"For those customers still running products like Windows 2000, Exchange 2000 or the earlier Exchange 5.5, are no longer in Microsoft mainstream support and are thus not covered under standard support agreements, the situation is even more dire, as it will cost them $4,000 for all the DST updates."
Any time Bill can scratch some more money out his suckers^m^m^m^m^m^m^mcustomers, he'll do it - especially if it motivates them to UPGRADE to his EVEN MORE EXPENSIVE NEW POS...
Gee, I wonder if this will screw up all those Microsoft shills who like to quote "studies" (from guys like Rob Enderle) that "prove" Microsoft is "faster" than OSS in fixing security holes...
Nah. They'll just fall back on the idea that OSS has MORE security holes - because a Linux distro comes with 2,000 packages instead of nothing like Windows.
You notice they never add in the Symantec security holes to the Windows total when they're discussing how security holes are to be counted. But they'll add in the SSH holes.
The only reason Microsoft is offering its compilers for free is because all the students couldn't afford them and ended up using either Linux or the OSS free compilers or other languages not supported by Microsoft.
"Developer friendliness" has nothing to do with it.
That the one with the dull corporate Web site fronting a corporation nobody gives a shit about anyway?
You have to have something worth attacking to get attacked.
Oh, wait, you're the guy with no locks on his doors, and his car door is unlocked, and you never put your money in the bank, you just lay it out on your lawn because nobody would ever steal from you. So you don't need any security because you've never been attacked by a tiger...
Since that rarely happens, the question I assume is hypothetical.
When my Mandriva 2007 upgrade broke my Mandriva 2006, I merely installed Kubuntu and carried on (although some of the stupidities in Kubuntu are making me long to go back to Mandriva.)
If Windows breaks, what alternative Windows do you install? Vista?
Only because Bill saw everybody abandoning VS for the free stuff?
Just like Bill is offering Office 2007 to Australian students for $75 - when the academic program in the US never offered Office - the Microsoft cash cow - at all? Only the OS's - to get students hooked on Windows early - because otherwise all students would be using Linux?
"IT shouldn't be an advocate of any product, because it needs to make determinations between them."
THIS from a guy who takes money from Microsoft to push Windows and attack Linux.
I mean, I thought Zionists and neocons had no shame and no intellectual integrity. This guy puts them to shame.
"Enderle clearly implies there was some sort of deliberate conspiracy to deceive by the people advocating linux"
Again, Enderle is projecting his own paid shilling onto his opponent.
This guy is a classic case of aberrant psychology. It doesn't get clearer than that.
The problem is that this drivel is intended to be read by people who don't know his history, don't know his bias, don't know he's a paid shill. They just see his bio as a "researcher" and think this is serious stuff.
Rob Enderle is the biggest fucking joke in so-called "IT journalism", not to mention his piss-ant "research organization."
He's a paid Microsoft shill whose only job is to attack Linux at every opportunity.
The dildo-heads here at/. who think his piece is some sort of "news" are obviously utter morons.
Obviously this crap was posted here just to start a flame-war because it's a slow Friday.
And of course it worked because the Microsoft shills had one article to congregate at.
Pathetic losers. These jerks are on a par with the 30% of morons in this country STILL supporting George Bush and the neocons, no matter how many people die as a result.
Every day I go to client sites running Windows. Every day I have to deal with this POS refusing to shut down, refusing to kill errant processes, refusing to connect across a network, hosing itself for no fucking reason whatsoever, being invaded by every piece of crapware in existence, and costing my clients the fucking earth on top of it all.
Anybody using or advocating the use of Windows is at the very least ignorant, and at worst a moron.
And anybody who thinks anything Rob Enderle has to say on any subject whatsoever is of significance is an UTTER moron.
"We did not get pubic lice from other hominids. We got them from the ancestors of gorillas."
Where does Paris Hilton get hers?
Based on some of her sex vids, I gotta say maybe from the same source, since many of her boyfriends appear to be gorillas - or at least dumber than gorillas.
Maybe even dumber than her, since they're screwing her.
In the US, Microsoft has an academic program that allows students in computer science classes to pick up Windows Server 2003, Project, SQL Server and other software for FREE. I got all that stuff while taking classes at Community College of San Francisco.
HOWEVER, the Microsoft "cash cow" - Office - was NOT offered in this US program.
So it's interesting that Microsoft is offering Office to Australian students for $75. Basically, Microsoft is trying to make a killing here by selling a product to students who normally could not afford to buy that product at its retail - or even a discounted educational store - price.
Not to mention that Microsoft also gets to condition students to using its Office product - as opposed to OpenOffice, which probably would have been the students first choice.
I doubt Microsoft will run the same program in the US - unless it discovers that Office 2007 is so bloated and so different in its interface that sales are seriously slower than expected. Then they may try to rope in students and sell a few more copies by discounting it as in Australia.
I don't even need to read his remarks
on
High Tech High 2.0
·
· Score: 1
It's obvious where he's going to go.
Linux and OSS are making huge inroads into education.
So Gates decides to be the "philanthropist" again - by dreaming up a notion and tying it to US "patriotism" disguised as "competitiveness" - with the end goal of making sure everybody in education loads up on Microsoft software.
Total Gates bullshit, as usual.
For Gates, spending $65 million on a school is obviously much better than using FREE software since the latter directly threatens his entire market.
Anybody who can't see this asshole AS an asshole IS an asshole.
I'm not sure who is the bigger asshole personality wise. That's a tossup.
Both of them need to be put out of business - Cheney by impeachment, trial and imprisonment for lying the US into a war AND damaging US security by outing a covert CIA agent and related CIA operations, and Gates simply out of the IT business completely along with his MicroCrap company.
Microsoft is directly identifying your MACHINE, if not YOU personally.
But we don't know that they aren't identifying YOU personally. Maybe they are, depending on what other data mining they are doing internally. The point is, we do not KNOW.
Maybe they don't care to identify you personally UNTIL they want to at some point in the future - maybe to sell your machine info to the RIAA in the event that your DRM use is suspect.
Maybe they don't care to identify you personally but are intent on TAGGING your machine as a potential pirate based on your WGA refusal.
The bottom line is that Microsoft does NOT need this mass of information about each and every one of 900 million machines in order to do their business of selling functional software.
That's BULLSHIT.
Microsoft is doing this for OTHER reasons which are irrelevant to the performance of the primary function and VERY relevant to sucking every last dime out of people's pockets for the benefit of Bill Gates.
Like I said yesterday - put this paranoid, greed-sucking ASSHOLE out of business! NOW!
Why the hell would Microsoft want the Hard Drive Serial Number just to indicate that someone didn't want to install WGA?
What possible use could that information have in connection with why someone refused WGA - except to be able to IDENTIFY that machine in the future for some OTHER nefarious reason? Obviously Microsoft expects ANYONE who refuses WGA to be intending to use a fake Windows key in the future, if not now.
In other words, Microsoft is TAGGING EVERYONE who refuses WGA as a potential pirate well in advance of their being so - or their being so at all.
I mean, how much more obvious does it get?
They may not be identifying YOU personally - but they are definitely identifying your MACHINE individually.
Which is pretty much the same thing depending on what ELSE they have done or may do in the future.
People need to realize what utter ASSHOLES the management who runs Microsoft ARE. These guys make the jerks at Enron look like Orphan Annie.
And STUPID to boot! I mean, no matter WHAT they've done over the years, they STILL have millions of pirate copies running around. So they spend all this effort dreaming up new activation and detection methods - for what? It's all been an utter waste of everybody's time! Windows Vista has had its activation cracked within a few months despite all their efforts.
Way to go, Bill, you paranoid, greed-sucking moron!
Why not try concentrating on producing an OS that doesn't FUCKING SUCK rather than worrying about nailing down every goddamn dime from everybody's pockets?
If the goddamn OS didn't cost $500 - and wasn't an illegal monopoly to boot - there wouldn't BE that many pirates out there. Not that it matters. Bill doesn't care about "pirates" - he just wants control of everybody's money regardless. He's not trying to prevent "pirates" - he's trying to nail down control of each and every individual customer so as to make sure that customer pays him every single dime HE thinks he's OWED by the world.
However, at this time, biotechnology-based life extension is only going to be useful for those of us who are on the edge of death within the next thirty years or so. Those who are under forty are likely to have their life spans extended by another fifty years or so by life extension methods. This will bring their life spans at a minimum to the end of this century.
Nanotechnology will subsume biotechnology-based methods of life extension over the next fifty years, and then go further and actually modify or replace the human body-brain complex.
This will render "life extension" per se irrelevant, since the resulting Transhuman entities will probably not even be "biological" in most senses of the term.
In other words, the "di-morphic split" between humans and Transhumans is going to be far more radical than merely those who have extended life spans and those who don't. When you have normal humans competing with Transhumans with "brains" that think a million times faster than humans, the issue is going to be far more than who's getting old or not.
Humans being wedded to primate competition are going to see Transhumans as "monsters" and have a violent reaction toward their existence. Since Transhumans are going to be far more effective at defending themselves than humans are, this does not bode well for the continued existence of humans. The only way humans will survive is if Transhumans are SO much more effective at defending themselves that there is no NEED for Transhumans to exterminate humans - rather, they will simply ignore them or go elsewhere.
My standard assumption is that of the three possibilities: 1) transmogrify humans; 2) exterminate humans; 3) ignore humans, the most likely is option 4) all of the above in varying degrees.
The only extremely unlikely outcome is that Transhumans lose.
However, at this point I think technological progress will leapfrog any evolutionary changes and allow direct modification - or even replacement - of the human body-brain complex within the next 50 years or so.
And he was supported by the Catholic Church in Germany during his rise. I specifically remember a nun being quoted as saying how wonderful it was that "that nice Mr. Hitler" had been made Chancellor.
Not to mention that I never said atheists should be put on a pedestal. RATIONAL people make better decisions than irrational ones. It's that simple.
Your other suggested implications of my post are equally the product of your own imagination.
Humans are primates. Their primary distinction from ordinary primates is the capacity of conceptual processing - which includes imagination.
Humans are the only primates who are AWARE of death as an abstract. Coupled with the inbuilt fear of death, humans would be at an evolutionary disadvantage if they didn't have some means of coping with that all-pervasive fear. potentiated by their ability to be continuously aware of it, not just aware when under direct threat.
So evolution selected for humans with the capacity to fantasize a "solution" to death. Never mind that the solution was no solution in reality. It worked. The same conceptual processing capability that allowed humans to manipulate their environment also allowed them to manipulate themselves - to fool themselves that they had a "solution" to death even when they didn't. This allowed them to function well enough to advance human development.
Unfortunately the "solution" also did NOT work. It caused most humans to be unable to come up with a rational solution to the problem of death. Only with the slow advance of rationality and science and technology has it become possible to contemplate a rational solution to death. In the meantime, their fantasy "solutions" resulted in murders, suicidal behavior, oppression and war. As usual, most human "solutions" lead to the exact opposite of their intended goals.
Over the millenia, quite a few attempts to (more or less) rationally deal with death were attempted. This was a result of the human capacity for conceptual reasoning. The Gnostics, the Taoists, and others attempted to find ways to deal with death by means of theories of the functioning of the universe and the human body. It would appear most and probably all such attempts failed. Some of them, however, led to the inventions of science and technology.
Now, however, we have nanotechnology and biotechnology. A rational solution is clearly feasible.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the human race continues to behave according to irrational belief systems. These belief systems threaten the security of everyone on the planet when coupled with military weapons technology.
The ignorance and irrationality of the citizens of the United States and Israel at this time, coupled with the insane lust for power of the controllers of these countries, are the greatest threat to peace on this planet ever known in the history of this planet. Compared to that, the so-called "threat" of Islamic fundamentalism pales because Islamic fundamentalists have little power to threaten any significant percentage of the world. The US and Israel, however, nuclear powers both, have the capacity to kill millions of people and to start wars that will kill millions, perhaps scores of millions, more.
Unfortunately, given the number of irrational humans, nothing can be done about this situation until the development of sufficient nanotechnology to take down the US and Israeli states. Israel could be dealt with by merely stealing one of its own nuclear weapons and taking its government out. But the US is not so easily dealt with - even the destruction of Washington, D.C., by a nuclear weapon would not eliminate the US threat to the world.
So the result over the next few decades will be more wars and the slow bleeding to death of these two states economically, militarily and geopolitically, until their threat is reduced. Unfortunately, this will result in the deaths of millions of civilians in the Middle East and elsewhere until this slow, irrational process is completed.
The fall of empires is never easy.
And it's all because evolution is sloppy in the way it selects for survival. Had evolution selected for higher rationality and less fear in humans, we would not be in this situation.
"As we have deepened our relationship with Microsoft as a managed ISV, our options for change grow less viable. For example, I did a LiveMeeting for Satya Nadella from Microsoft last summer, and the first thing he noticed was the Google toolbar in my Web browser. Needless to say, future presentations were made sans the Google toolbar. This being said, I don't feel we are losing out on anything by not exploring other options."
Gee, I wonder why with that kind of "bow down to Bill" attitude.
The rest of the discussion of options in Part 2 is on a par with that. "Gee, we can't switch because we run AutoCAD. You can't even run AutoCAD in a VM." "Gee, we can't switch because we have software with dongles."
Guys, all of those are REASONS to switch - not reasons you CAN'T switch.
Slashdot Mirror
You gotta love this!
"For those customers still running products like Windows 2000, Exchange 2000 or the earlier Exchange 5.5, are no longer in Microsoft mainstream support and are thus not covered under standard support agreements, the situation is even more dire, as it will cost them $4,000 for all the DST updates."
Any time Bill can scratch some more money out his suckers^m^m^m^m^m^m^mcustomers, he'll do it - especially if it motivates them to UPGRADE to his EVEN MORE EXPENSIVE NEW POS...
Gee, I wonder if this will screw up all those Microsoft shills who like to quote "studies" (from guys like Rob Enderle) that "prove" Microsoft is "faster" than OSS in fixing security holes...
Nah. They'll just fall back on the idea that OSS has MORE security holes - because a Linux distro comes with 2,000 packages instead of nothing like Windows.
You notice they never add in the Symantec security holes to the Windows total when they're discussing how security holes are to be counted. But they'll add in the SSH holes.
Maybe they should add in their ASSholes...
"It's not the size of the hard drive, it's how fast you can boot up."
Guys have been saying this for years.
Women, however, disagree...
The only reason Microsoft is offering its compilers for free is because all the students couldn't afford them and ended up using either Linux or the OSS free compilers or other languages not supported by Microsoft.
"Developer friendliness" has nothing to do with it.
"Developer lock-in" has everything to do with it.
Oh, really?
That the one with the dull corporate Web site fronting a corporation nobody gives a shit about anyway?
You have to have something worth attacking to get attacked.
Oh, wait, you're the guy with no locks on his doors, and his car door is unlocked, and you never put your money in the bank, you just lay it out on your lawn because nobody would ever steal from you. So you don't need any security because you've never been attacked by a tiger...
Microsoft shill moron.
Since that rarely happens, the question I assume is hypothetical.
When my Mandriva 2007 upgrade broke my Mandriva 2006, I merely installed Kubuntu and carried on (although some of the stupidities in Kubuntu are making me long to go back to Mandriva.)
If Windows breaks, what alternative Windows do you install? Vista?
Bwahahahahahahah!!!
And VSE came out when? Last year?
Only because Bill saw everybody abandoning VS for the free stuff?
Just like Bill is offering Office 2007 to Australian students for $75 - when the academic program in the US never offered Office - the Microsoft cash cow - at all? Only the OS's - to get students hooked on Windows early - because otherwise all students would be using Linux?
"Fair" has nothing to do with it.
"Unix is really _very_ user friendly, it's just a bit more picky about who it makes friends with."
Heh, I just got an email from Mark Gibbs asking about "Virtual Bumber Stickers" - and that was the quote he used as an example.
You wouldn't be a "Gibbs Irregular", would you?
"IT shouldn't be an advocate of any product, because it needs to make determinations between them."
THIS from a guy who takes money from Microsoft to push Windows and attack Linux.
I mean, I thought Zionists and neocons had no shame and no intellectual integrity. This guy puts them to shame.
"Enderle clearly implies there was some sort of deliberate conspiracy to deceive by the people advocating linux"
Again, Enderle is projecting his own paid shilling onto his opponent.
This guy is a classic case of aberrant psychology. It doesn't get clearer than that.
The problem is that this drivel is intended to be read by people who don't know his history, don't know his bias, don't know he's a paid shill. They just see his bio as a "researcher" and think this is serious stuff.
This is how propaganda is disseminated.
Jesus, the Microsoft shills are out in force.
/. who think his piece is some sort of "news" are obviously utter morons.
This first post was rated "0:Insightful"!
Fucking morons.
Rob Enderle is the biggest fucking joke in so-called "IT journalism", not to mention his piss-ant "research organization."
He's a paid Microsoft shill whose only job is to attack Linux at every opportunity.
The dildo-heads here at
Obviously this crap was posted here just to start a flame-war because it's a slow Friday.
And of course it worked because the Microsoft shills had one article to congregate at.
Pathetic losers. These jerks are on a par with the 30% of morons in this country STILL supporting George Bush and the neocons, no matter how many people die as a result.
Every day I go to client sites running Windows. Every day I have to deal with this POS refusing to shut down, refusing to kill errant processes, refusing to connect across a network, hosing itself for no fucking reason whatsoever, being invaded by every piece of crapware in existence, and costing my clients the fucking earth on top of it all.
Anybody using or advocating the use of Windows is at the very least ignorant, and at worst a moron.
And anybody who thinks anything Rob Enderle has to say on any subject whatsoever is of significance is an UTTER moron.
Good point.
How many other companies get to do free industry-wide data mining at their customer's expense and without their customers permission? Not many.
"We did not get pubic lice from other hominids. We got them from the ancestors of gorillas."
Where does Paris Hilton get hers?
Based on some of her sex vids, I gotta say maybe from the same source, since many of her boyfriends appear to be gorillas - or at least dumber than gorillas.
Maybe even dumber than her, since they're screwing her.
In the US, Microsoft has an academic program that allows students in computer science classes to pick up Windows Server 2003, Project, SQL Server and other software for FREE. I got all that stuff while taking classes at Community College of San Francisco.
HOWEVER, the Microsoft "cash cow" - Office - was NOT offered in this US program.
So it's interesting that Microsoft is offering Office to Australian students for $75. Basically, Microsoft is trying to make a killing here by selling a product to students who normally could not afford to buy that product at its retail - or even a discounted educational store - price.
Not to mention that Microsoft also gets to condition students to using its Office product - as opposed to OpenOffice, which probably would have been the students first choice.
I doubt Microsoft will run the same program in the US - unless it discovers that Office 2007 is so bloated and so different in its interface that sales are seriously slower than expected. Then they may try to rope in students and sell a few more copies by discounting it as in Australia.
It's obvious where he's going to go.
Linux and OSS are making huge inroads into education.
So Gates decides to be the "philanthropist" again - by dreaming up a notion and tying it to US "patriotism" disguised as "competitiveness" - with the end goal of making sure everybody in education loads up on Microsoft software.
Total Gates bullshit, as usual.
For Gates, spending $65 million on a school is obviously much better than using FREE software since the latter directly threatens his entire market.
Anybody who can't see this asshole AS an asshole IS an asshole.
Dick Cheney...is Bill Gates.
I'm not sure who is the bigger asshole personality wise. That's a tossup.
Both of them need to be put out of business - Cheney by impeachment, trial and imprisonment for lying the US into a war AND damaging US security by outing a covert CIA agent and related CIA operations, and Gates simply out of the IT business completely along with his MicroCrap company.
Microsoft is directly identifying your MACHINE, if not YOU personally.
But we don't know that they aren't identifying YOU personally. Maybe they are, depending on what other data mining they are doing internally. The point is, we do not KNOW.
Maybe they don't care to identify you personally UNTIL they want to at some point in the future - maybe to sell your machine info to the RIAA in the event that your DRM use is suspect.
Maybe they don't care to identify you personally but are intent on TAGGING your machine as a potential pirate based on your WGA refusal.
The bottom line is that Microsoft does NOT need this mass of information about each and every one of 900 million machines in order to do their business of selling functional software.
That's BULLSHIT.
Microsoft is doing this for OTHER reasons which are irrelevant to the performance of the primary function and VERY relevant to sucking every last dime out of people's pockets for the benefit of Bill Gates.
Like I said yesterday - put this paranoid, greed-sucking ASSHOLE out of business! NOW!
"if your company is bad at something" - like making an OS? - "and you have a lot of money, you solve it by hiring people from outside..."
Gee, maybe open source has the right idea after all...
And they don't even have a lot of money...
Oh, wait, that latter part is WHY Bill is in business.
Never mind.
Sure, the swine are flying - right out of Steve's ass!
Or maybe that's just excessive flatulence...
This is really the kicker.
Why the hell would Microsoft want the Hard Drive Serial Number just to indicate that someone didn't want to install WGA?
What possible use could that information have in connection with why someone refused WGA - except to be able to IDENTIFY that machine in the future for some OTHER nefarious reason? Obviously Microsoft expects ANYONE who refuses WGA to be intending to use a fake Windows key in the future, if not now.
In other words, Microsoft is TAGGING EVERYONE who refuses WGA as a potential pirate well in advance of their being so - or their being so at all.
I mean, how much more obvious does it get?
They may not be identifying YOU personally - but they are definitely identifying your MACHINE individually.
Which is pretty much the same thing depending on what ELSE they have done or may do in the future.
People need to realize what utter ASSHOLES the management who runs Microsoft ARE. These guys make the jerks at Enron look like Orphan Annie.
And STUPID to boot! I mean, no matter WHAT they've done over the years, they STILL have millions of pirate copies running around. So they spend all this effort dreaming up new activation and detection methods - for what? It's all been an utter waste of everybody's time! Windows Vista has had its activation cracked within a few months despite all their efforts.
Way to go, Bill, you paranoid, greed-sucking moron!
Why not try concentrating on producing an OS that doesn't FUCKING SUCK rather than worrying about nailing down every goddamn dime from everybody's pockets?
If the goddamn OS didn't cost $500 - and wasn't an illegal monopoly to boot - there wouldn't BE that many pirates out there. Not that it matters. Bill doesn't care about "pirates" - he just wants control of everybody's money regardless. He's not trying to prevent "pirates" - he's trying to nail down control of each and every individual customer so as to make sure that customer pays him every single dime HE thinks he's OWED by the world.
"You hobbyists steal your software."
That's Bill's defining mantra.
Get this asshole out of business. Now, please.
More importantly, we spend $750 billion to kill Muslims and anybody else who "threatens" US (and Israeli) world hegemony...
We could knock a few billion off that figure and divert it to NASA, I'm sure.
Oh, wait, that's primate fear and primate competition we're talking about here.
Never mind.
A possibly valid point.
However, at this time, biotechnology-based life extension is only going to be useful for those of us who are on the edge of death within the next thirty years or so. Those who are under forty are likely to have their life spans extended by another fifty years or so by life extension methods. This will bring their life spans at a minimum to the end of this century.
Nanotechnology will subsume biotechnology-based methods of life extension over the next fifty years, and then go further and actually modify or replace the human body-brain complex.
This will render "life extension" per se irrelevant, since the resulting Transhuman entities will probably not even be "biological" in most senses of the term.
In other words, the "di-morphic split" between humans and Transhumans is going to be far more radical than merely those who have extended life spans and those who don't. When you have normal humans competing with Transhumans with "brains" that think a million times faster than humans, the issue is going to be far more than who's getting old or not.
Humans being wedded to primate competition are going to see Transhumans as "monsters" and have a violent reaction toward their existence. Since Transhumans are going to be far more effective at defending themselves than humans are, this does not bode well for the continued existence of humans. The only way humans will survive is if Transhumans are SO much more effective at defending themselves that there is no NEED for Transhumans to exterminate humans - rather, they will simply ignore them or go elsewhere.
My standard assumption is that of the three possibilities: 1) transmogrify humans; 2) exterminate humans; 3) ignore humans, the most likely is option 4) all of the above in varying degrees.
The only extremely unlikely outcome is that Transhumans lose.
A possibly valid point.
However, at this point I think technological progress will leapfrog any evolutionary changes and allow direct modification - or even replacement - of the human body-brain complex within the next 50 years or so.
Human evolution is no longer relevant.
Hitler was not an atheist.
And he was supported by the Catholic Church in Germany during his rise. I specifically remember a nun being quoted as saying how wonderful it was that "that nice Mr. Hitler" had been made Chancellor.
Not to mention that I never said atheists should be put on a pedestal. RATIONAL people make better decisions than irrational ones. It's that simple.
Your other suggested implications of my post are equally the product of your own imagination.
Humans are primates. Their primary distinction from ordinary primates is the capacity of conceptual processing - which includes imagination.
Humans are the only primates who are AWARE of death as an abstract. Coupled with the inbuilt fear of death, humans would be at an evolutionary disadvantage if they didn't have some means of coping with that all-pervasive fear. potentiated by their ability to be continuously aware of it, not just aware when under direct threat.
So evolution selected for humans with the capacity to fantasize a "solution" to death. Never mind that the solution was no solution in reality. It worked. The same conceptual processing capability that allowed humans to manipulate their environment also allowed them to manipulate themselves - to fool themselves that they had a "solution" to death even when they didn't. This allowed them to function well enough to advance human development.
Unfortunately the "solution" also did NOT work. It caused most humans to be unable to come up with a rational solution to the problem of death. Only with the slow advance of rationality and science and technology has it become possible to contemplate a rational solution to death. In the meantime, their fantasy "solutions" resulted in murders, suicidal behavior, oppression and war. As usual, most human "solutions" lead to the exact opposite of their intended goals.
Over the millenia, quite a few attempts to (more or less) rationally deal with death were attempted. This was a result of the human capacity for conceptual reasoning. The Gnostics, the Taoists, and others attempted to find ways to deal with death by means of theories of the functioning of the universe and the human body. It would appear most and probably all such attempts failed. Some of them, however, led to the inventions of science and technology.
Now, however, we have nanotechnology and biotechnology. A rational solution is clearly feasible.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the human race continues to behave according to irrational belief systems. These belief systems threaten the security of everyone on the planet when coupled with military weapons technology.
The ignorance and irrationality of the citizens of the United States and Israel at this time, coupled with the insane lust for power of the controllers of these countries, are the greatest threat to peace on this planet ever known in the history of this planet. Compared to that, the so-called "threat" of Islamic fundamentalism pales because Islamic fundamentalists have little power to threaten any significant percentage of the world. The US and Israel, however, nuclear powers both, have the capacity to kill millions of people and to start wars that will kill millions, perhaps scores of millions, more.
Unfortunately, given the number of irrational humans, nothing can be done about this situation until the development of sufficient nanotechnology to take down the US and Israeli states. Israel could be dealt with by merely stealing one of its own nuclear weapons and taking its government out. But the US is not so easily dealt with - even the destruction of Washington, D.C., by a nuclear weapon would not eliminate the US threat to the world.
So the result over the next few decades will be more wars and the slow bleeding to death of these two states economically, militarily and geopolitically, until their threat is reduced. Unfortunately, this will result in the deaths of millions of civilians in the Middle East and elsewhere until this slow, irrational process is completed.
The fall of empires is never easy.
And it's all because evolution is sloppy in the way it selects for survival. Had evolution selected for higher rationality and less fear in humans, we would not be in this situation.
"As we have deepened our relationship with Microsoft as a managed ISV, our options for change grow less viable. For example, I did a LiveMeeting for Satya Nadella from Microsoft last summer, and the first thing he noticed was the Google toolbar in my Web browser. Needless to say, future presentations were made sans the Google toolbar. This being said, I don't feel we are losing out on anything by not exploring other options."
Gee, I wonder why with that kind of "bow down to Bill" attitude.
The rest of the discussion of options in Part 2 is on a par with that. "Gee, we can't switch because we run AutoCAD. You can't even run AutoCAD in a VM." "Gee, we can't switch because we have software with dongles."
Guys, all of those are REASONS to switch - not reasons you CAN'T switch.