"The military/DOD is a huge customer for Microsoft and one they will not give up without an epic battle."
That's okay - after they get destroyed in the epic battle shaping up in Iraq, they'll be open to new ideas. Heh, heh.
Maybe we'll get lucky and when the defeat finger-pointing starts, they'll decide it was Windows instability and insecurity that lost them the war. Or the insurgency was hacking amd virusing their Outlook mail boxes. Or Outlook never delivered their orders on time.
"the only vanilla box you can get for below $350 is a used piece of shit that has Windows ME installed. Get out of your basement, your parents need the space."
Get out of YOUR basement and go to any clone store and you will find nice $350 machines that run Linux very well - and Longhorn not at all based on the estimated requirements for it when it comes out.
"MS has costs associated with selling and supporting software that open source doesn't have"
Not to mention the costs of lawyers to draft restrictive OEM and IP theft contracts and fight anti-trust lawsuits and frivolously sue other small companies such as Lindows and that guy in Brazil.
Not to mention the cost of running ads claiming to be cheaper than Linux - what's wrong with this picture?
And you, "Anonymous Coward", have spent how much bandwidth to complain about this guy? And how many hours have you spent compiling links to everything this guy has said?
And you still don't have the balls to post with an identity?
Now you know why you have Score: 0.
The moderators may be stupid, but they're not THAT stupid.
Assuming of course that in fact there was any such thing - which, given that the report from the US military came EXACTLY at the time the torture scandal was heating up, almost certainly means that the report is entirely bogus.
Any *independent* reporter actually see this shell?
I didn't think so.
The OP must be the only moron left on the planet outside Rush and Ann and Bill who still think there are WMD's in Iraq. Even David Kay, the CIA asshole Bush sent over there with the intention of FAKING the fucking evidence had to come back and say he couldn't find ANYTHING! What the hell more do you morons need?
And now they're STILL trotting out the crap about Saddam and "Al Qaeda" which has been discredited a hundred times by just about everybody on the planet.
People are beginning to describe Bush as a "dry drunk" who can't think straight and is dangerously unstable. This guy makes Nixon at the height of Watergate look calm and cool.
"if the new government becomes stable and protects freedom for its citizens"
Which new government would this be?
The Quislings run by an ex-Baathist-thug, former Saddam assassin, CIA asset Allawi?
Or the phoney elected one they intend to put in place next year - presumably headed up by the same Allawi?
It has been said for months that the Bushies intended to find a new Saddam-like strongman to put in place - just like they did the original Saddam, who was a CIA asset for years before he assumed power. Well, now they've done it - again.
And the Iraqi people know it.
Unless Sistani can force truly open elections, there is NO chance any Iraqi government will be stable - or protect freedom. And it's questionable whether even an openly elected one will protect freedom - or survive both internal insurgency and external CIA/Mossad manipulation.
By TERESA HAMPTON Editor, Capitol Hill Blue Jun 22, 2004, 06:05
Each and every weekday, 11 federal judges meet in secret in Washington and review FBI and Department of Homeland Security requests for warrants to spy on Americans.
And, on average, the court approves seven warrants a day, according to records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
But while the numbers of warrants issued are obtainable (only after a long, bureaucratic battle with the Department of Justice), very little else is known about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secure chambers at the Department of Justice Headquarters.
Some privacy groups refer to the court as a "Star Chamber," a secret coven of judges who hold the future of Americans in their judicial hands. Although the court was created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, it has become recent tool of the Bush Administration to wiretap, follow, investigate and harass Americans under the guise of the war against terrorism.
And the law allows the court to conduct its business in secret, with no oversight from any federal agency or legislative body, including the U.S. Congress.
"This secrecy is unnecessary and allows problems in applying the law to fester," three U.S. Senators - one Democrat and two Republicans - told the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in a letter last year.
The three - Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Charles Grassley of Iowa - say their own investigations have found widespread inaccuracies in warrant applications, breaking of the law by top government attorneys and outright sloppiness in executing the warrants.
"Without oversight and public scrutiny, there is no compelling reason for the court or the Department of Justice to follow the rule of law," the letter said.
Errors in warrant applications have quadrupled since 2000, the senators found, and one FBI agent made so many repeated mistakes he was barred from ever appearing before the justices again.
Yet even with the mistakes, applications for warrants are routinely rubber-stamped by the court. Records obtained through FOIA show that of 3,887 applications for warrants submitted to the court from 2001-2003, only four were rejected (all in 2003). Before those four rejections in 2003, no application before the court had been rejected among the 12,612 processed between 1979 and 2000.
Before the 2001 terrorist attacks, the court reviewed between 500 and 700 applications per year. Since the attacks, the applications have more than doubled, with a record 1,724 applications submitted in 2003.
Legislation pending in both houses of Congress would grant the Department of Justice and the secret court even more leeway in approving wiretaps and surveillance. The Bush Administration wants the law expanded without any oversight by Congress but an increasing number of Representatives and Senators say they want to know more about the court's activities.
Last year, the American Bar Association also urged more Congressional oversight, saying it is impossible to determine if the court is following the law or abusing it.
Specter says the record shows widespread abuse.
He and his fellow Senators say the FBI secretly videotaped a meeting even though the court didn?t authorize video, continued to intercept an American's email even after the warrant expired and continued to tap a wireless phone that no longer belonged to the target and was, in fact, used by an innocent American not connected to the investigation.
They also found the supervisory special agent assigned to terrorism at FBI headquarters admitted under oath that he didn't know the legal standard for obtaining a warrant from the secret court even though he was the one who approved the applications for the warrants.
In a closed hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, a top FBI attorney admitt
And of course you who are totally uninvolved and unconnected can quite easily dismiss personal experience and conversation with senior IT staff members at the college on the basis of nothing more than your theory that I have a problem seeing the "other side of the coin".
Yeah, and in the last month, after having had this account for over a year, I'm now getting at least half a dozen virus-ridden email bounces and fake Microsoft alerts and Nigerian spam from this SBC Yahoo account.
Yahoo sends me email which they say is virus infected and the attachment could not be cleaned so they removed the attachment.
EXCEPT THEY DIDN'T REMOVE THE ATTACHMENT! It's still there and my AV has to move it to the virus vault because it's still infected.
Yahoo obviously has real quality AV software and a complete inability to identify fake Microsoft emails as spam.
What exactly is so bad about our society that you had to have a nonconformist tantrum over anyway?
I don't think/. has the disk space to explain it to you and obviously based on the mere fact that you have to ask the question, you couldn't possibly comprehend the answer anyway.
Well, the NON-"Anonymous Coward" who spent eight years in the Federal joint and who knows that Federal prisons are NOT "pound-me-in-the-ass" joints (at least if you're too old and unattractive to attract the sexual predators) once again writes in to request more objectivity and less stupidity in referencing the Federal prison system.
As for being a "dirty lawbreaker", I am PROUD (if not too impressed) to have robbed two banks in a (wasted) effort to overthrow your suck-ass "dictatorship of the morons" society.
Have a nice day. And I hope you get to occupy a cell some time - you seem like the type to need it.
One also hopes Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other war criminals also get the opportunity once the UN refuses to pass the US exemption from war crimes rider - which is now a total joke given the mass murders and torture in Iraq.
Post reporter dies in hail of bullets. By: DANIEL WILLIAMS on: 20.06.2004 [18:02 ] (133 reads)
The car in which Polish TV reporter Waldemar Milewicz and Algerian correspondent Mounir Bouamrane were killed in a downtown Baghdad ambush last month serves as a stark reminder of how completely the conflict between U.S.-led forces and violent opponents of the occupation is closing in on all foreign civilians working in Iraq.
Gunmen hunt down reporter on Iraq highway by DANIEL WILLIAMS SPECIAL TO THE STAR
BAGHDAD?I guess I've been working for newspapers too long, but when I looked into the face of my would-be killer as he shot bursts of AK-47 fire into my SUV on the superhighway from Falluja to Baghdad, the first thing that came to mind was the likely headline in the next day's paper: Post reporter dies in hail of bullets.
It had already been a harrowing trip through Falluja, the heart of rebellion, revenge and bloodshed in the so-called Sunni Triangle of Iraq.
Along with my driver, Falah, we had woven our way through the city to find ourselves blocked at every exit by masked insurgents who had won free rein after the withdrawal of U.S. Marines in May.
We were worried because the rebels kidnap foreigners and sometimes kill them. This was the town where, in April, ambushers killed and mutilated four American contractors and hung two of the burned bodies from a bridge over the Euphrates River.
I can't print the full name of my driver because mere association with a foreign organization like the Washington Post can mean death. Someone could find him, even in big Baghdad.
When we made it to the highway that leads from Falluja back to the capital, we were relieved.
"Hamdulillah," Falah said as he picked up speed past the Falluja interchange: "Thanks be to God."
"Hamdulillah," I responded. It's one of the key Arabic phrases one should know in Iraq. But God was not exactly finished with us. Out of nowhere, a car painted in the characteristic orange and white of Iraq's taxis pulled up close behind us. I heard a thud, something like the sound of a rubber sledgehammer or mud hitting a wall. I looked back and saw a spider-web pattern on the bulletproof rear window. And then more thuds.
"Oh," I said.
Falah was more precise. "They're shooting," he said and sped up from his already-fast 145 km/h.
The point of this or almost any story from Iraq these days is how completely the conflict between the United States and the violent opponents of U.S. occupation is closing in on anyone who lives here.
For a long time, rebel targets have included Iraqis who work for the foreigners, who work in government and even who labour for Iraqis in business or government. For the past few months, Americans and other foreigners working in Iraq have also been victims of ambush.
There is virtually no discrimination, and the narcotic sense of immunity that gave reporters the notion they could go into a war zone, talk to people and get back safely has been shattered.
The brazenness and frequency of all kinds of insurgent assaults ? from car bombings and mortar attacks to roadside bombs hidden under trash, in goat carcasses, in date palm logs, inside barrels or under asphalt ? have made reporters more and more likely to actually witness rather than just hear about an act of mayhem.
Recently, I was interviewing a sociologist about Shiite Muslim society at his office on the banks of the Tigris River.
We heard a blast, looked out the window and spied three slim figures in masks firing mortars. They casually dismantled the launcher, put it in the back of an Opel station wagon and drove away.
Of course, Iraqis and foreigners alike must be careful to steer clear of U.S. convoys on the road for fear that an ambush might stimulate the heavy American guns to fire or a roadside bomb might go off late and hit civilians.
I have covered conflicts in Palestine, Lebanon, El Salvador, Nicarag
Slashdot Mirror
"The military/DOD is a huge customer for Microsoft and one they will not give up without an epic battle."
That's okay - after they get destroyed in the epic battle shaping up in Iraq, they'll be open to new ideas. Heh, heh.
Maybe we'll get lucky and when the defeat finger-pointing starts, they'll decide it was Windows instability and insecurity that lost them the war. Or the insurgency was hacking amd virusing their Outlook mail boxes. Or Outlook never delivered their orders on time.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
"the only vanilla box you can get for below $350 is a used piece of shit that has Windows ME installed. Get out of your basement, your parents need the space."
Get out of YOUR basement and go to any clone store and you will find nice $350 machines that run Linux very well - and Longhorn not at all based on the estimated requirements for it when it comes out.
"MS has costs associated with selling and supporting software that open source doesn't have"
Not to mention the costs of lawyers to draft restrictive OEM and IP theft contracts and fight anti-trust lawsuits and frivolously sue other small companies such as Lindows and that guy in Brazil.
Not to mention the cost of running ads claiming to be cheaper than Linux - what's wrong with this picture?
Forget the office.
You can send me my check now - the money you just saved not wasting it on an office.
And you, "Anonymous Coward", have spent how much bandwidth to complain about this guy? And how many hours have you spent compiling links to everything this guy has said?
And you still don't have the balls to post with an identity?
Now you know why you have Score: 0.
The moderators may be stupid, but they're not THAT stupid.
Runlevel 6?
Reboot?
You mean 5, right? A typo? I hope.
SCORE 4? INFORMATIVE?
/. morons!
What do you think the FUCKING ARTICLE WAS ABOUT?
Jesus! Wake the fuck up,
Assuming of course that in fact there was any such thing - which, given that the report from the US military came EXACTLY at the time the torture scandal was heating up, almost certainly means that the report is entirely bogus.
Any *independent* reporter actually see this shell?
I didn't think so.
The OP must be the only moron left on the planet outside Rush and Ann and Bill who still think there are WMD's in Iraq. Even David Kay, the CIA asshole Bush sent over there with the intention of FAKING the fucking evidence had to come back and say he couldn't find ANYTHING! What the hell more do you morons need?
And now they're STILL trotting out the crap about Saddam and "Al Qaeda" which has been discredited a hundred times by just about everybody on the planet.
People are beginning to describe Bush as a "dry drunk" who can't think straight and is dangerously unstable. This guy makes Nixon at the height of Watergate look calm and cool.
"if the new government becomes stable and protects freedom for its citizens"
Which new government would this be?
The Quislings run by an ex-Baathist-thug, former Saddam assassin, CIA asset Allawi?
Or the phoney elected one they intend to put in place next year - presumably headed up by the same Allawi?
It has been said for months that the Bushies intended to find a new Saddam-like strongman to put in place - just like they did the original Saddam, who was a CIA asset for years before he assumed power. Well, now they've done it - again.
And the Iraqi people know it.
Unless Sistani can force truly open elections, there is NO chance any Iraqi government will be stable - or protect freedom. And it's questionable whether even an openly elected one will protect freedom - or survive both internal insurgency and external CIA/Mossad manipulation.
"which are well documented, and are beginnning to be discovered"
/.'ers!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!
Now THIS guy is a complete fucking moron!
Here we see the corrosive influence of Fox News on
Not ONE fucking WMD has been found in Iraq! Not ONE!
Period!
You complete and utter idiot!!
You mean Castro?
Oh, wait, he's currently in charge in Cuba - nothing "ex" about him.
My mistake.
(Heh, heh)
No. Microsoft will go the extra mile and get Dick Cheney to say it.
Cheney will say anybody is a terrorist - except Halliburton.
Inside the Federal Government's 'Star Chamber'
By TERESA HAMPTON
Editor, Capitol Hill Blue
Jun 22, 2004, 06:05
Each and every weekday, 11 federal judges meet in secret in Washington and review FBI and Department of Homeland Security requests for warrants to spy on Americans.
And, on average, the court approves seven warrants a day, according to records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
But while the numbers of warrants issued are obtainable (only after a long, bureaucratic battle with the Department of Justice), very little else is known about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secure chambers at the Department of Justice Headquarters.
Some privacy groups refer to the court as a "Star Chamber," a secret coven of judges who hold the future of Americans in their judicial hands. Although the court was created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, it has become recent tool of the Bush Administration to wiretap, follow, investigate and harass Americans under the guise of the war against terrorism.
And the law allows the court to conduct its business in secret, with no oversight from any federal agency or legislative body, including the U.S. Congress.
"This secrecy is unnecessary and allows problems in applying the law to fester," three U.S. Senators - one Democrat and two Republicans - told the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in a letter last year.
The three - Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Charles Grassley of Iowa - say their own investigations have found widespread inaccuracies in warrant applications, breaking of the law by top government attorneys and outright sloppiness in executing the warrants.
"Without oversight and public scrutiny, there is no compelling reason for the court or the Department of Justice to follow the rule of law," the letter said.
Errors in warrant applications have quadrupled since 2000, the senators found, and one FBI agent made so many repeated mistakes he was barred from ever appearing before the justices again.
Yet even with the mistakes, applications for warrants are routinely rubber-stamped by the court. Records obtained through FOIA show that of 3,887 applications for warrants submitted to the court from 2001-2003, only four were rejected (all in 2003). Before those four rejections in 2003, no application before the court had been rejected among the 12,612 processed between 1979 and 2000.
Before the 2001 terrorist attacks, the court reviewed between 500 and 700 applications per year. Since the attacks, the applications have more than doubled, with a record 1,724 applications submitted in 2003.
Legislation pending in both houses of Congress would grant the Department of Justice and the secret court even more leeway in approving wiretaps and surveillance. The Bush Administration wants the law expanded without any oversight by Congress but an increasing number of Representatives and Senators say they want to know more about the court's activities.
Last year, the American Bar Association also urged more Congressional oversight, saying it is impossible to determine if the court is following the law or abusing it.
Specter says the record shows widespread abuse.
He and his fellow Senators say the FBI secretly videotaped a meeting even though the court didn?t authorize video, continued to intercept an American's email even after the warrant expired and continued to tap a wireless phone that no longer belonged to the target and was, in fact, used by an innocent American not connected to the investigation.
They also found the supervisory special agent assigned to terrorism at FBI headquarters admitted under oath that he didn't know the legal standard for obtaining a warrant from the secret court even though he was the one who approved the applications for the warrants.
In a closed hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, a top FBI attorney admitt
that would sell their asses to any politician or cop - and not even on demand but voluntarily.
And this is not even for security from "terrorism" or anything else, but just because somebody in authority says they have to.
And also so they can claim to be "better citizens" than those who correctly suspect the government of
being a crooked extortion and protection racket.
Well, sorry, morons, but in fact you're all gutless punks - and I use the term in the prison sense.
I spit on you slaves.
Have a nice day, fuckwads.
Your description of yourself as a "fucktard without a cause" sort of sums it up better, I think.
Have a nice day, moron.
And of course you who are totally uninvolved and unconnected can quite easily dismiss personal experience and conversation with senior IT staff members at the college on the basis of nothing more than your theory that I have a problem seeing the "other side of the coin".
I too can clearly see the problem here.
Conversation over. Have a nice day.
Yeah, and in the last month, after having had this account for over a year, I'm now getting at least half a dozen virus-ridden email bounces and fake Microsoft alerts and Nigerian spam from this SBC Yahoo account.
Yahoo sends me email which they say is virus infected and the attachment could not be cleaned so they removed the attachment.
EXCEPT THEY DIDN'T REMOVE THE ATTACHMENT! It's still there and my AV has to move it to the virus vault because it's still infected.
Yahoo obviously has real quality AV software and a complete inability to identify fake Microsoft emails as spam.
Wonderful fucking email system.
What exactly is so bad about our society that you had to have a nonconformist tantrum over anyway?
/. has the disk space to explain it to you and obviously based on the mere fact that you have to ask the question, you couldn't possibly comprehend the answer anyway.
I don't think
The same applies to your comment on prisons.
Which is WHY you're a moron.
First of all, you don't use nanotech to manipulate atoms, you use it to manipulate molecules. You don't do it "atom by atom".
/.
/.
As for "seriously", you'd be well advised to reread the article. Oh, wait, this is
Maybe you'd better start by reading Drexler's original book, "Engines of Creation", before saying anything at all.
The rest of the posters could follow suit if they aren't afraid of being considered "fanboys".
Oh, wait, this is
Well, the NON-"Anonymous Coward" who spent eight years in the Federal joint and who knows that Federal prisons are NOT "pound-me-in-the-ass" joints (at least if you're too old and unattractive to attract the sexual predators) once again writes in to request more objectivity and less stupidity in referencing the Federal prison system.
As for being a "dirty lawbreaker", I am PROUD (if not too impressed) to have robbed two banks in a (wasted) effort to overthrow your suck-ass "dictatorship of the morons" society.
Have a nice day. And I hope you get to occupy a cell some time - you seem like the type to need it.
One also hopes Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other war criminals also get the opportunity once the UN refuses to pass the US exemption from war crimes rider - which is now a total joke given the mass murders and torture in Iraq.
Again, have a nice day.
You're definitely a /. nerd-boy!
Be proud!
Like THIS news report?
Post reporter dies in hail of bullets.
By: DANIEL WILLIAMS on: 20.06.2004 [18:02 ] (133 reads)
The car in which Polish TV reporter Waldemar Milewicz and Algerian correspondent Mounir Bouamrane were killed in a downtown Baghdad ambush last month serves as a stark reminder of how completely the conflict between U.S.-led forces and violent opponents of the occupation is closing in on all foreign civilians working in Iraq.
Gunmen hunt down reporter on Iraq highway by DANIEL WILLIAMS SPECIAL TO THE STAR
BAGHDAD?I guess I've been working for newspapers too long, but when I looked into the face of my would-be killer as he shot bursts of AK-47 fire into my SUV on the superhighway from Falluja to Baghdad, the first thing that came to mind was the likely headline in the next day's paper: Post reporter dies in hail of bullets.
It had already been a harrowing trip through Falluja, the heart of rebellion, revenge and bloodshed in the so-called Sunni Triangle of Iraq.
Along with my driver, Falah, we had woven our way through the city to find ourselves blocked at every exit by masked insurgents who had won free rein after the withdrawal of U.S. Marines in May.
We were worried because the rebels kidnap foreigners and sometimes kill them. This was the town where, in April, ambushers killed and mutilated four American contractors and hung two of the burned bodies from a bridge over the Euphrates River.
I can't print the full name of my driver because mere association with a foreign organization like the Washington Post can mean death. Someone could find him, even in big Baghdad.
When we made it to the highway that leads from Falluja back to the capital, we were relieved.
"Hamdulillah," Falah said as he picked up speed past the Falluja interchange: "Thanks be to God."
"Hamdulillah," I responded. It's one of the key Arabic phrases one should know in Iraq. But God was not exactly finished with us. Out of nowhere, a car painted in the characteristic orange and white of Iraq's taxis pulled up close behind us. I heard a thud, something like the sound of a rubber sledgehammer or mud hitting a wall. I looked back and saw a spider-web pattern on the bulletproof rear window. And then more thuds.
"Oh," I said.
Falah was more precise. "They're shooting," he said and sped up from his already-fast 145 km/h.
The point of this or almost any story from Iraq these days is how completely the conflict between the United States and the violent opponents of U.S. occupation is closing in on anyone who lives here.
For a long time, rebel targets have included Iraqis who work for the foreigners, who work in government and even who labour for Iraqis in business or government. For the past few months, Americans and other foreigners working in Iraq have also been victims of ambush.
There is virtually no discrimination, and the narcotic sense of immunity that gave reporters the notion they could go into a war zone, talk to people and get back safely has been shattered.
The brazenness and frequency of all kinds of insurgent assaults ? from car bombings and mortar attacks to roadside bombs hidden under trash, in goat carcasses, in date palm logs, inside barrels or under asphalt ? have made reporters more and more likely to actually witness rather than just hear about an act of mayhem.
Recently, I was interviewing a sociologist about Shiite Muslim society at his office on the banks of the Tigris River.
We heard a blast, looked out the window and spied three slim figures in masks firing mortars. They casually dismantled the launcher, put it in the back of an Opel station wagon and drove away.
Of course, Iraqis and foreigners alike must be careful to steer clear of U.S. convoys on the road for fear that an ambush might stimulate the heavy American guns to fire or a roadside bomb might go off late and hit civilians.
I have covered conflicts in Palestine, Lebanon, El Salvador, Nicarag
Here you go!
Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans 24/7
How Big Brother Is Watching, Listening and Misusing Information About You
since humans won't be remotely human in 50-100 years anyway.
Absolutely true.
They don't even protect from knives unless you've got ceramic or steel plates in them, either.