That's what Cisco is doing here.. YES, they ARE using the FBI and "national security" as a cover for a personal vendetta.
What they're basically asking is because their software is insecure, they've not reported the info to the public for 4 months, but this guy did, they want the FBI to "investigate" until they FIND something to charge him with. Because and FBI investigation is punishement in and of itself... It should take no more than 5 minutes for the FBI to realize this is a open & shut whistleblower case and Cisco is wasting their time. Unfortunately, the FBI doesn't care about what a person's RIGHTS are, only if they can find some crime you committed.. after all, they'll have to find something to justify spending the $100k's they've already spent!!! Going back to Cisco and fining them for a "false" police report almost never happens.
What would be really cool is if we could get the projects to work together on implementation.. so that feature were added at about the same time to both programs... The SVG spec is HUGE, and there's a lot to implement.. but if the KSVG, Inkscape, & firefox guys all got together [along with KHTML & apple, an the SVG Tiny guys] we could get this off the ground.
Sodipodi is considered part of the GNU "office" suite with Abiword, GNUmeric, Dia, etc.. Inkscape is a fork foused on getting SVG out there where Sodipodi is just an icon editor.
But that's the game Rockstar broke the rules to. It's a corperate thing to trust the ratings so they can "draw a line" with what your company feels comfortable selling. The Playboy game may have some nudity, but it doesn't have the scenes of robbery and violence... when you go for a rating it's a trade-off how many things you get to have.
In a sense Rockstar used up all their "bad points" with violence just enough to get a "M" but then hid the sex scene anyway.. That "one more thing" makes them "AO" because they were already at the line for "M".
This makes everybody look bad because they "played" the ratings board. Nobody should really be worrying about the game pulled from shelves... honestly, even as an "M" game most of the Big Box stores won't resell it again anyway. I fully expect the ESRB to be particularly hard on them when they re-rate the game... if the ESRB wanted to be REAL pricks they could refuse to rate ANY Rockstar games for 1 year.. that would stop this from happening again... because Big Box stores don't typically carry 'unrated' stuff.
Actually it had more to do with a right to self defense than anything else... One of the British "tricks" was to gather up all the guns from farmers on the "fringes" then leave them to get killed by indians unless they "quartered" a squad of Red Coats. This has a lot more to do with the war on terror right now than a random kid getting an uzi. According to the 2nd ammendment we should all be packin' when we fly! We should expect to sit like sheep till we're saved...
When a "towel head" pulls a homemade bomb out he should be meet with Smith & Wesson.. Knowing in a random group of 200 people 5-6 could be carrying.45's & not afraid to use um would be a pretty big deterrent! You'd think and administration from TEXAS could appreciate that!!!
yes, but if you grew up in the 70's and 80's you heard how bad all these things were. Missionaries had to sneak in Bibles, churches [if you had them] had offical KGB "monitors" that took names, tourists couldn't ask for directions from strangers, you could be stopped by the secret police and held for any reason. Documents that were "offensive" to the govt were ratted out.. heck even children were taught to rat out their parents... Of course, normal people, just stayed out of the way and didn't do anything "suspect" so they were just fine.
unfortunately, our current adminstration has nothing in common with administration that ended the Cold War, except in their dreams... they seem to think all those old eastern blok stories are SUGGESTIONS.. not something EVIL to fight anymore!
That's clever.. just have the drivers add the dots "everywhere" according to all the possible patterns! Of couse if something like a scanner is just looking for the dot pattern you're still not getting anywhere, even though you're filling them in because it's a valid pattern.
not really, you'd have to worry about stopping hard when the other guy's pulling in front of you. You , non seatbelt wearering, defensive driver, would be skewered while the stupid guy is just fine...
The GTA case is a good place to draw "the line" at.. the developers made the sex game and left it "hidden" in the shipping version. This is not "allowing" the game to be hacked but basically leaving secret content in there.. and we all know one of the things in video games is to unlock secret content. They left a fully developed sex game.. controls, scoring, etc in the game.. it wasn't an accident... it was on purpose.
That said, it sounds like it only applies to the PC version which can usually get away with such things... but with the eye on them already it was just a stupi thing to do!!
I wonder what my kid's friend's mom thinks about GTA:SA now! last week a neighbor kid [aged 9!] brought over his PS2 [we're a GC house] and along with it... GTA:3, GTA:VC & SGTA:SA!!! We [the parents] were picking up the playroom when we found them... needless to say, they didn't have much time to play PS2 anyway [we're diablo, warcraft & Sims 2 fans] so it wasn't an issue about being jerks about it. My wife did ask his mom if she knew just what he brought over and it didnt' seem to be a big deal!!! That was the worst part about the whole thing... I wonder what her thoughts are NOW!
That said, I think I'm doing an OK job so far. My oldest won't even open his email if he's not expecting it.. he's seen too much of our "surprise" choice spam and knows better. He freaks when he starts getting pop-ups he's not supposed to.[and that's with content filter andpop-up blockers] He's not much into surfing around looking for trouble like his friends are.. that's one bad habit I hope he doesn't pick up.
to put the article to more "real" use say for windows server versus red hat server....
The base windows server is about $1200 plus CALS.. the red hat is abut $1300 but there's no cals... Using the article's numbers the base price of the software is about $30 each... the rest is "options" that you're paying the company to stay around providing updates and support. IF you look at MS OEM pricing for places like dell that would seem to confirm this effect.. the cost to Dell is only about $60 for a license.. but MS provides no "options" directly... if you want those options you have to buy the $200 boxed set.
What this is really proving is that business men understand the need to pay for software and to keep the people who created it around. If anything it proves that MS is drastically overcharging because they're a monopoly and that OSS is not as "communist" as they would have you think. By his numbers even the OEM price is nearly 4x what it should be.. At that point you have to ask what level of support you're paying for.. frankly, unless you're really good, MS' support isn't worth that much.. basically you have to pay somebody else to support it [i.e. your sys admin] OSS is just a shift from paying MS for "canned" stuff and just paying the Admins and contractors themselves for support.
From a strictly business point of view, MS 5 years ago put up money to develop XP and IE6... other than bug fixes what have they done lately? Is the next product which is overbudget, late, and feature stripped going to be worth the "option" price users have been paying for licenses and maintenance the last 5 years? The value added to OSS by support companies is much better than what your getting from MS... I think the article was the first to put in $$$ that PHBs would understand why it's time to shake up the market.
I'd have to tag you on the seat belt laws though... after all, if you expect the govt to mandate manufactures to make "safer" cars, but then refuse to use basic safety equipment, you're just asking for trouble. Eventually you have to require the users to take the basic safety measures if your going to increase saftey. Otherwise, your insurance company or medicade should be "free" not to have to pay a dime to fix you if you get yourself critically injured when it was 100% within your means to prevent it... "freedom" cuts both ways!
somehow I don't thing our current prez is capable of understanding Mutually Assured Destruction. He's a typical executive that doesn't understand it CAN happen to him!!! He seems of the "let them eat cake" variety... remember, that wasn't a slam.. Marie really didn't understand that bread and cake are the same thing!!!
Of course if we didn't make the stuff there to begin with it would be a little harder for them to make stuff en masse. They exported all our JOBS making CDs and DVDs because the chinese were a little cheaper.. now the chineese own their own stamping houses and print whatever they want.
Bright move guys!!! Why should we spend our money again [after we already lost our wages] protecting their bad business decisions??
first, You hit the nail on the head.. nowhere in that oath is the president to protect safety, security or profits!!! His job is to protect the rights of the people. Period.
Many things don't need to be written in.. they are legal fictions that are perpetuated by the whole "literal" reading of the Constitution.. At one point the supreme court tried to say slaves weren't people [and could NEVER BE] because the Constitution only counted 2/5 as "citizens". It's crazy literal readings like that that got us in the mess we're in!!! Things like segregation are directly against the constution, but because of "literal" reading we can't fix them with common sense. Segregation directly violated the state's prohibition of "royalty" but we can't extend that to title of "ignobility" [aka scarlet letters] when that's obviously the meaning.
The worst part about the situation is that the legal system is geared around punishment or not-punishment rather than deciding if the laws are "right" or not in the first place. We've reached the point where there's so many illegal laws that you can't possibly get them all to the courts... so the courts are stuck ignoring all but the worst ones. The other problem is that laws and legal prececents never go "off the books" Things like Dread Scot and Rosa Parks still haunt the legal system... we had to use extreme measures to get past the masses wanting to maintain the status quo... but the ends are now worse than the means.
What about serious issues like prison labor, totatarian regimes, or child slavery/sex abuse/labor crimes!!! Seriously, this only proves the administration has "jumpped the shark" as far a bending over to corporations.
These aren't our "do the right thing" republicans from the "regan" era. These are selfish WASP businessmen at their finest. Look what they're doing in Iraq.. they aren't giving them US-style constitution, but a "fixed" version that heavily favors "order" and businesses above individual freedom. This whole administration is a shame to the very ideals they "promise" to protect.
The second thing is that this is ENTIRELY un-rebublican... we have no business telling other nations how to run their countries. That was true when it was land mines, slavery, child labor, environment... so why is it so interesting now that it's "intelectual property"? [or going overseas for kiddy sex, or enemy combatant tourture!!!] That stance from this administration doesn't jive. They're more interested in "Piracy" overseas than americans tourturing foreigners on US owned property!!!
this is the result of the misguided idea that law enforcemtn is to prevent crime rather than punish it. Like you just said, openness of the internet is a 2 way street!! reading a public page and "worming" your way into a social circle "old school" is the best way to go! What it means in the USA is we have to become more "amoral" like the europeans and less reactionary and prudish. We need to reduce the number of silly laws officers must enforce... things like public swearing, blow-jobs, some low end drugs, and the host of silly laws designed to give officers a reason to "harrass" you. We need to rid ourselves of the prudish, "bible belt" rules that have everybody checking themselves in fear at the sight of and officer... that's not how a free society should live! Banning nailclippers at the airport checkpoint is no substitute for 100 citizens paying attention to the people around them... i.e. the creepy guy acting stupid planting a bomb!!
back on track, used properly, they could net a lot of good intel in the drug trade keeping quite instead of playing cowboy... there's no reason Google wouldn't cooperate with investigations by providing logs or even fake accounts if the police just asked rather than made a heavy-handed power grab out of everything they don't understand.
of course that's been MS modus operendi for years now!!! They hire away the best of the competitors at the worst moment specifically to damage other people's products, or to gain influance in corperate contracts or product launches. For MS to sue for this is rediculous..
Of course, they probably have really good lawyers at defending these suits by smaller companies.. so they might be wanting to try their hand a being the plantiff for a change!!!
Usually, in high profile cases, the headhunters will work out the details well ahead of time with you to skirt the non-compete. Typically they will "verbally" promise you the job and then you quit the first company for the "time-out" period. At this level of pay, you pretty much have the finances to skip a year of working if you plan for it.. go on vacation [you gotta compensate for 80hour weeks!!] do something fun, research something cool. And the new company gets a recharged, happy new employee!!
MS must have gotten wind of the deal somehow just before the "time-out" was up and didn't take to kindly to Google bending the rules a bit.
Microsoft's headquarters is in Washington.. It would only be logical he signed at the corperate headquarters... after all, California doesn't respect any non-competes so he didnt' sign it there!
But Google is in California, so they don't have to be bound by Laws of Washington state!!! It's the main reason MS is NOT in CA.. because they can tailor the laws of washington to benifit them... versus being at the mercy of being "just another mega corp" in California. If the assignment's over seas then there's not much MS can legally do about it...
Wow.. sucks to be them.. but turnabout is fair play right!!!
IBM is KING of per CPU licensing.... Almost all the vendors use some kind of per-cpu fee. What makes it worse is that all of IBMs machines for several years now have used multi-core processors.. often with 4-8 on a "socket" but they've been getting a way with it for a while now!
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That's what Cisco is doing here.. YES, they ARE using the FBI and "national security" as a cover for a personal vendetta.
What they're basically asking is because their software is insecure, they've not reported the info to the public for 4 months, but this guy did, they want the FBI to "investigate" until they FIND something to charge him with. Because and FBI investigation is punishement in and of itself... It should take no more than 5 minutes for the FBI to realize this is a open & shut whistleblower case and Cisco is wasting their time. Unfortunately, the FBI doesn't care about what a person's RIGHTS are, only if they can find some crime you committed.. after all, they'll have to find something to justify spending the $100k's they've already spent!!! Going back to Cisco and fining them for a "false" police report almost never happens.
What would be really cool is if we could get the projects to work together on implementation.. so that feature were added at about the same time to both programs... The SVG spec is HUGE, and there's a lot to implement.. but if the KSVG, Inkscape, & firefox guys all got together [along with KHTML & apple, an the SVG Tiny guys] we could get this off the ground.
Sodipodi is considered part of the GNU "office" suite with Abiword, GNUmeric, Dia, etc.. Inkscape is a fork foused on getting SVG out there where Sodipodi is just an icon editor.
In a sense Rockstar used up all their "bad points" with violence just enough to get a "M" but then hid the sex scene anyway.. That "one more thing" makes them "AO" because they were already at the line for "M".
This makes everybody look bad because they "played" the ratings board. Nobody should really be worrying about the game pulled from shelves... honestly, even as an "M" game most of the Big Box stores won't resell it again anyway. I fully expect the ESRB to be particularly hard on them when they re-rate the game... if the ESRB wanted to be REAL pricks they could refuse to rate ANY Rockstar games for 1 year.. that would stop this from happening again... because Big Box stores don't typically carry 'unrated' stuff.
When a "towel head" pulls a homemade bomb out he should be meet with Smith & Wesson.. Knowing in a random group of 200 people 5-6 could be carrying .45's & not afraid to use um would be a pretty big deterrent! You'd think and administration from TEXAS could appreciate that!!!
unfortunately, our current adminstration has nothing in common with administration that ended the Cold War, except in their dreams... they seem to think all those old eastern blok stories are SUGGESTIONS.. not something EVIL to fight anymore!
That's clever.. just have the drivers add the dots "everywhere" according to all the possible patterns! Of couse if something like a scanner is just looking for the dot pattern you're still not getting anywhere, even though you're filling them in because it's a valid pattern.
Abstain from love & peace... shoot the terrorist!!!
not really, you'd have to worry about stopping hard when the other guy's pulling in front of you. You , non seatbelt wearering, defensive driver, would be skewered while the stupid guy is just fine...
That said, it sounds like it only applies to the PC version which can usually get away with such things... but with the eye on them already it was just a stupi thing to do!!
That said, I think I'm doing an OK job so far. My oldest won't even open his email if he's not expecting it.. he's seen too much of our "surprise" choice spam and knows better. He freaks when he starts getting pop-ups he's not supposed to.[and that's with content filter andpop-up blockers] He's not much into surfing around looking for trouble like his friends are.. that's one bad habit I hope he doesn't pick up.
The base windows server is about $1200 plus CALS.. the red hat is abut $1300 but there's no cals... Using the article's numbers the base price of the software is about $30 each... the rest is "options" that you're paying the company to stay around providing updates and support. IF you look at MS OEM pricing for places like dell that would seem to confirm this effect.. the cost to Dell is only about $60 for a license.. but MS provides no "options" directly... if you want those options you have to buy the $200 boxed set.
What this is really proving is that business men understand the need to pay for software and to keep the people who created it around. If anything it proves that MS is drastically overcharging because they're a monopoly and that OSS is not as "communist" as they would have you think. By his numbers even the OEM price is nearly 4x what it should be.. At that point you have to ask what level of support you're paying for.. frankly, unless you're really good, MS' support isn't worth that much
From a strictly business point of view, MS 5 years ago put up money to develop XP and IE6... other than bug fixes what have they done lately? Is the next product which is overbudget, late, and feature stripped going to be worth the "option" price users have been paying for licenses and maintenance the last 5 years? The value added to OSS by support companies is much better than what your getting from MS... I think the article was the first to put in $$$ that PHBs would understand why it's time to shake up the market.
only because aluminum foil from the supermarket maginfies the brain control rays! The feds took TIN foil off the market years ago.
I'd have to tag you on the seat belt laws though... after all, if you expect the govt to mandate manufactures to make "safer" cars, but then refuse to use basic safety equipment, you're just asking for trouble. Eventually you have to require the users to take the basic safety measures if your going to increase saftey. Otherwise, your insurance company or medicade should be "free" not to have to pay a dime to fix you if you get yourself critically injured when it was 100% within your means to prevent it... "freedom" cuts both ways!
they could give us all those skimpy hospital gowns though... that would cover us "enough" bonus points if its red, white, & blue.
somehow I don't thing our current prez is capable of understanding Mutually Assured Destruction. He's a typical executive that doesn't understand it CAN happen to him!!! He seems of the "let them eat cake" variety... remember, that wasn't a slam.. Marie really didn't understand that bread and cake are the same thing!!!
Bright move guys!!! Why should we spend our money again [after we already lost our wages] protecting their bad business decisions??
Gotta love it!! It's a smoke shop but you can't smoke inside!!!
Many things don't need to be written in.. they are legal fictions that are perpetuated by the whole "literal" reading of the Constitution.. At one point the supreme court tried to say slaves weren't people [and could NEVER BE] because the Constitution only counted 2/5 as "citizens". It's crazy literal readings like that that got us in the mess we're in!!! Things like segregation are directly against the constution, but because of "literal" reading we can't fix them with common sense. Segregation directly violated the state's prohibition of "royalty" but we can't extend that to title of "ignobility" [aka scarlet letters] when that's obviously the meaning.
The worst part about the situation is that the legal system is geared around punishment or not-punishment rather than deciding if the laws are "right" or not in the first place. We've reached the point where there's so many illegal laws that you can't possibly get them all to the courts... so the courts are stuck ignoring all but the worst ones. The other problem is that laws and legal prececents never go "off the books" Things like Dread Scot and Rosa Parks still haunt the legal system... we had to use extreme measures to get past the masses wanting to maintain the status quo... but the ends are now worse than the means.
These aren't our "do the right thing" republicans from the "regan" era. These are selfish WASP businessmen at their finest. Look what they're doing in Iraq.. they aren't giving them US-style constitution, but a "fixed" version that heavily favors "order" and businesses above individual freedom. This whole administration is a shame to the very ideals they "promise" to protect.
The second thing is that this is ENTIRELY un-rebublican... we have no business telling other nations how to run their countries. That was true when it was land mines, slavery, child labor, environment... so why is it so interesting now that it's "intelectual property"? [or going overseas for kiddy sex, or enemy combatant tourture!!!] That stance from this administration doesn't jive. They're more interested in "Piracy" overseas than americans tourturing foreigners on US owned property!!!
back on track, used properly, they could net a lot of good intel in the drug trade keeping quite instead of playing cowboy... there's no reason Google wouldn't cooperate with investigations by providing logs or even fake accounts if the police just asked rather than made a heavy-handed power grab out of everything they don't understand.
Of course, they probably have really good lawyers at defending these suits by smaller companies.. so they might be wanting to try their hand a being the plantiff for a change!!!
MS must have gotten wind of the deal somehow just before the "time-out" was up and didn't take to kindly to Google bending the rules a bit.
But Google is in California, so they don't have to be bound by Laws of Washington state!!! It's the main reason MS is NOT in CA.. because they can tailor the laws of washington to benifit them... versus being at the mercy of being "just another mega corp" in California. If the assignment's over seas then there's not much MS can legally do about it...
Wow.. sucks to be them.. but turnabout is fair play right!!!
IBM is KING of per CPU licensing.... Almost all the vendors use some kind of per-cpu fee. What makes it worse is that all of IBMs machines for several years now have used multi-core processors.. often with 4-8 on a "socket" but they've been getting a way with it for a while now!