Tax and spend, tax and spend... These people will tax anything that they can, so that they can have more for their pet pork barrel projects. This is the most ridiculous attempt yet to tax the Internet.
Screw ups happen. When it came to light, Netgear took responsibily for it, provided hardware to handle the load, revised the firmware and sent notices to those individuals that had registered their equipment. Was it bad programming to hardcode IP addresses in the firmware? - sure. But there are many more companies out there that would have acted less honorably.
It seems that George Orwell's "1984" is slowly but surely coming true. If you think that this infringement on privacy rights is going to stay in the schools, you're sorely mistaken. With all of the people abdicating their rights by having cameras monitor the public streets for better security, its only a matter of time before this rfid program will be expanded to the public streets. In the near future, if you want to go out into the public streets, you will have to carry a national id card that has an embedded rfid chip in it. All your movements can easily be the tracked, logged and spindled!
FYI, MFC is so fscked, that even Microsoft is abandoning it. M$ has been preaching.Net to replace it. Yes maybe 1%-2% of the future Windows apps may need to use it, but today,.Net is M$s' solution.
Well, I'd rather be using a system from the UK than the cowardly,snobass,passed their prime French. The metric system has been develeped and is maintained by them.
Don't go into programming. It is a dead end job. Our government has sold us out. Your job is eventually slated for it to disappear overseas. Instead, look at industries that are slated to expand over the next 10 years like health care, bio-genetics, and pharmacalogy.
Spending $10-$20 on a CD that has maybe 1 or 2 tracks that are good is too expensive in this economy. In addition, the number of tracks on a CD has been going down. People are losing their jobs, taxes are rising, the cost of living going up, the value of that CD is becoming lower and lower. The RIAA is now starting to see the effects of decreasing quality in their products. I see the RIAA as the Ludites. They want to continue the old model, and don't want to give their customers a better product.
As a stated before.. IANAL. I am only relaying what the client's lawyers have determined for their particular situation. Everyone should talk to a lawyer about their particular situation. HIPAA imposes some severe penalties for infringement and these lawyers are taking a very conservative approach on this. The EULAs themselves have not been tested in court and there is great uncertainty. These lawyers are also taking into account UCITA which M$ is one company that is actively trying to get enacted. True, UCITA for now has been stalled, but there is a consenses that over the next couple of years some form of it will eventually pass. The executive board has lost confidence with M$'s products with what the 150%-200% increase in licensing costs, screwy licensing, constant security problems, taking over users machines etc. They paused temporarily on Win2K to assess issues with WinXP and then decide and develop a new direction.
Executives don't like uncertainty. They are not about to bet the company on MS's products because they no longer trust that M$ is interested in their success. SP4 doesn't change any of this.
Now as for my msoftsucks1@hotmail.com email address. I thought that this was a humorous way of showing my contempt at what M$ has done to the Internet and computing. I'm sorry you don't feel that way.
SP4 is not HIPAA compliant. I am going through this with one of my clients. The lawyers that I'm working with are telling me that because service packs include previous service packs, agreeing to SP4 means that you also agree to SP3 legal terms. In order for SP4 to be HIPAA compliant it must specifically revoke any HIPAA onerous terms in SP3. SP4 doesn't do this. Basically the law takes from SP3 things that are not dealt with in SP4. IANAL but this is what the client's lawyers have come up with. My client is now stuck and is in the planning stages of ripping out Win2K and replacing it with Linux.
Half the time when M$crap installs automatic updates it breaks something. Look at how often M$ has to recall a patch or service pack. Their products and processes are flawed. I cannot rely on the fact that when I come in the morning that my machine will function like the day before. Businesses need for their machines to reliably function from day to day. M$ doesn't give a rat's ass about the general user. They care only about their image. When was the last time you heard that one of IBM's patches for their mainframes had to be recalled? It doesn't happen. IBM has products that were develeped properly and has the processes to make sure that a patch won't have unintended consequenses.
I am an independent consultant, and have been making my living riping out failed M$crap and replacing it with Linux. This has certaintly picked up after M$ released their licensing extortion schemes. The amount of clients I have that are even considering Windows Server 2003 can be counted on one hand. Usually when I explain to them the pros and cons of going with M$, they quickly reconsider. The next question they ask is if I have any other clients that have converted to Linux that are happy. After they talk to them, its usually an immediate go-ahead.
True, I can use additional software to fix IE's ActiveX flaws. But why should I have to do that? The Internet is built based upon open standards. By accepting IE's modifications of these standards and continuing to using IE, we say we are accepting that. I do web based development for a living, and yes Netscape/Mozilla doesn't do things the way IE does, but it is much closer to the standards than IE is. In order to get the easier development of IE you have to make a deal with the devil and accept M$'s bastardization of the Internet stardards. Why don't we use Mozilla and force the web sites to develop for official Internet stardards rather than the IE's versions? M$ is slowly turning the web into a version of MSN, proprietary and locked in. What's going to happen now that there won't be anymore standalone versions of IE past V6.01? Or how about all those Mac users, now that M$ has decided to abandon IE for the Mac? Will we all have to convert our machines over to XP or Longhorn just so we can browse web sites tailored to M$?
No. The correct approach to prevent M$ from further polluting the web is to use browsers other than IE. Most of these sites look at their server logs and make business decisions on them. If a large enough of their population is using alternative browsers then they will invest the resources to make sure that their web site displays properly on those browsers.
As for ActiveX, I have given up on that technology long ago. M$ has purposefully confused its security model. M$ wants me to trust everyone, yet won't trust me. It wants to install any software it wants on my machine, at any time it wants yet prevents me from excersizing control over my machine? And Longhorn and Palladium will just make this even worse. Yeah right.
I will continue extorting and using other browsers other that IE. And when Netscape does incorportate ActiveX technology, I'm sure there will be way to turn it off. Using a different browser other than IE, is the first step of getting off the M$ upgrade wheel.
IE has technologically fallen behind other browsers. Once you used tabbed browsing, you'll never go back. The cost to try it out is minimal. Go to www.mozilla.org and download a copy. If you don't like it, you can uninstall easily.
is a good thing. This is the first dribble of a coming flood of migrations. People have gotten tired of M$ licensing extortion schemes. They backed down a bit recently by throwing in some tech support. But lets face it guys, these new extortion schemes increase a company's software expenditures by 150-200% with no additional value. People are looking for alternatives that make sense. If OSS can fit that bill, so much the better. People are also getting tired of M$ bullshit of locking into a perpetual upgrade path. People want flexibility and options, and M$ is all about none of that.
For a long time I was an IE user. My machine would constantly fill up with spyware and adbots because of ActiveX. I tried disabling ActiveX and browsing was almost impossible because of IE's insistance of notifying me about every page that has ActiveX disabled. Could not stop these dialog boxes, and I got tired of it. I tried Opera and Mozilla, and I now I am a tried and true user of Mozilla. Although I have experienced some minor crashes with it, I'm willing to put up with these because my machine no longer fills up with spybots. Mozilla is superior to IE and the only way for others to know this is to explain them what the advantages are. Something free of questionable value is not really worth much.
In my mind, I think that IE dieing on the Mac is a good thing. Those sites that only code to IE's standards will now have to rethink that policy if they don't want to lose Mac users.
Companies today don't give a rat's ass about you. All they want is a bunch of robots paying them as little as possible. Everyone is replaceable. If you understand that and embrace it, you can always have the last laugh. Before you leave make sure you have something lined up to go to. As soon as you start at your new job, decide how long you want to stay there (3,4,5 years), and what kind of position you would want at that time. Never stay at a company for more than 6 years. During the time you're at the new job, study,read, and learn what it takes to be able to perform that new position. If the company offers training, great, but don't rely on them 100%. It's your responsibility to improve yourself. Once the time limit has been reached, if you haven't been promoted to the position you've been planning , go on a job hunt again. I once made the mistake of staying 8 years with a company. In the end, the company screwed me over, and I had to take a pay cut and a lower position just to get a new job.
Also, become more active politically. Write to your congressman about getting these excemptions to the labor laws reversed.Join organizations like (http://www.cdt.org/),(http://www.acm.org),(http://www.cpsr.org),(http://www.eff.org) . Laws against us have been passed because we aren't political enough. Look at UCITA. Vendors tried to screw us over one more time. We became organized, and now we are in a stalemate. It's not dead yet, but its certaintly not being enacted on a grand scale.
Unions are not an answer. They have their own adgendas and they kill and calcify whole industries once they take hold.
The cost of having my cable account has steadily been increasing. Its just too much money for too little value. I just can't afford it. Time to go back 56K modems.
With the recent FCC decision to allow big monopolies to own more stations, there is less and less interesting programs on the public airways. This spectrum should be redeployed for something more useful than the propaganda of these monopolies. As for me, I stopped watching TV long ago. That time is now spent on the Internet.
You've bought into the marketing hype. 60% of the tax cut has been set aside for tax cuts for dividends. The only people who this will matter to will be those who have substantial amounts os shares in stocks that pay dividends. Guess what, that is not the majority of folks that work for a living and make $50K/year. Lets face it folks, this tax cut was for the rich, paid on the backs of the middle class. The $300-$600 that you'll get back in no way makes up for the $10K-100K give back to the rich. This was not a jobs package, nor tax cut for the majority of us. This was a pay-out to Bush's supporters - plain and simple. If you think that this tax cut will jump start the economy- think again. The rich don't spend this money. They reinvest it - but not in the US. Look at how many jobs have disappeared overseas during Bush's tenure. Do you really think that those jobs will come back? Hopefully this will be a 1 term president like his father, because if he gets another, we'll all go broke. He doesn't get it. IT'S THE ECONOMY STUPID!!!
Does anyone know how Powell gets his job? Is he appointed by Bush or is he elected? Has Congress approved his appointment? If so, we should pester our congressmen to impeach him. His mandate is to protect the public's interest not big business. He has failed at his mandate. Therefore he should be fired. Plain and simple.
You can't. Try doing multiple DNS lookups from Verisign's DNS servers. If you go past 100 searchs, you're IP address becomes blacklisted and you won't be returned any further DNS entries. The only way to be removed from their blacklist is to call them. They list the phone number to call in the returned info, including a nasty message telling you that you will no longer be serviced until you call. I know, I've been through this. They give you a speil about how this technology is now patented and if you want to use it, you will have to pay a fee.
Until there is a challenge to this patent, I see a steady decline in the Internet environment.
Agreed, on paper Clear Channel looks like its losing money. But when you further look into their finances, you see alot of money shuffling. What they are effectively doing is funneling out of the company monies to make themselves look like they are losing money. At last count, my firm (I work in finance) has counted almost $1Billion USD that has been syphoned out of the company. How much you want to make a bet, that once the FCC loosens the restrictions, that this money will be used to fund the next round of purchases?
The FCC has already decided that it will allow companies to own much more than they can now. The FCC director stated that this oh so important decision does not need any debate. He tried to shut down the debate by refusing to fund town meetings around the country debating this and informing the general public. He has definitely been bought by the likes of Clear Channel. This will further erode democracy in this country, and if you now hate DMCA and its ilk, wait until the next pass. Laws like DMCA and PATRIOT 2 get passed because there is a lack of healthy debate. It has been shown time and time again that Clear Channel refuses to report on such items. If you don't believe me, when was this particular debate even mentioned on any of Clear Channel's stations?
The only time that I saw this reported was on a PBS program called "NOW with Bill Moyers". This was an excellent program that tried to look at the issue from all sides. You can find an in-depth discussion at http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/bigmedia.html Little by little our rights are being taken away from us. Just look at all of the recent laws implemented, DMCA, copyrights, PATRIOT act etc.
We need to act now, before the decision has been rendered. Once it has, there is very little chance of getting it changed. What's at stake is the very nature of democracy in this country. There is no way to rectify this if a bad decision is made. How do we rectify this in 10 years from now, once Clear Channel has bought up the few remaining independent stations? Do we really expect that at that point, a healthy debate about breaking up Clear Channel will be allowed by Clear Channel?
Clear Channel says it needs to be allowed to buy the remaining independent stations in order to become profitable. If they haven't become profitable at this size, what makes us believe that will become profitable when they have taken over the rest? Lets face it folks, these guys are lying to us saying that they are not profitable. They are quite profitable now, and what's really driving this is pure greed at the expense of this country's core values. They are destroying this country at the expense of a few bucks. Enough is enough.
To avoid using M$ products. This just highlights the extortion scheme that the Microsoft Licensing really is. It's time to start using open source products to help shut this down. Lets face it guys, our politicians have been bought and paid for to look the other way while M$ fleeces its customers. Don't want to get caught in this nightmare? Don't upgrade to new versions of M$ products. Instead start using OSS products. Don't feel that they are not as good as the M$ crap? Start by bringing it in to the non-critical areas. For instance, instead of using IIS, use Apache. Don't code for.NET, code for J2EE, Pearl, PHP or other OSS languages. You don't have to move everything over to OSS at one time. You can move gradually. Each time you move over a piece, you deny M$ its license fees. As this revenue starts to dwindle, they will either revise their extortion schemes, or suffer the fate of extinction. Plain and simple. Don't just whine about M$'s licensing, do something about it.
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Tax and spend, tax and spend...
These people will tax anything that they can, so that they can have more for their pet pork barrel projects. This is the most ridiculous attempt yet to tax the Internet.
Screw ups happen. When it came to light, Netgear took responsibily for it, provided hardware to handle the load, revised the firmware and sent notices to those individuals that had registered their equipment. Was it bad programming to hardcode IP addresses in the firmware? - sure. But there are many more companies out there that would have acted less honorably.
Try Netgear. I don't remember exactly where, but a recent comparison of home equipment rated them at the top of the heap.
It seems that George Orwell's "1984" is slowly but surely coming true. If you think that this infringement on privacy rights is going to stay in the schools, you're sorely mistaken. With all of the people abdicating their rights by having cameras monitor the public streets for better security, its only a matter of time before this rfid program will be expanded to the public streets. In the near future, if you want to go out into the public streets, you will have to carry a national id card that has an embedded rfid chip in it. All your movements can easily be the tracked, logged and spindled!
FYI, MFC is so fscked, that even Microsoft is abandoning it. M$ has been preaching .Net to replace it. Yes maybe 1%-2% of the future Windows apps may need to use it, but today, .Net is M$s' solution.
Well, I'd rather be using a system from the UK than the cowardly,snobass,passed their prime French. The metric system has been develeped and is maintained by them.
Tuna is full of mercury. Eating alot of fish will kill your kidneys. Your father should be checked for mercury toxicity.
Don't go into programming. It is a dead end job. Our government has sold us out. Your job is eventually slated for it to disappear overseas. Instead, look at industries that are slated to expand over the next 10 years like health care, bio-genetics, and pharmacalogy.
Spending $10-$20 on a CD that has maybe 1 or 2 tracks that are good is too expensive in this economy. In addition, the number of tracks on a CD has been going down. People are losing their jobs, taxes are rising, the cost of living going up, the value of that CD is becoming lower and lower. The RIAA is now starting to see the effects of decreasing quality in their products. I see the RIAA as the Ludites. They want to continue the old model, and don't want to give their customers a better product.
As a stated before.. IANAL. I am only relaying what the client's lawyers have determined for their particular situation. Everyone should talk to a lawyer about their particular situation. HIPAA imposes some severe penalties for infringement and these lawyers are taking a very conservative approach on this. The EULAs themselves have not been tested in court and there is great uncertainty. These lawyers are also taking into account UCITA which M$ is one company that is actively trying to get enacted. True, UCITA for now has been stalled, but there is a consenses that over the next couple of years some form of it will eventually pass. The executive board has lost confidence with M$'s products with what the 150%-200% increase in licensing costs, screwy licensing, constant security problems, taking over users machines etc. They paused temporarily on Win2K to assess issues with WinXP and then decide and develop a new direction.
Executives don't like uncertainty. They are not about to bet the company on MS's products because they no longer trust that M$ is interested in their success. SP4 doesn't change any of this.
Now as for my msoftsucks1@hotmail.com email address. I thought that this was a humorous way of showing my contempt at what M$ has done to the Internet and computing. I'm sorry you don't feel that way.
SP4 is not HIPAA compliant. I am going through this with one of my clients. The lawyers that I'm working with are telling me that because service packs include previous service packs, agreeing to SP4 means that you also agree to SP3 legal terms. In order for SP4 to be HIPAA compliant it must specifically revoke any HIPAA onerous terms in SP3. SP4 doesn't do this. Basically the law takes from SP3 things that are not dealt with in SP4. IANAL but this is what the client's lawyers have come up with. My client is now stuck and is in the planning stages of ripping out Win2K and replacing it with Linux.
Half the time when M$crap installs automatic updates it breaks something. Look at how often M$ has to recall a patch or service pack. Their products and processes are flawed. I cannot rely on the fact that when I come in the morning that my machine will function like the day before. Businesses need for their machines to reliably function from day to day. M$ doesn't give a rat's ass about the general user. They care only about their image. When was the last time you heard that one of IBM's patches for their mainframes had to be recalled? It doesn't happen. IBM has products that were develeped properly and has the processes to make sure that a patch won't have unintended consequenses.
I am an independent consultant, and have been making my living riping out failed M$crap and replacing it with Linux. This has certaintly picked up after M$ released their licensing extortion schemes. The amount of clients I have that are even considering Windows Server 2003 can be counted on one hand. Usually when I explain to them the pros and cons of going with M$, they quickly reconsider. The next question they ask is if I have any other clients that have converted to Linux that are happy. After they talk to them, its usually an immediate go-ahead.
True, I can use additional software to fix IE's ActiveX flaws. But why should I have to do that? The Internet is built based upon open standards. By accepting IE's modifications of these standards and continuing to using IE, we say we are accepting that. I do web based development for a living, and yes Netscape/Mozilla doesn't do things the way IE does, but it is much closer to the standards than IE is. In order to get the easier development of IE you have to make a deal with the devil and accept M$'s bastardization of the Internet stardards. Why don't we use Mozilla and force the web sites to develop for official Internet stardards rather than the IE's versions? M$ is slowly turning the web into a version of MSN, proprietary and locked in. What's going to happen now that there won't be anymore standalone versions of IE past V6.01? Or how about all those Mac users, now that M$ has decided to abandon IE for the Mac? Will we all have to convert our machines over to XP or Longhorn just so we can browse web sites tailored to M$?
No. The correct approach to prevent M$ from further polluting the web is to use browsers other than IE. Most of these sites look at their server logs and make business decisions on them. If a large enough of their population is using alternative browsers then they will invest the resources to make sure that their web site displays properly on those browsers.
As for ActiveX, I have given up on that technology long ago. M$ has purposefully confused its security model. M$ wants me to trust everyone, yet won't trust me. It wants to install any software it wants on my machine, at any time it wants yet prevents me from excersizing control over my machine? And Longhorn and Palladium will just make this even worse. Yeah right.
I will continue extorting and using other browsers other that IE. And when Netscape does incorportate ActiveX technology, I'm sure there will be way to turn it off. Using a different browser other than IE, is the first step of getting off the M$ upgrade wheel.
IE has technologically fallen behind other browsers. Once you used tabbed browsing, you'll never go back. The cost to try it out is minimal. Go to www.mozilla.org and download a copy. If you don't like it, you can uninstall easily.
is a good thing. This is the first dribble of a coming flood of migrations. People have gotten tired of M$ licensing extortion schemes. They backed down a bit recently by throwing in some tech support. But lets face it guys, these new extortion schemes increase a company's software expenditures by 150-200% with no additional value. People are looking for alternatives that make sense. If OSS can fit that bill, so much the better. People are also getting tired of M$ bullshit of locking into a perpetual upgrade path. People want flexibility and options, and M$ is all about none of that.
For a long time I was an IE user. My machine would constantly fill up with spyware and adbots because of ActiveX. I tried disabling ActiveX and browsing was almost impossible because of IE's insistance of notifying me about every page that has ActiveX disabled. Could not stop these dialog boxes, and I got tired of it. I tried Opera and Mozilla, and I now I am a tried and true user of Mozilla. Although I have experienced some minor crashes with it, I'm willing to put up with these because my machine no longer fills up with spybots. Mozilla is superior to IE and the only way for others to know this is to explain them what the advantages are. Something free of questionable value is not really worth much.
In my mind, I think that IE dieing on the Mac is a good thing. Those sites that only code to IE's standards will now have to rethink that policy if they don't want to lose Mac users.
Companies today don't give a rat's ass about you. All they want is a bunch of robots paying them as little as possible. Everyone is replaceable. If you understand that and embrace it, you can always have the last laugh. Before you leave make sure you have something lined up to go to. As soon as you start at your new job, decide how long you want to stay there (3,4,5 years), and what kind of position you would want at that time. Never stay at a company for more than 6 years. During the time you're at the new job, study,read, and learn what it takes to be able to perform that new position. If the company offers training, great, but don't rely on them 100%. It's your responsibility to improve yourself. Once the time limit has been reached, if you haven't been promoted to the position you've been planning , go on a job hunt again. I once made the mistake of staying 8 years with a company. In the end, the company screwed me over, and I had to take a pay cut and a lower position just to get a new job.
/ /www.cpsr.org),(http://www.eff.org) . Laws against us have been passed because we aren't political enough. Look at UCITA. Vendors tried to screw us over one more time. We became organized, and now we are in a stalemate. It's not dead yet, but its certaintly not being enacted on a grand scale.
Also, become more active politically. Write to your congressman about getting these excemptions to the labor laws reversed.Join organizations like (http://www.cdt.org/),(http://www.acm.org),(http:
Unions are not an answer. They have their own adgendas and they kill and calcify whole industries once they take hold.
The cost of having my cable account has steadily been increasing. Its just too much money for too little value. I just can't afford it. Time to go back 56K modems.
With the recent FCC decision to allow big monopolies to own more stations, there is less and less interesting programs on the public airways. This spectrum should be redeployed for something more useful than the propaganda of these monopolies. As for me, I stopped watching TV long ago. That time is now spent on the Internet.
Since you have to wipe the machine anyway, why don't you install a copy Linux? What do you need in XP that Linux doesn't do?
You've bought into the marketing hype. 60% of the tax cut has been set aside for tax cuts for dividends. The only people who this will matter to will be those who have substantial amounts os shares in stocks that pay dividends. Guess what, that is not the majority of folks that work for a living and make $50K/year. Lets face it folks, this tax cut was for the rich, paid on the backs of the middle class. The $300-$600 that you'll get back in no way makes up for the $10K-100K give back to the rich. This was not a jobs package, nor tax cut for the majority of us. This was a pay-out to Bush's supporters - plain and simple. If you think that this tax cut will jump start the economy- think again. The rich don't spend this money. They reinvest it - but not in the US. Look at how many jobs have disappeared overseas during Bush's tenure. Do you really think that those jobs will come back? Hopefully this will be a 1 term president like his father, because if he gets another, we'll all go broke. He doesn't get it. IT'S THE ECONOMY STUPID!!!
Does anyone know how Powell gets his job? Is he appointed by Bush or is he elected? Has Congress approved his appointment? If so, we should pester our congressmen to impeach him. His mandate is to protect the public's interest not big business. He has failed at his mandate. Therefore he should be fired. Plain and simple.
You can't. Try doing multiple DNS lookups from Verisign's DNS servers. If you go past 100 searchs, you're IP address becomes blacklisted and you won't be returned any further DNS entries. The only way to be removed from their blacklist is to call them. They list the phone number to call in the returned info, including a nasty message telling you that you will no longer be serviced until you call. I know, I've been through this. They give you a speil about how this technology is now patented and if you want to use it, you will have to pay a fee.
Until there is a challenge to this patent, I see a steady decline in the Internet environment.
Agreed, on paper Clear Channel looks like its losing money. But when you further look into their finances, you see alot of money shuffling. What they are effectively doing is funneling out of the company monies to make themselves look like they are losing money. At last count, my firm (I work in finance) has counted almost $1Billion USD that has been syphoned out of the company. How much you want to make a bet, that once the FCC loosens the restrictions, that this money will be used to fund the next round of purchases?
The FCC has already decided that it will allow companies to own much more than they can now. The FCC director stated that this oh so important decision does not need any debate. He tried to shut down the debate by refusing to fund town meetings around the country debating this and informing the general public. He has definitely been bought by the likes of Clear Channel. This will further erode democracy in this country, and if you now hate DMCA and its ilk, wait until the next pass. Laws like DMCA and PATRIOT 2 get passed because there is a lack of healthy debate. It has been shown time and time again that Clear Channel refuses to report on such items. If you don't believe me, when was this particular debate even mentioned on any of Clear Channel's stations? The only time that I saw this reported was on a PBS program called "NOW with Bill Moyers". This was an excellent program that tried to look at the issue from all sides. You can find an in-depth discussion at http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/bigmedia.html
Little by little our rights are being taken away from us. Just look at all of the recent laws implemented, DMCA, copyrights, PATRIOT act etc.
We need to act now, before the decision has been rendered. Once it has, there is very little chance of getting it changed. What's at stake is the very nature of democracy in this country. There is no way to rectify this if a bad decision is made. How do we rectify this in 10 years from now, once Clear Channel has bought up the few remaining independent stations? Do we really expect that at that point, a healthy debate about breaking up Clear Channel will be allowed by Clear Channel?
Clear Channel says it needs to be allowed to buy the remaining independent stations in order to become profitable. If they haven't become profitable at this size, what makes us believe that will become profitable when they have taken over the rest? Lets face it folks, these guys are lying to us saying that they are not profitable. They are quite profitable now, and what's really driving this is pure greed at the expense of this country's core values. They are destroying this country at the expense of a few bucks. Enough is enough.
To avoid using M$ products. This just highlights the extortion scheme that the Microsoft Licensing really is. It's time to start using open source products to help shut this down. Lets face it guys, our politicians have been bought and paid for to look the other way while M$ fleeces its customers. Don't want to get caught in this nightmare? Don't upgrade to new versions of M$ products. Instead start using OSS products. Don't feel that they are not as good as the M$ crap? Start by bringing it in to the non-critical areas. For instance, instead of using IIS, use Apache. Don't code for .NET, code for J2EE, Pearl, PHP or other OSS languages. You don't have to move everything over to OSS at one time. You can move gradually. Each time you move over a piece, you deny M$ its license fees. As this revenue starts to dwindle, they will either revise their extortion schemes, or suffer the fate of extinction. Plain and simple. Don't just whine about M$'s licensing, do something about it.