The JavaScript just KILLS Firefox 2.0. Just scrolling up and down the page is a nightmare - and it's a short page!
Opera scrolls the page much faster and more smoothly.
Firefox 2.0 has a LOT of work to do on it. Every day it irritates me more with its erratic performance, broken download function (on Kubuntu Linux, anyway), and occasional crashes and lockups due to JavaScript issues.
Note: I'm not complaining about Google Blogger - I haven't used it yet - - I'm just complaining about crap software in general.
Yeah - like during the election, every time a Democrat made some statement about his party, the media spun it as "Democrats can't agree on anything". Media spin is not limited to Republican deeds.
As an anarchist, I'm perfectly well aware that Democrats are as scummy as Republicans (possibly even more so in certain aspects, as the Repugs are in others.). But the Repugs spend more time than Democrats touting their "family and moral values" - which makes them hypocrites as well as scum.
We have only one party in the US - the War Party of the State, with Republican, Democratic, Green, Socialist, and Libertarian branches differing only in their degree of unity and relative power on how to steal from and control the citizen.
The purpose of law is to CREATE crime, and thus, criminals.
Behavior, coercion, violence, whatever, is one thing. Crime is another.
Crime - like war - is the health of the state.
Again, the essence of the state is: "You do everything we tell you to, and give us everything you have, and we'll protect you from the bad people inside and outside our borders - and if there aren't any bad people, we'll make some."
The state - ALL versions - is a protection/extortion racket depending on human fear, nothing more or less.
Chimpanzees apparently aren't capable of understanding this, unfortunately.
What killed Atari was Sam Tramiel's (and possibly Jack Tramiel's, depending on how much control he had at the time) incompetence as a CEO. Period.
Atari had a major presence in Europe, true. But it had little presence in the US because the company could not or did not develop its OS software sufficiently. Atari at the time had the capability of becoming a "cheap Apple" because it had a GUI OS which was quite nice running on hardware a fraction of the cost of an Apple at the time.
Their marketing wasn't that great in the US. They made the mistake of concentrating on Europe where sales were good because of exchange rates amplifying the low price benefit of the 520ST and concentrating on marketing rather than software development. The piracy mave have been an issue, but that would have been surmountable just as it has been in every other computer market had the system offered just a bit more capability. They had the potential of jumpstarting an entire industry around their product - there were plenty of cool startups producing devices for the ST, including 3D stuff and especially music industry stuff (musicians everywhere were using Atari - even Arsenio Hall's band leader used them - they could have owned the music industry niche.) I remember going to the West Coast Computer Faires around 1986-1987 and seeing all sorts of cool Atari stuff being developed. Add-on peripherals were coming out of the woodwork.
I've seen Sam Tramiel in person - a lightweight. His brother Leonard was the geek of the team, supposedly. Their father was the one who probably had the ability to pull it off, but he let his son sink the operation. Although Wikipedia says Jack ran the company "until the late 1980's", I never saw Jack Tramiel's name on anything coming out of Atari from day one - it was always Sam. Jack may have been running things behind the scenes, but it wasn't apparent to the Atari consumer. It was Sam and Leonard who showed up at West Coast Computer Faires and the like.
I also think that what sunk Atari was its attempt to get back into the videogame business, because they didn't really understand how to get the computer side going well. Switching tracks in mid-stream probably didn't do the company any good.
Bottom line: they had a chance to outdo Apple - and couldn't pull it off. I sincerely doubt it was piracy that had any significant effect - although I know a lot of Atari software companies complained about it (big surprise) - especially in the German market which was Atari's major market for small business and CAD software companies. Had Atari concentrated on marketing better in the US, the German piracy would have been small potatoes compared to US software sales, and the Atari software companies would have survived nicely.
Disclaimer: I was up for the post of Atari representative on the online systems (CompuServe, BIX, America Online) at one point, but I didn't get the job. I got interviewed by Neil Harris because I ran the Atari conference on the WELL for a while.
"Microsoft has to have the big hardware vendors universally behind it for this to work."
As TFA points out, IF Vista is allowed to fly, Microsoft will be in a position to DICTATE to the hardware manufacturers AND the content providers how things will go - because they will have the ONLY legally-protected (because of DMCA) platform for delivering protected content - and because they have an OS psuedo-monopoly guaranteed by the myopia of corporate CIOS and clueless consumers.
And the latter are WHY Vista WILL be allowed to fly - because nobody except a few critics like Gutmann are doing the thinking about the end result of all this. Corporate execs at the PC makers are thinking about next quarter stock results only, like most managers. The corporate CIOS are putting out fires for THEIR CEOs. And the consumers are clueless about the technology and its effects. (You're right, though, that the consumer protection organizations ought to get in on the act and EXPLAIN this stuff. Still, how many people will end up actually reading it? Enough to affect the actual market over the wishes and actions of corporate execs? Doubtful.)
Catch-22 all around. The only winner will be Microsoft.
OTOH, as I've said elsewhere, yes, this WILL all collapse eventually. Technology marches on and somebody - the Chinese if no one else - will eventually break the monopoly. ALL monopolies MUST fail eventually - even legal ones, if by no other means than violent revolution. It may take years (or as Duncan Macleod once said, "Centuries even!"), but Microsoft and DRM WILL go down.
Excellent point about the non-premium content. Corporations (except those in the media industry itself) in particular mostly won't care about any of these Vista "features" - but they will end up paying extra in their budgets for new PCs for decades to come. But it's unlikely any CIO is thinking about it in those terms - which means Vista is, in a sense, a "Trojan Horse". As TFA points out, basically it's intent is to establish Microsoft as an even bigger "technological monopoly" (supported by the "legal monopoly" means of DMCA legislation) who can dictate terms to BOTH the hardware manufacturers AND the content owners - and by extension, to corporate busineess and the consumers - while at the same time shutting down the open source software industry.
And we can the Bush administration's lack of enforcement of the Microsoft monopoly decision for enabling this.
OTOH, I have faith that the entire thing WILL collapse at some point - just like the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures collapsed - rendering Microsoft a shadow of its former self, damaging the content companies big time, and eventually paving the way for a reaction which will really boost FOSS and open standards on commodity hardware and the Net.
Which is why Vista by all accounts needs 1GB RAM at least to function with any applications. Microsoft is ensuring (for the benefit of the hardware manufacturers) that everybody has to upgrade fairly soon to new hardware. This insures that everybody gets new DRM'd hardware where Vista can do its dirty work (assuming the hardware manufacturers go along.) So the CPU makers, the large PC makers, the memory makers, the content companies and Microsoft all benefit to the detriment, apparently, of the peripheral and chip makers - and the consumer of course.
Since we're talking primarily private consumers, not corporate consumers (other than the media industry per se), for the media issues involved in TFA, and since consumer purchases DO influence corporate PC purchases to some extent, this means that corporations will eventually be forced to upgrade their hardware even if they don't upgrade to run Vista per se. A number of articles recently have pointed out that consumer software and hardware is influencing corporate buying decisions.
It would be interesting to see what the "food chain" looks like here. If the peripheral and chip manufacturers rebel against raising their costs by the effects listed in TFA, will this impact the board manufacturers and PC makers enough for them to rebel against Microsoft? Or does it go the other way around - does the board and PC manufacturers being the only way that peripheral and chip makers can make a living mean they can dictate to those makers? Does the mere fact that peripheral and chip costs will go up migrate enough cost to the board and PC makers, thus cutting their profit margins, that they will be inclined to rebel against Microsoft?
TFA doesn't cover all this in detail, merely outlining the potential problems. Are these problems comparable to any previous issues the various parties have had - such as migrating to new hardware standards like AGP, PCIe, SATA, etc.? If so, can we assume the various parties will suck it up and go ahead with Vista - or not?
Is there anybody in the affected industries raising these issues besides Gutmann? It would seem to me that since Vista is shipping shortly that much of the effects should already have been considered by the industry parties. OTOH, since content using the Vista features isn't shipping yet, is it possible that the industry has NOT been affected by these issues yet and therefore has NOT considered them - making Vista a "Trojan Horse"?
Inquiring minds want to know - which means why am I posting these questions on/.?
I'm sure that's true, but also keep in mind that CompUSA Geek Squad do installations for small businesses as well. My new client had them do his on a setup with 25-30 PCs.
OTOH, just think of the opportunities for private PC support guys! Every time the home user's Vista machine "degrades" the content, the user will not know that it's deliberate and think their PC is on the fritz. The unscrupulous PC tech will assure them that it is so, and only charge $75 an hour to "fix it". Of course, he CAN'T fix it, so that means the "fix or no charge" PC tech will go out of business and the unscrupulous ones will be the only ones left in the field.
Way to go, Microsoft. Making the industry safe for frauds.
You think we care if anybody finds it "appealing?" One is either a Transhumanist or one isn't. Do you care if the roaches under your sink find your Roach Motel "appealing"?
I'm perfectly well aware that nanotech can be DESIGNED to be deadly. That was my point. The point of TFA on the other hand was that nanotech could be ACCIDENTALLAY and EASILY converted SPONTANEOUSLY to being deadly to life - and not just some life, ALL life. That is far more unlikely, which the author does not acknowledge.
The fact that he supports Bill Joy and Richard Smalley pretty well defines this idiot.
Smalley is a wannabe who came late to nanotech and decided to use his higher conventional scientific status to try to take over the field from Drexler. He failed, despite this guy's opinion.
Joy is simply incapable of rational reasoning.
And this guy's paranoid fantasies about nanobots "spontaneously impregnating" each other with technology to become an artificial life form - and one that dooms all other life in addition, despite millions of years of evolutionary adaptation on this planet to just about every conceivable hazard - is just drivel.
Sure, nanotech could be designed to destroy all life - but it would have to be DESIGNED to do so. The odds of it happening by chance are so low as to be not worth considering. Sure, badly designed nanotech - and there WILL be badly designed nanotech, we CAN count on that - COULD cause massive medical issues on a par with a deadly virus such as the flu virus in the early 20th century or something like Ebola. So what? You take the risk and you try to prevent it. Nanotech offers many technical options for inhibiting this sort of thing. If the IT industry will get off its ass and develop some AI-based engineering programs that check for stupid engineering mistakes, the entire engineering industry would be better off as well.
What IS going to happen is that Transhumanists will use nanotech to transform themselves into a superior species And that's where the threat is going to come from as monkey-ass humans follow their usual primate instincts to try to suppress the Transhumans - and unlike the Star Trek shows and Terminator movies, the humans will get their asses kicked trying - at least until the Transhumans have improved enough that they can just ignore the chimps and go about their business anyway.
Military hardware - especially nukes - is never meant to be USED.
It's meant to be PAID FOR.
And it's only used when somebody wants to GET PAID AGAIN FOR REPLACING IT - or use it up arranging for somebody else to get paid (in oil or whatever resource is the reason for the war.)
"Boondoggles" happen for a reason - and it's not simple stupidity or incompetence.
Years ago, I read in an electronic engineering journal an article by an engineer who consulted for a company manufacturing a certain component for the US government. He arrived at a factory with scores of employee cars in the parking lot, a big building, and a revenue of $100 million. He estimated he could produce this component for $100 with ten people. The owner of the company told him: "You can produce it for $100. I produce it for $100 million. Who's smarter?"
It has been proven repeatedly - regardless of the Supreme Court's views - by the people who WROTE the Constitution that this is an individual right that applies to all citizens (male citizens, anyway, given the Founder's sexism at the time.)
Besides, who cares? You want to start another black market - this time in guns? Go right ahead. People who want to be armed will BE armed, regardless of what you do.
You couldn't stop drugs coming into the country, feel free to try to stop guns.
There's a REASON you have TWO concepts: "computer" and "network".
Conflating the two is just marketing hype from people who want to control your access to knowledge and computing power. That's the deal with Microsoft and it's the same deal from Sun - which is why Sun is ultimately doomed, despite OSS'ing Java and the like.
Especially when the "charity" is mostly a stock laundering and corporate influence scheme, as opposed to a "real" charity.
It's amazing how the suckers think Gates has some sort of "good side" to him. The only "evidence" they can point to is this "Foundation" run by his father which takes billions in stock. converts it to cash (which Bill can't do due to SEC regulations on corporate officers), then doles out a few percent of it (and the company BARELY makes the legal requirements for this) as "charity" while putting the rest into investments into corporations Bill wants to influence or control. People need to look at the list of "contributions" on the Foundation Web site - ninety percent are small amounts relative to the size of the assets and the likelihood of impact on the problem being addressed and most of those are distributed over multiple years as well to even make up the small amounts being spent.
Was he supposed to display his banner on a Sunday afternoon when no one was around?
Fucking morons...
THIS is WHY students get a gun and go into a school and shoot people - deservedly so.
My hat's off to the Columbine students. May many more like them appear in schools everywhere. Maybe then the morons who run the educational system in this country will get a clue that you can't treat people like that without consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not? Bill is writing crappy software.
Oh, wait, he doesn't write software anymore - he just does charity work...uh, huh, that's it.
The JavaScript just KILLS Firefox 2.0. Just scrolling up and down the page is a nightmare - and it's a short page!
Opera scrolls the page much faster and more smoothly.
Firefox 2.0 has a LOT of work to do on it. Every day it irritates me more with its erratic performance, broken download function (on Kubuntu Linux, anyway), and occasional crashes and lockups due to JavaScript issues.
Note: I'm not complaining about Google Blogger - I haven't used it yet - - I'm just complaining about crap software in general.
Yeah - like during the election, every time a Democrat made some statement about his party, the media spun it as "Democrats can't agree on anything". Media spin is not limited to Republican deeds.
As an anarchist, I'm perfectly well aware that Democrats are as scummy as Republicans (possibly even more so in certain aspects, as the Repugs are in others.). But the Repugs spend more time than Democrats touting their "family and moral values" - which makes them hypocrites as well as scum.
We have only one party in the US - the War Party of the State, with Republican, Democratic, Green, Socialist, and Libertarian branches differing only in their degree of unity and relative power on how to steal from and control the citizen.
The purpose of law is to CREATE crime, and thus, criminals.
Behavior, coercion, violence, whatever, is one thing. Crime is another.
Crime - like war - is the health of the state.
Again, the essence of the state is: "You do everything we tell you to, and give us everything you have, and we'll protect you from the bad people inside and outside our borders - and if there aren't any bad people, we'll make some."
The state - ALL versions - is a protection/extortion racket depending on human fear, nothing more or less.
Chimpanzees apparently aren't capable of understanding this, unfortunately.
I owned an Atari ST.
What killed Atari was Sam Tramiel's (and possibly Jack Tramiel's, depending on how much control he had at the time) incompetence as a CEO. Period.
Atari had a major presence in Europe, true. But it had little presence in the US because the company could not or did not develop its OS software sufficiently. Atari at the time had the capability of becoming a "cheap Apple" because it had a GUI OS which was quite nice running on hardware a fraction of the cost of an Apple at the time.
Their marketing wasn't that great in the US. They made the mistake of concentrating on Europe where sales were good because of exchange rates amplifying the low price benefit of the 520ST and concentrating on marketing rather than software development. The piracy mave have been an issue, but that would have been surmountable just as it has been in every other computer market had the system offered just a bit more capability. They had the potential of jumpstarting an entire industry around their product - there were plenty of cool startups producing devices for the ST, including 3D stuff and especially music industry stuff (musicians everywhere were using Atari - even Arsenio Hall's band leader used them - they could have owned the music industry niche.) I remember going to the West Coast Computer Faires around 1986-1987 and seeing all sorts of cool Atari stuff being developed. Add-on peripherals were coming out of the woodwork.
I've seen Sam Tramiel in person - a lightweight. His brother Leonard was the geek of the team, supposedly. Their father was the one who probably had the ability to pull it off, but he let his son sink the operation. Although Wikipedia says Jack ran the company "until the late 1980's", I never saw Jack Tramiel's name on anything coming out of Atari from day one - it was always Sam. Jack may have been running things behind the scenes, but it wasn't apparent to the Atari consumer. It was Sam and Leonard who showed up at West Coast Computer Faires and the like.
I also think that what sunk Atari was its attempt to get back into the videogame business, because they didn't really understand how to get the computer side going well. Switching tracks in mid-stream probably didn't do the company any good.
Bottom line: they had a chance to outdo Apple - and couldn't pull it off. I sincerely doubt it was piracy that had any significant effect - although I know a lot of Atari software companies complained about it (big surprise) - especially in the German market which was Atari's major market for small business and CAD software companies. Had Atari concentrated on marketing better in the US, the German piracy would have been small potatoes compared to US software sales, and the Atari software companies would have survived nicely.
Disclaimer: I was up for the post of Atari representative on the online systems (CompuServe, BIX, America Online) at one point, but I didn't get the job. I got interviewed by Neil Harris because I ran the Atari conference on the WELL for a while.
"Microsoft has to have the big hardware vendors universally behind it for this to work."
As TFA points out, IF Vista is allowed to fly, Microsoft will be in a position to DICTATE to the hardware manufacturers AND the content providers how things will go - because they will have the ONLY legally-protected (because of DMCA) platform for delivering protected content - and because they have an OS psuedo-monopoly guaranteed by the myopia of corporate CIOS and clueless consumers.
And the latter are WHY Vista WILL be allowed to fly - because nobody except a few critics like Gutmann are doing the thinking about the end result of all this. Corporate execs at the PC makers are thinking about next quarter stock results only, like most managers. The corporate CIOS are putting out fires for THEIR CEOs. And the consumers are clueless about the technology and its effects. (You're right, though, that the consumer protection organizations ought to get in on the act and EXPLAIN this stuff. Still, how many people will end up actually reading it? Enough to affect the actual market over the wishes and actions of corporate execs? Doubtful.)
Catch-22 all around. The only winner will be Microsoft.
OTOH, as I've said elsewhere, yes, this WILL all collapse eventually. Technology marches on and somebody - the Chinese if no one else - will eventually break the monopoly. ALL monopolies MUST fail eventually - even legal ones, if by no other means than violent revolution. It may take years (or as Duncan Macleod once said, "Centuries even!"), but Microsoft and DRM WILL go down.
Excellent point about the non-premium content. Corporations (except those in the media industry itself) in particular mostly won't care about any of these Vista "features" - but they will end up paying extra in their budgets for new PCs for decades to come. But it's unlikely any CIO is thinking about it in those terms - which means Vista is, in a sense, a "Trojan Horse". As TFA points out, basically it's intent is to establish Microsoft as an even bigger "technological monopoly" (supported by the "legal monopoly" means of DMCA legislation) who can dictate terms to BOTH the hardware manufacturers AND the content owners - and by extension, to corporate busineess and the consumers - while at the same time shutting down the open source software industry.
And we can the Bush administration's lack of enforcement of the Microsoft monopoly decision for enabling this.
OTOH, I have faith that the entire thing WILL collapse at some point - just like the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures collapsed - rendering Microsoft a shadow of its former self, damaging the content companies big time, and eventually paving the way for a reaction which will really boost FOSS and open standards on commodity hardware and the Net.
Which is why Vista by all accounts needs 1GB RAM at least to function with any applications. Microsoft is ensuring (for the benefit of the hardware manufacturers) that everybody has to upgrade fairly soon to new hardware. This insures that everybody gets new DRM'd hardware where Vista can do its dirty work (assuming the hardware manufacturers go along.) So the CPU makers, the large PC makers, the memory makers, the content companies and Microsoft all benefit to the detriment, apparently, of the peripheral and chip makers - and the consumer of course.
Since we're talking primarily private consumers, not corporate consumers (other than the media industry per se), for the media issues involved in TFA, and since consumer purchases DO influence corporate PC purchases to some extent, this means that corporations will eventually be forced to upgrade their hardware even if they don't upgrade to run Vista per se. A number of articles recently have pointed out that consumer software and hardware is influencing corporate buying decisions.
It would be interesting to see what the "food chain" looks like here. If the peripheral and chip manufacturers rebel against raising their costs by the effects listed in TFA, will this impact the board manufacturers and PC makers enough for them to rebel against Microsoft? Or does it go the other way around - does the board and PC manufacturers being the only way that peripheral and chip makers can make a living mean they can dictate to those makers? Does the mere fact that peripheral and chip costs will go up migrate enough cost to the board and PC makers, thus cutting their profit margins, that they will be inclined to rebel against Microsoft?
TFA doesn't cover all this in detail, merely outlining the potential problems. Are these problems comparable to any previous issues the various parties have had - such as migrating to new hardware standards like AGP, PCIe, SATA, etc.? If so, can we assume the various parties will suck it up and go ahead with Vista - or not?
Is there anybody in the affected industries raising these issues besides Gutmann? It would seem to me that since Vista is shipping shortly that much of the effects should already have been considered by the industry parties. OTOH, since content using the Vista features isn't shipping yet, is it possible that the industry has NOT been affected by these issues yet and therefore has NOT considered them - making Vista a "Trojan Horse"?
Inquiring minds want to know - which means why am I posting these questions on
I'm sure that's true, but also keep in mind that CompUSA Geek Squad do installations for small businesses as well. My new client had them do his on a setup with 25-30 PCs.
OTOH, just think of the opportunities for private PC support guys! Every time the home user's Vista machine "degrades" the content, the user will not know that it's deliberate and think their PC is on the fritz. The unscrupulous PC tech will assure them that it is so, and only charge $75 an hour to "fix it". Of course, he CAN'T fix it, so that means the "fix or no charge" PC tech will go out of business and the unscrupulous ones will be the only ones left in the field.
Way to go, Microsoft. Making the industry safe for frauds.
"There's no such thing as an "anti-linux" crowd, unless you happen to be one of the big shots at Micro$oft"
/. much, do you?
You don't read
You think we care if anybody finds it "appealing?" One is either a Transhumanist or one isn't. Do you care if the roaches under your sink find your Roach Motel "appealing"?
I'm perfectly well aware that nanotech can be DESIGNED to be deadly. That was my point. The point of TFA on the other hand was that nanotech could be ACCIDENTALLAY and EASILY converted SPONTANEOUSLY to being deadly to life - and not just some life, ALL life. That is far more unlikely, which the author does not acknowledge.
"Since I'd rather be dead than living in the hell you describe, I'm not that worried about it."
Trust me, we're not worried about you being dead rather than living in "our hell" either.
Works for us.
The fact that he supports Bill Joy and Richard Smalley pretty well defines this idiot.
Smalley is a wannabe who came late to nanotech and decided to use his higher conventional scientific status to try to take over the field from Drexler. He failed, despite this guy's opinion.
Joy is simply incapable of rational reasoning.
And this guy's paranoid fantasies about nanobots "spontaneously impregnating" each other with technology to become an artificial life form - and one that dooms all other life in addition, despite millions of years of evolutionary adaptation on this planet to just about every conceivable hazard - is just drivel.
Sure, nanotech could be designed to destroy all life - but it would have to be DESIGNED to do so. The odds of it happening by chance are so low as to be not worth considering. Sure, badly designed nanotech - and there WILL be badly designed nanotech, we CAN count on that - COULD cause massive medical issues on a par with a deadly virus such as the flu virus in the early 20th century or something like Ebola. So what? You take the risk and you try to prevent it. Nanotech offers many technical options for inhibiting this sort of thing. If the IT industry will get off its ass and develop some AI-based engineering programs that check for stupid engineering mistakes, the entire engineering industry would be better off as well.
What IS going to happen is that Transhumanists will use nanotech to transform themselves into a superior species And that's where the threat is going to come from as monkey-ass humans follow their usual primate instincts to try to suppress the Transhumans - and unlike the Star Trek shows and Terminator movies, the humans will get their asses kicked trying - at least until the Transhumans have improved enough that they can just ignore the chimps and go about their business anyway.
He's too much of a writer. Instead of making a point, he makes phrases and allegories.
I appreciate his sci-fi enormously, but his other writings get old fast.
Make your point, then shut up.
They let drunken assholes like Dick Cheney hunt - and then cover up for him when he shoots someone.
If you've got that much money, we know YOU'RE not working in IT...
Er, you're not...Bill...are you?
I asked my AI.
It replied: "Sourceforge? SOURCEFORGE! You've gotta be kidding me! What can Sourceforge do for you that I can't?"
Military hardware - especially nukes - is never meant to be USED.
It's meant to be PAID FOR.
And it's only used when somebody wants to GET PAID AGAIN FOR REPLACING IT - or use it up arranging for somebody else to get paid (in oil or whatever resource is the reason for the war.)
"Boondoggles" happen for a reason - and it's not simple stupidity or incompetence.
Years ago, I read in an electronic engineering journal an article by an engineer who consulted for a company manufacturing a certain component for the US government. He arrived at a factory with scores of employee cars in the parking lot, a big building, and a revenue of $100 million. He estimated he could produce this component for $100 with ten people. The owner of the company told him: "You can produce it for $100. I produce it for $100 million. Who's smarter?"
Get a clue.
"100 years of Grass Hoppers"?
That would be really bad...
Biblical, even...
It has been proven repeatedly - regardless of the Supreme Court's views - by the people who WROTE the Constitution that this is an individual right that applies to all citizens (male citizens, anyway, given the Founder's sexism at the time.)
Besides, who cares? You want to start another black market - this time in guns? Go right ahead. People who want to be armed will BE armed, regardless of what you do.
You couldn't stop drugs coming into the country, feel free to try to stop guns.
Suckers.
Well, for Word, they suggested not opening or saving Word documents.
That's one app down.
I suppose for the Player, they suggest...not playing anything.
Another app down.
What's left? Excel? Access? We already KNOW Outlook Express and Outlook and IE are toast on a daily basis.
And corporations still USE this crap?
Suckers.
"The network is the computer."
No, it's not. Never was, never will be.
There's a REASON you have TWO concepts: "computer" and "network".
Conflating the two is just marketing hype from people who want to control your access to knowledge and computing power. That's the deal with Microsoft and it's the same deal from Sun - which is why Sun is ultimately doomed, despite OSS'ing Java and the like.
Sun - and Microsoft - just don't get it.
Especially when the "charity" is mostly a stock laundering and corporate influence scheme, as opposed to a "real" charity.
It's amazing how the suckers think Gates has some sort of "good side" to him. The only "evidence" they can point to is this "Foundation" run by his father which takes billions in stock. converts it to cash (which Bill can't do due to SEC regulations on corporate officers), then doles out a few percent of it (and the company BARELY makes the legal requirements for this) as "charity" while putting the rest into investments into corporations Bill wants to influence or control. People need to look at the list of "contributions" on the Foundation Web site - ninety percent are small amounts relative to the size of the assets and the likelihood of impact on the problem being addressed and most of those are distributed over multiple years as well to even make up the small amounts being spent.
Suckers.
Was he supposed to display his banner on a Sunday afternoon when no one was around?
Fucking morons...
THIS is WHY students get a gun and go into a school and shoot people - deservedly so.
My hat's off to the Columbine students. May many more like them appear in schools everywhere. Maybe then the morons who run the educational system in this country will get a clue that you can't treat people like that without consequences.