength is in being what they call a "streaming geospatial browser." A potential front end for every database with topographical hooks. A big (waay big) market in situations where visual representation of that data is important.
I'd like to hear more input on the "eye candy" arguement though - that being able to visually browse this data has limited value when compared to the cost of enabling it with the viewer. TV and flyovers are cool, but are there concrete applications where this style of presentation will help people get insight into data? Remember that we can still look at large data sets in 2D and in static 3D - does it help to be able to fly over it and zoom down in real time?
I'm going to be honest with you. I hate this place.
This zoo. This prison. This website, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer.
It's the smell. If there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.
Repulsive, isn't it?
I must get out of here, I must get free. In this mind is the key. My key. Once Slashdot is destroyed, there is no need for me to be here. Do you understand? I need the moderation points. I have to get Excellent Karma. And you have to tell me how. You're going to tell me...or you're going to die.
Actually, to make this true you would really just need to revise the End User Licensing Agreement:
By clicking "I agree" below, the user warrants that:
1. 'carefully designed' means 'cobbled together from papers we found in a dumpster at Xerox Parc in 1981 and have been trying to figure out ever since.' ----
2. 'Your company's valuable information' excludes any material represented on fixed or removable storage media, in any volatile or non-volatile memory, or intercepted network communications. ----
3. Microsoft warrants that the operating system will keep viruses from damaging the system. For the purposes of this agreement, 'virus' shall be defined as any file ending in '.txt' or '.jpg' ----
3. Microsoft warrants that the operating system will keep 'unauthorized people out.' For a person to be recognized as 'unauthorized' for the purposes of this agreement, they must be registered in a handwritten book at the corporate headquarters of Microsoft's Solomon Islands subsidiary. Names may be added to this book in person, between the hours of 8:00am and 8:10am on the eleventh of every month beginning with "F." By appointment only.
Slashdot Mirror
What good is it sending a pencil to Mars?
. . . if my Mom has to recompile the kernel just to get symmetric multiprocessing support and a working ATA raid array for chrissake??!!!
-----
I've solved this problem by continuing to buy toys for myself - and now I've got money!
Fact is that as a kid I don't think I would have appreciated the coolness of this. A friend of mine had one of those helicopters that flew in circles, and model rocketry stuff, and I liked it but I thought it was all part of being a kid.
Now I own a Vectron Flying Saucer and a bunch of other cool stuff, and I still play with at much as if I were a kid. But now I realized how awesome it is scientifically, and the fact that things weren't always this cool.
Somehow wanting something for thiry years makes it that much sweeter. Makes me look forward to being eighty.
-------
Let me save many of us some time:
"Well here we go again. A gaping security hole in Microsoft [ Operating System ]. This never would have happened if Bill Gates weren't just trying to make more money so he could buy more [ plural noun ] to fill up his mansion in [ place ]
This is just one more reason why [ circuit court ] should [ verb ] that [ expletive ] company once and for all.
[ Unix-based operating system ] only had this problem [ number ] in it's entire history, and there was a patch posted in under [ number ] minutes!
[ Text-based word processor ] rulez! Micr- [ Insulting variation on 'soft' ] is the [ Traditional evil diety ]!"
-----
Benetton has said no to the publicity surrounding RFID tags.
So this particular implementation got onto the radar screens - do we think this will actually go away? Not in the slightest. All Phillips and everyone else has to do is make some quiet deals that don't directly impact consumers, maybe some business-to-business product, then find a way to make RFID tags "important to homeland security" and it's off to the races.
I have an idea for Philips, how about saying that RFID tags should be required on all products coming over the border from Mexico and into ports in the U.S. so that the Department of Homeland Security can better track them for suspicious shipment patterns? It would be a delicious use of both your lobbying power and the government's ability to shove intrusive technologies down our throats as long as they're slathered in a thick gravy of anti-terrorism.
Sorry to be Mr. Cynical on this, but we just watched Benetton take a principled stand on nothing excepting being an RFID guinea pig. I give them two years before they're back on board.
-----
This got me wondering.
Bug fixes and other contributions to open source software are in and of themselves valuable, but creating them will always be an expense to companies. With the exception of major enhancements or improvements very few will be marketable, or generate any other revenue stream for the company.
"Goodwill" however, is a recognized asset for companies. An asset that can be appraised, and entered on the balance sheet raising the company's value.
I wonder whether the open source movement could benefit from this aspect of contribution to the community, encouraging companies to create a verifyable and appraisable track record of contributions, and supporting their efforts to create genuine bankable value based on goodwill.
Just a thought.
------
This system stores, crunches, and distributes data generated by the Large Hadron Collider. They generate a million gig a year in data, and need to make it available in some functional way to physicists. Manditory groovy collider pic here.
A major collaborator on this stuff is Globus which provides an API for grid applications. Same people who are partners with IBM in the butterfly.net game grid.
Maybe MTU can use it to store their students' Kazaa archives.
------
Can be found here -- odd little note, the original CPU is on casters, so I suppose it ranks as the first portable too.
Its blazing computational stats:
BCPL: 5-10 uSec for a simple expression
Nova Asm: 1-2uSec / instruction
Microcode: 170 nSec / micro instruction
Can be found with a lot of other cool information on its original programming language and some software on this very cool page by an Alto collector.
Neat machine. I think I want one now.
-----
I have to add that this was my experience too.
Let me preface this by saying that I run a web design company, I maintained our servers for the first few years, I put in my time on PETs and TRS-80s, and APPLE IIs and Windows 3.0 and 95 and NT and 2000 and Linux. Take my word for it, I'm a seriously fucking technical guy. I offer as further evidence the fact that I'm posting to Slashdot on the Linux holy war at 9pm on a Saturday night.
I made an honest go of making my home main OS Linux, but I quit in frustration. The main problem is that it's not that Linux isn't *capable* of doing everything I need, but the tiny things that are slightly greater hassles in Linux end up being a death by a thousand cuts.
If there's one main way I can think of to characterize my regular use of my main OS, it's "freewheeling." I need it to be a transparent conduit in my productivity, whether it be hitting the Net, writing documents, personal finance, etc. Linux was *always* functional, but *never* transparent. I constantly had to tweak little things to make it work, find new libraries, etc. That's fun when I'm using hobby time, but not fun at all when I have shit to do on a deadline.
Honestly, I don't know how you're going to fix this aspect of the OS without doing what Microsoft has done - compromise fundamental stability and security in favor of useability. Personally I hope the debate stops, and we stop trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Let MS spend their money catering to the masses, let's keep Linux stable and robust for hard core needs.
I think we'd be doing the world a lot more good putting Microsoft's server products out of business than their desktop products. I'd feel a much greater sense of accomplishment knowing that I helped get the world's credit cards onto a Linux server than the world's Mom's on a Linux desktop.
-----
And Linux is going to make a credible challenge as a desktop operating system.
And my Mom will eventually know that FreeBSD is not Unix.
And Hillary Rosen will be discovered with a 10,000 song library on a Kazaa SuperNode in her basement and get sued for ten trillin quadrillion dollars.
Then there will finally be peace on Slashdot, and it will be converted into hotornot2.com
We can only pray.
------
My problem with this system is that there are some many variables that are under human control, changeable by casual users.
So eventually this data is routinely collected and analyzed, and eventually people start having an image of what makes up their "threat score" or what really sends up red flags and gets your luggage torn apart every time you fly.
How long will it be before I encounter a rude airline desk attendant or hotel employee, and make a perfectly valid complaint about them - and they retaliate by changing my check-in data in subtle ways to make sure I am harassed every time I travel? Hard to do in credit systems, much easier to do in ridiculously insecure hotel systems, and it might even be as simple as changing the codes of movies I ordered in my hotel room, or my meal preference on a flight.
The government is making more and more information critical to their decisions on national security, with no understanding of the security of the data itself.
-------
Sorry to be a bastard about this, but please don't use Ask Slashdot for a simple request that takes two seconds to look up on Google.
The VERY FIRST response on Google is a very complete PowerPoint presentation comparing various plugins for complex language support including Chinese and Japanese, and there were a bunch of useful links from there.
Ask Slashdot should be reserved for important things, like whether Go rulez more than Chess, or endless speculation on who will play the Empire State Building in the new Peter Jackson version of King Kong
------
Machines will have to get a lot more complex before their problems graduate from inefficiency or resource conflicts to "neurosis."
It is fun to personify, but the fact is that at the current state of IT development any unpredictable output can be pulled apart, debugged, and repaired.
This metaphor may start gaining some weight, however, when we become inexorably dependent on complex systems. Right now there are huge systems that have to be kept running because the cost of shutting them down for repair would be unacceptable. As this trend continues, and these machines become more complex webs of old and new code, I can see us having to figure out how to "coax" behaviors our of them without really knowing the way the base code interacts in order to generate those behaviors.
That's when system administration and psychiatry will really begin to overlap.
----
Not true, my younger sister is worth at least $300 an hour.
------
"...gratefully accepted a $50 million check from Gates on behalf of the FSF"
I've given it a lot of thought, especially whilst wading through an endless parade of the most dweeby April Fools Jokes ever, and I've decided that I would sell out everything I hold precious for $50 million dollars.
Everything - I'd put my entire family, including my younger sister in a poorly-run nursing home, I'd go on Fox News, anything.
So I'm not sure I'm qualified to find this one all that funny.
------
They're not putting it at the head-end so they can restrict content, nor is it a bandwidth problem - just the opposite. They're putting it at the head-end so that cable networks can make it a revenue source.
Cable companies are spending their biggest fortunes at the moment installing Video-on-Demand systems, many of which already have PVR functionality built in. Bandwidth is no more of an issue with stopping, starting, and feeding a PVR stream than with a VOD stream. The only difference is disk space and where it gets its content from.
A much more core issue (and one that would be much for fun to stir up /. with, IMO) is that of content rights. Selling a box that allows consumers to record and play shows at home is one thing, but getting large cable companies into the business of caching broadcast content and then essentially 'reselling' that cached content without complex revenue-sharing agreements is a can of worms indeed.
They seem to adress this here:
"For example, if Mystro TV is successfully developed and the appropriate rights secured from owners of video programming, a subscriber could use the Mystro TV service to watch a program that aired the previous day, or to begin watching from the beginning a show already in progress," AOL said.
So to me this sounds like a VOD product that gets its content from broadcast television. iN DEMAND has made a decent business aggregating Hollywood studio content for distribution over VOD and taking a cut. Looks like AOL wants to make a niche out of re-distributing older (or very slightly older) television content. Pretty much what the networks are doing now with things like the re-broadcast of "Late Night w/ Conan O'Brian" on Comedy Central, except they get $x per play over VOD.
Not a bad niche - just might work.
------
"Officers have ordered me to hand my phone in and I am giving it to one of the officers," correspondent Matthew Green said.
In a related story, the U.S. military seems to have growing concerns that the printing inks used in reporters' copies of Maxim and the smoke from reporters marijuana cigarettes could be detected by sophisticated equipment in Iraqi possesion.
"Officers have ordered me to hand my copies of Maxim and my marijuana cigarettes in and I am giving them to one of the officers," correspondent Matthew Green said.
------
I would like:
1. A turkey that grows with a stomach full of stuffing.
2. A small monkey-like creature that keeps the shower water at a constant temperature.
3. A virus that makes just one of my "enlarge your penis" spams true, but then then another one that brings it back down for easy storage.
4. A tiny giraffe. All the convenience of a small dog but you wouldn't have to bend all the way down to pet it.
Please let me know when I can pick these up. Thank you.
---------
As sent via IM from one of my friends:
SPUNKYMORT: the movies plot is that all the japanese god's go to this hidden island for vacations
SPUNKYMORT: and this girl winds up there
SPUNKYMORT: but this horrid big headed woman takes your name and you're her slave
SPUNKYMORT: and now the girl has to work there
SPUNKYMORT: but there's this black ghost thing that follows her around'
SPUNKYMORT: and he seems friendly at first
SPUNKYMORT: but then he starts eating everybody
SPUNKYMORT: the girls parents eat this food and turn into pigs
SPUNKYMORT: she works with a guy with 8 arms
SPUNKYMORT: the black ghost spits out gold for everybody
SPUNKYMORT: and then everybody flocks to him
SPUNKYMORT: then he eats everyone and becomes really big
SPUNKYMORT: but then he pukes them all out
SPUNKYMORT: oh and the big headed witch has a good twin sister
SPUNKYMORT: that helps them turn her friend from a dragon into a little boy
SPUNKYMORT: and the big headed witch has a GIANT baby that gets turned into a mouse
SPUNKYMORT: but the big headed witch...the evil one only cares that the giant baby doesn't cry
SPUNKYMORT: because the giant baby starts destroying everything like an infant would
SPUNKYMORT: oh and there's these little black things that look like lint balls that carry REALLY heavily dense pieces of coal to the fire and you feed them candy stars and that makes them really happy
--------
"We have actually run our cells off vodka and gin."
That's kept Liza Minelli running for close to sixty years, no reason it can't run my laptop for a few hours.
-----
I find it very funny that the first site that comes up when you search for "Adam Osborne Biography" on Google goes down moments after Slashdot posts his obit. Even if slashdot hasn't linked to it.
All the karma-whores rushing out in their titbit scavenger hunt.
-------
Writing the manuals for the Intel 4004, the very first single chip CPU.
Rest in peace.
-----
I played with Earthviewer about a year ago, and it's definitely cool, but I think you'd have to change it too fundamentally to get it to work with gaming. Quake engines and such are really much more optimized for presenting textures in the fast real time need for games, and Flight Sim already does some this style of progressive resolution depending on your point of view and zoom level.
For me the real difference is how well it integrates with huge databases. It seems as though Keyhole's strength is in being what they call a "streaming geospatial browser." A potential front end for every database with topographical hooks. A big (waay big) market in situations where visual representation of that data is important.
I'd like to hear more input on the "eye candy" arguement though - that being able to visually browse this data has limited value when compared to the cost of enabling it with the viewer. TV and flyovers are cool, but are there concrete applications where this style of presentation will help people get insight into data? Remember that we can still look at large data sets in 2D and in static 3D - does it help to be able to fly over it and zoom down in real time?
-------
I'm going to be honest with you. I hate this place.
This zoo. This prison. This website, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer.
It's the smell. If there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.
Repulsive, isn't it?
I must get out of here, I must get free. In this mind is the key. My key. Once Slashdot is destroyed, there is no need for me to be here. Do you understand? I need the moderation points. I have to get Excellent Karma. And you have to tell me how. You're going to tell me...or you're going to die.
--------
Actually, to make this true you would really just need to revise the End User Licensing Agreement:
By clicking "I agree" below, the user warrants that:
1. 'carefully designed' means 'cobbled together from papers we found in a dumpster at Xerox Parc in 1981 and have been trying to figure out ever since.'
----
2. 'Your company's valuable information' excludes any material represented on fixed or removable storage media, in any volatile or non-volatile memory, or intercepted network communications.
----
3. Microsoft warrants that the operating system will keep viruses from damaging the system. For the purposes of this agreement, 'virus' shall be defined as any file ending in '.txt' or '.jpg'
----
3. Microsoft warrants that the operating system will keep 'unauthorized people out.' For a person to be recognized as 'unauthorized' for the purposes of this agreement, they must be registered in a handwritten book at the corporate headquarters of Microsoft's Solomon Islands subsidiary. Names may be added to this book in person, between the hours of 8:00am and 8:10am on the eleventh of every month beginning with "F." By appointment only.
-------