You said, and I quote: "Nobody is forcing them to make a change. They can
run windows xp for as long as they like. People out there are still running
windows 95."
That is exactly Microsoft's idea, forcing a change, in my opinion.
If a corporation needs to buy 1,000 new computers, they are placed in
a terrible position. Will they buy Windows XP, a product that Bill Gates,
software's Dr. Death, has declared is Mainstream Support Retired on 4/14/2009? If they do, they
will be forced to pay extra when they can't get official support for Windows
XP. And they need official support because of the huge, huge number of
vulnerabilities that are found in Microsoft products. Remember that people
don't even bother to run anti-spyware and anti-virus software on Apple Macs
because they don't have problems. Operating systems don't naturally have
vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities are a feature of Microsoft products that make
more money for Microsoft.
On the other hand, Windows XP became usable without hassles 3
years after its introduction, with the release of Service Pack 2. There is
every clue that Windows Vista will also be full of hassles at least until
Vista SP2.
People were forced to upgrade to Windows XP because Windows 98 had an
unstable file system, an unstable registry, and lots of problems with the
"Blue Screen of Death" and "DLL Hell". That means they had to endure 3 bad
years with Windows XP pre-SP2. There have been only 3 relatively good years
with Windows XP, and now there is pressure to have bad years again.
That's ugly in my opinion, and I'm not the only one who thinks that
way. This is all being done by billionaires who want nothing more than more
money. That's sick.
Remember, they are sinking the company over the long term to get
short-term profit.
With operating systems, there is lock-in. Linux is not an easy option
because re-writing software and re-training 1,000 employees would be too
expensive.
It's fine if Microsoft introduces a new product. But there should not
be pressure to buy the new product until it is stable.
"They [Microsoft's promises] only protect 'noncommercial' development and are set up to create a patented standards toll road so that Microsoft can charge competitors to compete."
Someone could make a really, really scary horror movie: Bill Gates as software's "Dr. Death", killing an OS used by millions of people, wasting their time by releasing software that isn't finished, and generally being dishonest and sneaky and adversarial toward the whole world.
Just when you thought that was as much ugliness as you could handle, there would be scenes of Microsoft Marketing robots spewing corporate-speak and not realizing that they are the undead.
One of the biggest and most respected IT magazines is rejecting
Windows Vista: Save Windows XP. Quote: "More than 75,000 people have
signed InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition in the three weeks since it was launched
- many with passionate, often emotional pleas to not be forced to make a
change."
OS/2 ran on machines I owned, too. But people didn't like it because IBM was never serious about providing drivers. A lot of equipment people wanted couldn't be used with OS/2 because there were no drivers.
More importantly, at the time people were not willing to adopt IBM as a technology partner because of IBM's bad behavior. As soon as there was a livable option, people avoided IBM.
Now IBM has a reputation of being a little more cooperative and friendly. The company stills seems stiff and out of touch to me, sometimes.
Basically, the idea is correct. Because of the mismanagement and aggressive,
adversarial behavior of IBM at the time, IBM lost a business that it once
controlled. The point is that Microsoft's adversarial, abusive management is
already causing the company to be less successful, similar to what happened to
IBM.
At the time, numerous companies were selling small computers, for
example, the CP/M-based Morrow Microdecision. When IBM entered the market, the
market for those other computers collapsed.
But the hate for IBM was amazingly intense. Even non-technical people
knew about IBM's manipulation of U.S. laws. IBM had the reputation then that
Microsoft does now. IBM was successful only when there was no reasonable
alternative.
Then the Compaq IBM PC compatible became available, and, even though
the Compaq had problems with overheating, buyers began choosing Compaq to
avoid IBM.
Very soon, the "IBM compatibles" had most of the market for small
computers. The statistics quoted in business magazines were not accurate,
because they used numbers provided by only the large suppliers. There were
many small suppliers of IBM compatibles, and the percentage of the market they
captured was close to 100%.
"Are US soldiers shooting them, or are they getting killed by Muslims?"
Both.
Should the U.S. government be considered responsible only for the people it kills directly, or should it also be considered responsible for the violence that violence causes? I've read several books that have considered that fundamental issue.
When the U.S. government was violent in
Cambodia during the Vietnam war, for example, how many people died as a result
of U.S. government action? The answer is more than 2 million people, in Cambodia alone, because the
U.S. government supported the rise of a very violent dictator.
The U.S. government supported Saddam Hussein, partly by selling him weapons. The weapons deliveries were still being made when the U.S. government declared its first war on Iraq.
When people try to calculate the total number the U.S. government killed, they arrive at figures
like perhaps 3 million killed directly since the end of the 2nd world war, and perhaps 8 to 11 million total if the
people killed by the destabilization the U.S. government caused are also included, not including the people killed in Iraq. Partly the killing happened as a result of the U.S. government invading or bombing 25 countries.
All or almost all of the U.S. government's killing appears to be motivated entirely
by profit. Certainly Cambodians and Vietnamese could never have threatened
anyone in the U.S.; they only made about $200 per year, and had no animosity
toward anyone in the U.S., if they even knew the U.S. existed.
The problem is that most taxpayers, who pay for the violence, don't realize
the underlying facts. Both attacks against the World Trade Center, for example, were motivated
by the U.S. government's killing of Arabs and Muslims long before. But most U.S. taxpayers
don't know about the earlier violence.
I am always against violence; nothing I say recommends or justifies
violence; I think violence is caused by mental illness. The fact is, when one person or group acts out
mental illness by being violent, there is a liklihood that some other person or group will feel
encouraged to act out his or its mental illness.
The U.S. government has often used its "cooperation" with the
governments of other countries to corrupt those governments. See, for example,
Coups Arranged or Backed by the USA. Most or all of that corruption
happened for profit, such as kickbacks of U.S. government foreign aid. When
the governments of Israel or Pakistan buy weapons from U.S. manufacturers
using money from "foreign aid", that is embezzlement of taxpayer money.
Apparently Slashdot editors agree with at least some of this, because now and for the last 2 months or more, this has been on the main Slashdot page, on the right, under Book Reviews: "The
Creature from Jekyll Island is a compelling look at the history of
the Federal Reserve system and asks if it's a system that has run it's
course. (Michael J.
Ross's review)"
"The Creature from Jekyll Island" discusses how the U.S. monetary system is
manipulated by rich and powerful people for their own profit. It says that wars are
started for profit.
The big secret is that Vista and Duke Nukem Forever are actually the same
program. The trouble is, people keep trying to get Vista to act like an OS.
This incident has everything: 1) Overpaying executives and underpaying
the people who do the work. He got stock options worth $30 million just for
coming to work the first day? 2) Corporate lies and sneakiness and
manipulation. 3) Absolutely no caring for customers. 4) Behavior that will
eventually sink the company. Remember, at one time IBM had 100% of the PC
business. Remember, IBM lost $1 billion on OS2, and then lost another $1
billion. Even the biggest company cannot treat customers badly forever.
The whole Vista experience oozes sleaziness. It's the true modern
horror story. In comparison, the movie "Aliens" is for schoolchildren. What's
a monster compared to Bill Gates in the role as software's "Dr. Death",
degrading the quality of life of millions of people by hassling them and
costing them more?
One of the biggest and most respected IT magazines is rejecting
Windows Vista: Save Windows XP. Quote: "More than 75,000 people have
signed InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition in the three weeks since it was launched
- many with passionate, often emotional pleas to not be forced to make a
change."
It's not just you. The absurdities are piling on top of each other, like
cockroaches in a cup.
Gates: "We have a strategy for competing in the search space that
Google dominates today, that we'll pursue that we had before we made the Yahoo
offer, and that we can pursue without that. It involves breakthrough
engineering."
"... competing in the search space..." That's corporate-speak.
Generally, when someone uses corporate-speak, you can expect that they are
talking baloney.
"... breakthrough engineering..." When has Microsoft
ever had "breakthrough engineering". If you know of an example, please
mention it.
Maybe he means "broken engineering". Microsoft's engineering is so bad
that one of the biggest and most respected IT magazines is rejecting their
newest product: Save Windows XP. Quote: "More than 75,000 people have
signed InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition in the three weeks since it was launched
- many with passionate, often emotional pleas to not be forced to make a
change."
Bill Gates is software's Dr. Death. If you are pro-life, sign the
petition.
The "engineering" of Windows XP was so bad that Windows XP was an
enormous hassle until Service Pack 2 was released, 3 years after
Windows XP was introduced. Then we got only 3 years of use with less hassle
(except for a very large number of software engineering bugs that created
vulnerabilities), and now Gates wants to kill it.
Microsoft has proven, over many years, that it does not know how to
run a search engine. Buying Yahoo will not magically make Microsoft smarter,
especially since Yahoo has proven, over many years, that...
Title of your comment: "Slashdot is no longer worth reading"
Then don't read it! And certainly don't post comments.
"Try to understand opposing views, rather than dismissing them." I agreed with Shihar's view, as I mentioned. I just added what I considered to be more insight.
I disagree with what you said. I am trying to dramatize what I consider to be extreme corruption in the U.S. government.
Quotes from the Cryptome.org story mentioned in the parent comment:
"The website WikiLeaks.org has been taken off line in many parts of the world. "
"Several factors have taken the site off line including DDoS attacks, which
was followed by a fire which took out the main servers hosting the site in
Sweden..."
Wikileaks previously published hundreds of documents obtained from a whistleblower of the Swiss Bank, "purportedly showing offshore tax evasion and money
laundering by extremely wealthy and in some cases, politically sensitive, clients from the US, Europe, China and Peru."
Shihar, I agree with what you said. However, it seems to me that people,
including you, don't deal with abuse very well.
Note that the grandparent comment to this one, which is your extremely
sensible observations, is moderated 0, Flamebait, and the parent comment,
which is a minor and obvious correction you wrote, is +3, Informative. That's
crazy.
The "one minor judge" has succeeded in stopping most access to the
WikiLeaks site, except for technically knowledgeable people. That shows the
mood of the U.S. government. There is no cry from the U.S. government to
restore free speech.
The problem is not just "one minor judge". It is an entire
governmental culture of corruption. See this thread in another Slashdot story
(which includes comments I wrote): The U.S. government is too corrupt to investigate
corruption. That comment is moderated "60% Insightful, 40% Flamebait" as I
write this. Perhaps 60% of the readers understand the issues, and 40% want to
avoid thinking about abusive situations.
In actuality, the U.S. Constitution says that Congress can make no law
against free speech. It doesn't say that the U.S. government cannot allow
misleading speech, or do other things to prevent free expression. The
governmental guarantee is much weaker than most people realize. The power of
the rich who want corruption is much stronger than most people realize.
Whoever destroyed the World Trade Center killed 3,000 Americans. The decision
of Cheney and Bush to have a war with Iraq has killed more" Americans than that.
The number is rapidly rising. In October 2006 the number of Iraqis
killed was estimated to be 655,000.
The highest estimate of Iraqis killed by Saddam Hussein was 1 million,
so the U.S. government has killed more than Saddam. See, for example, Survey: Saddam killed 61,000 in Baghdad.
"The cases falling into the second category usually require deep thinking
-- they aren't simple problems..."
That's exactly right. However, most of the problems are created by
laws that aren't clear, or have edge cases the lawmakers didn't consider.
Hearing only 1% of the cases is evidence that something is broken. The
people the law is designed to protect are not satisfied. The justices of the
Supreme Court serve their own intellectual interests more than they serve the
interests of their customers.
The system is broken, and when it is broken, no one fixes it.
Irresponsibly ignoring the fact that the something is very wrong is the
behavior of children, not adults. The U.S. legal system needs adult
supervision.
Quote from one of the comments in that story: "The Congressional
Research Service has concluded that holding stock options while in elective
office DOES constitute a "financial interest" whether or not the holder of the
options donates the proceeds to charities, and deferred compensation is also a
financial interest." [My emphasis]
Also, in general Cheney and Bush have shown that they don't believe
any rules apply to them. So, there may be hidden bank accounts in Dubai, for
example, which is where the head office of Halliburton is located now.
My understanding is that the U.S. Supreme Court hears only about 50 of the 5,000 cases that people try to bring before it.
That's a perfect work-avoidance scheme: "We just do as much work as we want to do."
If a case gets all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, that indicates SOMETHING is broken. However, faults in the law generally cannot be fixed because of a conflict of interest. A large part of what lawyers do is work generated by faults in the law. They don't want most of their work taken away from them. United States Supreme Court justices are lawyers, and they think like lawyers to a large extent, and they have allowed themselves to become comfortable with the faults in the law. It's all a huge work-avoidance operation.
Catch-22: The U.S. government is too corrupt to investigate corruption.
Catch-23: Oil and weapons investors Cheney and Bush want the price of oil and weapons to rise, so Iraqis must die.
Cheney and Bush have killed more Americans than the terrorists, and far more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein.
In general, it is legally acceptable to abuse.
on
UK Report Slams EULAs
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Rich people and organizations are given advantages. In many cases it is entirely legal to take advantage of the average person.
We don't have government for the people, we have government that takes advantage of people. This is especially true of Bush administration, but it has been true of other U.S. administrations and of those in other countries, too.
"Unfortunately the FSM forgot to provide us with the reference manual,..."
It appears to me that when you involved the Flying Spaghetti Monster in this discussion you helped create exactly the right tone of seriousness that Kurzweil's statement deserves.
Maybe the nutty one is a follower of The Noodly One.
I wrote the parent comment. Since I posted it, I've been trying to understand
how Ray Kurzweil could say something so foolish as "We'll have intelligent
nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with
our biological neurons."
Not only is he saying that there will be artificial intelligence in
only 21 years, but he is saying that the computers on which the new AI runs
will be so small they can travel like cells in our bloodstream, and do useful
work based on an extremely advanced understanding of biochemistry and an
ability to interact on a molecular level.
There is no evidence that anything like that is happening. It is wild
imagining.
I'm guessing that Ray Kurzweil understood correctly that the National
Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges for Engineering is a publicity gimmick, and that the committee is a social group. Maybe Mr. Kurzweil decided
to try to outdo everyone else in getting publicity. So, he put together the popular
prefix nano- and the hot words robots, medicine, and AI. And he was
successful. He tricked the BBC into
quoting a prediction he himself doesn't believe.
Apparently, Ray Kurzweil interpreted the event as a socially backward
macho male competition, and, given that, he won.
The National Academy of Engineering web page, Reverse-engineer the brain, is also wildly nonsensical, but somewhat more
restrained, saying: "... further advances are needed...", and
"Because each nerve cell receives messages from tens of thousands of
others, and circuits of nerve cells link up in complex networks, it is
extremely difficult to completely trace the signaling pathways."
There is lying, and then there is creative, energetic
pseudo-scientific lying. There is treating other people badly, and then there
is using a knowledge of science to take advantage of the shortcomings and weaknesses of other
people. I suppose Ray Kurzweil was only getting into the mood of the baloney
artistry the National Academy of Engineering created for him. But using
baloney artistry to get attention is not only infantile, it is FRAUD.
This is all my opinion. If you can find a more positive interpretation
of it, I'm interested.
FRAUD ALERT: Apparently something sneaky is happening, or
something extremely stupid. The parent post is correct, there is no chance
there will be "Artificial Intelligence" by "2029". What is known about how the
brain works is less than 0.1% of what there is to know, in my opinion, maybe
far less.
Larry Page and Dr. Craig Venter, and the BBC, are embarrassing
themselves by being a part of this.
Ray
Kurzweil, if you are such a "Futureologist", please post stock prices for
next week. Hey, that's only a WEEK in advance, and far, far less complicated
-- It's only a list of numbers.
Perhaps 99% of what is called science in the media contains some
element of fraud. Someone is wanting attention, or wanting money, and taking
advantage of the fascination of the average person with science and the
ignorance, too.
"Yahoo doesn't really seem like a good match for Microsoft."
Yes, but they are a bit similar: Microsoft has proven, over many years, that it does not know how to run a search engine. Yahoo has proven, over many years, that...
Slashdot Mirror
See, the Micro-Hoo merger is already making money for some people.
You said, and I quote: "Nobody is forcing them to make a change. They can run windows xp for as long as they like. People out there are still running windows 95."
That is exactly Microsoft's idea, forcing a change, in my opinion.
If a corporation needs to buy 1,000 new computers, they are placed in a terrible position. Will they buy Windows XP, a product that Bill Gates, software's Dr. Death, has declared is Mainstream Support Retired on 4/14/2009? If they do, they will be forced to pay extra when they can't get official support for Windows XP. And they need official support because of the huge, huge number of vulnerabilities that are found in Microsoft products. Remember that people don't even bother to run anti-spyware and anti-virus software on Apple Macs because they don't have problems. Operating systems don't naturally have vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities are a feature of Microsoft products that make more money for Microsoft.
On the other hand, Windows XP became usable without hassles 3 years after its introduction, with the release of Service Pack 2. There is every clue that Windows Vista will also be full of hassles at least until Vista SP2.
People were forced to upgrade to Windows XP because Windows 98 had an unstable file system, an unstable registry, and lots of problems with the "Blue Screen of Death" and "DLL Hell". That means they had to endure 3 bad years with Windows XP pre-SP2. There have been only 3 relatively good years with Windows XP, and now there is pressure to have bad years again.
That's ugly in my opinion, and I'm not the only one who thinks that way. This is all being done by billionaires who want nothing more than more money. That's sick.
Remember, they are sinking the company over the long term to get short-term profit.
With operating systems, there is lock-in. Linux is not an easy option because re-writing software and re-training 1,000 employees would be too expensive.
It's fine if Microsoft introduces a new product. But there should not be pressure to buy the new product until it is stable.
"They [Microsoft's promises] only protect 'noncommercial' development and are set up to create a patented standards toll road so that Microsoft can charge competitors to compete."
Someone could make a really, really scary horror movie: Bill Gates as software's "Dr. Death", killing an OS used by millions of people, wasting their time by releasing software that isn't finished, and generally being dishonest and sneaky and adversarial toward the whole world.
Just when you thought that was as much ugliness as you could handle, there would be scenes of Microsoft Marketing robots spewing corporate-speak and not realizing that they are the undead.
One of the biggest and most respected IT magazines is rejecting Windows Vista: Save Windows XP. Quote: "More than 75,000 people have signed InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition in the three weeks since it was launched - many with passionate, often emotional pleas to not be forced to make a change."
OS/2 ran on machines I owned, too. But people didn't like it because IBM was never serious about providing drivers. A lot of equipment people wanted couldn't be used with OS/2 because there were no drivers.
More importantly, at the time people were not willing to adopt IBM as a technology partner because of IBM's bad behavior. As soon as there was a livable option, people avoided IBM.
Now IBM has a reputation of being a little more cooperative and friendly. The company stills seems stiff and out of touch to me, sometimes.
Basically, the idea is correct. Because of the mismanagement and aggressive, adversarial behavior of IBM at the time, IBM lost a business that it once controlled. The point is that Microsoft's adversarial, abusive management is already causing the company to be less successful, similar to what happened to IBM.
At the time, numerous companies were selling small computers, for example, the CP/M-based Morrow Microdecision. When IBM entered the market, the market for those other computers collapsed.
But the hate for IBM was amazingly intense. Even non-technical people knew about IBM's manipulation of U.S. laws. IBM had the reputation then that Microsoft does now. IBM was successful only when there was no reasonable alternative.
Then the Compaq IBM PC compatible became available, and, even though the Compaq had problems with overheating, buyers began choosing Compaq to avoid IBM.
Very soon, the "IBM compatibles" had most of the market for small computers. The statistics quoted in business magazines were not accurate, because they used numbers provided by only the large suppliers. There were many small suppliers of IBM compatibles, and the percentage of the market they captured was close to 100%.
"Are US soldiers shooting them, or are they getting killed by Muslims?"
Both.
Should the U.S. government be considered responsible only for the people it kills directly, or should it also be considered responsible for the violence that violence causes? I've read several books that have considered that fundamental issue.
When the U.S. government was violent in Cambodia during the Vietnam war, for example, how many people died as a result of U.S. government action? The answer is more than 2 million people, in Cambodia alone, because the U.S. government supported the rise of a very violent dictator.
The U.S. government supported Saddam Hussein, partly by selling him weapons. The weapons deliveries were still being made when the U.S. government declared its first war on Iraq.
When people try to calculate the total number the U.S. government killed, they arrive at figures like perhaps 3 million killed directly since the end of the 2nd world war, and perhaps 8 to 11 million total if the people killed by the destabilization the U.S. government caused are also included, not including the people killed in Iraq. Partly the killing happened as a result of the U.S. government invading or bombing 25 countries.
All or almost all of the U.S. government's killing appears to be motivated entirely by profit. Certainly Cambodians and Vietnamese could never have threatened anyone in the U.S.; they only made about $200 per year, and had no animosity toward anyone in the U.S., if they even knew the U.S. existed.
The problem is that most taxpayers, who pay for the violence, don't realize the underlying facts. Both attacks against the World Trade Center, for example, were motivated by the U.S. government's killing of Arabs and Muslims long before. But most U.S. taxpayers don't know about the earlier violence.
I am always against violence; nothing I say recommends or justifies violence; I think violence is caused by mental illness. The fact is, when one person or group acts out mental illness by being violent, there is a liklihood that some other person or group will feel encouraged to act out his or its mental illness.
The U.S. government has often used its "cooperation" with the governments of other countries to corrupt those governments. See, for example, Coups Arranged or Backed by the USA. Most or all of that corruption happened for profit, such as kickbacks of U.S. government foreign aid. When the governments of Israel or Pakistan buy weapons from U.S. manufacturers using money from "foreign aid", that is embezzlement of taxpayer money.
For one example of profiting from violence, read How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power or Bush-Nazi Link Confirmed: Documents in National Archives Prove George W. Bush's Grandfather Traded with Nazis - Even After Pearl Harbor.
Apparently Slashdot editors agree with at least some of this, because now and for the last 2 months or more, this has been on the main Slashdot page, on the right, under Book Reviews: " The Creature from Jekyll Island is a compelling look at the history of the Federal Reserve system and asks if it's a system that has run it's course. (Michael J. Ross's review)"
"The Creature from Jekyll Island" discusses how the U.S. monetary system is manipulated by rich and powerful people for their own profit. It says that wars are started for profit.
The Cooperative Research History Commons is very valuable for those wanting to do their own research.
The poorly edited but very interesting free movie
Yes, I meant 100% of the PC-compatible business computer market. Tandy and Commodore were not used in businesses, usually.
The big secret is that Vista and Duke Nukem Forever are actually the same program. The trouble is, people keep trying to get Vista to act like an OS.
This incident has everything: 1) Overpaying executives and underpaying the people who do the work. He got stock options worth $30 million just for coming to work the first day? 2) Corporate lies and sneakiness and manipulation. 3) Absolutely no caring for customers. 4) Behavior that will eventually sink the company. Remember, at one time IBM had 100% of the PC business. Remember, IBM lost $1 billion on OS2, and then lost another $1 billion. Even the biggest company cannot treat customers badly forever.
The whole Vista experience oozes sleaziness. It's the true modern horror story. In comparison, the movie "Aliens" is for schoolchildren. What's a monster compared to Bill Gates in the role as software's "Dr. Death", degrading the quality of life of millions of people by hassling them and costing them more?
One of the biggest and most respected IT magazines is rejecting Windows Vista: Save Windows XP. Quote: "More than 75,000 people have signed InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition in the three weeks since it was launched - many with passionate, often emotional pleas to not be forced to make a change."
It's not just you. The absurdities are piling on top of each other, like cockroaches in a cup.
Gates: "We have a strategy for competing in the search space that Google dominates today, that we'll pursue that we had before we made the Yahoo offer, and that we can pursue without that. It involves breakthrough engineering."
"... competing in the search space..." That's corporate-speak. Generally, when someone uses corporate-speak, you can expect that they are talking baloney.
"... breakthrough engineering..." When has Microsoft ever had "breakthrough engineering". If you know of an example, please mention it.
Maybe he means "broken engineering". Microsoft's engineering is so bad that one of the biggest and most respected IT magazines is rejecting their newest product: Save Windows XP. Quote: "More than 75,000 people have signed InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition in the three weeks since it was launched - many with passionate, often emotional pleas to not be forced to make a change."
Bill Gates is software's Dr. Death. If you are pro-life, sign the petition.
The "engineering" of Windows XP was so bad that Windows XP was an enormous hassle until Service Pack 2 was released, 3 years after Windows XP was introduced. Then we got only 3 years of use with less hassle (except for a very large number of software engineering bugs that created vulnerabilities), and now Gates wants to kill it.
Microsoft has proven, over many years, that it does not know how to run a search engine. Buying Yahoo will not magically make Microsoft smarter, especially since Yahoo has proven, over many years, that...
I notice that the Altiris site contains very poor writing.
It would be great to have a suggestion from a better company.
Comment on your sig: Since when have facts, logic, and rationality been part of Microsoft's management policies?
For example, things are so bad with Windows Vista that InfoWorld, one of the most respected IT publications, is running a Save Windows XP campaign.
Title of your comment: "Slashdot is no longer worth reading"
Then don't read it! And certainly don't post comments.
"Try to understand opposing views, rather than dismissing them." I agreed with Shihar's view, as I mentioned. I just added what I considered to be more insight.
I disagree with what you said. I am trying to dramatize what I consider to be extreme corruption in the U.S. government.
The best source of research I've found is Cooperative Research History Commons.
More alternative links, besides www.wikileaks.be:
www.wikileaks.ws
www.wikileaks.cx
WikiLeaks information about the story at the Sunshine Press copy of WikiLeaks: Cayman Tax Avoidance.
The way WikiLeaks recommends to find stories about the censorship: Google News.
Excellent article: Wikileaks' Leaked Documents Blocked But Unbowed. I got all the above information from that article.
Quotes from the Cryptome.org story mentioned in the parent comment:
"The website WikiLeaks.org has been taken off line in many parts of the world. "
"Several factors have taken the site off line including DDoS attacks, which was followed by a fire which took out the main servers hosting the site in Sweden..."
Wikileaks previously published hundreds of documents obtained from a whistleblower of the Swiss Bank, "purportedly showing offshore tax evasion and money laundering by extremely wealthy and in some cases, politically sensitive, clients from the US, Europe, China and Peru."
Shihar, I agree with what you said. However, it seems to me that people, including you, don't deal with abuse very well.
Note that the grandparent comment to this one, which is your extremely sensible observations, is moderated 0, Flamebait, and the parent comment, which is a minor and obvious correction you wrote, is +3, Informative. That's crazy.
The "one minor judge" has succeeded in stopping most access to the WikiLeaks site, except for technically knowledgeable people. That shows the mood of the U.S. government. There is no cry from the U.S. government to restore free speech.
The problem is not just "one minor judge". It is an entire governmental culture of corruption. See this thread in another Slashdot story (which includes comments I wrote): The U.S. government is too corrupt to investigate corruption. That comment is moderated "60% Insightful, 40% Flamebait" as I write this. Perhaps 60% of the readers understand the issues, and 40% want to avoid thinking about abusive situations.
In actuality, the U.S. Constitution says that Congress can make no law against free speech. It doesn't say that the U.S. government cannot allow misleading speech, or do other things to prevent free expression. The governmental guarantee is much weaker than most people realize. The power of the rich who want corruption is much stronger than most people realize.
See my comment above: U.S. government killed more in every category.
I have respect for what Iraq Body Count is doing, but their methods do not count all those killed.
Whoever destroyed the World Trade Center killed 3,000 Americans. The decision of Cheney and Bush to have a war with Iraq has killed more" Americans than that.
See these stories, for example:
Iraq Conflict Has Killed A Million Iraqis: Survey.
The number is rapidly rising. In October 2006 the number of Iraqis killed was estimated to be 655,000.
The highest estimate of Iraqis killed by Saddam Hussein was 1 million, so the U.S. government has killed more than Saddam. See, for example, Survey: Saddam killed 61,000 in Baghdad.
"The cases falling into the second category usually require deep thinking -- they aren't simple problems..."
That's exactly right. However, most of the problems are created by laws that aren't clear, or have edge cases the lawmakers didn't consider.
Hearing only 1% of the cases is evidence that something is broken. The people the law is designed to protect are not satisfied. The justices of the Supreme Court serve their own intellectual interests more than they serve the interests of their customers.
The system is broken, and when it is broken, no one fixes it. Irresponsibly ignoring the fact that the something is very wrong is the behavior of children, not adults. The U.S. legal system needs adult supervision.
"So why again does Bush and Cheney want the price of oil to rise?"
See these stories, for example:
Cheney's Halliburton Options Up 3,281% Last Year
Cheney: "I cut all ties to Halliburton years ago." Congressional Research Service: "Cheney made $8,000,000 from Haliburton while in office."
Quote from one of the comments in that story: "The Congressional Research Service has concluded that holding stock options while in elective office DOES constitute a "financial interest" whether or not the holder of the options donates the proceeds to charities, and deferred compensation is also a financial interest." [My emphasis]
Also, in general Cheney and Bush have shown that they don't believe any rules apply to them. So, there may be hidden bank accounts in Dubai, for example, which is where the head office of Halliburton is located now.
My understanding is that the U.S. Supreme Court hears only about 50 of the 5,000 cases that people try to bring before it.
That's a perfect work-avoidance scheme: "We just do as much work as we want to do."
If a case gets all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, that indicates SOMETHING is broken. However, faults in the law generally cannot be fixed because of a conflict of interest. A large part of what lawyers do is work generated by faults in the law. They don't want most of their work taken away from them. United States Supreme Court justices are lawyers, and they think like lawyers to a large extent, and they have allowed themselves to become comfortable with the faults in the law. It's all a huge work-avoidance operation.
Catch-22: The U.S. government is too corrupt to investigate corruption.
Catch-23: Oil and weapons investors Cheney and Bush want the price of oil and weapons to rise, so Iraqis must die.
Cheney and Bush have killed more Americans than the terrorists, and far more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein.
Rich people and organizations are given advantages. In many cases it is entirely legal to take advantage of the average person.
We don't have government for the people, we have government that takes advantage of people. This is especially true of Bush administration, but it has been true of other U.S. administrations and of those in other countries, too.
"Unfortunately the FSM forgot to provide us with the reference manual, ..."
It appears to me that when you involved the Flying Spaghetti Monster in this discussion you helped create exactly the right tone of seriousness that Kurzweil's statement deserves.
Maybe the nutty one is a follower of The Noodly One.
I wrote the parent comment. Since I posted it, I've been trying to understand how Ray Kurzweil could say something so foolish as "We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons."
Not only is he saying that there will be artificial intelligence in only 21 years, but he is saying that the computers on which the new AI runs will be so small they can travel like cells in our bloodstream, and do useful work based on an extremely advanced understanding of biochemistry and an ability to interact on a molecular level.
There is no evidence that anything like that is happening. It is wild imagining.
I'm guessing that Ray Kurzweil understood correctly that the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges for Engineering is a publicity gimmick, and that the committee is a social group. Maybe Mr. Kurzweil decided to try to outdo everyone else in getting publicity. So, he put together the popular prefix nano- and the hot words robots, medicine, and AI. And he was successful. He tricked the BBC into quoting a prediction he himself doesn't believe.
Apparently, Ray Kurzweil interpreted the event as a socially backward macho male competition, and, given that, he won.
The National Academy of Engineering web page, Reverse-engineer the brain, is also wildly nonsensical, but somewhat more restrained, saying: "... further advances are needed...", and "Because each nerve cell receives messages from tens of thousands of others, and circuits of nerve cells link up in complex networks, it is extremely difficult to completely trace the signaling pathways."
There is lying, and then there is creative, energetic pseudo-scientific lying. There is treating other people badly, and then there is using a knowledge of science to take advantage of the shortcomings and weaknesses of other people. I suppose Ray Kurzweil was only getting into the mood of the baloney artistry the National Academy of Engineering created for him. But using baloney artistry to get attention is not only infantile, it is FRAUD.
This is all my opinion. If you can find a more positive interpretation of it, I'm interested.
Ray Kurzweil gave another interview about his imaginings that was rather uninformative, but not so nutty: Interview with Ray Kurzweil about the engineering challenges of the 21st Century (MP3, 6 minutes).
"No chance"
That exactly right: No chance.
FRAUD ALERT: Apparently something sneaky is happening, or something extremely stupid. The parent post is correct, there is no chance there will be "Artificial Intelligence" by "2029". What is known about how the brain works is less than 0.1% of what there is to know, in my opinion, maybe far less.
Larry Page and Dr. Craig Venter, and the BBC, are embarrassing themselves by being a part of this.
Ray Kurzweil, if you are such a "Futureologist", please post stock prices for next week. Hey, that's only a WEEK in advance, and far, far less complicated -- It's only a list of numbers.
Perhaps 99% of what is called science in the media contains some element of fraud. Someone is wanting attention, or wanting money, and taking advantage of the fascination of the average person with science and the ignorance, too.
"Yahoo doesn't really seem like a good match for Microsoft."
Yes, but they are a bit similar: Microsoft has proven, over many years, that it does not know how to run a search engine. Yahoo has proven, over many years, that...