Cheer for Monopolists. Cheer for high market barriers to entry. Cheer for Government regulation (copyrights).
Hey, you wanna take 'em down, create products that can compete. It's funny how folks on Slashdot seem to think the only way to accomplish something is to go through the courts...unless someone goes through the courts against "them".
Clearly their only motivation is to be anti-competitive
Or, it could be that they don't put a whole lot of thought into worrying about the slim percentage of people who run alternative OSes? Or, the even slimmer percentage who want to dual-boot? Personally, I'm glad they don't waste a moment of their time coding even an "are you sure" question for that. You wanna work with multiple OSes, you figure it out. The rest of us have real work to do.
which is what one expects from a convicted monopolist.
Gonna help you not sound like an idiot: "convicted" implies a criminal trial. The sham DoJ case of a couple of years ago was a CIVIL trial, you can't be "convicted" of being a monopolist. A criminal trial requires a preponderance of evidence in order to convict someone. A civil trial requires only the judgement of the judge. That means, after the DoJ finished parading lying whiner after lying whiner the judge tosses a coin and decides which lawyer had the nicer hair-do. The DoJ trial, like the current EU fiasco, caused more harm to more people than Microsoft ever has.
Neither the article nor the blog entry say for certain that the tools will require WGA to access. For example, you can download resource kits from MS without the WGA tool or anything of the like.
"Runs" can mean a lot of things. So can "runs just fine." Your machine most certainly doesn't run Vista with all the Vista eye candy turned on in any kind of a speedy fasion, and it most certainly isn't "peppy" about doing any real, modern work even with the eye-candy turned off.
"Runs" means it does "real, modern work". Yeah, I turn the eye-candy off, I don't need that and would do it if my machine was brand new. There's much, much more to a machine's performance than just whether the eye-candy is off or not.
And as a consumer, that distinction doesn't matter in the least. A printer that doesn't work is a printer that doesn't work.
And guess what? It happens with every OS. At least there's a shot the drive will be upgraded if a user moves to a new version of Windows. Using Linux they're lucky if it works at all.
I built my curren't rig about 3 years ago. I'll probably get Vista next summer
And, mine is 6 years old now and runs Vista Beta just fine.
I'm confused, isn't there already a concentration of wealth and power? Isn't power/money already unequal? Isn't our court system already corrupted?
Yes, yes and yes.
Why/How would a change towards civil liberties and personal freedoms make things worse? We've been failing with the two party system for quite some time now, why can't we just try something different? It can't get much worse at this point.
I apologize to the poster for speaking for them, but I believe their point was there was no way to move towards civil liberties. In order to make those changes that would move us towards more civil liberties and personal freedom, we'd have to already be at that point. As long as there's a concentration of wealth and power working against civil liberties, you'll never have them.
I feel wierd saying it, but I'm not proud to be an American right now, I'm embarassed. I love this country and its people. I am very thankful for the oppurtunities that this country has provided me. I feel very lucky to have been born here. However, our government and political systems are no longer fighting "for the people"
Don't worry, it's happening everywhere in small doses, it's just the people in those other countries don't see it yet. My plan had been to flee to Canada, but they just "elected" a conservative government (I quoted it because I believe we "elected" a conservative government in this country about as much as I believe in Micheal Jackson or OJ Simpson's innocence) and immediately we see major "terrorist plots" being exposed all over the place. The call for a "war on terror" won't be far behind. In fact, the rumblings are already beginning. They've got some great freedoms up north...for the moment. Same's happening everywhere, very slowly. We're moving to a single world government, which wouldn't be such a bad thing...if it weren't for the fact that it's going to be more of the same.
Paranoid? Yes. Does that make it untrue? Not, neccessarily.
Think about the transition from Win3.11 to Win95. Microsoft just made you buy a new Office suite.
No they didn't. Office 4.2 worked just fine on 95. THE #1 biggest benefit to using Office 95 on Windows 95? Long file names. Office 95 was more or less just a recompile to 32-bit.
How many people found their multifunction printers didn't work under Win2K?
That's the fault of the printer vendor, not the OS vendor. It's not like W2K was a surprise. They had plenty of time to test new drivers with beta versions of the OS...that's what it's for! Aside from that, though, you're talking two completely different architectures. W2K was still considered the "office" version of Windows, not for home use. Firstly, it was a hodgepodge of 16/32-bit code, of course there'd need to be new drivers. Secondly, since most corporations (at least those with IT departments who can keep control on such things) didn't allow multi-function printers (they weren't really ready for prime-time back then) there was no real need to support them on 2K. Regardless, W2K was almost 7 years ago. If your vendor hasn't updated the drivers to include 2k, XP or 2K3 support, it's time to get a new vendor.
And was the transition from WinME to WinXP a painless one?
I've heard it wasn't for some, I've heard it was no big deal for others.
It's a 1.4GHz box with a geforce 4 video card. That sucker screams when playing games of the Win98/WinME era. Most of 'em can be loaded just fine on my WinXP box, but it's painful for some of them.
Then you fucked something up on your XP install. My personal desktop is a 1Ghz machine that runs XP just fine and I regularly play older games (like Quake, QII) on it.
Care to explain why he should be extradited under this?
Because that's the way the world works. Think you can change it, you're free to try. Regardless, he went into his endeavour knowing that to illegally access government computers was now considered an act of terrorism. Can't do the time, don't do the crime!
erm.... first, they where Boeing 767-222's, not 747's. Obviously you've done plenty of research into this topic, and just forgot this.....
Typo.
A 767 weighs a little over 100 tonnes. The floors of the buildings weighed around 1000-> 3000 tonnes each. so adding the entire weight of a 767 added a whopping 3 -10% extra load to the floor, assuming it managed to stop itself on just one floor rather than multiple floors and assuming none fell out of the building. (I hope Im never in a structure where the safety limits are so low that 3% extra can make it fall..) If you cant see your argument is rediculous, I'll help you out a little more:
And, if one of those floors is weakened enough by the impact, explosion and resulting fires, the extra weight might be enough to make that ONE FLOOR fall onto the next one, thereby doubling the load on the next floor. That floor then falls on the next, and so on and so on...remarkably just like what happened that day. How about this: the explosion of the plane hitting fractures the floor ABOVE where it hit, spilling large amounts of the floor and objects on the floor onto the one below. How much weight increase are we talking now? A 767 is about 16M tall, meaning best case scenario, when it hit the building it severely damaged three floors. Even if 90% of those floors and the plane were ejected out of the other side on impact, you're still putting a 20% load on the one at the bottom, which has also been severly damaged.
The buildings where designed to handle impacts from "fully loaded 707's", the largest passenger aircraft at the time. (this from the WTC construction and Project manager). In fact he believes they could withstand MULTIPLE strikes due to the "intense grid" construction, with a plane being like a "pencil through a screen door". A boeing 707 weighs between 100 and 150 tonnes. This is the same or in some cases MORE than the 767's that hit.
Again with the "IN THEORY, it should have worked like this...but in reality, it acted like this. Therefore there must be a conspiracy" theory. I believed I could setup my in-laws computer so as to protect them from themselves, viruses, spyware, etc...and yet, there it sits on my desk waiting to be rebuilt. No conspiracy, I just assumed they were going to use it for e-mail and browsing only. My bad. The only conspiracy I see here is the Construction and Project Manager trying to preserve his reputation. Because, afterall, building contruction is such a perfect and exact science that mistakes NEVER happen.
Perhaps you should consider the hundreds of firefighters, who are normally experts (or at least the people in charge are) on when a building is safe to enter or not, who died because they disagreed with your statement. Perhaps you should read some of their interesting witness statements that they where BLOCKED FROM RELEASING for years!!!
I'm really not sure what your point is here. My point was that I found it amazing that a structure that tall could be hit close to the top with 100 tons of high-speed airplane and not fall over. And, if the firefighters died that day, how much can you really trust their eyewitness statements?
Read a Gartner brochure once in a while, you'll see where these looney numbers come from. Numbers regarding computer stuff have been skewed since they first said it costs $5000/year to maintain each PC in an organization. But, that being said, forensic analysis of a potentially compromised computer takes a little more than just reviewing logs. And, it wouldn't be limited to just the PCs they know were compromised, they'd have to investigate all of the computers on the same network, just in case. When your security model is reactive, as theirs appears to be, reactions typically cost a lot.
Yes, you have the right to shoot someone, but for you to find it reasonable to shoot someone because they were looking through you things is disturbing at best.
The parent poster was a bit wrong in his legal advice. For the most part, you're not "allowed" to shoot anyone on your property. You're limited, at best, to "self defense" as an argument, but you have to prove that you were pretty sure your life was in danger. Someone walking onto your property (outside) cannot be shot...unless they're carrying a bomb or 50-caliber machinegun. Then they're fair game. Once someone's in your house, though, self-defense is a lot easier to prove. Most states require some warning be given before a shot is fired (which actually includes warning shots). So the lost, confused or mentally challenged person who managed to pick the lock on your front door, disarm your alarm and is now coming up the stairs with a butcher knife in the dark can make it clear they're they just wanted to play a game of knifey-spoony before you shoot them. So, if you do just shoot someone rifling through your things and shoot them, you better run to the kitchen and get a knife to put in their hands. Just touch the handle to their fingers so their prints show up. You can then toss the knife into the corner and say you disarmed them after you shot 'em, just in case they weren't dead yet.:)
In other words, the parent is an idiot...and while I'd like to say not representative of US citizens, I know all too well I'd be wrong....
OK thats enough for now. Im not going to argue with anyone here unless I think they have gone through this info first, because if they havent then it will be pointless.
In other words: unless you only marginally disagree with me, I don't want to argue with you. I've gone through a lot of the info you've referenced, and I've gone through the info on the other side. I gotta tell you: I disagree with you completely on almost all points (it's been a long time since I looked it all over, but I found nothing on the paranoid side to indicate they had anything beyond speculation, rumor and outright lies.). So far, everything I've seen on the MIHOP side is nothing more than "intelligent design" applied to 9/11. "There's a lot of stuff we don't understand, so there must've been some intelligent agent behind the stuff outside our cognitive abilities." Things didn't happen exactly as predicted, operative word there being "PREDICTED". As in "the weather man predicted rain, but it's been dry all day". The outcome of a plane flying into the side of the WTC was predicted by the engineers and architects who designed it. It was tested, I'm sure, in wind tunnels and with mockups and all kinds of nifty stuff that's outside my pervue....but until you actually fly a full-sized plane into a full-sized building, you have only a very educated guess as to what's going to happen next.
I suppose this is why highrise buildings have fallen over previously from fires, because the steel gets weakened by the fire... oh wait they haven't?
Did they also have the weight of a fully-loaded 747 sitting on one of their stress-weakened floors? Geez, I'm still amazed by the fact that it didn't fall over when it was hit, everyone else seems to be amazed that it fell over at all.
Sorry, hit submit too fast: And, perhaps, if it leads to "smarter" legislators, we might just get people in office who can manage the taxes they do get better. Regardless, perhaps there's a penalty to be paid? Taking an example from Heinlein, and fitting it to this conversation, perhaps no one who pays taxes can own a business? Can't participate in government loan or "welfare" programs (such as grants or federally backed loans for students of non-taxpayers)? There are easy ways around the problem...they just can't be implemented with the current population being involved in the voting process. You can't give out intelligence tests to gain voting rights, but perhaps people can be persuaded to provide the answers on their own...Discouraging solutions just because it brings up new problems also isn't the solution: it's the cause of all of our current problems.
That was a rallying cry, not a law. Regardless, if it meant we'd get less moronic people voting in based on the latest soundbyte from CNN, then yes they can be exempt from taxes. Those types typically don't pay much in taxes anyway (the rich with their tax shelters, the poor due to income).
I think there's more to the story here than we know.
Silly, silly, silly. You're supposed to judge the news story entirely based on the "sound byte" provided to you by the journalist attempting to sway you over to their point of view...not express or attempt to start an intelligent discussion of the issues.
to protect our privacy through common sense legislation
Then, you're never going to get it. Just ask anyone in IT how well that whole Sarbanes-Oxley crap is protecting people's privacy and money. There was something that could have been good for the community at large, and in the end it only served to drive a company's operating costs through the roof without actually fixing the problems it was meant to fix (re: it was supposed to protect consumers from another Enron, but the people who "committed" the Enron aren't the ones affected by the laws). Common sense and legistlation are two words that just don't go together.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheer for Monopolists. Cheer for high market barriers to entry. Cheer for Government regulation (copyrights).
Hey, you wanna take 'em down, create products that can compete. It's funny how folks on Slashdot seem to think the only way to accomplish something is to go through the courts...unless someone goes through the courts against "them".
I love it.
Glad you love your tax dollars being wasted.
Clearly their only motivation is to be anti-competitive
Or, it could be that they don't put a whole lot of thought into worrying about the slim percentage of people who run alternative OSes? Or, the even slimmer percentage who want to dual-boot? Personally, I'm glad they don't waste a moment of their time coding even an "are you sure" question for that. You wanna work with multiple OSes, you figure it out. The rest of us have real work to do.
which is what one expects from a convicted monopolist.
Gonna help you not sound like an idiot: "convicted" implies a criminal trial. The sham DoJ case of a couple of years ago was a CIVIL trial, you can't be "convicted" of being a monopolist. A criminal trial requires a preponderance of evidence in order to convict someone. A civil trial requires only the judgement of the judge. That means, after the DoJ finished parading lying whiner after lying whiner the judge tosses a coin and decides which lawyer had the nicer hair-do. The DoJ trial, like the current EU fiasco, caused more harm to more people than Microsoft ever has.
because you're afraid of terrorists.
Only the ones that run the US. I stopped being afraid of Osama a looooong time ago.
Neither the article nor the blog entry say for certain that the tools will require WGA to access. For example, you can download resource kits from MS without the WGA tool or anything of the like.
Or simply admit that Proprietary vendors cannot keep pace with the Open Source Model?
Why would they want to slow down that far? Seriously, if MS was as fast as open source, we'd still be running on DOS 5.0 with Windows 3.0.
"Runs" can mean a lot of things. So can "runs just fine." Your machine most certainly doesn't run Vista with all the Vista eye candy turned on in any kind of a speedy fasion, and it most certainly isn't "peppy" about doing any real, modern work even with the eye-candy turned off.
"Runs" means it does "real, modern work". Yeah, I turn the eye-candy off, I don't need that and would do it if my machine was brand new. There's much, much more to a machine's performance than just whether the eye-candy is off or not.
And as a consumer, that distinction doesn't matter in the least. A printer that doesn't work is a printer that doesn't work.
And guess what? It happens with every OS. At least there's a shot the drive will be upgraded if a user moves to a new version of Windows. Using Linux they're lucky if it works at all.
I built my curren't rig about 3 years ago. I'll probably get Vista next summer
And, mine is 6 years old now and runs Vista Beta just fine.
I'm confused, isn't there already a concentration of wealth and power? Isn't power/money already unequal? Isn't our court system already corrupted?
Yes, yes and yes.
Why/How would a change towards civil liberties and personal freedoms make things worse? We've been failing with the two party system for quite some time now, why can't we just try something different? It can't get much worse at this point.
I apologize to the poster for speaking for them, but I believe their point was there was no way to move towards civil liberties. In order to make those changes that would move us towards more civil liberties and personal freedom, we'd have to already be at that point. As long as there's a concentration of wealth and power working against civil liberties, you'll never have them.
I feel wierd saying it, but I'm not proud to be an American right now, I'm embarassed. I love this country and its people. I am very thankful for the oppurtunities that this country has provided me. I feel very lucky to have been born here. However, our government and political systems are no longer fighting "for the people"
Don't worry, it's happening everywhere in small doses, it's just the people in those other countries don't see it yet. My plan had been to flee to Canada, but they just "elected" a conservative government (I quoted it because I believe we "elected" a conservative government in this country about as much as I believe in Micheal Jackson or OJ Simpson's innocence) and immediately we see major "terrorist plots" being exposed all over the place. The call for a "war on terror" won't be far behind. In fact, the rumblings are already beginning. They've got some great freedoms up north...for the moment. Same's happening everywhere, very slowly. We're moving to a single world government, which wouldn't be such a bad thing...if it weren't for the fact that it's going to be more of the same.
Paranoid? Yes. Does that make it untrue? Not, neccessarily.
Think about the transition from Win3.11 to Win95. Microsoft just made you buy a new Office suite.
No they didn't. Office 4.2 worked just fine on 95. THE #1 biggest benefit to using Office 95 on Windows 95? Long file names. Office 95 was more or less just a recompile to 32-bit.
How many people found their multifunction printers didn't work under Win2K?
That's the fault of the printer vendor, not the OS vendor. It's not like W2K was a surprise. They had plenty of time to test new drivers with beta versions of the OS...that's what it's for! Aside from that, though, you're talking two completely different architectures. W2K was still considered the "office" version of Windows, not for home use. Firstly, it was a hodgepodge of 16/32-bit code, of course there'd need to be new drivers. Secondly, since most corporations (at least those with IT departments who can keep control on such things) didn't allow multi-function printers (they weren't really ready for prime-time back then) there was no real need to support them on 2K. Regardless, W2K was almost 7 years ago. If your vendor hasn't updated the drivers to include 2k, XP or 2K3 support, it's time to get a new vendor.
And was the transition from WinME to WinXP a painless one?
I've heard it wasn't for some, I've heard it was no big deal for others.
Just an idea, I know there's no cure for utter stupidity.
Are you apologizing because your idea was stupid or because you think the people who use online banking are stupid?
It's a 1.4GHz box with a geforce 4 video card. That sucker screams when playing games of the Win98/WinME era. Most of 'em can be loaded just fine on my WinXP box, but it's painful for some of them.
Then you fucked something up on your XP install. My personal desktop is a 1Ghz machine that runs XP just fine and I regularly play older games (like Quake, QII) on it.
US != world
Not yet, but they're working on it.
So, when you write you don't have to use grammar? Huh. I guess I've been doing it wrong this whole time then...
If you can't spell the words constructing sentences becomes more difficult regardless of the grammar.
Care to explain why he should be extradited under this?
Because that's the way the world works. Think you can change it, you're free to try. Regardless, he went into his endeavour knowing that to illegally access government computers was now considered an act of terrorism. Can't do the time, don't do the crime!
erm.... first, they where Boeing 767-222's, not 747's. Obviously you've done plenty of research into this topic, and just forgot this.....
Typo.
A 767 weighs a little over 100 tonnes. The floors of the buildings weighed around 1000-> 3000 tonnes each. so adding the entire weight of a 767 added a whopping 3 -10% extra load to the floor, assuming it managed to stop itself on just one floor rather than multiple floors and assuming none fell out of the building. (I hope Im never in a structure where the safety limits are so low that 3% extra can make it fall..) If you cant see your argument is rediculous, I'll help you out a little more:
And, if one of those floors is weakened enough by the impact, explosion and resulting fires, the extra weight might be enough to make that ONE FLOOR fall onto the next one, thereby doubling the load on the next floor. That floor then falls on the next, and so on and so on...remarkably just like what happened that day. How about this: the explosion of the plane hitting fractures the floor ABOVE where it hit, spilling large amounts of the floor and objects on the floor onto the one below. How much weight increase are we talking now? A 767 is about 16M tall, meaning best case scenario, when it hit the building it severely damaged three floors. Even if 90% of those floors and the plane were ejected out of the other side on impact, you're still putting a 20% load on the one at the bottom, which has also been severly damaged.
The buildings where designed to handle impacts from "fully loaded 707's", the largest passenger aircraft at the time. (this from the WTC construction and Project manager). In fact he believes they could withstand MULTIPLE strikes due to the "intense grid" construction, with a plane being like a "pencil through a screen door". A boeing 707 weighs between 100 and 150 tonnes. This is the same or in some cases MORE than the 767's that hit.
Again with the "IN THEORY, it should have worked like this...but in reality, it acted like this. Therefore there must be a conspiracy" theory. I believed I could setup my in-laws computer so as to protect them from themselves, viruses, spyware, etc...and yet, there it sits on my desk waiting to be rebuilt. No conspiracy, I just assumed they were going to use it for e-mail and browsing only. My bad. The only conspiracy I see here is the Construction and Project Manager trying to preserve his reputation. Because, afterall, building contruction is such a perfect and exact science that mistakes NEVER happen.
Perhaps you should consider the hundreds of firefighters, who are normally experts (or at least the people in charge are) on when a building is safe to enter or not, who died because they disagreed with your statement. Perhaps you should read some of their interesting witness statements that they where BLOCKED FROM RELEASING for years!!!
I'm really not sure what your point is here. My point was that I found it amazing that a structure that tall could be hit close to the top with 100 tons of high-speed airplane and not fall over. And, if the firefighters died that day, how much can you really trust their eyewitness statements?
How is $5000 reasonable at all?
:)
Read a Gartner brochure once in a while, you'll see where these looney numbers come from. Numbers regarding computer stuff have been skewed since they first said it costs $5000/year to maintain each PC in an organization. But, that being said, forensic analysis of a potentially compromised computer takes a little more than just reviewing logs. And, it wouldn't be limited to just the PCs they know were compromised, they'd have to investigate all of the computers on the same network, just in case. When your security model is reactive, as theirs appears to be, reactions typically cost a lot.
Yes, you have the right to shoot someone, but for you to find it reasonable to shoot someone because they were looking through you things is disturbing at best.
The parent poster was a bit wrong in his legal advice. For the most part, you're not "allowed" to shoot anyone on your property. You're limited, at best, to "self defense" as an argument, but you have to prove that you were pretty sure your life was in danger. Someone walking onto your property (outside) cannot be shot...unless they're carrying a bomb or 50-caliber machinegun. Then they're fair game. Once someone's in your house, though, self-defense is a lot easier to prove. Most states require some warning be given before a shot is fired (which actually includes warning shots). So the lost, confused or mentally challenged person who managed to pick the lock on your front door, disarm your alarm and is now coming up the stairs with a butcher knife in the dark can make it clear they're they just wanted to play a game of knifey-spoony before you shoot them. So, if you do just shoot someone rifling through your things and shoot them, you better run to the kitchen and get a knife to put in their hands. Just touch the handle to their fingers so their prints show up. You can then toss the knife into the corner and say you disarmed them after you shot 'em, just in case they weren't dead yet.
In other words, the parent is an idiot...and while I'd like to say not representative of US citizens, I know all too well I'd be wrong....
US federal laws don't apply in the UK.
And, that's why there's extradition.
OK thats enough for now. Im not going to argue with anyone here unless I think they have gone through this info first, because if they havent then it will be pointless.
In other words: unless you only marginally disagree with me, I don't want to argue with you. I've gone through a lot of the info you've referenced, and I've gone through the info on the other side. I gotta tell you: I disagree with you completely on almost all points (it's been a long time since I looked it all over, but I found nothing on the paranoid side to indicate they had anything beyond speculation, rumor and outright lies.). So far, everything I've seen on the MIHOP side is nothing more than "intelligent design" applied to 9/11. "There's a lot of stuff we don't understand, so there must've been some intelligent agent behind the stuff outside our cognitive abilities." Things didn't happen exactly as predicted, operative word there being "PREDICTED". As in "the weather man predicted rain, but it's been dry all day". The outcome of a plane flying into the side of the WTC was predicted by the engineers and architects who designed it. It was tested, I'm sure, in wind tunnels and with mockups and all kinds of nifty stuff that's outside my pervue....but until you actually fly a full-sized plane into a full-sized building, you have only a very educated guess as to what's going to happen next.
I suppose this is why highrise buildings have fallen over previously from fires, because the steel gets weakened by the fire... oh wait they haven't?
Did they also have the weight of a fully-loaded 747 sitting on one of their stress-weakened floors? Geez, I'm still amazed by the fact that it didn't fall over when it was hit, everyone else seems to be amazed that it fell over at all.
Sorry, hit submit too fast: And, perhaps, if it leads to "smarter" legislators, we might just get people in office who can manage the taxes they do get better. Regardless, perhaps there's a penalty to be paid? Taking an example from Heinlein, and fitting it to this conversation, perhaps no one who pays taxes can own a business? Can't participate in government loan or "welfare" programs (such as grants or federally backed loans for students of non-taxpayers)? There are easy ways around the problem...they just can't be implemented with the current population being involved in the voting process. You can't give out intelligence tests to gain voting rights, but perhaps people can be persuaded to provide the answers on their own...Discouraging solutions just because it brings up new problems also isn't the solution: it's the cause of all of our current problems.
Again, anyone that self-interested isn't paying much in taxes anyway.
I guess the question is: do we want people who are that self-centered voting anyway?
"No taxation without representation"
That was a rallying cry, not a law. Regardless, if it meant we'd get less moronic people voting in based on the latest soundbyte from CNN, then yes they can be exempt from taxes. Those types typically don't pay much in taxes anyway (the rich with their tax shelters, the poor due to income).
I think there's more to the story here than we know.
Silly, silly, silly. You're supposed to judge the news story entirely based on the "sound byte" provided to you by the journalist attempting to sway you over to their point of view...not express or attempt to start an intelligent discussion of the issues.
Given Europe recent action against Microsoft Windows Media player and all, I wouldn't be so indifferent of that decision.
Yeah, because that didn't turn out to be a tremendous waste of time and money.
to protect our privacy through common sense legislation
Then, you're never going to get it. Just ask anyone in IT how well that whole Sarbanes-Oxley crap is protecting people's privacy and money. There was something that could have been good for the community at large, and in the end it only served to drive a company's operating costs through the roof without actually fixing the problems it was meant to fix (re: it was supposed to protect consumers from another Enron, but the people who "committed" the Enron aren't the ones affected by the laws). Common sense and legistlation are two words that just don't go together.