What should be on trial here is not this specific patent, but the state in which our patent system currently is.
That's exactly what's happening, to a degree. The patent was already found to be valid. The only question presented to the Supreme Court is:
Whether the Federal Circuit erred in setting forth a general rule in patent cases that
a district court must, absent exceptional circumstances, issue a permanent
injunction after a finding of infringement.
You can get more background by reading the lower court decisions. Judges have discretion as to whether or not to issue an injunction in a patent violation case, although they are almost always issued by tradition. Even though the district court was forced by the law to find the patent valid, the judge still felt the patent was ridiculous and refused to order an injunction. I don't remember the exact quote, but it was something to the effect that software patent law was highly controversial and in a big state of flux. He basically expected and hoped the law would be changed by the time it got through the court system again.
Note that refusing to order an injunction only means that ebay won't be forced to remove that feature. MercExchange can still sue them over and over for continued damages, and will win the cases over and over until the patent law changes or ebay changes their site. Injunctions are issued by tradition to prevent the court system from getting bogged down. The Supreme Court will decide if they are required to issue the injuction. My guess is that they will decide they aren't required to do so. The Supreme Court is not generally in the business of limiting the power of the judicial branch.
Are you kidding? I'm ecstatic that Vista for home users won't be out for this Christmas. The year that XP came out, I spent my entire Christmas break configuring networks and tracking down drivers for all my family's printers, modems, CD recorders, and digital cameras that didn't work anymore with the CDs that came in the box.
If you really love your wife, get her Gnome 2.16 for Christmas like I'm planning to do for mine.
I have news for you. Companies that used Windows for the last 10 years spent a lot more than the non-free licensing costs on supporting the whole thing.
When Windows Vista comes out, there will be all sorts of pressure to migrate to it. This guy picked the perfect time to switch so that he has time to do it right, before that pressure hits. It's the kind of foresight I expect from a company that would be able to see past the short term hassle of switching operating system suppliers in the first place.
You're thinking too short term. Presumably, this guy wasn't hired specifically for the Linux migration. If he wasn't spending some time on this, he would be working on the next service pack upgrade or whatever. It sounds like he is doing it right by taking it slow, and I'd be really suprised if he was rolling anything out to users that wasn't fully tested.
You're right -- in the short term this is more trouble than it's worth. There are a lot of things he needs to learn, and the initial setup can be difficult and time consuming when you have never done it before. The payoff only comes in the long run.
Imagine how much your company would have saved in licensing costs if they had migrated to open source software in 1995. Imagine how easy it would be to support Linux if the IT staff and employees had 10 years of solid Linux experience.
This guy's company is going to be in a great position in 2015, and people who couldn't tolerate some short term inconvenience will be even further entrenched in a single-source solution. In fact, I think the Linux migration will more than adequately prove itself financially much sooner -- by the time his friends are in the middle of a Vista migration. (I'll resist the temptation to insert a cheap shot about 2015 here).
As for the original question, I would suggest if he wants something that shares files like Windows, to use Samba. It's not just for interoperability; KDE and Gnome both integrate with Samba very nicely.
I haven't really used windows since win98, so you make a valid point, but I don't often bash Microsoft either. After thinking about why I read these articles, this is what I came up with:
I just like learning about computer stuff.
Family and friends are eventually going to ask me for help on it.
Maybe I'll see something that will convince me to switch back.
Although I'd never admit it to anyone, I am addicted to that sadistic feeling I get when I see a feature that has been available on my desktop for months or years, and think about all the people eagerly anticipating it in Vista.
You are what I call an open source dabbler. That's not a derogatory term; it just means you do almost all your work on commercial software, and occasionally try out open source software for comparison on non-critical tasks. You invariably find the commercial software to be easier to use because that's what you are accustomed to, have invested thousands of hours and hundreds of dollars in, and have come to rely on for several years.
As difficult as it is to believe, there are also people who are commercial software dabblers. We do almost all our work on open source software, and only occasionally come across commercial software when we use someone else's computer. We invariably find the open source software to be easier to use because that's what we are accustomed to, have invested thousands of hours in, and have come to rely on for several years.
I don't think it's fair for dabblers of either variety to make any claim about the other side. There is little incentive for either one to invest enough time and money in the other kind of software to make a fair comparison. Photoshop is as unintuitive to us as the gimp is to you, and we have as much difficulty creating complex documents in word as you have in openoffice.
I know that sounds crazy, but it sounds just as crazy to me when I hear people say it isn't possible to do real work on Linux, when I have used it every day for complex tasks for 8 years, and reclaimed the unused disk space by deleting my Windows partition 6 years ago. No, I don't use wine or virtual machines either.
That being said, I actually agree with your original point. I think a vast majority of vocal Microsoft bashers on slashdot are clinging to a Microsoft lifeline. Why else would someone complain about Microsoft if it didn't impact them personally at all?
Yes, he's young, but he's been using Linux for 6 years -- longer than a lot of slashdotters have probably managed. I learned about some packages that I wasn't aware of, and it's obvious he doesn't limit himself to the normal teenage computer interests.
the security model in NT-based systems is much richer than that in Linux-based systems
I beg to differ, unless you qualify that with default. Even then, there is little difference in capability in actual practice, as you pointed out. The security model in Linux has almost always been as rich as you want it to be. Process and role based access control has been available and used in Linux for several years in systems where that level of control is desirable, and has even crept into default installations of some server and even desktop distros in the last couple of years.
For example, all the applications that connect to the internet on my home desktop already have similar restrictions to the IE7 restrictions the grandparent pointed out, and are probably more configurable and transparent. There are also several other layers of security that will probably prevent an attacker from ever getting to that point. Now you can say you've heard of an "ordinary" user process switching to an even less privileged user account.
Admittedly, it wasn't easy to set up, but it is very easy to use and maintain. When I first made the changes, my wife didn't even notice a difference, and she couldn't see what the big deal was. I'll be very interested to see if Microsoft can manage to make it effective, easy enough for the average joe to install, and transparent enough that the average joe won't get annoyed and turn it off. I don't see how they can do it without limiting the extra security features to their own products in very inflexible configurations.
why in the hell would I want my browser to do that?
Because your most precious data is usually stored in your home directory (or whatever the windows equivalent is). I don't want a web browser flaw to allow access to my financial data, email, confidential work files, or other personal private data.
I agree with you about the prompt being annoying, though. On my system, I can only upload/download from a default non-executable "sandbox" directory, but my wife's account is configured to only hide specific sensitive files and directories from firefox. The extra security is completely transparent to her unless she downloads a bank statement or something, when she has to use nautilus to move the file to a secure directory after downloading it.
Take your point a bit further
on
Sudo vs. Root
·
· Score: 1
You bring up an interesting point, and I think the other replies haven't gone far enough to address it.
You argued that sudo is a vulnerable point when a browser or IM is compromised. Other people have addressed those potential weaknesses of sudo. I assert that a browser or IM process should never be able to run sudo in the first place, or for that matter, do anything other than maintain the bookmarks and preferences, read/write from a specific uploads/downloads directory, and launch a couple of viewer applications like acrobat reader and a media player.
In other words, I find it ironic that people will go to great lengths to prevent root access when their most valuable data is freely accessible by a normal user. Although having root access is a definite bonus for an attacker, there is plenty of mischief that can be done with a regular account, especially for a targeted attack. For example, do you really care if someone can't get root on your machine if your banking, investments, schedule, address book, correspondence, private encryption keys, and photographs are all in your home directory?
Whether you know it or not, you made a great case for mandatory access control as another layer of security in addition to properly configuring sudo and keeping your applications patched. A web browser should never have the same privileges as a shell, even if they are being used by the same person.
Interesting. My eye always moves first to whatever button has the highlighting that means it is the default selection. As such, the different orderings in different apps has never bothered me.
I know what you mean about the form letters. One of my senators is actually pretty specific and frequent in his replies, but the rest of my representatives are just like you said. However, I have found that the minority party (since they want to regain power) is especially sensitive to public opinion, and letters to them will make more difference than letters to the majority.
On the other hand, I have had my majority party congressman cross party lines to cosponsor a bill after a letter to him, so don't give up on expressing your opinion. On a more local level, a traffic light was put into a dangerous intersection shortly after my letter to the city council once. Also, you may not change a representative's opinion on a bill, but if there is not enough popular support, it may never get a vote or may get many moderating amendments.
There are several choices for 2008 presidential candidates at this point. It just boils down to essentially two by the time the general election rolls around. Moderates just don't participate enough in the nomination process. For example, one of my favorite 2008 republican candidates, Senator McCain, is somewhat centrist, and blows Senator Clinton out of the water in polls, but he will have a difficult time gaining the nomination.
We do have interesting abberations in candidate platforms every once in a while. For example, Senator Chafee describes himself as a "pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-Bill of Rights Republican". Well, this is closer to being a libertarian than either a democrat or republican, but he never would have won that way.
This is a pretty common practice. At my job we are required to frequently go through quite a rigorous process to make sure nothing sensitive to U.S. national security makes it into exported source code. Actually delivering compilable source costs a lot extra, is specified in a contract, and comes with training and a compile/test environment.
The argument is that it will have a chilling effect on sources, who will be loath to inform a newspaper that can't protect its computers, thereby preventing the paper from reporting some stories that it otherwise could. In other words they have confused freedom of the press with freedom from a tarnished reputation.
The solution is simple. The paper just has to refuse information that causes themselves or the source to break the law. Or at least have the brains to only use the information -- as Mark "Deep Throat" Felt put it -- for "deep background" and find a safe second source for anything they print. That's just responsible journalism in my book. That's what every other industry is required to do.
I don't feel bad for the paper at all. Whether the coroner was complicit or not, they damaged their own reputation by prying into confidential medical records and being stupid enough to print the evidence in a public newspaper. The paper is the one who violated privacy rights, not the court who is holding them accountable for that action.
I work for an arms dealer (legal kind). Does that mean my company is immune from certain search warrants, because it would abridge someone's 2nd amendment rights if suppliers couldn't trust us to keep their confidential data secret?
I get prints of the best ones, delete the worst ones, put the crops in subfolders labeled with the dimensions, burn to CD or DVD depending on size, label it, and stick it in one of those CD carriers that hold about 500 discs.
I don't keep the raw images, because I would just post-process it the same anyway, but a subdirectory named raw would make sense for those if you absolutely need them. One of the most important aspects of organization in either the physical or virtual world is knowing what to throw away.
That gives me a disc with directories like original, 5x7, 8x10, 11x14, etc. The lab I use for enlargements will print the image from the appropriate directory if I specify that in the instructions.
Personally, I think you're looking for a complex solution to a simple problem. With revision control, you would have to check out the appropriate version and copy it to another medium for reprints. Not to mention the extra complexity of maintaining backups that is inherent to a version control system. Version control has its place, but it is mainly designed for files that need to be changed a lot over time by several people. Images are usually processed by one person right after the shoot, and then never modified significantly again.
I use gentoo for a few different reasons, none of which have anything to do with ekeing out every last cycle from my machine:
Nearly universal support for stack smash protection which must be enabled at compile time.
Incremental updates. I update my system a little bit at a time instead of doing a major upgrade when the distro makes a new major release. I've used gentoo for a long time (5+ years), so I don't know how much of a problem this still is with other distros or not.
Better dependency handling. No problems with different packages being compiled by different compilers against different development library versions.
Not strongly married to either KDE or Gnome.
Multimedia is easier to get working than any other distro I've tried. decss, win32 codecs, etc.
Can stay bleeding edge where I want to, and extremely stable in other areas.
Easy to make small changes to source. I occasionally add a minor feature, change a default, fix a bug, or apply a security patch from a mailing list instead of waiting for the next release.
Easy to distribute to multiple machines. It's a snap to compile and test on one machine, then quickly install my custom binary package on many machines.
USE flags. Almost everywhere you could use --disable-feature on a manual configure, there is a USE flag for that feature. This is very useful both for enabling features that most distro's wouldn't include and disabling features that most distros include by default. For example, when alsa was still pretty new and usually not enabled by default, the alsa USE flag made migration much easier.
I love it when people define standards as whatever Microsoft says the standard is; it reminds me of an old joke:
Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. They just redefine darkness as the new industry standard.
Allow me to illustrate some basic knowledge for a Linux desktop:
To log on in the morning, I enter my username and password and click login. My programmer friend says it would take him about 10 minutes including downloading the source and recompile time to change gdm to require pressing control-alt-delete first, but I don't want him to do that because it makes little sense. To log out, I click the log out button on the panel.
To read my email, I use evolution, thunderbird, or something else.
Ctrl+O opens a file. Ctrl+S saves it. Alt+F4 closes a window. Alt+Tab switches apps, etc.
To create a text document, spreadsheet, or presentation, I run OpenOffice and choose to create a new text document, spreadsheet, or presentation. Most of the key combos and tricks I learned on MS Office still work, and the rest are easily customizable or easily learned. Since it is open source, I actually can code the next version of OpenOffice. I never have to worry about someone having a different version of office than me, because I can create a pdf to send to them with one click, which I actually prefer, or they can always download the latest version for free if they need to be able to edit.
To browse the Internet, I use firefox.
To use my USB flash drive/iPod, I plug it in and go. Scanners and printers admittedly can be difficult to set up, but the IT guys take care of that kind of stuff for me.
I see on the Internet all the time that you have to know the command line to use Linux, but I don't even know what that means, because I've never had to do it.
Anyone who says programming is not a science has never fixed an elusive bug in a multi-million line program. Form a hypothesis, create and run an experiment, document results. Sound familiar?
First of all, it isn't sensational enough to make the mainstream media. Remember that the filibuster last year received approximately the same level of coverage as Cheney's hunting accident. If you want thorough, accurate, and impartial news about the United States Congress, do what I do and get it from http://thomas.loc.gov.
Second, while the original patriot act did create several civil liberties concerns, the main focus of this bill was to solve a vast majority of those problems. That was done to the satisfaction of all but 10 senators, including several who are not up for re-election this year, and also including some of the most liberal, Bush-hating senators from liberal, Bush-hating states like Kennedy, Kerry, Schumer, and Clinton.
Lastly, the mainstream media has a liberal bias in general. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that bad news about a republican beats a republican congressional victory. Ironically, if the democrats hadn't been so openly obstructionist, they might have been able to spin this as a democratic victory due to the many civil liberty concerns that were addressed. Now, it is much easier for the republicans to spin it that they were able to renew the crucial patriot act and address several important civil liberty concerns in the process (republicans like liberty too, believe it or not), in spite of democrats' attempt to block the legislation.
Um, have you read the patriot act, or do you just know what you have heard on slashdot? It is easiest to find by searching for H.R. 3162 of the 107th congress at thomas.loc.gov. Section 501 is the one in question, which you'll need to know because the word "library" doesn't appear anywhere. All that section does is give the FBI the authority to get a warrant from a judge for certain kinds of evidence in terrorism investigations. Other law enforcement agencies in other circumstances have always been able to do that. Libraries have never been accorded special immunity from warrants.
I know you haven't read H.R. 3199, the bill that just passed the senate, because it actually vastly increased the protections for the case you are referring to.
The last time I can remember writing a complete sentence with pencil and paper, outside of an examination, was 1996. For a lot of us, using pencil and paper to write a letter or report became obsolete a long time ago.
What I'm wondering is how does anyone here expect to be able to prevent exposing their children to technology? My daughter can't even walk yet and she is fascinated by it. She has her own unattached keyboard that I have to use as a decoy because she wants to "help" me so much. I can understand limiting their usage or dependence, but isn't first exposure sort of a moot point around here? Of course, a lot of people still have Microsoft products at home, so I guess I could see where they would be concerned.
I think the important thing is making sure they fully understand the basics before relying on a machine to do the work for them, but I would hope my children would be able to take advantage of technology to progress faster than I did.
"Dad, I need a calculator for my math homework." "Sure. You know where we keep the mosfets." "Awww, Dad. All my friends get to use 74 series logic." "And I bet they all listened to their parents when they said the wafer fab needed upgrades."
You make a very excellent point. My brother had almost exactly the same experience as you, except with younger children. He is now married to a woman who is a wonderful wife and mother. My nephews still have issues, but the difference two good parents make in their lives is remarkable and obvious. I congratulate you on creating a happy and successful environment for your family.
I can also empathize with the grandparent poster. Too frequently the new marriage isn't any better than the old one, and neither the parents nor the children are better off.
I heard about a column in a talk radio show the other week that lamented the ever shrinking importance placed on government promoting a traditional family. His very interesting thesis was that having a strong family isn't just a moral issue, it is also an economic one. He cited studies that showed that people with strong families are indistinguishable economically from each other, regardless of their ethnic background. There is a possible cause and effect fallacy here, but the conclusion was that a government that promotes strong marriages and families, promotes economic stability in families as a side effect.
I think yours is an interesting case study along that line. I'd be very interested in your opinion on how having your wife in the family might affect your children's future economic stability.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that refusing to order an injunction only means that ebay won't be forced to remove that feature. MercExchange can still sue them over and over for continued damages, and will win the cases over and over until the patent law changes or ebay changes their site. Injunctions are issued by tradition to prevent the court system from getting bogged down. The Supreme Court will decide if they are required to issue the injuction. My guess is that they will decide they aren't required to do so. The Supreme Court is not generally in the business of limiting the power of the judicial branch.
If you really love your wife, get her Gnome 2.16 for Christmas like I'm planning to do for mine.
When Windows Vista comes out, there will be all sorts of pressure to migrate to it. This guy picked the perfect time to switch so that he has time to do it right, before that pressure hits. It's the kind of foresight I expect from a company that would be able to see past the short term hassle of switching operating system suppliers in the first place.
You're right -- in the short term this is more trouble than it's worth. There are a lot of things he needs to learn, and the initial setup can be difficult and time consuming when you have never done it before. The payoff only comes in the long run.
Imagine how much your company would have saved in licensing costs if they had migrated to open source software in 1995. Imagine how easy it would be to support Linux if the IT staff and employees had 10 years of solid Linux experience.
This guy's company is going to be in a great position in 2015, and people who couldn't tolerate some short term inconvenience will be even further entrenched in a single-source solution. In fact, I think the Linux migration will more than adequately prove itself financially much sooner -- by the time his friends are in the middle of a Vista migration. (I'll resist the temptation to insert a cheap shot about 2015 here).
As for the original question, I would suggest if he wants something that shares files like Windows, to use Samba. It's not just for interoperability; KDE and Gnome both integrate with Samba very nicely.
As difficult as it is to believe, there are also people who are commercial software dabblers. We do almost all our work on open source software, and only occasionally come across commercial software when we use someone else's computer. We invariably find the open source software to be easier to use because that's what we are accustomed to, have invested thousands of hours in, and have come to rely on for several years.
I don't think it's fair for dabblers of either variety to make any claim about the other side. There is little incentive for either one to invest enough time and money in the other kind of software to make a fair comparison. Photoshop is as unintuitive to us as the gimp is to you, and we have as much difficulty creating complex documents in word as you have in openoffice.
I know that sounds crazy, but it sounds just as crazy to me when I hear people say it isn't possible to do real work on Linux, when I have used it every day for complex tasks for 8 years, and reclaimed the unused disk space by deleting my Windows partition 6 years ago. No, I don't use wine or virtual machines either.
That being said, I actually agree with your original point. I think a vast majority of vocal Microsoft bashers on slashdot are clinging to a Microsoft lifeline. Why else would someone complain about Microsoft if it didn't impact them personally at all?
My favorites:
I beg to differ, unless you qualify that with default. Even then, there is little difference in capability in actual practice, as you pointed out. The security model in Linux has almost always been as rich as you want it to be. Process and role based access control has been available and used in Linux for several years in systems where that level of control is desirable, and has even crept into default installations of some server and even desktop distros in the last couple of years.
For example, all the applications that connect to the internet on my home desktop already have similar restrictions to the IE7 restrictions the grandparent pointed out, and are probably more configurable and transparent. There are also several other layers of security that will probably prevent an attacker from ever getting to that point. Now you can say you've heard of an "ordinary" user process switching to an even less privileged user account.
Admittedly, it wasn't easy to set up, but it is very easy to use and maintain. When I first made the changes, my wife didn't even notice a difference, and she couldn't see what the big deal was. I'll be very interested to see if Microsoft can manage to make it effective, easy enough for the average joe to install, and transparent enough that the average joe won't get annoyed and turn it off. I don't see how they can do it without limiting the extra security features to their own products in very inflexible configurations.
Because your most precious data is usually stored in your home directory (or whatever the windows equivalent is). I don't want a web browser flaw to allow access to my financial data, email, confidential work files, or other personal private data.
I agree with you about the prompt being annoying, though. On my system, I can only upload/download from a default non-executable "sandbox" directory, but my wife's account is configured to only hide specific sensitive files and directories from firefox. The extra security is completely transparent to her unless she downloads a bank statement or something, when she has to use nautilus to move the file to a secure directory after downloading it.
You argued that sudo is a vulnerable point when a browser or IM is compromised. Other people have addressed those potential weaknesses of sudo. I assert that a browser or IM process should never be able to run sudo in the first place, or for that matter, do anything other than maintain the bookmarks and preferences, read/write from a specific uploads/downloads directory, and launch a couple of viewer applications like acrobat reader and a media player.
In other words, I find it ironic that people will go to great lengths to prevent root access when their most valuable data is freely accessible by a normal user. Although having root access is a definite bonus for an attacker, there is plenty of mischief that can be done with a regular account, especially for a targeted attack. For example, do you really care if someone can't get root on your machine if your banking, investments, schedule, address book, correspondence, private encryption keys, and photographs are all in your home directory?
Whether you know it or not, you made a great case for mandatory access control as another layer of security in addition to properly configuring sudo and keeping your applications patched. A web browser should never have the same privileges as a shell, even if they are being used by the same person.
Interesting. My eye always moves first to whatever button has the highlighting that means it is the default selection. As such, the different orderings in different apps has never bothered me.
On the other hand, I have had my majority party congressman cross party lines to cosponsor a bill after a letter to him, so don't give up on expressing your opinion. On a more local level, a traffic light was put into a dangerous intersection shortly after my letter to the city council once. Also, you may not change a representative's opinion on a bill, but if there is not enough popular support, it may never get a vote or may get many moderating amendments.
We do have interesting abberations in candidate platforms every once in a while. For example, Senator Chafee describes himself as a "pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-Bill of Rights Republican". Well, this is closer to being a libertarian than either a democrat or republican, but he never would have won that way.
This is a pretty common practice. At my job we are required to frequently go through quite a rigorous process to make sure nothing sensitive to U.S. national security makes it into exported source code. Actually delivering compilable source costs a lot extra, is specified in a contract, and comes with training and a compile/test environment.
The solution is simple. The paper just has to refuse information that causes themselves or the source to break the law. Or at least have the brains to only use the information -- as Mark "Deep Throat" Felt put it -- for "deep background" and find a safe second source for anything they print. That's just responsible journalism in my book. That's what every other industry is required to do.
I don't feel bad for the paper at all. Whether the coroner was complicit or not, they damaged their own reputation by prying into confidential medical records and being stupid enough to print the evidence in a public newspaper. The paper is the one who violated privacy rights, not the court who is holding them accountable for that action.
I work for an arms dealer (legal kind). Does that mean my company is immune from certain search warrants, because it would abridge someone's 2nd amendment rights if suppliers couldn't trust us to keep their confidential data secret?
I don't keep the raw images, because I would just post-process it the same anyway, but a subdirectory named raw would make sense for those if you absolutely need them. One of the most important aspects of organization in either the physical or virtual world is knowing what to throw away.
That gives me a disc with directories like original, 5x7, 8x10, 11x14, etc. The lab I use for enlargements will print the image from the appropriate directory if I specify that in the instructions.
Personally, I think you're looking for a complex solution to a simple problem. With revision control, you would have to check out the appropriate version and copy it to another medium for reprints. Not to mention the extra complexity of maintaining backups that is inherent to a version control system. Version control has its place, but it is mainly designed for files that need to be changed a lot over time by several people. Images are usually processed by one person right after the shoot, and then never modified significantly again.
Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. They just redefine darkness as the new industry standard.
Allow me to illustrate some basic knowledge for a Linux desktop:
I've been doing that for years -- even before I got a DVR. I call home and ask my wife to record the show.
Anyone who says programming is not a science has never fixed an elusive bug in a multi-million line program. Form a hypothesis, create and run an experiment, document results. Sound familiar?
Second, while the original patriot act did create several civil liberties concerns, the main focus of this bill was to solve a vast majority of those problems. That was done to the satisfaction of all but 10 senators, including several who are not up for re-election this year, and also including some of the most liberal, Bush-hating senators from liberal, Bush-hating states like Kennedy, Kerry, Schumer, and Clinton.
Lastly, the mainstream media has a liberal bias in general. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that bad news about a republican beats a republican congressional victory. Ironically, if the democrats hadn't been so openly obstructionist, they might have been able to spin this as a democratic victory due to the many civil liberty concerns that were addressed. Now, it is much easier for the republicans to spin it that they were able to renew the crucial patriot act and address several important civil liberty concerns in the process (republicans like liberty too, believe it or not), in spite of democrats' attempt to block the legislation.
I know you haven't read H.R. 3199, the bill that just passed the senate, because it actually vastly increased the protections for the case you are referring to.
What I'm wondering is how does anyone here expect to be able to prevent exposing their children to technology? My daughter can't even walk yet and she is fascinated by it. She has her own unattached keyboard that I have to use as a decoy because she wants to "help" me so much. I can understand limiting their usage or dependence, but isn't first exposure sort of a moot point around here? Of course, a lot of people still have Microsoft products at home, so I guess I could see where they would be concerned.
I think the important thing is making sure they fully understand the basics before relying on a machine to do the work for them, but I would hope my children would be able to take advantage of technology to progress faster than I did.
"Dad, I need a calculator for my math homework." "Sure. You know where we keep the mosfets." "Awww, Dad. All my friends get to use 74 series logic." "And I bet they all listened to their parents when they said the wafer fab needed upgrades."
I can also empathize with the grandparent poster. Too frequently the new marriage isn't any better than the old one, and neither the parents nor the children are better off.
I heard about a column in a talk radio show the other week that lamented the ever shrinking importance placed on government promoting a traditional family. His very interesting thesis was that having a strong family isn't just a moral issue, it is also an economic one. He cited studies that showed that people with strong families are indistinguishable economically from each other, regardless of their ethnic background. There is a possible cause and effect fallacy here, but the conclusion was that a government that promotes strong marriages and families, promotes economic stability in families as a side effect.
I think yours is an interesting case study along that line. I'd be very interested in your opinion on how having your wife in the family might affect your children's future economic stability.