All Communism(at least Marx's version) really is is the belief that at some point in the future human societies will learn to cooperate on the macro scale the way they once did on the micro scale. That is to say that we'll find a way to live with each other in a city of 10 million the way we did in a small town of 50(ie. no more "I don't know who you are so I don't care if you live or die"). The Leninist/Stalinist government control of corporations is just the way a couple of early 20th century Russian radicals thought they could force that result to happen now, and has been proven to fail over and over again.
Fascism(from the Italian for a bundle of sticks) was an Italian version of national socialism(little N not big N) which is to say "socialism for me and people like me and we'll make money off other people". The modern idea of Fascism comes from an unfortunate alliance between Mussolini and Hitler and the general confusion between "national socialism" and the "National Socialism" of the Nazi party in Hitler's Germany.
It might also be noted that the idea of a fascist mainland china is rather an amusing idea as the KMT(or GMD depending on your choice of spellings) of Chiang Kai-Shek was modelled very heavily after Mussolini's Italy, and was decidedly fascist in nature. I'm not entirely sure how the Chinese would feel about the idea that they had the same political system as the people who initially ran Taiwan, but I can hazard a guess.
Laptops cost more than desktops for comparable performance, have a higher support cost than desktops(they break more easily, they're more finicky, etc), and most people don't need them.
If laptops were handed out based on genuine business need(ie benefits outweigh costs) as opposed to as part of "mobility initiatives" and as executive toys, and if organizations understood the increase in support costs and resourced appropriately then we wouldn't have a problem with laptops.
All the problems on this list are true, but the biggest problem is people using laptops who don't have a justifiable business need to have one, people who think that because it's a laptop it's theirs and they can use it for personal home use, and businesses who don't understand that laptops take more time to support and so more resources are needed to support them.
Natural monopolies aren't about public utilities, they're about the infrastructure to deliver them. We don't have a monopoly on pizzas, but only the government builds the roads on which that pizza is transported. We shouldn't have a monopoly on phone providers, but we should have only one group that builds the lines(the government).
Note, I never said exchange wasn't a steaming barely functional pile of bits that sort of work together. I just said that if you actually want the functionality that exchange offers(your case is not one of those times and exchange shouldn't have been used), that it's the best steaming barely functional pile of bits avaiable for the task.
The problem with natural monopolies is usually when you allow one company to actually own the infrastructure over which it is delivered(as opposed to merely maintaining on contract a publicly owned infrastructure).
It's inefficient to have multiple telephone lines coming into your house and it stifles competition because every company who wants to deliver you telephone service has to either put in their own infrastructure(expensive) or rent it from an existing provider. That's not to say that being a telco or a gas company, or an electric company isn't expensive in and of itself, but if every one of them had to dig up the streets and put in new pipes, cables, etc then you'd not only never be able to actually get anywhere because everything would always be under construction, but pretty much no one other than the current players could afford to play anyway.
At the same time, allowing a private company to own the infrastructure and be responsible for all costs associated with said infrastructure is equally foolish as you either have to regulate the company in question to the point that they can't control their own business or they tend to overcharge their potential competitors to the point of monopoly.
The ideal solution as far as I can tell is to pay for said infrastructure out of taxes(either local, state, or federal depending on the nature of the infrastructure), and maintain public ownership of said infrastructure. You then charge companies a reasonable access fee for using the equipment(or none if your government is that way inclined) and contract out maintainence and builing of said infrastructure to the company best able to perform these tasks(best value for money).
I know that the idea of the government owning things scares libertarians and some folks who are still afraid of the red menace, but as infrastructure of this type is done essentially for the public good(in addition to providing improved quality of life these services improve land value and productivity therefor increasing tax revenue for the government), private ownership is not really an option(as I've said before, private enterprise does an absolutely terrible job at anything which can't be measured in dollars in income) and public ownership just makes sense.
Hate to break it to you, but most of Exchange's competitors suck too. I'm not talking about e-mail servers, there are tonnes of better e-mail servers out there, but there's pretty much nothing which competes in the Exchange space(calendar, appointments, messaging, voice mail, etc). I work in a place using Novell's Groupwise product(about the only other thing on the market) and it's not only just about as terrible, but since it has no market share, nothing integrates with it.
People don't care because when DRM is non intrusive it doesn't affect most people.
The average person has no information ideology and so long as they're not inconvenienced by whatever DRM exists they don't care.
That said you're right, the more companies use DRM to be dickheads(and MLB is notorious about being dickheads about copyright), the more it will inconvenience people and the more they'll want it gone. So for all of you who have a fundamental objection to DRM, send a thank you letter to MLB because it's folks like them who will get rid of it for you.
What's the alternative. Someone has to organise things, and private enterprise does an absolutely terrible job on anything where the goal can't be measured money.
Does the US need to spend more than everyone else in the world combined on their military? Do they need to have as many three letter agencies as they do? Probably not, but these aren't usually the things that small government proponents want to dismantle.
Someone has to organize treaties, trade, commerce, and all the other things the constitution says the government should manage and it's complicated and expensive for a nation the size of the US in the modern era. Even if we went to the libertarian ideal and got rid of the government all together we'd still have to have someone organize all those things, and after a bunch of groups got together to negotiate for the same things you'd end up with basically a government again.
Corporations have to obey legal requests from law enforcement, that's how it works. It's how rule of law works.
Yahoo! has neither the right nor a responsibility to determine the validity of a legal case(they can't and shouldn't decide if a suspected criminal is actually a criminal). Yahoo! can't and shouldn't try to determine the difference between a serial child molester and a political dissident. So they either have to refuse all requests for the private information of their users, or they have to submit to all legal requests regardless of the record of their country of origin.
The only way to accomplish the former in all countries is for Yahoo! and everyone else to log nothing whatsoever, or to have the protection of international law, or at least US law.
This would mean that no government could get private information about users. No information about spammers, no information about pedophiles, con artists, terrorists, murderers, or any other group you can imagine no matter how terrible they might be. If we make exceptions for certain groups then law enforcement in oppressive regimes will just claim that the people they're looking for aren't a member of that group and Yahoo! isn't qualified to make that decision.
There's nothing wrong with biggish government. The world is both bigger and smaller than it was in 1776 and we need a bigger and more complex government to deal with it. It's also expected that certain parts of government will attempt to change things in order to make their lives easier at the expense of private citizens. The US and most western democracies have checks and balances in place for that.
We even have checks and balances for when the people who are supposed to keep the three letter organizations in check get out of control. It's called voting. We even have the ability for third parties to run when everyone sucks. The problem we have is that the people on average don't care. They buy the line about how doing all this will save them from the terrorist threat which doesn't exist. They buy the idea that the terrorists hate American freedoms and the only way to save our freedoms is to let the government take them away.
Democracy is about getting the government you vote for, and when the people who vote are apathetic, ignorant, greedy, fearful, and bigotted, you get apathetic, ignorant, fearful, and bigotted government. In other words crap government.
Is this current state of affairs George Bush(or more accurately Dick Cheney)'s fault? Yes. Dick Cheney is an evil bastard and Bush seems for the most part to just do what he's told. We've established that, we've paid for it now comes the new question?
Why are none of the feebs running for the next election being held accountable for fixing it? Why are we letting both parties and most of the third party candidates get away with not promising to dismantle this crap?
That said of course, those 100 lines of code take less than an hour to right, but if you'd bought your 400 Mhz machine brand spanking new when they started building E17 it would likely have succumbed to the ravages of time before E17 finishes.
Not that E17 isn't great, I'm seriously looking forward to when it actually works without being a gigantic pain to work with, but efficiency is about more than the amount of energy used(particularly when the the amount of energy used by a modern processor isn't substantially more than some older processors), it can be about efficiency of time. If we really wanted to save electricity we could stop using computers at all and go back to doing everything by hand, but that's not efficient either.
I don't know about you, but I find in most bars/pubs, the ambient noise(music, people talking, etc) is so loud that I can't hear my cell phone ring not the other way around. Sure there are exceptions, but most of those exceptions are places where you have a much smaller number of customers, and can deal with things on an individual basis.
Like it or not, cell phones are a fact of modern life, and they don't really change anything. There's nothing fundamentally more rude about talking on cell phone than talking to another person who is in the room, and a lot of folks for one reason or another need to be reachable. Most of those folks will leave the area to deal with what they need to deal with, though it can be hard to do that without disrupting someone.
Cell Phone rudeness is basically a combination of a number of things.
People thinking that a phone conversation is automatically ruder than talking to a person.
The modulation of voice in cell phones so you don't know how loud you're talking
Inconsiderate jackasses who were likely to be inconsiderate jackasses in one way or another regardless.
None of these things are solved by blocking or faraday cages. Intolerant people will still be intolerant, rude people will still be rude, and the fact that most of us can't control our volume when talking on the phones is an issue to be looked at directly.
Trent's comments were made in Sydney Australia, to Australians based on the idea that CD's here are overpriced.
Down here CD's do cost $20(or more). There are quite a few legacies of the old exchange rates down here that refuse to go down(games~=$100 for new PC games more for console, videos ~= $30 for a DVD and music ~= $20 for a single CD for example). Entertainment here in general is much more expensive than it is in the US(movie ~= $16, concert > $100, etc).
Trent feels, probably quite rightly, that the cost of music in Australia is much higher than it should be. As such he's told his Australian fans that they shouldn't put up with it, and should steal his music instead. Trent's comments were not aimed at the US market, nor at the excesses of the RIAA, but at the excesses of the Australin Record Industry Association(our down home equivilant though they whinge more and sue less).
It's very simple. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is for the Enterprise, that's what they sell. Same thing for SuSe(though with some extensions). They sell rather expensive support contracts to organizations large enough to require them, folks don't pay that kind of money because they can't get the product some other way, they pay it to not have to have linux developers on staff, and to have support and limited culpability from a third party. Red Hat might lose a few boundary cases(people who want an enterprise style system but don't want support), but it's not going to be a major drama for them.
That said I think that Enterprise systems are pretty terrible and I've never really liked Red Hat's product. But that's a story for another time.
It's not really just fox though. During the time period when most of those shows got canceled most of the networks were canning shows if they weren't immediately successful, or randomly changing the time-slot. Firefly wasn't there yet when it got cancelled, but I think it would have been. The movie certainly was.
I don't really know what to say about Family Guy, I have no idea why they cancelled that, though they did bring it back(along with American Dad which isn't as funny).
Futurama though, was a lost cause, it wasn't what Matt Groening wanted to make, and if it hadn't been for the Simpsons, Fox never would have aired it in the first place. Neither party was happy with it existing and so it went.
Let me preface this by saying I use firefox as my primary browser at home, and my primary environment for web design at work, the speed of rendering plus the time things like firebug save me in debugging the oddities of javascript are just amazing and blow anything IE 6 has to offer out of the water(I've used IE 7 a bit, but we're not ready to roll that out corporate wide yet so while I check things with it I write for IE6 and Firefox).
There are some issues I have with the fact that there's no simple way for users to set trusted zone and Firefox security tends to throw the baby out with the bath water as far as security goes(no modal windows, no clipboard modification etc, I know why this is the case, but sometimes folks like me have legitimate reasons for these sorts of things). I'm also a bit annoyed with the whole "we'll fix it in 3.0" thing that's going on right now, but that's another story.
This all sounds like a wonderful story for the Mozilla corp, but it's not. While the bundling didn't help, Netscape got beaten by IE because IE was better. It's not now, but that's mostly because Microsoft have been slack bastards and sat on it for years.
I remember the browser wars well. I wasn't on the web for mosaic, but I was on for the browser wars. I know that having bundled IE got a lot of people on the net who wouldn't have otherwise gotten there, and I know that Netscape got bundled by ISPs for a while too. Netscape 4 was a great browser, it was better than IE 4, when I had to choose between those two, I used Netscape. However, Netscape 4 wasn't better than IE 5, and by extension it wasn't better than IE 6.
After Netscape 4 there was pretty much nothing for a number of years. Netscape 6 was an abomination, an unfinished rendering agent(gecko is great now but it wasn't done then). Opera was and is a great browser, probably the greatest browser of that time(might still be haven't played with it in a while) most of the innovations of the new era of browsers came from Opera, but it never caught on. Partly that was because in order to be faster it gave up on all the terrible web kludges and large chucks of the web in those days was terrible kludges. It could also be its linux reliance on QT which was bad back then, or the cost, who knows. You want to find a case for why a good browser failed, look at Opera, but back then Netscape wasn't in it and Mozilla wasn't done.
As for the reason why there are standards out there that nobody complies with, it's because the standards suck.
I think the question is more what's the technological innovation. The slashdot crowd aren't really much for innovative uses of existing processes as you'll see if you take a look at any patent conversation. So since there isn't any technical difference between matching a signature and matching a picture then it's not really technologically new and therefor uninteresting.
Opt in filters work great if the number of people you want to talk to is small, fixed, and well known. Which is to say opt in filters work great if you're anti-social and have no friends. For regular people, if they have to jump through hoops every time they change their contact details they just won't talk to you.
I bought Vista Ultimate sometime last april or may(can't really recall), mostly out of curiosity. I'm running a Athlon 64 X2 4200 with 2 GB of Ram and an Nvidia 7600(DX 9) video card, so basically a decent PC, but not cutting edge, with the new core 2 duo chipsets you could put something together that's faster for less money than I spent.
I don't run it in a client server environment so I can't comment on network copys or any of that sort of thing, but in general it's not too bad.
It's no more resource intensive for most things than XP was when it first came out(compared to currently available hardware and previous Operating Systems) some parts of it are actually quite a bit faster. It's possible that if you're playing a lot of shooters or doing other things that are programmed to use every bit of resource you can possibly get your hands on you might notice a difference, but I've been playing Bioshock and had no gaming slow downs.
The User Protection system sucks, I turned it off. It's sort of a difficult thing to judge though. Personally it was the screen turning gray and everything stopping for 5 seconds that drove me nuts not the actual notifications, and Microsoft could probably take that out, but at the same time regular users wouldn't be using elevated privelidges as often as I do, and probably need a serious hitch in their workflow in order for them not to just click through the warning.
DRM hasn't been a problem for me, I haven't tried any purchased HD content, but with my setup I haven't noticed anything different when playing regular old MP3's and AVI's. I don't watch DVD's in Microsoft because they're stuck with enforcing region codes which I can't deal with because I've moved from one region to another and half my legal DVD's are one region and half another and I'm not going to buy a second copy of something I legally already own. I've had my video driver restart a total of one time, so that hasn't really been a big deal. It's a little better as a media player than XP was, but a properly configured linux system is probably better, still quite tolerable though.
The new interface is pretty(and getting a little bit prettier), it's not really anything you can't do on linux though if you bother to take the time to install the appropriate software. The new locations of things take a bit of getting used to which can be a little frustrating especially if you were like me and had XP running with the old Win2k interface, but the learning curve isn't all that hard.
I hate the searching system, but I don't really use it all that much so I haven't really taken the time to set it up properly, so I don't know whether it just sucks or whether I just haven't configured indexing properly and haven't learned to use it yet.
To sum up, I can't really comment about it as a server OS, but it's basically the same situation that happened when Windows XP first came out, not worth getting unless you were going to pay for one anyway.
From my experience, speeding doesn't cause accidents, it makes accidents worse. Unfortunately, the things that actually cause accidents (tail gating, not paying attention to the road, bad road design, etc) are difficult and expensive to monitor. Presumably the governments and police work on the principle that since they can't or won't stop accidents from happening, they're going to attack speeding because in theory it should mean that the severity of accidents is reduced(sometimes to zero when the driver has the opportunity to stop the car in time).
That said, while I don't have much against speeding tickets(though some of the speed traps during end of month revenue raising are a bit annoying), I hate speed cameras, because they neither prevent the behaviour(most folks don't even know they've been hit during the day and so aren't scared into driving sensibly for a while as they would be when they're stopped by a cop) nor are they capable of stopping or even monitoring all the additional bad behaviour on the roads that a cop might be able to.
Well it really depends on a couple of things, presuming that your encryption method of choice has no weak points(ie backdoors or algorithm faults) and P!=NP and the government doesn't have a quantum computer and factoring is indeed hard, then breaking your encryption basically involves a brute force approach. Since for most reasonable encyrption methods these assumptions are valid(at least at the moment), we'll presume that brute force is the only way to crack it.
They did a distributed computing project a few years back to break a 64 bit encryption method and it took them a little over 5 years. Most encryption keys these days are 128 bits or higher and every bit you add doubles the number of possibilities they'd have to check, so for 128 bit using the same level of resources brute force would take 92,233,720,368,547,758,080 years(assuming that the five years case was an average case). Computers are a lot faster than they were, but not that much faster.
To sum up, if encryption works at all, no one is going to get in without knowing your password, and the shows are bollocks. That said some encryption algorithms do contain backdoors for the US government, and some algorithms are badly written(WEP for instance), P may equal NP and the US government will probably have a quantum computer as soon as they're available so YMMV.
Just wanted to make that one clear. The Senate down here is much more about moderating bills that are already going to go through as opposed to being directly involved with legislation. For the most part its role tends to be to bicker continuously and moderate the really terrible stuff. Folks here tend to vote pragmatically for parliament and then vote their conscience for the senate.
Most of the time it works pretty well(though the current government is sort of suffering quite a bit because in the last election they took the senate too and there's no one there to buffer their own stupidity), but it's not composed of the same sorts of people as the US Senate and an on-line senator would fit in pretty well there.
Add the fact that most politicians tend to just vote the way of the polls anyway.
In Microsoft's defense that's mostly because a lot of linux distributions give you files that Microsoft can't distribute because they either host outside the US and ignore software patents or just don't care. Media Player only sucks because it has to follow all the stupid idiotic media company laws(like actually paying attention to DVD regions).
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Fascism(from the Italian for a bundle of sticks) was an Italian version of national socialism(little N not big N) which is to say "socialism for me and people like me and we'll make money off other people". The modern idea of Fascism comes from an unfortunate alliance between Mussolini and Hitler and the general confusion between "national socialism" and the "National Socialism" of the Nazi party in Hitler's Germany.
It might also be noted that the idea of a fascist mainland china is rather an amusing idea as the KMT(or GMD depending on your choice of spellings) of Chiang Kai-Shek was modelled very heavily after Mussolini's Italy, and was decidedly fascist in nature. I'm not entirely sure how the Chinese would feel about the idea that they had the same political system as the people who initially ran Taiwan, but I can hazard a guess.
If laptops were handed out based on genuine business need(ie benefits outweigh costs) as opposed to as part of "mobility initiatives" and as executive toys, and if organizations understood the increase in support costs and resourced appropriately then we wouldn't have a problem with laptops.
All the problems on this list are true, but the biggest problem is people using laptops who don't have a justifiable business need to have one, people who think that because it's a laptop it's theirs and they can use it for personal home use, and businesses who don't understand that laptops take more time to support and so more resources are needed to support them.
Natural monopolies aren't about public utilities, they're about the infrastructure to deliver them. We don't have a monopoly on pizzas, but only the government builds the roads on which that pizza is transported. We shouldn't have a monopoly on phone providers, but we should have only one group that builds the lines(the government).
Note, I never said exchange wasn't a steaming barely functional pile of bits that sort of work together. I just said that if you actually want the functionality that exchange offers(your case is not one of those times and exchange shouldn't have been used), that it's the best steaming barely functional pile of bits avaiable for the task.
It's inefficient to have multiple telephone lines coming into your house and it stifles competition because every company who wants to deliver you telephone service has to either put in their own infrastructure(expensive) or rent it from an existing provider. That's not to say that being a telco or a gas company, or an electric company isn't expensive in and of itself, but if every one of them had to dig up the streets and put in new pipes, cables, etc then you'd not only never be able to actually get anywhere because everything would always be under construction, but pretty much no one other than the current players could afford to play anyway.
At the same time, allowing a private company to own the infrastructure and be responsible for all costs associated with said infrastructure is equally foolish as you either have to regulate the company in question to the point that they can't control their own business or they tend to overcharge their potential competitors to the point of monopoly.
The ideal solution as far as I can tell is to pay for said infrastructure out of taxes(either local, state, or federal depending on the nature of the infrastructure), and maintain public ownership of said infrastructure. You then charge companies a reasonable access fee for using the equipment(or none if your government is that way inclined) and contract out maintainence and builing of said infrastructure to the company best able to perform these tasks(best value for money).
I know that the idea of the government owning things scares libertarians and some folks who are still afraid of the red menace, but as infrastructure of this type is done essentially for the public good(in addition to providing improved quality of life these services improve land value and productivity therefor increasing tax revenue for the government), private ownership is not really an option(as I've said before, private enterprise does an absolutely terrible job at anything which can't be measured in dollars in income) and public ownership just makes sense.
Hate to break it to you, but most of Exchange's competitors suck too. I'm not talking about e-mail servers, there are tonnes of better e-mail servers out there, but there's pretty much nothing which competes in the Exchange space(calendar, appointments, messaging, voice mail, etc). I work in a place using Novell's Groupwise product(about the only other thing on the market) and it's not only just about as terrible, but since it has no market share, nothing integrates with it.
I understand libertarianism. Libertarianism is the ideal of leave my cash alone and fuck everyone else.
The average person has no information ideology and so long as they're not inconvenienced by whatever DRM exists they don't care.
That said you're right, the more companies use DRM to be dickheads(and MLB is notorious about being dickheads about copyright), the more it will inconvenience people and the more they'll want it gone. So for all of you who have a fundamental objection to DRM, send a thank you letter to MLB because it's folks like them who will get rid of it for you.
Does the US need to spend more than everyone else in the world combined on their military? Do they need to have as many three letter agencies as they do? Probably not, but these aren't usually the things that small government proponents want to dismantle.
Someone has to organize treaties, trade, commerce, and all the other things the constitution says the government should manage and it's complicated and expensive for a nation the size of the US in the modern era. Even if we went to the libertarian ideal and got rid of the government all together we'd still have to have someone organize all those things, and after a bunch of groups got together to negotiate for the same things you'd end up with basically a government again.
Yahoo! has neither the right nor a responsibility to determine the validity of a legal case(they can't and shouldn't decide if a suspected criminal is actually a criminal). Yahoo! can't and shouldn't try to determine the difference between a serial child molester and a political dissident. So they either have to refuse all requests for the private information of their users, or they have to submit to all legal requests regardless of the record of their country of origin.
The only way to accomplish the former in all countries is for Yahoo! and everyone else to log nothing whatsoever, or to have the protection of international law, or at least US law.
This would mean that no government could get private information about users. No information about spammers, no information about pedophiles, con artists, terrorists, murderers, or any other group you can imagine no matter how terrible they might be. If we make exceptions for certain groups then law enforcement in oppressive regimes will just claim that the people they're looking for aren't a member of that group and Yahoo! isn't qualified to make that decision.
We even have checks and balances for when the people who are supposed to keep the three letter organizations in check get out of control. It's called voting. We even have the ability for third parties to run when everyone sucks. The problem we have is that the people on average don't care. They buy the line about how doing all this will save them from the terrorist threat which doesn't exist. They buy the idea that the terrorists hate American freedoms and the only way to save our freedoms is to let the government take them away.
Democracy is about getting the government you vote for, and when the people who vote are apathetic, ignorant, greedy, fearful, and bigotted, you get apathetic, ignorant, fearful, and bigotted government. In other words crap government.
Is this current state of affairs George Bush(or more accurately Dick Cheney)'s fault? Yes. Dick Cheney is an evil bastard and Bush seems for the most part to just do what he's told. We've established that, we've paid for it now comes the new question?
Why are none of the feebs running for the next election being held accountable for fixing it? Why are we letting both parties and most of the third party candidates get away with not promising to dismantle this crap?
Not that E17 isn't great, I'm seriously looking forward to when it actually works without being a gigantic pain to work with, but efficiency is about more than the amount of energy used(particularly when the the amount of energy used by a modern processor isn't substantially more than some older processors), it can be about efficiency of time. If we really wanted to save electricity we could stop using computers at all and go back to doing everything by hand, but that's not efficient either.
Like it or not, cell phones are a fact of modern life, and they don't really change anything. There's nothing fundamentally more rude about talking on cell phone than talking to another person who is in the room, and a lot of folks for one reason or another need to be reachable. Most of those folks will leave the area to deal with what they need to deal with, though it can be hard to do that without disrupting someone.
Cell Phone rudeness is basically a combination of a number of things.
None of these things are solved by blocking or faraday cages. Intolerant people will still be intolerant, rude people will still be rude, and the fact that most of us can't control our volume when talking on the phones is an issue to be looked at directly.
Down here CD's do cost $20(or more). There are quite a few legacies of the old exchange rates down here that refuse to go down(games~=$100 for new PC games more for console, videos ~= $30 for a DVD and music ~= $20 for a single CD for example). Entertainment here in general is much more expensive than it is in the US(movie ~= $16, concert > $100, etc).
Trent feels, probably quite rightly, that the cost of music in Australia is much higher than it should be. As such he's told his Australian fans that they shouldn't put up with it, and should steal his music instead. Trent's comments were not aimed at the US market, nor at the excesses of the RIAA, but at the excesses of the Australin Record Industry Association(our down home equivilant though they whinge more and sue less).
That said I think that Enterprise systems are pretty terrible and I've never really liked Red Hat's product. But that's a story for another time.
I don't really know what to say about Family Guy, I have no idea why they cancelled that, though they did bring it back(along with American Dad which isn't as funny).
Futurama though, was a lost cause, it wasn't what Matt Groening wanted to make, and if it hadn't been for the Simpsons, Fox never would have aired it in the first place. Neither party was happy with it existing and so it went.
There are some issues I have with the fact that there's no simple way for users to set trusted zone and Firefox security tends to throw the baby out with the bath water as far as security goes(no modal windows, no clipboard modification etc, I know why this is the case, but sometimes folks like me have legitimate reasons for these sorts of things). I'm also a bit annoyed with the whole "we'll fix it in 3.0" thing that's going on right now, but that's another story.
This all sounds like a wonderful story for the Mozilla corp, but it's not. While the bundling didn't help, Netscape got beaten by IE because IE was better. It's not now, but that's mostly because Microsoft have been slack bastards and sat on it for years.
I remember the browser wars well. I wasn't on the web for mosaic, but I was on for the browser wars. I know that having bundled IE got a lot of people on the net who wouldn't have otherwise gotten there, and I know that Netscape got bundled by ISPs for a while too. Netscape 4 was a great browser, it was better than IE 4, when I had to choose between those two, I used Netscape. However, Netscape 4 wasn't better than IE 5, and by extension it wasn't better than IE 6.
After Netscape 4 there was pretty much nothing for a number of years. Netscape 6 was an abomination, an unfinished rendering agent(gecko is great now but it wasn't done then). Opera was and is a great browser, probably the greatest browser of that time(might still be haven't played with it in a while) most of the innovations of the new era of browsers came from Opera, but it never caught on. Partly that was because in order to be faster it gave up on all the terrible web kludges and large chucks of the web in those days was terrible kludges. It could also be its linux reliance on QT which was bad back then, or the cost, who knows. You want to find a case for why a good browser failed, look at Opera, but back then Netscape wasn't in it and Mozilla wasn't done.
As for the reason why there are standards out there that nobody complies with, it's because the standards suck.
I think the question is more what's the technological innovation. The slashdot crowd aren't really much for innovative uses of existing processes as you'll see if you take a look at any patent conversation. So since there isn't any technical difference between matching a signature and matching a picture then it's not really technologically new and therefor uninteresting.
Opt in filters work great if the number of people you want to talk to is small, fixed, and well known. Which is to say opt in filters work great if you're anti-social and have no friends. For regular people, if they have to jump through hoops every time they change their contact details they just won't talk to you.
I don't run it in a client server environment so I can't comment on network copys or any of that sort of thing, but in general it's not too bad.
It's no more resource intensive for most things than XP was when it first came out(compared to currently available hardware and previous Operating Systems) some parts of it are actually quite a bit faster. It's possible that if you're playing a lot of shooters or doing other things that are programmed to use every bit of resource you can possibly get your hands on you might notice a difference, but I've been playing Bioshock and had no gaming slow downs.
The User Protection system sucks, I turned it off. It's sort of a difficult thing to judge though. Personally it was the screen turning gray and everything stopping for 5 seconds that drove me nuts not the actual notifications, and Microsoft could probably take that out, but at the same time regular users wouldn't be using elevated privelidges as often as I do, and probably need a serious hitch in their workflow in order for them not to just click through the warning.
DRM hasn't been a problem for me, I haven't tried any purchased HD content, but with my setup I haven't noticed anything different when playing regular old MP3's and AVI's. I don't watch DVD's in Microsoft because they're stuck with enforcing region codes which I can't deal with because I've moved from one region to another and half my legal DVD's are one region and half another and I'm not going to buy a second copy of something I legally already own. I've had my video driver restart a total of one time, so that hasn't really been a big deal. It's a little better as a media player than XP was, but a properly configured linux system is probably better, still quite tolerable though.
The new interface is pretty(and getting a little bit prettier), it's not really anything you can't do on linux though if you bother to take the time to install the appropriate software. The new locations of things take a bit of getting used to which can be a little frustrating especially if you were like me and had XP running with the old Win2k interface, but the learning curve isn't all that hard.
I hate the searching system, but I don't really use it all that much so I haven't really taken the time to set it up properly, so I don't know whether it just sucks or whether I just haven't configured indexing properly and haven't learned to use it yet.
To sum up, I can't really comment about it as a server OS, but it's basically the same situation that happened when Windows XP first came out, not worth getting unless you were going to pay for one anyway.
That said, while I don't have much against speeding tickets(though some of the speed traps during end of month revenue raising are a bit annoying), I hate speed cameras, because they neither prevent the behaviour(most folks don't even know they've been hit during the day and so aren't scared into driving sensibly for a while as they would be when they're stopped by a cop) nor are they capable of stopping or even monitoring all the additional bad behaviour on the roads that a cop might be able to.
I'm well aware of this, but the original post asked about strong passwords. And my post presumed you don't have a broken algorithm like WEP.
They did a distributed computing project a few years back to break a 64 bit encryption method and it took them a little over 5 years. Most encryption keys these days are 128 bits or higher and every bit you add doubles the number of possibilities they'd have to check, so for 128 bit using the same level of resources brute force would take 92,233,720,368,547,758,080 years(assuming that the five years case was an average case). Computers are a lot faster than they were, but not that much faster.
To sum up, if encryption works at all, no one is going to get in without knowing your password, and the shows are bollocks. That said some encryption algorithms do contain backdoors for the US government, and some algorithms are badly written(WEP for instance), P may equal NP and the US government will probably have a quantum computer as soon as they're available so YMMV.
Most of the time it works pretty well(though the current government is sort of suffering quite a bit because in the last election they took the senate too and there's no one there to buffer their own stupidity), but it's not composed of the same sorts of people as the US Senate and an on-line senator would fit in pretty well there.
Add the fact that most politicians tend to just vote the way of the polls anyway.
In Microsoft's defense that's mostly because a lot of linux distributions give you files that Microsoft can't distribute because they either host outside the US and ignore software patents or just don't care. Media Player only sucks because it has to follow all the stupid idiotic media company laws(like actually paying attention to DVD regions).