Fascists who quote Marx tend to be called socialists or communists. The difference is really very superficial.
Given that "NAZI" was coined as a derisive abbreviation for Hitler's NASDP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei = National Socialist German Workers' party), that's hardly surprising.
It could also indicate that the growth control signaling in rats is enough different from that in humans that SOME component of human brain tissue doesn't get told to stop multiplying. Once one of the HUMAN stem cells in the rat's head differentiates into that tissue type, it has become a cancer from the rat's viewpoint.
The only place I see "interoperability" is an exception for reverse enginerring the lock on the OPERATION OF A PROGRAM to get it to interact with another program. It does not apply to defeating the measures on ACCESSING THE DATA.
Sounds like they're on good ground for the tool that allows writing iTunes compatible files for play by iTunes clients.
But IMHO the one that allows playing iTunes songs on other players may not fit the exception that well so the issue will have to be litigated.
A win for DoubleTwist is a win for us - gutting the use of the DMCA to parlay copy protection schemes into a trashing of fair use and the first sale principle. DT will have the financial incentive to defend this position, and enough of a head start on the competition if they win to profit from having fought the battle.
So let's see how the courts handle it. Or if the **AA will refuse to take on the baby gorilla, throw in the towel on the rights grab, and stick to harassing end user alleged infringers.
(Given that the latter is their actual mandate, it wouldn't be entirely beyond imagniation that they might do it.)
Yes, I know:
- you don't need to "circularize" if you get to geosync altitude,
- somewhere below that you can let go and end up with an eliptical orbit with perigee sufficiently above the atmosphere, and
- energetically, if you want to head out it's better to climb PAST geosync and take off than to let go sooner and use some thruster.
But using the momentum from the tether's vibration lets you cut loose lower, reducing the amount of space-elevator time needed to achieve your goals. Space-elevator time is, IMHO, likely to be a scarce enough resource that the best price-performance might be accomplished by minimizing it at the cost of more propultion on the payloads once you get them out of the atmosphere. And even if not, it will be non-zero cost, so you'll want to cut loose as soon as your payload can be given the needed momentum.
You also have to handle the oscilation modes of the cable as a plucked string.
Seems to me you can turn this to your advantage:
Initially the climber plus payload pulls the counterweight back - but then it swings forward, converting a backward momentum delta to a forward one, which you can then use to accellerate the payload further with more climbing. When you get to a decent release point you can also wait until you've got extra forward momentum to help circularize your orbit or improve your launch, and let go then.
You end up with the whole thing in some combination of string vibration and pendulum oscilation. But you can damp much of that out on the climber's way back down - unless you want to deliberately leave some of that energy and momentum in the elevator's motion for use by the next payload.
The point is that by modulating the climber's travel rates you can move energy and momentum among the vibration modes, payload motion, and Earth's rotation, ending up up dumping it into the payload, where it's useful, rather than accumulating it in the cable and counterweight until you pull the counterweight out of orbit.
Devil's in the details, of course. You'll need a bunch of computation and to tweak it with feedback measurements from payload to payload. (If nothing else, wind loading will pump up the vibrational modes.)
You might also put "dampers" on the cable. In particular, by letting part of a climber's mass move sideways with the cable and part lag behind you can collect vibrational energy at the climber, damping it out of the cable's motion, and using it to generate power for more climbing. (Or avoid the extra gear on the climber by doing it at the ground station - letting the attachment move along a track with a generator/motor/actuator attached, to damp out the reflection by recovering the power.)
It might be interesting to analyze how much energy you could send up the cable to the climber by shaking it. (Probably not enough. But worth a look - especially if the cable is not prone to fatigue.)
there is legal room when you aim is to establish interoperability, the illegal comes when it's jsut meant to curcumvent, ie illegal uses.
Last time I looked, "circumvent" meant defeating the system REGARDLESS of whether the circumvention was used for fair use or copyright infringement, and the DMCA was deliberately written, and enforced, to ban both.
They slapped the company name on it after they bought it. That says "We stake our reputation on this product."
No argument there. It's like a vicious dog: They bought it, they're responsible for it from then on. It's up to them to do their "due dilligence" - to determine whether the product is up to legal requirements and their own standards - and if not, to do whatever is necessary to the purchased division to bring it up to snuff. They clearly have fallen down on that job.
My posting is in response to the continual rain of posters who seem to think that the same organization designed and built first the ATM and then the voting machines, with the implication that, since the ATM machines have high fraud resistance and the voting machines do not, it's because of a deliberate design decision on Diebold's part.
My point is that this assumption is false: Diebold got it from outside, flaws and all. Cleaning up its act requires motivation and time - and the recognition that it is necessary.
As long as the political machines that buy the system are happy with it as-is, there's the temptation to avoid buying trouble and leave it alone. So it's up to the rest of us to create incentives, both for Diebold itself and the governmental customers, to make the counting transparent and reliable.
This is nothing new. Software tabulation has been done by proprietary closed-source software since it began, and has been plagued by similar charges of fraud. But it's been low-key until now, when general familiarity with computers and malware, some very close presidential elections, and the deployment of hands-on terminals, brought the possibility of such fraud and its consequences into the public attention.
This is the same reason... I want to boycott *all* Sony products after seeing/hearing what Sony BMG did with root kits on audio CDs (and some other things in their consumer electronics lines, yes, I'm talking about DRM in BD). They said "We put our company name behind this product, and you can judge our company by this product."
I, on the other hand, boycott ALL Sony products because the decision to correct such behavior must come from upper management, who pay attention only to the bottom line. So I boycott ALL the products they're responsible for, to do the maximum damage to the bottom line and create the maximum incentive.
And also because I can't trust their prodcts, of course. B-)
As to the "malice in design" specifically... have you looked at the software people that coded the voting machines? As of a few years ago, a bunch of them had convictions for fun crimes like computer fraud... just the sort of people *I* want coding my voting machine. Check the wiki entry for them.
Quite aware of it. Could be a pack of psychopaths being generic bad guys and backdooring the system "because we can", incompetence, or deliberate design of a hackable system for future election fraud.
Regardless, it's up to Diebold to clean it up. The longer they do the "In Denial" act, the more they look like they're actively complicit and the less like they're just trying to keep the company afloat while they improve the product.
It's clear how to fix it: Add hardcopy printers of "official ballots" for stuffing in a ballot box and either manual or machine reading for recounts, turning the terminals into ballot-marking aids that opportunisticly collect a potentially unofficial count that's auditable by humans and by other machines. The longer they fight that, the worse they look.
Like to point out, however, that even a "has been" rocket scientist has to know that what goes up finishes by coming back down.
The basic principle of "escape velocity" is that you can make something "fall up" forever. Something even us "has been" rocket scientists know. B-)
As for "has been", yes, a lot of us old has-been rocket scientists have gone on to other things since the NASA's heyday. Like building the infrastructure of the Internet.
Takes more than just Al Gore to make all those pipes. B-)
I was immediately outraged at the illegal install of software, but then I remembered the virus itself was illegal anyhow,...
I wonder, though, if a retaliatory disinfector, or even a "beneficial nematode", would be legal?
This would be a server that not only detects and blocks worm infection attempts, but responds (using one of the vulnerabilities exploited by the original malware or one it installs - which are known to exist due to the malware's presence) by disabling the malware in the attacking computer, and perhaps patching the vulnerabilities exploited by the malware and/or (in the "beneficial nematode" case) copying itself to it. The former attacker is now no longer attacking, is protected from reinfection by the secondary infection, and perhaps becomes another source of counter-attacks.
Since it only counter-attacked, and even a passively-blocked attack without a counter-attack consumes resources (amounting to a DoS if sufficiently large and persistent), it could be argued that the counter-infection falls under the same principle as the use of force in self-defence. Or perhaps a "necessity defence" could be argued.
Of course one would have to be especially careful when designing such a self-reproducing tool. A significant issue would be accidental escape into the wild of a buggy version early in the development. Timeouts or "hayflick limit" reproduction counters seem advisable. And building them on pirated antiviral tools would be out of the question.
IANAL. Does anybody out there have a more informed opinion?
*I've said it before and I'll say it again, can we please come up with a better sobriquet than "Net Neutrality"?! How the hell am I supposed to get my family and friends interested in "neutrality"?
How about "network EQUALITY"? How can they POSSIBLY be against "equality"? People have fought wars FOR "equality"?
(I thought about "network NON-DISCRIMINATION" but that sounded too much like it had something to do with eliminating the "digital divide".)
One is a deliberate lie, and the other has set us back hundreds of years.
And how far has Clinton's perjury set back womens' rights?
Sexual harasment on-the-job, short of rape with physical battery, is essentially a dead issue thanks to the "Clinton Defense". The remaining womens' rights organizations are discredited after their support for Clinton led them into the same blaming-the-victim behavior they decry (to the point of characterizing Clinton's accuser as "Trailer trash" and someone who should have been honored by his attentions.)
I could go on with other political fallout. (It's part of what has enabled the looney fringe to take control of the Democratic party.) But I trust you get the point.
I'm going to start working... on a virus right now that effectively shuts down any Vista computer by causing WGA to always detect the OS as a pirated copy.... considering the number of false positives that are cropping up on XP, it should be quite doable.
Considering the number of false positives that are cropping up, perhaps it has already been done. B-)
'The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,'
He missied a BIG point:... CO2 taking as long as 20,000 years to be restored to it's natural level, but will decrease.
Unfortunately for this rosey scenario, it now appears that humans CO2 output has been holding off an ice age - which should have been well under way by now - since the dawn of agriculture at what was the temperature peak of the current interglacial.
Absent humans' emissions the temperature should crash back onto the (falling and accellerating) downward curve within a couple centuries. (The CO2 level might be detectably {if anybody was there to look} above its "natural" level for a long time, but only by a squidge. Asymptotic approaches are fastest when they have the farthest to go.
But don't sweat it. By the same model, even if we drastically cut back on carbon emissions to carefully hold global temperatures level (and trashed tech so we couldn't do anything else useful later), we'd run out of fossil fuels and crash back into the cold times within a two milleniua or so.
Modern "food" turkeys have such huge breasts that they are physically unable to breed without human help. Even if they escaped their pens, they'd be doomed to extinction.
However, "wild" turkeys will do quite fine. And they're already extablished in far more ranges thanks to human intervention than they'd have been in without it. (Example: The population in Oregon, descended from some escaped lab animals a few decades back and now solidly established.)
Their population may fall back a bit, without human management and crops to parasitize. But I don't expect extinction. They're quite adept survivors.
Another example [of a market exposed to legislative influence, graft and corruption] was the de-regulated power industry that California used for a while.
Please, put quotes around "de-regulated" when referring to the California scheme.
The legislation CLAIMED to be deregulation. Instead it was ADDITIONAL regulation, requiring PG&E to divest itself of generation resources AND long-term contracts, buy power on the spot market and sell it for a fixed price.
Of course this bankrupted them, caused maintainence deferrals that's still blacking out chunks of San Francisco intermittently, produced supply shortages and blackouts, and encouraged price manipulation (and cheating on the new regulations) by suppliers.
Oh, and keep a firewall in front of your machine and the internet. Pipe all your X communications over SSH.
And don't surf the web, read email, use java applets, look at documents with fancy fonts embedded, watch flash, etc.
If you read the fine article you'll see that this particular root exploit can be done through essentially any application that can hand defined fonts and a text string using them to X.
Well, for one thing, it's Abramoff, not Abramov... be sure you know what you're searching for, or you might end up with something like the case the story here's about ("Paule" Wilke).
Too true.
I wasn't too sure of the spelling so I searched for my first guess and "scandal". Unfortunately, enough OTHER people misspelled it that way that a whole bunch of stuff came up in the search, so I assumed that I'd gotten it right. B-(
Postings so far have criticized the cost of conversion to save the under-$25/year figure.
But there's another cost:
How much does it cost in lost productivity, over a year, while people wait for their monitors and computer to "warm up" from power-save mode every time they've left their desks or done something OFF the computer for too long?
And for recreational machines: In lost lifetime? How much is YOUR life worth to you?
A factual analysis of the liberal attempts at talk radio show that they just don't make money. It seems there is less of a market for liberals bashing of conservatives than most liberals would care to admit.
This seems especially timely: I heard this morning that Air Americal just filed for Chapter 11.
And I heard it on KCBS radio - the CBS news stations in San Francisco - not on a conservative talk show. (KCBS is about as left-wing as a news station can get and still pretend to be objectvie.)
Check out just a few links in the Abramoff Web of corruption.
Two links to The Daily Kos in three articles, both by the same poster. Again, do you have any other sources, that people other than those on the far left side of the "Progressive Movement" might find credible?
Open source already has a reputation for being left-wing. But The Daily Kos has one (even among Democratic politicians) for being so far left wing that it's brewing the Kool-Aid for the entire Democratic party.
If we're to get Open-Source adopted by businessmen (who tend to be on the conservative side, at least when it comes to economics and business issues) and governmental IT bureaucrats (who tend to listen to powerful non-profit groups), we need to establish credibility with them.
Right here we have an opportunity to discredit one of the major voices against use of open source in government, by tying it to Microsoft through the Abramov lobbying scandal. But if we are heard quoting even ONE bogus item that decision-makers recognize as coming from what they perceive as a left-wing looney bin, it's all over.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that "NAZI" was coined as a derisive abbreviation for Hitler's NASDP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei = National Socialist German Workers' party), that's hardly surprising.
It could also indicate that the growth control signaling in rats is enough different from that in humans that SOME component of human brain tissue doesn't get told to stop multiplying. Once one of the HUMAN stem cells in the rat's head differentiates into that tissue type, it has become a cancer from the rat's viewpoint.
The only place I see "interoperability" is an exception for reverse enginerring the lock on the OPERATION OF A PROGRAM to get it to interact with another program. It does not apply to defeating the measures on ACCESSING THE DATA.
Sounds like they're on good ground for the tool that allows writing iTunes compatible files for play by iTunes clients.
But IMHO the one that allows playing iTunes songs on other players may not fit the exception that well so the issue will have to be litigated.
A win for DoubleTwist is a win for us - gutting the use of the DMCA to parlay copy protection schemes into a trashing of fair use and the first sale principle. DT will have the financial incentive to defend this position, and enough of a head start on the competition if they win to profit from having fought the battle.
So let's see how the courts handle it. Or if the **AA will refuse to take on the baby gorilla, throw in the towel on the rights grab, and stick to harassing end user alleged infringers.
(Given that the latter is their actual mandate, it wouldn't be entirely beyond imagniation that they might do it.)
Yes, I know:
- you don't need to "circularize" if you get to geosync altitude,
- somewhere below that you can let go and end up with an eliptical orbit with perigee sufficiently above the atmosphere, and
- energetically, if you want to head out it's better to climb PAST geosync and take off than to let go sooner and use some thruster.
But using the momentum from the tether's vibration lets you cut loose lower, reducing the amount of space-elevator time needed to achieve your goals. Space-elevator time is, IMHO, likely to be a scarce enough resource that the best price-performance might be accomplished by minimizing it at the cost of more propultion on the payloads once you get them out of the atmosphere. And even if not, it will be non-zero cost, so you'll want to cut loose as soon as your payload can be given the needed momentum.
You also have to handle the oscilation modes of the cable as a plucked string.
Seems to me you can turn this to your advantage:
Initially the climber plus payload pulls the counterweight back - but then it swings forward, converting a backward momentum delta to a forward one, which you can then use to accellerate the payload further with more climbing. When you get to a decent release point you can also wait until you've got extra forward momentum to help circularize your orbit or improve your launch, and let go then.
You end up with the whole thing in some combination of string vibration and pendulum oscilation. But you can damp much of that out on the climber's way back down - unless you want to deliberately leave some of that energy and momentum in the elevator's motion for use by the next payload.
The point is that by modulating the climber's travel rates you can move energy and momentum among the vibration modes, payload motion, and Earth's rotation, ending up up dumping it into the payload, where it's useful, rather than accumulating it in the cable and counterweight until you pull the counterweight out of orbit.
Devil's in the details, of course. You'll need a bunch of computation and to tweak it with feedback measurements from payload to payload. (If nothing else, wind loading will pump up the vibrational modes.)
You might also put "dampers" on the cable. In particular, by letting part of a climber's mass move sideways with the cable and part lag behind you can collect vibrational energy at the climber, damping it out of the cable's motion, and using it to generate power for more climbing. (Or avoid the extra gear on the climber by doing it at the ground station - letting the attachment move along a track with a generator/motor/actuator attached, to damp out the reflection by recovering the power.)
It might be interesting to analyze how much energy you could send up the cable to the climber by shaking it. (Probably not enough. But worth a look - especially if the cable is not prone to fatigue.)
there is legal room when you aim is to establish interoperability, the illegal comes when it's jsut meant to curcumvent, ie illegal uses.
Last time I looked, "circumvent" meant defeating the system REGARDLESS of whether the circumvention was used for fair use or copyright infringement, and the DMCA was deliberately written, and enforced, to ban both.
They slapped the company name on it after they bought it. That says "We stake our reputation on this product."
... I want to boycott *all* Sony products after seeing/hearing what Sony BMG did with root kits on audio CDs (and some other things in their consumer electronics lines, yes, I'm talking about DRM in BD). They said "We put our company name behind this product, and you can judge our company by this product."
No argument there. It's like a vicious dog: They bought it, they're responsible for it from then on. It's up to them to do their "due dilligence" - to determine whether the product is up to legal requirements and their own standards - and if not, to do whatever is necessary to the purchased division to bring it up to snuff. They clearly have fallen down on that job.
My posting is in response to the continual rain of posters who seem to think that the same organization designed and built first the ATM and then the voting machines, with the implication that, since the ATM machines have high fraud resistance and the voting machines do not, it's because of a deliberate design decision on Diebold's part.
My point is that this assumption is false: Diebold got it from outside, flaws and all. Cleaning up its act requires motivation and time - and the recognition that it is necessary.
As long as the political machines that buy the system are happy with it as-is, there's the temptation to avoid buying trouble and leave it alone. So it's up to the rest of us to create incentives, both for Diebold itself and the governmental customers, to make the counting transparent and reliable.
This is nothing new. Software tabulation has been done by proprietary closed-source software since it began, and has been plagued by similar charges of fraud. But it's been low-key until now, when general familiarity with computers and malware, some very close presidential elections, and the deployment of hands-on terminals, brought the possibility of such fraud and its consequences into the public attention.
This is the same reason
I, on the other hand, boycott ALL Sony products because the decision to correct such behavior must come from upper management, who pay attention only to the bottom line. So I boycott ALL the products they're responsible for, to do the maximum damage to the bottom line and create the maximum incentive.
And also because I can't trust their prodcts, of course. B-)
As to the "malice in design" specifically... have you looked at the software people that coded the voting machines? As of a few years ago, a bunch of them had convictions for fun crimes like computer fraud... just the sort of people *I* want coding my voting machine. Check the wiki entry for them.
Quite aware of it. Could be a pack of psychopaths being generic bad guys and backdooring the system "because we can", incompetence, or deliberate design of a hackable system for future election fraud.
Regardless, it's up to Diebold to clean it up. The longer they do the "In Denial" act, the more they look like they're actively complicit and the less like they're just trying to keep the company afloat while they improve the product.
It's clear how to fix it: Add hardcopy printers of "official ballots" for stuffing in a ballot box and either manual or machine reading for recounts, turning the terminals into ballot-marking aids that opportunisticly collect a potentially unofficial count that's auditable by humans and by other machines. The longer they fight that, the worse they look.
Aren't the side-effects on dynamic content from distributing via cacheing, load-leveling, web servers interesting?
The fact that diebold also makes ATM's indicates nothing less than malice in the design ...
Diebold BOUGHT the voting machine deisgn (by buying the company that made it). It is unrelated to their ATM designs.
Like to point out, however, that even a "has been" rocket scientist has to know that what goes up finishes by coming back down.
The basic principle of "escape velocity" is that you can make something "fall up" forever. Something even us "has been" rocket scientists know. B-)
As for "has been", yes, a lot of us old has-been rocket scientists have gone on to other things since the NASA's heyday. Like building the infrastructure of the Internet.
Takes more than just Al Gore to make all those pipes. B-)
I was immediately outraged at the illegal install of software, but then I remembered the virus itself was illegal anyhow, ...
I wonder, though, if a retaliatory disinfector, or even a "beneficial nematode", would be legal?
This would be a server that not only detects and blocks worm infection attempts, but responds (using one of the vulnerabilities exploited by the original malware or one it installs - which are known to exist due to the malware's presence) by disabling the malware in the attacking computer, and perhaps patching the vulnerabilities exploited by the malware and/or (in the "beneficial nematode" case) copying itself to it. The former attacker is now no longer attacking, is protected from reinfection by the secondary infection, and perhaps becomes another source of counter-attacks.
Since it only counter-attacked, and even a passively-blocked attack without a counter-attack consumes resources (amounting to a DoS if sufficiently large and persistent), it could be argued that the counter-infection falls under the same principle as the use of force in self-defence. Or perhaps a "necessity defence" could be argued.
Of course one would have to be especially careful when designing such a self-reproducing tool. A significant issue would be accidental escape into the wild of a buggy version early in the development. Timeouts or "hayflick limit" reproduction counters seem advisable. And building them on pirated antiviral tools would be out of the question.
IANAL. Does anybody out there have a more informed opinion?
(I thought about "network NON-DISCRIMINATION" but that sounded too much like it had something to do with eliminating the "digital divide".)
One is a deliberate lie, and the other has set us back hundreds of years.
And how far has Clinton's perjury set back womens' rights?
Sexual harasment on-the-job, short of rape with physical battery, is essentially a dead issue thanks to the "Clinton Defense". The remaining womens' rights organizations are discredited after their support for Clinton led them into the same blaming-the-victim behavior they decry (to the point of characterizing Clinton's accuser as "Trailer trash" and someone who should have been honored by his attentions.)
I could go on with other political fallout. (It's part of what has enabled the looney fringe to take control of the Democratic party.) But I trust you get the point.
I'm going to start working... on a virus right now that effectively shuts down any Vista computer by causing WGA to always detect the OS as a pirated copy. ... considering the number of false positives that are cropping up on XP, it should be quite doable.
Considering the number of false positives that are cropping up, perhaps it has already been done. B-)
'The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,'
... CO2 taking as long as 20,000 years to be restored to it's natural level, but will decrease.
He missied a BIG point:
Unfortunately for this rosey scenario, it now appears that humans CO2 output has been holding off an ice age - which should have been well under way by now - since the dawn of agriculture at what was the temperature peak of the current interglacial.
Absent humans' emissions the temperature should crash back onto the (falling and accellerating) downward curve within a couple centuries. (The CO2 level might be detectably {if anybody was there to look} above its "natural" level for a long time, but only by a squidge. Asymptotic approaches are fastest when they have the farthest to go.
But don't sweat it. By the same model, even if we drastically cut back on carbon emissions to carefully hold global temperatures level (and trashed tech so we couldn't do anything else useful later), we'd run out of fossil fuels and crash back into the cold times within a two milleniua or so.
Modern "food" turkeys have such huge breasts that they are physically unable to breed without human help. Even if they escaped their pens, they'd be doomed to extinction.
However, "wild" turkeys will do quite fine. And they're already extablished in far more ranges thanks to human intervention than they'd have been in without it. (Example: The population in Oregon, descended from some escaped lab animals a few decades back and now solidly established.)
Their population may fall back a bit, without human management and crops to parasitize. But I don't expect extinction. They're quite adept survivors.
Another example [of a market exposed to legislative influence, graft and corruption] was the de-regulated power industry that California used for a while.
Please, put quotes around "de-regulated" when referring to the California scheme.
The legislation CLAIMED to be deregulation. Instead it was ADDITIONAL regulation, requiring PG&E to divest itself of generation resources AND long-term contracts, buy power on the spot market and sell it for a fixed price.
Of course this bankrupted them, caused maintainence deferrals that's still blacking out chunks of San Francisco intermittently, produced supply shortages and blackouts, and encouraged price manipulation (and cheating on the new regulations) by suppliers.
Oh, and keep a firewall in front of your machine and the internet. Pipe all your X communications over SSH.
And don't surf the web, read email, use java applets, look at documents with fancy fonts embedded, watch flash, etc.
If you read the fine article you'll see that this particular root exploit can be done through essentially any application that can hand defined fonts and a text string using them to X.
Well, for one thing, it's Abramoff, not Abramov... be sure you know what you're searching for, or you might end up with something like the case the story here's about ("Paule" Wilke).
Too true.
I wasn't too sure of the spelling so I searched for my first guess and "scandal". Unfortunately, enough OTHER people misspelled it that way that a whole bunch of stuff came up in the search, so I assumed that I'd gotten it right. B-(
Postings so far have criticized the cost of conversion to save the under-$25/year figure.
But there's another cost:
How much does it cost in lost productivity, over a year, while people wait for their monitors and computer to "warm up" from power-save mode every time they've left their desks or done something OFF the computer for too long?
And for recreational machines: In lost lifetime? How much is YOUR life worth to you?
It would be interesting to find out if RIAA and/or MPAA had hired Abramov in their lobbying efforts.
(A cursory search didn't find any connections.)
Isn't that part of the point for Intel?
"Look at this! Buy a computer built around our new faster chip and your Second Life experience won't be running so dog slow!"
Is it still "censorship" when the "information" is a blatant lie?
Yes.
A factual analysis of the liberal attempts at talk radio show that they just don't make money. It seems there is less of a market for liberals bashing of conservatives than most liberals would care to admit.
This seems especially timely: I heard this morning that Air Americal just filed for Chapter 11.
And I heard it on KCBS radio - the CBS news stations in San Francisco - not on a conservative talk show. (KCBS is about as left-wing as a news station can get and still pretend to be objectvie.)
Check out just a few links in the Abramoff Web of corruption.
Two links to The Daily Kos in three articles, both by the same poster. Again, do you have any other sources, that people other than those on the far left side of the "Progressive Movement" might find credible?
Open source already has a reputation for being left-wing. But The Daily Kos has one (even among Democratic politicians) for being so far left wing that it's brewing the Kool-Aid for the entire Democratic party.
If we're to get Open-Source adopted by businessmen (who tend to be on the conservative side, at least when it comes to economics and business issues) and governmental IT bureaucrats (who tend to listen to powerful non-profit groups), we need to establish credibility with them.
Right here we have an opportunity to discredit one of the major voices against use of open source in government, by tying it to Microsoft through the Abramov lobbying scandal. But if we are heard quoting even ONE bogus item that decision-makers recognize as coming from what they perceive as a left-wing looney bin, it's all over.