"Macrovision and other companies' claims that they can "protect" content. They can't, but they've made a lot of money by convincing people that they can, but unfortunately, that's all starting to unravel."
Let's reword this:
Microsoft and other companies claim that they can "protect" an OS. They can't, but they've made a lot of money by convincing people that they can, but unfortunately, that's all starting to unravel.
I'd say that's equally and completely true.
Not a criticism of your point, which is true, merely an observation.
This scares me, because one of my favorite singers, Andrea Corr, has a solo album coming out this year, and rumor has it that the music execs want to make her "the next J-Lo". Which scares fans because most of them can't stand J-Lo.
Besides, Andrea doesn't have the booty to be "the next J-Lo."
But Andrea looks good with hair and probably wouldn't look good without it.
So any cloning has to be done leaving in the genes for hair.
As for the "voice-destroying virus", that's already happened - it's called "digital processing". All the record industry bimbos sound alike (except maybe Jewel and a couple others). Even Andrea doesn't sound like Andrea on CD - only in live concert. That's why I rarely listen to Corrs CDs or MP3s, but prefer to watch Corrs videos. Not to mention that the Corrs girls are gorgeous and somehow MP3's and CD's tend not to point that out - must be the audio only content...
Tell it to my current client who has had more trouble with QuickBooks in the last couple months than he's had in years.
Their last release, according to him, was a disaster. Numerous very large patches had to be applied, and he still has some problems, I think.
Not to mention the stupid thing needs to run in ADMINISTRATOR MODE at all times - which is giving Intuit fits trying to move to Vista. Turns out QuickBooks was never certified for Windows XP, either, because they use the poor programming practice of using the Registry to communicate between third party add-ons, according to the article I read.
As for accounting software not being suitable for OSS because of "liability" issues, that's utter nonsense. Just because software is OSS doesn't mean it isn't capable of being supported by a company with full support guarantees.
Not to mention that Marcus Ranum pointed out in one of his rants that NOBODY ever sues software companies for failure to perform anyway. Once a company has poured a ton of money and effort into a software, they will continue to do so no matter HOW BAD the thing is. The only reason a company wants another company behind software is so some manager can CYA by SAYING - not DOING - that they want "someone to sue."
In fact, accounting software historically has been a bitch for commercial companies to develop and use. EVERY company does its accounting slightly differently than any other, no matter what accounting "standards" there are. Most accounting packages have evolved over the last three decades to be reasonably flexible, but there is undoubtedly still a thriving "accounting package modification consulting" industry that does what it can to make these things more flexible. Stories abound over the last three decades about how accounting and ERP software is inflexible, hard to manage, hard to change to match corporate business rule and regulatory rule changes, and the like.
OSS is far more likely to be flexible enough to deal with such issues than any commercial product.
somebody who wants to call Linux "GNU/Linux"? (And, yes, some of these clowns have decided to call Solaris "GNU/Solaris" now that Sun wants to use GPLv3. Idiots.)
Who cares?
Call the organization the Lizardian Group for all I care.
Re:Daniel Lyons strikes again
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Agreed.
I had to go seven pages of posts to find someone finally identifying the author of this garbage as the same tool who's been shilling for Microsoft and SCO at Forbes since forever.
Look who wrote the Forbes article
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Daniel Lyons.
Anything else you need to know? Lyons has been feuding with PJ for years, even since the SCO case came into existence.
Didn't say it was Microsoft's fault that Intuit wrote their crap that way. I did say that it was stupid that Windows places the Admin account in Safe Mode and then requires a SECOND admin account. Never have seen an answer as to why that is.
"The value to an advertiser is not, however, in delivering the advertisement to the computer. The value is realized when a human viewer consumes the advertisement and the particular message of the advertisement is conveyed to a user. The consumption of an advertisement by a human user is even more important when one option for paying for the subsidized computer is through the delivery of paid advertising. Attestation of delivery may be challenging. Simply presenting the advertisement offers little or no assurance that the ad was consumed by a human. Even verifying the presence of a user, e.g. by use of a camera, may provide assurance that someone is there, but not necessarily that he or she is paying attention to the advertisement."
In other words, we are patenting methods to FORCE EVERY CONSUMER of an ad-sponsored PC to VIEW EACH AND EVERY AD on that PC WHETHER THEY WANT TO OR NOT!
Like I said, Microsoft is an EXTORTION RACKET masquerading as a computer software company.
How ANYBODY can justify dealing with this company in any way any more is beyond me. This company makes Enron look like Greenpeace and Consumer Reports combined.
OTOH, anybody who gets a PC under such terms probably deserves to be forced to watch the ads...Morons...
This is funny because I have a client who just Friday had yet ANOTHER Dell power supply blow out - the third one in the last couple months out of his 22 machines (none of the machines are more than three or four years old). He went out and bought a replacement power supply as he did before.
I was aware that Dell power supplies tend to be non-standard (or have been, depending on the year and model). But I thought that had to do with case layout only (and it does affect case layout - standard power supplies on some Dells will not have the power connector accessible without cutting a slot on the case.) So I checked and discovered that I was unaware that Dell power supplies in many cases were not merely non-standard in layout, but have different pinouts. Meaning that if you put a standard power supply in such a Dell, you will FRY YOUR MOTHERBOARD! Dell has NO warnings on the case about this!
I double-checked the model number on the client's system inventory I took, and determined that it is Dell 8300, which is one that DOES take a standard ATX power supply. However, had it been the 8400 machine NEXT to the 8300 machine, it would NOT.
"Dude! You bought a Dell!"
Anybody who buys a Dell, an HP, a Gateway, or any other "consumer grade" machine from a large corporation for corporate use is going to get bit down the road by that purchase. Quite frankly, home users shouldn't even buy that crap.
PCs are COMMODITIES. Buy them that way. Buy a white box from a storefront run by some Chinese guys. You'll get standard parts, an installable OS CD, and no crap on the desktop.
(Aside: My client just replaced his own desktop Dell with a white box PC. We spent several days trying to figure out how to get his hard drive moved to the new PC while still allowing him to run his existing Windows XP, before dropping the idea and just putting a new XP on the new box. Since he had no Dell reinstall CD - since the original box came with Windows 2000, Dell had no reinstall XP hat he could use - and since trying a Sysprep move would have been risky, and since the old XP was screwing up anyway, we decided to just install a new XP and reinstall his apps.)
(Further aside: That's when I discovered QuickBooks Premiere requires him to run as Administrator ALL THE TIME! Nice move, Intuit, YOU MORONS! He went ahead and installed it on the default admin account before I could warn him to create a NEW Admin account, so now we're hosed security-wise. And I can't even put my own account on the box now to enable remote monitoring because if I do, it will send the original admin account to Safe Mode access only, and QuickBooks is totally tied to that default admin account. Nice work, Bill, YOU MORON!)
(Final aside: Just think about it, folks! The accounting software that practically every small business and small business accounting firm uses to keep track of your books, your transactions, and your credit card numbers is that one software that runs on Windows in ADMINISTRATOR MODE AT ALL TIMES! Tell me again about "security is job one".)
"free America from the tyranny of oil" - when he supports a military attack on Iran? And don't tell me he doesn't, either. He babbles on about Iran's "nuclear threat" - just like Hillary does - when there is absolutely NO evidence that Iran has or will have ANY nuclear weapons program whatsoever. Even assuming (and it might well be a correct assumption) that various factions in Iran WANT nuclear weapons, they HAVE NO PROGRAM. Not a scrap of evidence other than some documents which Iran has not accounted for from the A Q Khan network years ago has been uncovered that there is ANY such thing as an Iranian nuclear weapons program.
It has been ESTABLISHED that the Iranian NUCLEAR ENERGY RESEARCH program is years, if not DECADES, away from being able to enrich sufficient quantities of uranium to the 90-95% level required for ONE nuclear weapon. Said weapon will have NO delivery system whatsoever outside of truck, container ship or camel, let alone be a threat to the estimated 100-400 nuclear weapons (including those on second-strike capable cruise missiles on submarines) that Israel possesses, let alone Europe, Russia or (gimme a break!) the United States.
Five minutes after the first US bomb drops on Iran, you will be paying $5/gallon for gas at the pump.
In a year, you'll be paying $10-20/gallon.
The oil companies have set this up for exactly that reason.
Do any of you morons remember that the Bush crime family is an OIL crime family?
Obama is a JOKE - a slick-talking Black "preacher" (okay, not officially, but he represents himself the same as one), just like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and a host of others. He will last five minutes in an election campaign, before the entire country decides he's just another smooth-talking hustler. Give me Lou Gossett instead - I KNOW he can talk the talk.
Hillary Clinton is a corrupt politician owned and operated by AIPAC and the Israeli Lobby who will immediately involve the US in a war with Iran - assuming Bush hasn't done so by then, which is a virtual certainty.
Personally, even as an anarchist, I think we need to start a political party that will run Vladimir Putin for President, with British MP George Galloway for Vice President. At least we'd have two politicians who are both smart and don't mind telling the truth (when it serves their purposes, at least)instead of being morons and lying ALL the time like ours do.
This article, along with the other I just read quoting Bill Gates as claiming that "security experts" are producing Mac exploits "every day" that "totally take over your [Mac] machine" (I mean, WTF!), clearly demonstrates both that Bill Gates is a deliberate LIAR (as I have reiterated on Slashdot for years) and that Microsoft is a CORRUPT, ILLEGAL pseudo-monopoly and EXTORTION RACKET that needs to be put out of business NOW by any means necessary.
Microsoft and its management make Enron look like Greenpeace and Consumer Reports combined.
Bill Gates has done this EXACT SAME THING since he STARTED Microsoft.
Go read the bios. His standard response to a customer saying "The new stuff is crap!" is: "Wait until the next version! It will be awesome! You'll see!"
(Anybody remember Jake Blues in "The Blues Brothers"?)
Email me when this happens - in about five years - or ten.
OTOH, after waiting FIVE years for Vista - and the comment about, "Gee, it was late because we had to stop working on it to make XP more secure!" - Oh, please, stop me! Bwahahahahaha!!! - they obviously think Vista is going to be SUCH A DOG that people will be DESPERATE for yet ANOTHER DOG two years later!
Jesus! You can't believe the bullshit this fucking company puts out!
What can you expect from a state where the tourist brochures state that, because of the heat, you lose up to ten percent of your mental capacity? Which most people don't have too much of to start with...
I lived there for a year back in the Eighties (not by choice). Florida is full of redneck morons, drug dealers, wizened retirees (including my father, which is why I was there), and assorted other losers. It's on a par with Texas, Oklahoma, and other benighted states with backwards, inbred cretins.
The state needs to fall into the bottomless pits it's built on. (No joke, they have sinkholes all over that state. A two-lane fifty-foot section of freeway suddenly disappeared into a sinkhole some years back.)
Prosecuting two teens for sending racy pictures to each other is the dumbest thing I've heard all week (next to Dell and their power supplies, and Intuit for making QuickBooks require the Administrator account to run.)
Change Florida's motto to: Florida - the Chimpanzee State.
"The US won the war, handily. The US is having somewhat more trouble occupying the country, a different problem."
Look, stupid, try to follow me here.
So you manage to prove T is a bomber.
SO FUCKING WHAT?
He's replaced tomorrow by ANOTHER bomber.
Did you see the latest Bond movie? What did M chew Bond out for doing right off? Killing ONE bomb maker!
I quote M: "Hardly the big picture, wouldn't you say?"
As it happens to be a movie, Bond uses the bomb maker's cell phone to lead him on to bring down the whole network. Nice.
But irrelevant to Iraq, where we are dealing with a massive, broadly-based, nationalist insurgency, not a single terrorist network with a handful of people in it.
So NOTHING the US does with any given insurgent, or even penetrating any given insurgency group, is going to alter the ultimate outcome of the situation.
As for the "US won the war", the US defeated Saddam Hussein's military, which then dispersed into the population. From May 2003 on, these same guys have been blowing up US troops to the tune of over 3,000 of them by now. They have been joined by al-Sadr's militia, and a few imported Al Qaeda guys, and a variety of other groups of various allegiances.
So the US "won" a war which wasn't even much of a war.
What it LOST was the whole damn PURPOSE of the war (assuming chaos in Iraq wasn't the neocons purpose in the first place, which I am not sure is true.)
I call that "losing the war".
If we had defeated Germany's army in WWII (which we did), occupied Germany (which we did), then had been forced out of the country by an insurgency and the Nazis resumed power (which they didn't), history would have said we "lost the war."
The same applies in Iraq.
What's going to happen now is that Bush is going to "double-down". He's going to attack Iran. Then the thousands of Iranian agents already in Iraq and additional thousands of Iranian Revolutionary Guards will join the Iraqi Shia militias (most of whom, except for al-Sadr's bunch, were trained and armed in Iran years ago) in cutting the US-Kuwait supply lines. Thirty to sixty days later, the US military will be out of food, water, fuel, and ammo, and under constant attacks far more effective than the current insurgent attacks. US casualties will spike into the hundreds per month, not dozens. The US will be forced to leave Iraq leaving behind thousands of new dead and scores of billions of dollars of equipment which the insurgency will use against the Iraqi government (and vice versa, probably).
I call that "losing the war."
Bush will explain that, "No, we never lost the war. Iran just forced us to switch to attacking Iran." And morons like you will buy that.
Following on that, Iran will then bleed the US for the next ten years militarily, economically, and geopolitically until the US is forced to quit - just like Vietnam, except several times worse.
And you Bush lovers will still be saying it's all good.
Morons.
It's people like you why this country is fucking doomed.
Yeah, right, it would be nice to know the insurgency's networks.
And how many years will that take?
And every time you "arrest and separate", you recruit a replacement for the network.
This is moronic. Anybody who knows anything about insurgencies knows that virtually everybody in one is replaceable at the drop of a hat. There are no "military geniuses" running insurgencies. Sure, you can cause disruption by taking out either some of the leaders or critical support personnel such as financiers. The smaller the insurgency, the better this sort of tactic works. Che Guevara went nowhere in Bolivia because he never had more than a handful of people in his group and he had no national suppport.
That is not the case in Iraq, where literally scores of thousands of people are involved in the insurgency, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, support them. Not to mention the tribal nature which demands relatives and tribe members take up arms against anyone - such as the US - who kills their people.
I repeat, there is NOTHING about an insurgency which resembles "cops back home", except at the very, very early stages where there are only a handful of people plotting one.
We are infinitely past that stage in Iraq.
None of these methods will have ANY impact on the ultimate outcome.
The insurgency in Iraq CANNOT be defeated by US forces with ANY tactic short of nuking the entire country.
And if General Petraeus says otherwise, he's CYAing his ass to maintain his command - just like the rest of the generals in Iraq have done up to now.
What part of EVERY single study and statistic showing that there are more terrorists and more terrorist incidents now than before 9/11 don't you raging, drooling Bush lovers understand?
Now to mention that the US's actions for the last fucking hundred years have fueled Middle East hatred of the US in the first place.
You can't even comprehend plain English. The poster said "creating new terrorists" - not "created before 9/11" - even though he would have been correct to say so.
When the US attacks Iran, and the Iraqi Shia and Iranian Revolutionary Guards completely cut the US-Kuwait supply lines, and thirty to sixty days later our troops are out of food, water, fuel, and ammo, and have to flee the country, leaving behind several thousand US dead and billions in equipment for the Iraqis and "Al Qaida" to use, tell me again how we "won" the war.
You're an idiot. Worse, you're a clueless Bush idiot.
When you're dealing with a broad nationalist-based insurgency, you are NOT going to win it. Period.
It is utterly IRRELEVANT what you do with any given set of insurgents you might get your hands on, or even any groups that you might be able to destroy. There are DOZENS of insurgent groups in Iraq, and at least a half dozen MAJOR groups.
These tactics will NOT work and even to the degree that they do work in local instances they will utterly NO effect on the ultimate outcome.
As William Lind has pointed out, insurgents wars are about "credibility". The US doesn't have it in Iraq. It's over.
And it's going to get worse. I just read that article yesterday that said Java is being eclipsed by AJAX and JavaScript for building rich Web interfaces. So that means MORE JavaScript, not less.
Turning off JavaScript for most sites is NOT an option.
A better idea - don't send chimps into space, send Transhumans who don't have chimp brains.
William Burroughs talked about this forty years ago - sending clean-cut, all-American macho test-pilot guys into space was "nothing to the purpose".
I'm not surprised some of them turned out to be weirdos (although it might be a bit surprising to see it was one of the females. OTOH, maybe her issue was too much testosterone?)
Great. So our morons in Iraq are going to fingerprint (and perhaps photograph) "suspected insurgents".
I can't think of a more idiotic way to deal with the insurgency.
Exactly what good do fingerprints do you? Or even photos of suspected insurgents? The latter may have some use in that you can show them to informants and get an ID, then give copies to patrols who can spot the guy and pick him up - IF you KNOW he's an insurgent, not just a "suspect". And if he's a "suspect", THEN what do you do? Toss him in Abu Ghraib and torture him until he "confesses"? Right, real effective so far.
But fingerprints? Useful ONLY for identifying someone you HAVE picked up, geniuses! And only for someone you have picked up BEFORE as well!
This is just makework. It's useless in actually doing anything to WIN the counter-insurgency. Utterly useless. Even if you arrest five times more people than the US is now - with its random sweeps yanking in everybody on the street after an incident - it will do absolutely nothing to stem recruitment and motivation for the insurgency.
Morons. That word is WHY the US lost the war - and will lose the next one in Iran with far more devastating consequences on the US economy, military, and geopolitical credibility.
Expect to be at war with Iran in the next three to six months. A third aircraft carrier group is on the way into the Pacific, probably heading for the Indian Ocean as support for the two in the Gulf region.
Thanks, I looked at NoScript. However I tend not to use addons that let one turn stuff on and off - except for Adblock and FlashBlock, of course. Mostly because I never turn AdBlock off and Flashblock is just a click on the Flash movie to use it.
So many sites use JavaScript that you can't really leave it turned off and yet it is rare that Firefox crashes on one, so you can't tell when you should turn it off until you've crashed... So a whitelist based system doesn't work well. It's great for Windows, but I'm on Linux, so the malicious JavaScript threat is much less, which is NoScript's primary purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
"Macrovision and other companies' claims that they can "protect" content. They can't, but they've made a lot of money by convincing people that they can, but unfortunately, that's all starting to unravel."
Let's reword this:
Microsoft and other companies claim that they can "protect" an OS. They can't, but they've made a lot of money by convincing people that they can, but unfortunately, that's all starting to unravel.
I'd say that's equally and completely true.
Not a criticism of your point, which is true, merely an observation.
"Clones Britney"
Uh, with or without hair?
This scares me, because one of my favorite singers, Andrea Corr, has a solo album coming out this year, and rumor has it that the music execs want to make her "the next J-Lo". Which scares fans because most of them can't stand J-Lo.
Besides, Andrea doesn't have the booty to be "the next J-Lo."
But Andrea looks good with hair and probably wouldn't look good without it.
So any cloning has to be done leaving in the genes for hair.
As for the "voice-destroying virus", that's already happened - it's called "digital processing". All the record industry bimbos sound alike (except maybe Jewel and a couple others). Even Andrea doesn't sound like Andrea on CD - only in live concert. That's why I rarely listen to Corrs CDs or MP3s, but prefer to watch Corrs videos. Not to mention that the Corrs girls are gorgeous and somehow MP3's and CD's tend not to point that out - must be the audio only content...
"Your accounting needs to work 100% of the time"
Tell it to my current client who has had more trouble with QuickBooks in the last couple months than he's had in years.
Their last release, according to him, was a disaster. Numerous very large patches had to be applied, and he still has some problems, I think.
Not to mention the stupid thing needs to run in ADMINISTRATOR MODE at all times - which is giving Intuit fits trying to move to Vista. Turns out QuickBooks was never certified for Windows XP, either, because they use the poor programming practice of using the Registry to communicate between third party add-ons, according to the article I read.
As for accounting software not being suitable for OSS because of "liability" issues, that's utter nonsense. Just because software is OSS doesn't mean it isn't capable of being supported by a company with full support guarantees.
Not to mention that Marcus Ranum pointed out in one of his rants that NOBODY ever sues software companies for failure to perform anyway. Once a company has poured a ton of money and effort into a software, they will continue to do so no matter HOW BAD the thing is. The only reason a company wants another company behind software is so some manager can CYA by SAYING - not DOING - that they want "someone to sue."
In fact, accounting software historically has been a bitch for commercial companies to develop and use. EVERY company does its accounting slightly differently than any other, no matter what accounting "standards" there are. Most accounting packages have evolved over the last three decades to be reasonably flexible, but there is undoubtedly still a thriving "accounting package modification consulting" industry that does what it can to make these things more flexible. Stories abound over the last three decades about how accounting and ERP software is inflexible, hard to manage, hard to change to match corporate business rule and regulatory rule changes, and the like.
OSS is far more likely to be flexible enough to deal with such issues than any commercial product.
somebody who wants to call Linux "GNU/Linux"? (And, yes, some of these clowns have decided to call Solaris "GNU/Solaris" now that Sun wants to use GPLv3. Idiots.)
Who cares?
Call the organization the Lizardian Group for all I care.
Agreed.
I had to go seven pages of posts to find someone finally identifying the author of this garbage as the same tool who's been shilling for Microsoft and SCO at Forbes since forever.
Daniel Lyons.
Anything else you need to know? Lyons has been feuding with PJ for years, even since the SCO case came into existence.
Lyons is a known Microsoft and SCO shill.
Try reading something other than the taglines under the commentators on Fox News sometime.
That might help.
Didn't say it was Microsoft's fault that Intuit wrote their crap that way. I did say that it was stupid that Windows places the Admin account in Safe Mode and then requires a SECOND admin account. Never have seen an answer as to why that is.
Well, actually, they do - only they call it "promoting democracy"...
See General Boykin for details...
They have a problem with such tactics only when it is INDIVIDUALS or small groups who blow things up when you disagree with them.
"The value to an advertiser is not, however, in delivering the advertisement to the computer. The value is realized when a human viewer consumes the advertisement and the particular message of the advertisement is conveyed to a user. The consumption of an advertisement by a human user is even more important when one option for paying for the subsidized computer is through the delivery of paid advertising. Attestation of delivery may be challenging. Simply presenting the advertisement offers little or no assurance that the ad was consumed by a human. Even verifying the presence of a user, e.g. by use of a camera, may provide assurance that someone is there, but not necessarily that he or she is paying attention to the advertisement."
In other words, we are patenting methods to FORCE EVERY CONSUMER of an ad-sponsored PC to VIEW EACH AND EVERY AD on that PC WHETHER THEY WANT TO OR NOT!
Like I said, Microsoft is an EXTORTION RACKET masquerading as a computer software company.
How ANYBODY can justify dealing with this company in any way any more is beyond me. This company makes Enron look like Greenpeace and Consumer Reports combined.
OTOH, anybody who gets a PC under such terms probably deserves to be forced to watch the ads...Morons...
so if this is redundant, mark it so and fuck off!
"Dude! You bought a Dell!"
This is funny because I have a client who just Friday had yet ANOTHER Dell power supply blow out - the third one in the last couple months out of his 22 machines (none of the machines are more than three or four years old). He went out and bought a replacement power supply as he did before.
I was aware that Dell power supplies tend to be non-standard (or have been, depending on the year and model). But I thought that had to do with case layout only (and it does affect case layout - standard power supplies on some Dells will not have the power connector accessible without cutting a slot on the case.) So I checked and discovered that I was unaware that Dell power supplies in many cases were not merely non-standard in layout, but have different pinouts. Meaning that if you put a standard power supply in such a Dell, you will FRY YOUR MOTHERBOARD! Dell has NO warnings on the case about this!
I double-checked the model number on the client's system inventory I took, and determined that it is Dell 8300, which is one that DOES take a standard ATX power supply. However, had it been the 8400 machine NEXT to the 8300 machine, it would NOT.
"Dude! You bought a Dell!"
Anybody who buys a Dell, an HP, a Gateway, or any other "consumer grade" machine from a large corporation for corporate use is going to get bit down the road by that purchase. Quite frankly, home users shouldn't even buy that crap.
PCs are COMMODITIES. Buy them that way. Buy a white box from a storefront run by some Chinese guys. You'll get standard parts, an installable OS CD, and no crap on the desktop.
(Aside: My client just replaced his own desktop Dell with a white box PC. We spent several days trying to figure out how to get his hard drive moved to the new PC while still allowing him to run his existing Windows XP, before dropping the idea and just putting a new XP on the new box. Since he had no Dell reinstall CD - since the original box came with Windows 2000, Dell had no reinstall XP hat he could use - and since trying a Sysprep move would have been risky, and since the old XP was screwing up anyway, we decided to just install a new XP and reinstall his apps.)
(Further aside: That's when I discovered QuickBooks Premiere requires him to run as Administrator ALL THE TIME! Nice move, Intuit, YOU MORONS! He went ahead and installed it on the default admin account before I could warn him to create a NEW Admin account, so now we're hosed security-wise. And I can't even put my own account on the box now to enable remote monitoring because if I do, it will send the original admin account to Safe Mode access only, and QuickBooks is totally tied to that default admin account. Nice work, Bill, YOU MORON!)
(Final aside: Just think about it, folks! The accounting software that practically every small business and small business accounting firm uses to keep track of your books, your transactions, and your credit card numbers is that one software that runs on Windows in ADMINISTRATOR MODE AT ALL TIMES! Tell me again about "security is job one".)
"free America from the tyranny of oil" - when he supports a military attack on Iran? And don't tell me he doesn't, either. He babbles on about Iran's "nuclear threat" - just like Hillary does - when there is absolutely NO evidence that Iran has or will have ANY nuclear weapons program whatsoever. Even assuming (and it might well be a correct assumption) that various factions in Iran WANT nuclear weapons, they HAVE NO PROGRAM. Not a scrap of evidence other than some documents which Iran has not accounted for from the A Q Khan network years ago has been uncovered that there is ANY such thing as an Iranian nuclear weapons program.
It has been ESTABLISHED that the Iranian NUCLEAR ENERGY RESEARCH program is years, if not DECADES, away from being able to enrich sufficient quantities of uranium to the 90-95% level required for ONE nuclear weapon. Said weapon will have NO delivery system whatsoever outside of truck, container ship or camel, let alone be a threat to the estimated 100-400 nuclear weapons (including those on second-strike capable cruise missiles on submarines) that Israel possesses, let alone Europe, Russia or (gimme a break!) the United States.
Five minutes after the first US bomb drops on Iran, you will be paying $5/gallon for gas at the pump.
In a year, you'll be paying $10-20/gallon.
The oil companies have set this up for exactly that reason.
Do any of you morons remember that the Bush crime family is an OIL crime family?
Obama is a JOKE - a slick-talking Black "preacher" (okay, not officially, but he represents himself the same as one), just like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and a host of others. He will last five minutes in an election campaign, before the entire country decides he's just another smooth-talking hustler. Give me Lou Gossett instead - I KNOW he can talk the talk.
Hillary Clinton is a corrupt politician owned and operated by AIPAC and the Israeli Lobby who will immediately involve the US in a war with Iran - assuming Bush hasn't done so by then, which is a virtual certainty.
Personally, even as an anarchist, I think we need to start a political party that will run Vladimir Putin for President, with British MP George Galloway for Vice President. At least we'd have two politicians who are both smart and don't mind telling the truth (when it serves their purposes, at least)instead of being morons and lying ALL the time like ours do.
This article, along with the other I just read quoting Bill Gates as claiming that "security experts" are producing Mac exploits "every day" that "totally take over your [Mac] machine" (I mean, WTF!), clearly demonstrates both that Bill Gates is a deliberate LIAR (as I have reiterated on Slashdot for years) and that Microsoft is a CORRUPT, ILLEGAL pseudo-monopoly and EXTORTION RACKET that needs to be put out of business NOW by any means necessary.
Microsoft and its management make Enron look like Greenpeace and Consumer Reports combined.
Mod parent up!
Bill Gates has done this EXACT SAME THING since he STARTED Microsoft.
Go read the bios. His standard response to a customer saying "The new stuff is crap!" is: "Wait until the next version! It will be awesome! You'll see!"
(Anybody remember Jake Blues in "The Blues Brothers"?)
The next Windows OS will out in two years!
Bwahahahahaha!!!
Email me when this happens - in about five years - or ten.
OTOH, after waiting FIVE years for Vista - and the comment about, "Gee, it was late because we had to stop working on it to make XP more secure!" - Oh, please, stop me! Bwahahahahaha!!! - they obviously think Vista is going to be SUCH A DOG that people will be DESPERATE for yet ANOTHER DOG two years later!
Jesus! You can't believe the bullshit this fucking company puts out!
Put this company OUT OF BUSINESS! NOW! PLEASE!
What can you expect from a state where the tourist brochures state that, because of the heat, you lose up to ten percent of your mental capacity? Which most people don't have too much of to start with...
I lived there for a year back in the Eighties (not by choice). Florida is full of redneck morons, drug dealers, wizened retirees (including my father, which is why I was there), and assorted other losers. It's on a par with Texas, Oklahoma, and other benighted states with backwards, inbred cretins.
The state needs to fall into the bottomless pits it's built on. (No joke, they have sinkholes all over that state. A two-lane fifty-foot section of freeway suddenly disappeared into a sinkhole some years back.)
Prosecuting two teens for sending racy pictures to each other is the dumbest thing I've heard all week (next to Dell and their power supplies, and Intuit for making QuickBooks require the Administrator account to run.)
Change Florida's motto to: Florida - the Chimpanzee State.
"The US won the war, handily. The US is having somewhat more trouble occupying the country, a different problem."
Look, stupid, try to follow me here.
So you manage to prove T is a bomber.
SO FUCKING WHAT?
He's replaced tomorrow by ANOTHER bomber.
Did you see the latest Bond movie? What did M chew Bond out for doing right off? Killing ONE bomb maker!
I quote M: "Hardly the big picture, wouldn't you say?"
As it happens to be a movie, Bond uses the bomb maker's cell phone to lead him on to bring down the whole network. Nice.
But irrelevant to Iraq, where we are dealing with a massive, broadly-based, nationalist insurgency, not a single terrorist network with a handful of people in it.
So NOTHING the US does with any given insurgent, or even penetrating any given insurgency group, is going to alter the ultimate outcome of the situation.
As for the "US won the war", the US defeated Saddam Hussein's military, which then dispersed into the population. From May 2003 on, these same guys have been blowing up US troops to the tune of over 3,000 of them by now. They have been joined by al-Sadr's militia, and a few imported Al Qaeda guys, and a variety of other groups of various allegiances.
So the US "won" a war which wasn't even much of a war.
What it LOST was the whole damn PURPOSE of the war (assuming chaos in Iraq wasn't the neocons purpose in the first place, which I am not sure is true.)
I call that "losing the war".
If we had defeated Germany's army in WWII (which we did), occupied Germany (which we did), then had been forced out of the country by an insurgency and the Nazis resumed power (which they didn't), history would have said we "lost the war."
The same applies in Iraq.
What's going to happen now is that Bush is going to "double-down". He's going to attack Iran. Then the thousands of Iranian agents already in Iraq and additional thousands of Iranian Revolutionary Guards will join the Iraqi Shia militias (most of whom, except for al-Sadr's bunch, were trained and armed in Iran years ago) in cutting the US-Kuwait supply lines. Thirty to sixty days later, the US military will be out of food, water, fuel, and ammo, and under constant attacks far more effective than the current insurgent attacks. US casualties will spike into the hundreds per month, not dozens. The US will be forced to leave Iraq leaving behind thousands of new dead and scores of billions of dollars of equipment which the insurgency will use against the Iraqi government (and vice versa, probably).
I call that "losing the war."
Bush will explain that, "No, we never lost the war. Iran just forced us to switch to attacking Iran." And morons like you will buy that.
Following on that, Iran will then bleed the US for the next ten years militarily, economically, and geopolitically until the US is forced to quit - just like Vietnam, except several times worse.
And you Bush lovers will still be saying it's all good.
Morons.
It's people like you why this country is fucking doomed.
Yeah, right, it would be nice to know the insurgency's networks.
And how many years will that take?
And every time you "arrest and separate", you recruit a replacement for the network.
This is moronic. Anybody who knows anything about insurgencies knows that virtually everybody in one is replaceable at the drop of a hat. There are no "military geniuses" running insurgencies. Sure, you can cause disruption by taking out either some of the leaders or critical support personnel such as financiers. The smaller the insurgency, the better this sort of tactic works. Che Guevara went nowhere in Bolivia because he never had more than a handful of people in his group and he had no national suppport.
That is not the case in Iraq, where literally scores of thousands of people are involved in the insurgency, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, support them. Not to mention the tribal nature which demands relatives and tribe members take up arms against anyone - such as the US - who kills their people.
I repeat, there is NOTHING about an insurgency which resembles "cops back home", except at the very, very early stages where there are only a handful of people plotting one.
We are infinitely past that stage in Iraq.
None of these methods will have ANY impact on the ultimate outcome.
The insurgency in Iraq CANNOT be defeated by US forces with ANY tactic short of nuking the entire country.
And if General Petraeus says otherwise, he's CYAing his ass to maintain his command - just like the rest of the generals in Iraq have done up to now.
What part of EVERY single study and statistic showing that there are more terrorists and more terrorist incidents now than before 9/11 don't you raging, drooling Bush lovers understand?
Now to mention that the US's actions for the last fucking hundred years have fueled Middle East hatred of the US in the first place.
You can't even comprehend plain English. The poster said "creating new terrorists" - not "created before 9/11" - even though he would have been correct to say so.
Cretin.
When the US attacks Iran, and the Iraqi Shia and Iranian Revolutionary Guards completely cut the US-Kuwait supply lines, and thirty to sixty days later our troops are out of food, water, fuel, and ammo, and have to flee the country, leaving behind several thousand US dead and billions in equipment for the Iraqis and "Al Qaida" to use, tell me again how we "won" the war.
You're an idiot. Worse, you're a clueless Bush idiot.
Useless tactics.
When you're dealing with a broad nationalist-based insurgency, you are NOT going to win it. Period.
It is utterly IRRELEVANT what you do with any given set of insurgents you might get your hands on, or even any groups that you might be able to destroy. There are DOZENS of insurgent groups in Iraq, and at least a half dozen MAJOR groups.
These tactics will NOT work and even to the degree that they do work in local instances they will utterly NO effect on the ultimate outcome.
As William Lind has pointed out, insurgents wars are about "credibility". The US doesn't have it in Iraq. It's over.
Well, you gotta tell it to the Web sites.
And it's going to get worse. I just read that article yesterday that said Java is being eclipsed by AJAX and JavaScript for building rich Web interfaces. So that means MORE JavaScript, not less.
Turning off JavaScript for most sites is NOT an option.
when you send chimps into space...
A better idea - don't send chimps into space, send Transhumans who don't have chimp brains.
William Burroughs talked about this forty years ago - sending clean-cut, all-American macho test-pilot guys into space was "nothing to the purpose".
I'm not surprised some of them turned out to be weirdos (although it might be a bit surprising to see it was one of the females. OTOH, maybe her issue was too much testosterone?)
Great. So our morons in Iraq are going to fingerprint (and perhaps photograph) "suspected insurgents".
I can't think of a more idiotic way to deal with the insurgency.
Exactly what good do fingerprints do you? Or even photos of suspected insurgents? The latter may have some use in that you can show them to informants and get an ID, then give copies to patrols who can spot the guy and pick him up - IF you KNOW he's an insurgent, not just a "suspect". And if he's a "suspect", THEN what do you do? Toss him in Abu Ghraib and torture him until he "confesses"? Right, real effective so far.
But fingerprints? Useful ONLY for identifying someone you HAVE picked up, geniuses! And only for someone you have picked up BEFORE as well!
This is just makework. It's useless in actually doing anything to WIN the counter-insurgency. Utterly useless. Even if you arrest five times more people than the US is now - with its random sweeps yanking in everybody on the street after an incident - it will do absolutely nothing to stem recruitment and motivation for the insurgency.
Morons. That word is WHY the US lost the war - and will lose the next one in Iran with far more devastating consequences on the US economy, military, and geopolitical credibility.
Expect to be at war with Iran in the next three to six months. A third aircraft carrier group is on the way into the Pacific, probably heading for the Indian Ocean as support for the two in the Gulf region.
Thanks, I looked at NoScript. However I tend not to use addons that let one turn stuff on and off - except for Adblock and FlashBlock, of course. Mostly because I never turn AdBlock off and Flashblock is just a click on the Flash movie to use it.
So many sites use JavaScript that you can't really leave it turned off and yet it is rare that Firefox crashes on one, so you can't tell when you should turn it off until you've crashed... So a whitelist based system doesn't work well. It's great for Windows, but I'm on Linux, so the malicious JavaScript threat is much less, which is NoScript's primary purpose.
Can't win...