Socialism is an economic system, communism in it's implementation(not perhaps its original inception) is a political system.
Norway is politically a democracy(or republic not sure) and economically socialist.
China is communist, which in modern reality turns out to be a dictatorship, and while economically they might be socialist, socialism doesn't work when you have a ruling elite because there's no way for the non-elites to call the government out.
The population fled to the Communists because the alternative was worse. Taiwan might be democratic now, but the folks who founded it were fascists who by all the evidence I read used to let their people get slaughtered by the Japanese during the way so they could save their bullets to shoot the communists.
Communism in China has gone a great deal off course in the last 60 years, and has a lot to answer for, but from all I've read(some of which was published accounts of CIA operatives in China at the time), in 1940 if I'd had to choose between Mao and Chang Kai Shek I would have chosen the same way the people did.
Since then Mao and his successors have done a lot of reprehensible things(though some of them can probably be attributed to the consequences of someone who believes they know better than the people and who has the power and authority to force them to change), and the Taiwanese government seems to have done some relatively good things, but when the decision was made the KMT were literally fascists(in the Italian not German sense mind you).
OS X is not linux, OS X is a heavily modified version of Unix(well BSD).
Yes both systems are based on POSIX, and yes both systems have a lot of common attributes.
However there is one thing that provides a massive differentiation between linux and unix/bsd. Linux comes with an ideology, and zealots. Linux comes with RMS and his ilk who actively set out to punish anyone who tries to make any sort of compromise whatsoever.
The GPLv3 can basically be summed up as "I'm taking my ball and going home". And that's fine, GPL software belongs to the people who wrote it or to whatever organization holds the copyright. It is their ball and it's perfectly within their rights to take it and go home if the people playing with them aren't playing by their rules.
The problem is that just like people stop playing with the kid who takes his ball and goes home, business is reluctant to work with linux.
There's been an upsurge in the Linux market for the enterprise, new versions of RHEL, and SLES as well as Debian and Ubuntu and the like are getting increasing uptake, but for my money if Linux doesn't learn some pragmatism you'll see things like OpenSolaris and its ilk replacing Linux in the enterprise server market, and I don't see anything replacing Windows on the desktop(or for that matter in the Authentication or corporate e-mail spheres(exchange not just plain e-mail) spheres any time soon.)
The problem with all that openness and freedom is that javascript is a mess and flash is a poorly written insecure kludge and always has been. Until the W3C can come up with an alternative we're stuck with proprietary stuff like silverlight.
Do I think that Microsoft needs to start viewing their stuff like.NET and silverlight and their ASP technologies as technologies in their own right that just happen to work best on their technology as opposed to attempts to lock people into their server environment, yes, but you can't really blame anyone for trying to find a solution to the javascript dilemma.
W3C takes so long to approve any standard that you may as well ignore them and try to fix things later.
They're not asking for the government to tell people how to make a properly working product.
What they're saying is that by the definition of first sale as defined in law, the product is not working properly.
Software companies(and for that matter dvd and record companies) have been trying to live for years in some sort of half way world where they sell you the product but at the same time they don't.
If I'm buying a license then the media that I use to exercise that license shouldn't matter in the slightest. If my license it to listen to a piece of music I should be able to listen to it on anything I like. If my cd breaks I should be able to get another copy of the music in some other format for the cost of sending it to me plus the cost of the media(ie for a cd less than a dollar).
If I'm buying the physical cd, then it's mine to do with as I like, and all this "license" garbage is stupid.
What a lot of the software folks and record folks and movie folks want to do is to sell you a license to view/listen to/use their software, but only using the media the physical media they provided on the players they allow and in exactly the manner they proscribe, which is an onerous contract requirement and probably illegal.
There's a simple reason for this. Microsoft often fails to deliver what they set out to, and they're proprietary, and often due to the realities of being a for profit software company based in the US they have to add things they'd probably rather not like DRM, but they've spent millions researching the UI's they use.
Add to that the fact that Open Office is trying to get people to switch to it and you'll see that having the lowest learning curve possible can be a big benefit.
Now that that's out of the way this whole "it has to be different" mantra that you see in some open source folks is a horrible trait and an indication of stupidity.
Software development should always be about making the best software possible, and sometimes that means that when you're creating a new version that something that the other guy did was actually the right thing to do.
This is particularly often the case in User Interfaces because while the proprietary world isn't always perfect, I've never seen a completed open source product with a UI that was both original and non crap. Enlightenment comes close, but E17 has been in development for as long as I can remember and even that's mostly stolen from Apple.
Your analogy is flawed. You're not forcing anyone to convert to anything, you're not making heterosexual bigots become homosexuals. You're not even forcing them to accept homosexuals or to stop being bigots.
What you're doing is preventing them from forcing other people who don't believe that homosexuality is wrong to live their lives according to someone else's values.
In other words metaphorically you're preventing anyone from forcing American Christians to convert to Islam while allowing both American Christians and Muslims to continue to exist and to believe what they already believe with equal protection under the law.
In a free country you have the right to believe anything you want to believe, however, the other guy has the same right to believe what he believes and where there is no justifiable public interest in intervening the government should not intervene in those beliefs.
What that means is not that "the government shouldn't change marriage" it's more that the government shouldn't prevent anyone who wants to be married from being married where there isn't a public interest in doing so.
That is to say if two consenting adults are doing something that isn't hurting anyone else and they want to declare in front of the world that they only want to do those things with each other and no one else and they want some tax benefits and common property rights, they should have the right to do that, and the government shouldn't have the right to tell them that their declaration is any different than anyone else's(ie that their declaration is a civil union whereas someone else's declaration is a marriage).
The US already has such a system. The problem with it is that a lot of people suffer who aren't at fault in that kind of scenario(offspring of loser parents, people with genuine disabilities, folks who have just suffered a long string of really bad luck, or who need assistance to retrain themselves after their skill set has become obsolete).
I've always sort of reckoned that the kind of useless losers who become welfare cheats or as we call them over here dole bludgers, would, if forced into employment, simply become a useless burden on an individual employer as opposed to the government and that society would pay for the salary of that useless incompetent anyway.
A lot of people use the safety net for the things it's supposed to cover, and the things it's supposed to cover are very important. The people who misuse it are largely going to be a drain on society no matter what you do with them, and even if it were ethical to let them starve to death, and even if they weren't likely to turn to a life of crime(though being an effective criminal usually involves a greater deal of togetherness than most of this lot can manage) punishing them is likely to punish others in their family who might potentially not be complete and total losers.
In other words, I don't feel bad paying to help people in need, most of the people who aren't really in need were just going to take my money in another way and children shouldn't have to suffer any more than they already have to just because their parents are wastes of oxygen.
Your analogy is incorrect. Swinging an axe at a wooden door creates a visible change to the state of the door.
The insanity idea would be closer to the idea of hitting a 3 foot thick steel blast door with an axe. Yes if you had an infinite amount of time, an infinite amount of axes, and were immune to injuries caused by broken axe blades, you could probably make your way through a 3 foot thick steel blast door, however trying to get through that door based on your perceived degree of success when hitting it with an axe is insane.
Of course the case in this situation is not really like either of those situations, the case in point is a bit more like poking a lion with a blunt stick in order to kill it and then trying to poke it again. Unless you've changed the stick or at least where you're poking the lion, you're much more likely to get disemboweled than you are to kill the lion.
In the same way antagonizing a judge by telling him his finding was wrong is unlikely to achieve the desired result unless your argument as to why he was wrong is a particularly good one and sufficiently different from the one you originally sent that he or she reconsiders the issue.
When I meant lessons learned I didn't mean in the sense of learning from their mistakes.
Microsoft has a long term habit of making their "revolutionary OS" about 3 versions later than they anticipated. XP was what 2000 was actually supposed to be and Windows 7 will probably be what Vista was supposed to be.
Most of this just happens because doing something new takes a long time and shareholders and analysts get a little fidgety if they haven't released anything in a while.
It was more Microsoft offered them quite a reasonable price for it($33 per share), the Yahoo board asked for substantially more($37 per share) refused to budge and Microsoft said forget it.
The yahoo board are more likely to be fired by the shareholders than Balmer.
For that matter Vista isn't really all that much of a failure in the long run, it gets a lot of bad press, but it's not a horrible OS, and even if financially it does turn into the next ME, the lessons they've learned will still be useful in the next OS.
Balmer has been with Microsoft for a long time, and given that everyone will think that the Microsoft CEO is a vicious, greedy, vindictive SOB even if they put a saint in the position, they may as well get the benefits of an actual vicious, greedy, vindictive SOB.
Just because you don't need a warrant doesn't mean you can do anything you want it'll still be logged that you made the request and if you start making a habit of it, folks are going to notice.
If you want to worry about being stalked via your mobile phone, be worried about the phone company employees not the police.
I don't trust law enforcement any more than the next guy, but so long as they're logging the requests somewhere and looking for suspicious patterns I don't see a problem.
If you work in a proper help desk, one where you actually try to help people, and where there's a proper escalation of work within the company, help desk is anything but a dead end job. Level 2 folks move on, and good help desk staff are always good candidates to replace them.
The only real obstacles to progressing from this kind of role are either not enough or too much ambition(ie folks who don't care and don't try and folks who think that having done a year of help desk makes them qualified to be sys admins).
Working in a call centre(ie a place where all you do is take and log calls, maybe follow a few scripts etc) is dead end work, because it's not IT work.
It also tends to be outsourced to companies that don't do anything but call centre work and where there's no real technical progression path.
Basically speaking Help Desk, or even Call Centre work is a good way to prove you have some real world technical experience, it won't get you a job you're not qualified for, but it will make getting on you are qualified for slightly easier, presuming of course you didn't take a massive step straight down to take it, and of course presuming that your goal is to work in a support role(administration, networking etc). Being a phone monkey probably won't help you become a developer, or a project manager or that sort of thing because it's not in the same chain.
You won't, but you wouldn't pay redhat either. The enterprise may. If Ubuntu finds a home in the enterprise, the enterprise will pay for support for it, that's the way it works.
Let's presume that everything he says is right. So we've got a great filter, it's ahead of us, and our odds of surviving it are billions to one.
That doesn't mean we should despair, that's the whole thing about consciousness, we can make decisions, we can work towards not blowing ourselves up, not creating a super plague, and even if for some reason we can't not do those things, we can still simply hope to survive, as we always have and always will.
The reason life thrives everywhere on the planet is not because of some mystical principle, it's because life continues to try. Presuming that life in volcanic vents didn't evolve independently of other life then billions or trillions or more of living things probably died to either get into that environment or to get out of it(if that's where life began), but some of them made it. And those things gained resources that weren't available to others. That's the whole beautiful and terrible thing about life.
If we don't destroy ourselves and it's physically possible, human beings or something like us will colonize outer space.
Maybe we will destroy ourselves, maybe getting anywhere substantially far away is impossible, but that's not going to stop us trying, and the whole "billions of others couldn't do it so why should we be more lucky" is just pathetic.
Do you really think they hand code the news? I'll bet you dollars to donuts that they hand coded a content engine(or at least the front end to one), and the news gets automatically rendered into that content framework. No waste of money, in fact a savings of money.
Who really cares? With the exception of file or whole drive encryption, which this device isn't going to help with anyway, if someone has physical access to your box for any length of time, they have access to your machine, doesn't matter what OS you're running, or how complex your password is, phyiscal access to your box will give them any unencrypted data eventually.
With the right tools you can read files regardless of permissions, change passwords, add users, etc, almost anything. Building a linux live cd which can read most file formats and ignores ACL's and that's not even counting the various and sundry tools available which allow you to change even a root password to a machine you've forgotten the credentials to.
If the cops or anyone else has your PC they have access to anything on it that's not ecrypted, whether Microsoft wins some quick PR with law enforcement by making it easy for them or not. This is essentially a non story.
Actually that's not true, proper training with a long bow took more than a decade(quite a long time given life expectancies at the time).
The first guns were terrible things, unreliable, dangerous, etc, but when one blew up and killed the operator you could train up someone else very quickly.
The same is true of swords, using a sword, or for that matter any melee weapon is actually quite complicated unless you happen to be 7 feet tall, 200 kilos of pure muscle and using it to bludgeon people to death, and even then a sufficiently skilled smaller man can probably kill you.
Ya see, the funny thing about all of this, is that the reason people buy these things is because they want to feel less guilty about their purchase(I paid for it, it's not my business whether the seller is genuine). It's not huge in the states, but I've known folks who went for that Russian allofmp3 or who bought knock off DVD's in Bali, because they felt better doing that than just downloading it without paying for it.
Basically the organized criminals have discovered what the RIAA and MPAA never seem to work out, which is to say that people will pay for the ability to feel legitimate in their purchases.
Sure the legal justification is shaky at best(and in some places purchasing stolen goods can get you jail time), and the funds are going to people who are likely more morally repugnant than the record industry, but people pay it.
I once took a flight into LA sitting next to a bloke who made movies(or claimed he did, who knows in LA). He was violently against pirating movies, but he was running a pirated version of Office on his PC with no moral qualms whatsoever.
This fight isn't about the right or wrong of copyright, it never has been. It's about a bunch of folks fighting to protect their livelihoods. This is a perfectly natural thing for them to do and something we all understand. Unsurprisingly the folks fighting the hardest are the folks whose positions are becoming superfluous under the new system. I could even forgive them, except most of the current batch of record/movie execs have never been anything but scum sucking parasites as their positions have been tecnically superfluous since before they got them.
RS232 is still very much in use on all sorts of things like switches, the systems which buzz you to tell you you're meal is ready, and a whole bunch of other things. RS232 is a port that can be programmed to do pretty much anything without requiring you to have much in the way of processing power.
Generally if you want something to do something odd, and you want to do it in a manner which is pretty well as basic and reliable as you can possibly make it you use RS232.
First of all, to all those whinging about the fact that they share their connection on purpose, it's simple, don't press charges. This is a misdemeanor offense which requires victim cooperation and last time I checked at least in the US you don't have to press charges on things a lot worse than misdemeanors.
Second, the reason for the harshness of this is that people are using connections to commit illegal activities. It's basically a possession type charge. They didn't catch you with the pot, but they caught you with a used bong.
Thirdly the I'm an idiot and just let Windows connecto to what it did is covered by the "purposely" defense. It gets you one freebee if you can convince a judge that you're stupid. If you're out there in your car with an antennae on top wardriving you're screwed.
Fourthly, this is theft of service/trespass. Just because I leave my door open doesn't mean you can walk in, just because I leave my access point open(which I don't) doesn't mean you can use my connection. Doing either may be stupid, but it isn't consent. Consent is putting up a sign saying you can come in, or inviting you in.
In short, if it's not yours and the owner hasn't told you you can use it(and setting your AP to FreeInternet might imply consent), then don't use it. If you need to use the internet at a cafe, buy a cup of coffee, don't use someone elses, pay for your own stuff.
You may note that I mentioned drivers and software which depends on kernels(which is what the software which Microsoft has broken is). This doesn't affect userland, but none of the apps on this list are userland.
This was and is the fundamental flaw with wikipedia. Whether you believe that a collaborative encyclopaedia can really work or not, Wikipedia is set up in such a way that the integrity, reliability, and accuracy of any controversial data on the site can come down the the integrity, reliability, and honesty of one man.
Whether Jimmy Wales did or didn't take money, sex, or anything else in exchange for modifying wikipedia articles doesn't realy matter. The problem is that there's nothing in place to prevent him from doing so or even to show that he did it.
Wikipedia has no oversight policy(there doesn't even seem to be a requirement for the involvement of more than one administrator in controversial decisions), and includes the ability to permanently delete content so that not only has the article been changed or removed, but there is no way of knowing that it was ever there.
Any encyclopaedia is a bad reference source, simply because it's an encyclopaedia. But an encyclopaedia that can be rewritten at will by a single person with no oversight is a largely worthless encylopaedia.
Personally I use wikipedia quite often, but I don't bother with it for anything controversial.
Slashdot Mirror
Norway is politically a democracy(or republic not sure) and economically socialist.
China is communist, which in modern reality turns out to be a dictatorship, and while economically they might be socialist, socialism doesn't work when you have a ruling elite because there's no way for the non-elites to call the government out.
Communism in China has gone a great deal off course in the last 60 years, and has a lot to answer for, but from all I've read(some of which was published accounts of CIA operatives in China at the time), in 1940 if I'd had to choose between Mao and Chang Kai Shek I would have chosen the same way the people did.
Since then Mao and his successors have done a lot of reprehensible things(though some of them can probably be attributed to the consequences of someone who believes they know better than the people and who has the power and authority to force them to change), and the Taiwanese government seems to have done some relatively good things, but when the decision was made the KMT were literally fascists(in the Italian not German sense mind you).
Yes both systems are based on POSIX, and yes both systems have a lot of common attributes.
However there is one thing that provides a massive differentiation between linux and unix/bsd. Linux comes with an ideology, and zealots. Linux comes with RMS and his ilk who actively set out to punish anyone who tries to make any sort of compromise whatsoever.
The GPLv3 can basically be summed up as "I'm taking my ball and going home". And that's fine, GPL software belongs to the people who wrote it or to whatever organization holds the copyright. It is their ball and it's perfectly within their rights to take it and go home if the people playing with them aren't playing by their rules.
The problem is that just like people stop playing with the kid who takes his ball and goes home, business is reluctant to work with linux.
There's been an upsurge in the Linux market for the enterprise, new versions of RHEL, and SLES as well as Debian and Ubuntu and the like are getting increasing uptake, but for my money if Linux doesn't learn some pragmatism you'll see things like OpenSolaris and its ilk replacing Linux in the enterprise server market, and I don't see anything replacing Windows on the desktop(or for that matter in the Authentication or corporate e-mail spheres(exchange not just plain e-mail) spheres any time soon.)
Do I think that Microsoft needs to start viewing their stuff like .NET and silverlight and their ASP technologies as technologies in their own right that just happen to work best on their technology as opposed to attempts to lock people into their server environment, yes, but you can't really blame anyone for trying to find a solution to the javascript dilemma.
W3C takes so long to approve any standard that you may as well ignore them and try to fix things later.
What they're saying is that by the definition of first sale as defined in law, the product is not working properly.
Software companies(and for that matter dvd and record companies) have been trying to live for years in some sort of half way world where they sell you the product but at the same time they don't.
If I'm buying a license then the media that I use to exercise that license shouldn't matter in the slightest. If my license it to listen to a piece of music I should be able to listen to it on anything I like. If my cd breaks I should be able to get another copy of the music in some other format for the cost of sending it to me plus the cost of the media(ie for a cd less than a dollar).
If I'm buying the physical cd, then it's mine to do with as I like, and all this "license" garbage is stupid.
What a lot of the software folks and record folks and movie folks want to do is to sell you a license to view/listen to/use their software, but only using the media the physical media they provided on the players they allow and in exactly the manner they proscribe, which is an onerous contract requirement and probably illegal.
Add to that the fact that Open Office is trying to get people to switch to it and you'll see that having the lowest learning curve possible can be a big benefit.
Now that that's out of the way this whole "it has to be different" mantra that you see in some open source folks is a horrible trait and an indication of stupidity.
Software development should always be about making the best software possible, and sometimes that means that when you're creating a new version that something that the other guy did was actually the right thing to do.
This is particularly often the case in User Interfaces because while the proprietary world isn't always perfect, I've never seen a completed open source product with a UI that was both original and non crap. Enlightenment comes close, but E17 has been in development for as long as I can remember and even that's mostly stolen from Apple.
What you're doing is preventing them from forcing other people who don't believe that homosexuality is wrong to live their lives according to someone else's values.
In other words metaphorically you're preventing anyone from forcing American Christians to convert to Islam while allowing both American Christians and Muslims to continue to exist and to believe what they already believe with equal protection under the law.
In a free country you have the right to believe anything you want to believe, however, the other guy has the same right to believe what he believes and where there is no justifiable public interest in intervening the government should not intervene in those beliefs.
What that means is not that "the government shouldn't change marriage" it's more that the government shouldn't prevent anyone who wants to be married from being married where there isn't a public interest in doing so.
That is to say if two consenting adults are doing something that isn't hurting anyone else and they want to declare in front of the world that they only want to do those things with each other and no one else and they want some tax benefits and common property rights, they should have the right to do that, and the government shouldn't have the right to tell them that their declaration is any different than anyone else's(ie that their declaration is a civil union whereas someone else's declaration is a marriage).
I've always sort of reckoned that the kind of useless losers who become welfare cheats or as we call them over here dole bludgers, would, if forced into employment, simply become a useless burden on an individual employer as opposed to the government and that society would pay for the salary of that useless incompetent anyway.
A lot of people use the safety net for the things it's supposed to cover, and the things it's supposed to cover are very important. The people who misuse it are largely going to be a drain on society no matter what you do with them, and even if it were ethical to let them starve to death, and even if they weren't likely to turn to a life of crime(though being an effective criminal usually involves a greater deal of togetherness than most of this lot can manage) punishing them is likely to punish others in their family who might potentially not be complete and total losers.
In other words, I don't feel bad paying to help people in need, most of the people who aren't really in need were just going to take my money in another way and children shouldn't have to suffer any more than they already have to just because their parents are wastes of oxygen.
The insanity idea would be closer to the idea of hitting a 3 foot thick steel blast door with an axe. Yes if you had an infinite amount of time, an infinite amount of axes, and were immune to injuries caused by broken axe blades, you could probably make your way through a 3 foot thick steel blast door, however trying to get through that door based on your perceived degree of success when hitting it with an axe is insane.
Of course the case in this situation is not really like either of those situations, the case in point is a bit more like poking a lion with a blunt stick in order to kill it and then trying to poke it again. Unless you've changed the stick or at least where you're poking the lion, you're much more likely to get disemboweled than you are to kill the lion.
In the same way antagonizing a judge by telling him his finding was wrong is unlikely to achieve the desired result unless your argument as to why he was wrong is a particularly good one and sufficiently different from the one you originally sent that he or she reconsiders the issue.
Microsoft has a long term habit of making their "revolutionary OS" about 3 versions later than they anticipated. XP was what 2000 was actually supposed to be and Windows 7 will probably be what Vista was supposed to be.
Most of this just happens because doing something new takes a long time and shareholders and analysts get a little fidgety if they haven't released anything in a while.
The yahoo board are more likely to be fired by the shareholders than Balmer.
For that matter Vista isn't really all that much of a failure in the long run, it gets a lot of bad press, but it's not a horrible OS, and even if financially it does turn into the next ME, the lessons they've learned will still be useful in the next OS.
Balmer has been with Microsoft for a long time, and given that everyone will think that the Microsoft CEO is a vicious, greedy, vindictive SOB even if they put a saint in the position, they may as well get the benefits of an actual vicious, greedy, vindictive SOB.
If you want to worry about being stalked via your mobile phone, be worried about the phone company employees not the police.
I don't trust law enforcement any more than the next guy, but so long as they're logging the requests somewhere and looking for suspicious patterns I don't see a problem.
The only real obstacles to progressing from this kind of role are either not enough or too much ambition(ie folks who don't care and don't try and folks who think that having done a year of help desk makes them qualified to be sys admins).
Working in a call centre(ie a place where all you do is take and log calls, maybe follow a few scripts etc) is dead end work, because it's not IT work.
It also tends to be outsourced to companies that don't do anything but call centre work and where there's no real technical progression path.
Basically speaking Help Desk, or even Call Centre work is a good way to prove you have some real world technical experience, it won't get you a job you're not qualified for, but it will make getting on you are qualified for slightly easier, presuming of course you didn't take a massive step straight down to take it, and of course presuming that your goal is to work in a support role(administration, networking etc). Being a phone monkey probably won't help you become a developer, or a project manager or that sort of thing because it's not in the same chain.
You won't, but you wouldn't pay redhat either. The enterprise may. If Ubuntu finds a home in the enterprise, the enterprise will pay for support for it, that's the way it works.
That doesn't mean we should despair, that's the whole thing about consciousness, we can make decisions, we can work towards not blowing ourselves up, not creating a super plague, and even if for some reason we can't not do those things, we can still simply hope to survive, as we always have and always will.
The reason life thrives everywhere on the planet is not because of some mystical principle, it's because life continues to try. Presuming that life in volcanic vents didn't evolve independently of other life then billions or trillions or more of living things probably died to either get into that environment or to get out of it(if that's where life began), but some of them made it. And those things gained resources that weren't available to others. That's the whole beautiful and terrible thing about life.
If we don't destroy ourselves and it's physically possible, human beings or something like us will colonize outer space.
Maybe we will destroy ourselves, maybe getting anywhere substantially far away is impossible, but that's not going to stop us trying, and the whole "billions of others couldn't do it so why should we be more lucky" is just pathetic.
Do you really think they hand code the news? I'll bet you dollars to donuts that they hand coded a content engine(or at least the front end to one), and the news gets automatically rendered into that content framework. No waste of money, in fact a savings of money.
With the right tools you can read files regardless of permissions, change passwords, add users, etc, almost anything. Building a linux live cd which can read most file formats and ignores ACL's and that's not even counting the various and sundry tools available which allow you to change even a root password to a machine you've forgotten the credentials to.
If the cops or anyone else has your PC they have access to anything on it that's not ecrypted, whether Microsoft wins some quick PR with law enforcement by making it easy for them or not. This is essentially a non story.
The first guns were terrible things, unreliable, dangerous, etc, but when one blew up and killed the operator you could train up someone else very quickly.
The same is true of swords, using a sword, or for that matter any melee weapon is actually quite complicated unless you happen to be 7 feet tall, 200 kilos of pure muscle and using it to bludgeon people to death, and even then a sufficiently skilled smaller man can probably kill you.
Onboard sound can use cpu cycles when you don't want it to, buy yourself a cheap dedicated card and you're fine.
Basically the organized criminals have discovered what the RIAA and MPAA never seem to work out, which is to say that people will pay for the ability to feel legitimate in their purchases.
Sure the legal justification is shaky at best(and in some places purchasing stolen goods can get you jail time), and the funds are going to people who are likely more morally repugnant than the record industry, but people pay it.
This fight isn't about the right or wrong of copyright, it never has been. It's about a bunch of folks fighting to protect their livelihoods. This is a perfectly natural thing for them to do and something we all understand. Unsurprisingly the folks fighting the hardest are the folks whose positions are becoming superfluous under the new system. I could even forgive them, except most of the current batch of record/movie execs have never been anything but scum sucking parasites as their positions have been tecnically superfluous since before they got them.
Generally if you want something to do something odd, and you want to do it in a manner which is pretty well as basic and reliable as you can possibly make it you use RS232.
Second, the reason for the harshness of this is that people are using connections to commit illegal activities. It's basically a possession type charge. They didn't catch you with the pot, but they caught you with a used bong.
Thirdly the I'm an idiot and just let Windows connecto to what it did is covered by the "purposely" defense. It gets you one freebee if you can convince a judge that you're stupid. If you're out there in your car with an antennae on top wardriving you're screwed.
Fourthly, this is theft of service/trespass. Just because I leave my door open doesn't mean you can walk in, just because I leave my access point open(which I don't) doesn't mean you can use my connection. Doing either may be stupid, but it isn't consent. Consent is putting up a sign saying you can come in, or inviting you in.
In short, if it's not yours and the owner hasn't told you you can use it(and setting your AP to FreeInternet might imply consent), then don't use it. If you need to use the internet at a cafe, buy a cup of coffee, don't use someone elses, pay for your own stuff.
You may note that I mentioned drivers and software which depends on kernels(which is what the software which Microsoft has broken is). This doesn't affect userland, but none of the apps on this list are userland.
This was and is the fundamental flaw with wikipedia. Whether you believe that a collaborative encyclopaedia can really work or not, Wikipedia is set up in such a way that the integrity, reliability, and accuracy of any controversial data on the site can come down the the integrity, reliability, and honesty of one man.
Whether Jimmy Wales did or didn't take money, sex, or anything else in exchange for modifying wikipedia articles doesn't realy matter. The problem is that there's nothing in place to prevent him from doing so or even to show that he did it.
Wikipedia has no oversight policy(there doesn't even seem to be a requirement for the involvement of more than one administrator in controversial decisions), and includes the ability to permanently delete content so that not only has the article been changed or removed, but there is no way of knowing that it was ever there.
Any encyclopaedia is a bad reference source, simply because it's an encyclopaedia. But an encyclopaedia that can be rewritten at will by a single person with no oversight is a largely worthless encylopaedia.
Personally I use wikipedia quite often, but I don't bother with it for anything controversial.