The executive agencies have a responsibility to cut off public funds when they have a very good reason to believe they are being subject to fraud, waste and abuse. GSA, the General Services Administration, does this sort of thing all the time when it does internal criminal audits of how Congressionally-allocated funds are being used. One of their jobs is to bust up slush funds and take down those who were using them. Do you honestly think they let someone just spend all of those tax dollars all the way through the investigation?
The Congress desparately needs to have its spending and law-making powers curtailed by a few good constitutional amendments. The President needs the power of line-item veto, the Congress needs to have every bill address only one subject with all riders to the contrary automatically ruled unenforceable and deficit spending when the Congress has not issued a formal declaration of war should be unconstitutional.
I applaud the FCC, it's about damn time that an executive agency told Congress to take responsibility for where it spends tax dollars. The Congress spends our money, which it confiscates by threat of prison time, like a bunch of rich old white businessmen at a Vegas strip club. As long as the FCC just keeps the funds tied up, it shouldn't have any legal trouble. Since it is saying that it is merely tying up the funds to prevent them from going to what evidence shows is most likely an illegal use, it doesn't have to ask the Congress for permission. The Constitution doesn't say that the executive agencies have to actually spend money for purposes known to be illegal under federal law....
Growing up, not too long into adolescence a friend of our family died of complications due to AIDS. I was barely 14 at the time and it struck me how dangerous AIDS really is. For years people used to think that my having no desire to fuck around like most of my peers was that I was gay. Then occassionally I'd let slip the story about our friend it just floored them. The scariest part is that they could have had HIV at the very moment they were thinking, after my telling that story, "but that can't happen to me."
What really struck me was that we saw the guy only about 3-4 months before he died. He was about as healthy as I am now at 21, and I workout on a regular basis. Then a few months later, *BOOM* dead of complication caused by AIDS. The scariest thing about the disease is that you can go without knowing you have it until the last minute.
Other tech and IP companies could really stand to learn from Google. They took what was originally a niche market and they have built it up and brought that market into new areas. One of the best things that Google did was make their search features customizable for individual websites. They aren't the first to do this, but they have been very good at making it fit in well with the websites that want to add search capabilities.
Now what would be really sweet would be for Google to convince the music and movie industries to let it index song lyrics and movie scripts. That would be just another nail in the coffin for Google's competitors and it probably wouldn't be that difficult to do.
You expect that from the government, and luckily we have checks and balances in the government. We have watchdog groups. We have the FOIA. We have none of these covering private businesses; the only way we'd know an ISP was reading mail is if they did something stupid, or a whistleblower speaks out. We have no checks and balances with private businesses.
You really haven't been paying attention to politics lately. Ever heard of the USA PATRIOT Act or the foreign surveillance courts and laws? Puhlease, private business are now more accountable to you than your own government. The checks and balances are almost dead entirely.
You know we can't access bugzilla from slashdot links. It's just everytime I go to the clubs with a beanie, I get turned away. Why are we doings this to each other, HUH?!
Imagine if we go the route that many groups want which is to have local and state governments provide their own taxpayer-subsidized WiFi internet access, as is being talked about for Houston. It would be a disaster for civil liberties. It would be so much easier for the government to spy on you under the guise of the law and you'd have no recourse but to pray that private ISPs are still in business in your area, which they very well might not be with a cheap state-sponsored competitor.
There are of course limits that have to be placed on how private your messages are on an ISP's network. I personally have no problem with somebody that the ISP has detected has been systematically, egregiously violating state and federal laws with the ISP's resources getting spied on a bit to cover the ISP's ass. The ISP has a right, if it **happens** to find you systematically violating the law and putting it in any way at risk to see what you are up to. The only alternatives are a world where criminals have complete freedom of movement and the other is where the police actively spy on the public. I happen to like neither, but that's just me.
You also have to wonder why someone who is sending stuff that is so sensitive that they wouldn't want anyone but the recipient seeing it, wouldn't encrypt the message first. If nothing more write a little script that that scrambles the message based on some hack algorithm you come up with and send it via another email account to the recipient. It's not REALLY secure, but it's a little better than nothing.
If it is true that PearPC's minimum specs are a 2.5Ghz processor and the XBox runs a 733mhz PIII. This XBox hack isn't even running at 1/3 the minimum spec of PearPC doing anything remotely usable.
Novell buying SuSE could be the best thing for SuS
on
SUSE 9.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Under Novell's leadership they released the first free version of SuSE on ISO that I can ever recall hearing about. Before that I didn't know anyone who gave SuSE the time of day because they were the only vendor that was remotely popular without free CD images. Now, SuSE has the chance to actually gain marketshare against RedHat and force them to work harder on Fedora.
Have the NSF buy a few billion dollars worth of high end Opteron hardware and make it availible to those who are doing public research. I think that access to a few million dollars worth of high end hardware would help cut down on the R&D costs for drugs that are partially paid for with taxpayers' dollars. The good side is that if part of the package is free time on really sophisticated NSF clusters capable of really cutting down number crunching time, the public can demand on its end lower prices and/or shorter patent intervals.
Is that some new gimmick from Old Spice? "Here young man, carry this 'odorant detector' with you so that you know when you need to swipe on some more of our classic deodorant goodness to keep the honeys happy."
This is nothing more than the federal government creating telecom equivalent to the state and local laws that let you tell advertisers and sales people to get off your property and to stop bothering you. It's a no brainer that the SCotUS would uphold it.
I'll take my victories where I can, but personally I'd rather be harassed by solicitors than have to live under the USA PATRIOT Act.
Apple has the best DRM system around for simulating real user rights while protecting media interests. It keeps the casual copier at bay and yet it doesn't limit fair use. What Microsoft thinks is that customers are so stupid that they won't see a difference between FairPlay and Microsoft's vision of a "you are completely owned by the label" world view. In the end, Apple will come out on top. It was there first, it has the biggest selection and is the best at balancing both copyright holder and customer interests.
Why didn't they just modify BeIA so that it could run on their hardware? BeIA, the stripped down internet appliance version of BeOS, could easily run on their hardware now. I had BeOS running in half that memory on a PII 450 and it was FAST. Whoever made the decision to buy Be's IP and not fully exploit it at Palm should be shot.
Knowing how exposed most software is to things like worms, it would be very easy with powerful control hardware to lock people out of their systems without actually damaging the system. One of the things I find very interesting is how does one go about preventing a worm from rewriting certain parts of Windows and user apps so that they think the trusted hardware is either not present or does not let the user do what they are trying to do?
If after a year and incredible amounts of money spent on R&D, Microsoft cannot really slow down the spread of worms, how can they write an operating system that cannot be totally mindfucked by a worm that twists how Windows deals with the trusted hardware? So maybe Microsoft requires code signing, who is to say that someone isn't going to find a way to spoof a real code signature so that the worm appears to be Microsoft?
My money is the proposition that they'll try it, it'll work great for 3-6 months then people will start writing worms that target trusted systems and that totally ruin them. Then it will be a big flop within 2 years. IBM, Microsoft and other companies need to realize that the human component of security simply cannot be automated. Despite all of their attempts at real security, Microsoft cannot deal with the fact that the single greatest security hole in its OS is the user that never patches and that thinks it's not cool to remember what they aren't supposed to do to avoid getting worms and other hacks.
And if it doesn't work, just stock up on as much pre-trusted hardware as possible and put it into a closet for safe keeping....
Most people's musical interest is in purely mainstream stuff that can be easily acquired legally on a service like iTMS. For those who can't find it there, this makes sense, but please, don't give me that excuse that you can't find most of the MTV/CMT hits on iTMS.
The thing that has always been a thorn in the side of those who don't abuse P2P are the users that download stuff that they could easily have gotten legally because they're too cheap to pay for mainstream stuff. Stuff like that really makes it hard to defend P2P, and that's sad IMO.
I'm sorry, but if you're downloading Brittney Spears or something like that, you have no excuse. Pay The Man. If it's some obscure band, then no big deal since you probably couldn't find a way to legitimately pay for it. Just remember, most of the cool bands out there that don't make too much money are subsidized by the teenieboppers who buy the pop junk. The profitability of the latter covers the lack thereof in the former and gives us more options, not that I'm suggesting that we buy the pop shit just to subsidize our favorite bands.
Ultimately the biggest barrier to this system working is the credit card processors. If they didn't charge so much for small transactions then micropayments would be possible and practical.
What company in its right mind would do that to Wal-Mart? They're a company with more than enough money to effectively bury any of their little vendors who tried to defraud them like that. And that is exactly what they would be doing if they did that.
Whatever gains they might get, Wal-Mart's vendors could never justify the risks involved. Suppose they only get a few more "sales" here and there. Is that kind of increase in revenue worth getting millions of dollars in legal fees and fines shoved up their ass? Besides if it is a largescale operation, the chances that Wal-Mart would catch on very quickly is very high.
First the Eolas lawsuit, now this. What is going to take for Bill Gates to wake up and say that suing OpenOffice developers isn't worth being able to lose $1.06B to a company that actually has the legal resources to wage a protracted war with Microsoft? If Sun loses this, the Microsoft had better be willing to settle in a very generous was or Kodak will go after them. $1.06B for Sun, since Microsoft has much, much more money it could just as easily be $5B from Microsoft.
This is all starting to become like nuclear weapons in and after the cold war. First it seemed like no big deal, hell it was even a requirement to be a big player to have nukes. Now all these little players are getting them, and Eolas and Kodak IMO are no different or better than the rogue states getting their own arsenals of nukes. Now the big boys are getting attacked so, what do they do? Disarm by pushing for the elimination of all software and business method patents, to keep these guys from having legal nukes to use against them, or do they just pray that not enough ankle biters will get enough patents to bankrupt them in independent and coordinated lawsuits?
Speak for yourself, OSX is more than there already
on
Syllable 0.5.4 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I have been using Linux off and on as a desktop, but have been using MacOS X as my main desktop for about 2 years now. You can't even compare the two. Linux with KDE or GNOME is, no offense to those projects, barely a 9 year old child's bicycle with training wheels, while OSX is a Harley. Linux is barely at the point that Windows was with Windows 2000, and it isn't showing much signs of competing with XP-SP2 and Longhorn.
OSX is a very fast desktop oriented OS and it is the only desktop OS capable of really competing in a market whose needs go beyond the strictly utilitarian, like the home market. When a complete novice wants to install something from a CD on OSX all they do is drag the.app bundle to the hard disk, with Linux you either have to use some vendor specific tool to manage the myriad dependencies or run rpm manually. Linux is a great desktop, provided you want to only use the software that you are given by the distributor and/or have someone to maintain it for you. OSX, all that is quite unnecessary.
I like Linux, but it really isn't there yet. The majority of the people I know at least, would be scared to death of it.
The most common complaint about Syllable I have seen is the one that I also have, it just doesn't boot natively on my hardware. An OS that won't boot on a stock Asus motherboard with a AthlonXP 2400, Radeon9000 and plain ol' IDE drives is not going to make a dent even with Linux users.
I would love to try my hand at helping to port software over, even if it is nothing more than working on helping to get Python ported over and write native bindings for Syllable. But I don't have the time to hack away at a hobbyist OS that won't even boot on common hardware. If it only works in VMWare, it might as well not work at all for me. Even the hacked new distros of BeOS booted on that hardware for God's sake!
The syllable guys need to spend more of their time working on getting such basic necessities as actually having it bootable on all common hardware before they even think of challenging Windows. Firefox is a bad project to compare Syllable to because Firefox is built on an incredibly mature foundation that is over 5 years and millions of dollars of corporate R&D money in the making. Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't Mozilla proper actually closing in on 6-7 years old now?
What would really help is if some of the Linux kernel hackers would take a break from Linux and work on the Syllable kernel. OSS does need a plan B for the desktop, and going from Fedora or Mandrake to Debian sadly doesn't count:-P
If so many people are shitcanning their copies of Linux for Windows it means that the threat of desktop Linux to Windows is still nowhere near as bad as it could be.
Intelligent cars that can be programmed could be easily controlled by the government. In a worst case scenario this could effectively eliminate public protests and in and of itself could eliminate the remainder of what little we have of freedom of association. When the government can program your car, it can tell it where it can't go.
Oh come on. In this day and age if you share copyrighted goods online and have no clue that it is illegal then you are helpless because of a mental disability, not your financial state. While I have some sympathy for those who get caught, I just have to say you brought this on yourselves.
Until the law is changed, you know what you are up against if you share files you have no right to. We can disagree with what the RIAA is doing all day, and I certainly don't think that sharing a few songs is worth $5000 in fees, more like $1 or so for each song IMO, but these people are merely stupid, not helpless.
It slowed down Microsoft's monopoly engine long enough for Linux to rise, Apple to recover and release a very successful new OS and for groups like Mozilla to start fighting against Microsoft. Does anyone really want the court to hand a "victory" to those of us not fond of Microsoft? Does anyone think that Netscape or Sun or any of the other plaintiffs were really good, noble, altruistic companies that didn't salivate at the thought of filling in the vacuum left by a devastated Microsoft?
The way I see it, the case was good for another reason as well. It forced debate on both sides of the political spectrum, especially the right. Many conservatives were floored when Robert Bork, a well-respected conservative legal authority, agreed with Ralph Nader on Microsoft's trial. It helped bring new ideas and attitudes into respectability on the right, and it allowed left-leaning libertarians to point to a good example of how unfettered corporate power is still a real danger.
I would go so far as to say that the case did its job just fine, and coupled with Microsoft's recent security problems, a door is opening for free market enterprise once more. I will go so far as to say that there are a lot more Firefox users out there than we'd have previously guessed. I read comments all the time on sites like FreeRepublic which aren't known for their technical insight saying how Firefox kicks ass. In fact, of the dozens or so on threads about Firefox, most are overwhelmingly "I can't believe I ever used IE now that I have Firefox."
Microsoft, like Rome, didn't build their Empire in a day, and thus we won't dismantle it in a day. It'll take several more years of whittling away at them on multiple fronts. We just have to learn from history and be more civilized and cooperative if we win, than the barbarians were when they took down the Roman Empire.
Slashdot Mirror
The executive agencies have a responsibility to cut off public funds when they have a very good reason to believe they are being subject to fraud, waste and abuse. GSA, the General Services Administration, does this sort of thing all the time when it does internal criminal audits of how Congressionally-allocated funds are being used. One of their jobs is to bust up slush funds and take down those who were using them. Do you honestly think they let someone just spend all of those tax dollars all the way through the investigation?
The Congress desparately needs to have its spending and law-making powers curtailed by a few good constitutional amendments. The President needs the power of line-item veto, the Congress needs to have every bill address only one subject with all riders to the contrary automatically ruled unenforceable and deficit spending when the Congress has not issued a formal declaration of war should be unconstitutional.
I applaud the FCC, it's about damn time that an executive agency told Congress to take responsibility for where it spends tax dollars. The Congress spends our money, which it confiscates by threat of prison time, like a bunch of rich old white businessmen at a Vegas strip club. As long as the FCC just keeps the funds tied up, it shouldn't have any legal trouble. Since it is saying that it is merely tying up the funds to prevent them from going to what evidence shows is most likely an illegal use, it doesn't have to ask the Congress for permission. The Constitution doesn't say that the executive agencies have to actually spend money for purposes known to be illegal under federal law....
Growing up, not too long into adolescence a friend of our family died of complications due to AIDS. I was barely 14 at the time and it struck me how dangerous AIDS really is. For years people used to think that my having no desire to fuck around like most of my peers was that I was gay. Then occassionally I'd let slip the story about our friend it just floored them. The scariest part is that they could have had HIV at the very moment they were thinking, after my telling that story, "but that can't happen to me."
What really struck me was that we saw the guy only about 3-4 months before he died. He was about as healthy as I am now at 21, and I workout on a regular basis. Then a few months later, *BOOM* dead of complication caused by AIDS. The scariest thing about the disease is that you can go without knowing you have it until the last minute.
Other tech and IP companies could really stand to learn from Google. They took what was originally a niche market and they have built it up and brought that market into new areas. One of the best things that Google did was make their search features customizable for individual websites. They aren't the first to do this, but they have been very good at making it fit in well with the websites that want to add search capabilities.
Now what would be really sweet would be for Google to convince the music and movie industries to let it index song lyrics and movie scripts. That would be just another nail in the coffin for Google's competitors and it probably wouldn't be that difficult to do.
You really haven't been paying attention to politics lately. Ever heard of the USA PATRIOT Act or the foreign surveillance courts and laws? Puhlease, private business are now more accountable to you than your own government. The checks and balances are almost dead entirely.
You know we can't access bugzilla from slashdot links. It's just everytime I go to the clubs with a beanie, I get turned away. Why are we doings this to each other, HUH?!
Imagine if we go the route that many groups want which is to have local and state governments provide their own taxpayer-subsidized WiFi internet access, as is being talked about for Houston. It would be a disaster for civil liberties. It would be so much easier for the government to spy on you under the guise of the law and you'd have no recourse but to pray that private ISPs are still in business in your area, which they very well might not be with a cheap state-sponsored competitor.
There are of course limits that have to be placed on how private your messages are on an ISP's network. I personally have no problem with somebody that the ISP has detected has been systematically, egregiously violating state and federal laws with the ISP's resources getting spied on a bit to cover the ISP's ass. The ISP has a right, if it **happens** to find you systematically violating the law and putting it in any way at risk to see what you are up to. The only alternatives are a world where criminals have complete freedom of movement and the other is where the police actively spy on the public. I happen to like neither, but that's just me.
You also have to wonder why someone who is sending stuff that is so sensitive that they wouldn't want anyone but the recipient seeing it, wouldn't encrypt the message first. If nothing more write a little script that that scrambles the message based on some hack algorithm you come up with and send it via another email account to the recipient. It's not REALLY secure, but it's a little better than nothing.
If it is true that PearPC's minimum specs are a 2.5Ghz processor and the XBox runs a 733mhz PIII. This XBox hack isn't even running at 1/3 the minimum spec of PearPC doing anything remotely usable.
Under Novell's leadership they released the first free version of SuSE on ISO that I can ever recall hearing about. Before that I didn't know anyone who gave SuSE the time of day because they were the only vendor that was remotely popular without free CD images. Now, SuSE has the chance to actually gain marketshare against RedHat and force them to work harder on Fedora.
Have the NSF buy a few billion dollars worth of high end Opteron hardware and make it availible to those who are doing public research. I think that access to a few million dollars worth of high end hardware would help cut down on the R&D costs for drugs that are partially paid for with taxpayers' dollars. The good side is that if part of the package is free time on really sophisticated NSF clusters capable of really cutting down number crunching time, the public can demand on its end lower prices and/or shorter patent intervals.
Is that some new gimmick from Old Spice? "Here young man, carry this 'odorant detector' with you so that you know when you need to swipe on some more of our classic deodorant goodness to keep the honeys happy."
This is nothing more than the federal government creating telecom equivalent to the state and local laws that let you tell advertisers and sales people to get off your property and to stop bothering you. It's a no brainer that the SCotUS would uphold it.
I'll take my victories where I can, but personally I'd rather be harassed by solicitors than have to live under the USA PATRIOT Act.
Apple has the best DRM system around for simulating real user rights while protecting media interests. It keeps the casual copier at bay and yet it doesn't limit fair use. What Microsoft thinks is that customers are so stupid that they won't see a difference between FairPlay and Microsoft's vision of a "you are completely owned by the label" world view. In the end, Apple will come out on top. It was there first, it has the biggest selection and is the best at balancing both copyright holder and customer interests.
Why didn't they just modify BeIA so that it could run on their hardware? BeIA, the stripped down internet appliance version of BeOS, could easily run on their hardware now. I had BeOS running in half that memory on a PII 450 and it was FAST. Whoever made the decision to buy Be's IP and not fully exploit it at Palm should be shot.
Behold.... for I am
William Shatner
I got canned
really fast by priceline..
dot com
Now I am
an overrated washed up actor
Whose only claim to fame is
acting in Esperanto and
being the first white man
to admit to kissing a black chick
Now I can be me
Not competing with
that damn vulcan nemoy.
Knowing how exposed most software is to things like worms, it would be very easy with powerful control hardware to lock people out of their systems without actually damaging the system. One of the things I find very interesting is how does one go about preventing a worm from rewriting certain parts of Windows and user apps so that they think the trusted hardware is either not present or does not let the user do what they are trying to do?
If after a year and incredible amounts of money spent on R&D, Microsoft cannot really slow down the spread of worms, how can they write an operating system that cannot be totally mindfucked by a worm that twists how Windows deals with the trusted hardware? So maybe Microsoft requires code signing, who is to say that someone isn't going to find a way to spoof a real code signature so that the worm appears to be Microsoft?
My money is the proposition that they'll try it, it'll work great for 3-6 months then people will start writing worms that target trusted systems and that totally ruin them. Then it will be a big flop within 2 years. IBM, Microsoft and other companies need to realize that the human component of security simply cannot be automated. Despite all of their attempts at real security, Microsoft cannot deal with the fact that the single greatest security hole in its OS is the user that never patches and that thinks it's not cool to remember what they aren't supposed to do to avoid getting worms and other hacks.
And if it doesn't work, just stock up on as much pre-trusted hardware as possible and put it into a closet for safe keeping....
Most people's musical interest is in purely mainstream stuff that can be easily acquired legally on a service like iTMS. For those who can't find it there, this makes sense, but please, don't give me that excuse that you can't find most of the MTV/CMT hits on iTMS.
The thing that has always been a thorn in the side of those who don't abuse P2P are the users that download stuff that they could easily have gotten legally because they're too cheap to pay for mainstream stuff. Stuff like that really makes it hard to defend P2P, and that's sad IMO.
I'm sorry, but if you're downloading Brittney Spears or something like that, you have no excuse. Pay The Man. If it's some obscure band, then no big deal since you probably couldn't find a way to legitimately pay for it. Just remember, most of the cool bands out there that don't make too much money are subsidized by the teenieboppers who buy the pop junk. The profitability of the latter covers the lack thereof in the former and gives us more options, not that I'm suggesting that we buy the pop shit just to subsidize our favorite bands.
Ultimately the biggest barrier to this system working is the credit card processors. If they didn't charge so much for small transactions then micropayments would be possible and practical.
What company in its right mind would do that to Wal-Mart? They're a company with more than enough money to effectively bury any of their little vendors who tried to defraud them like that. And that is exactly what they would be doing if they did that.
Whatever gains they might get, Wal-Mart's vendors could never justify the risks involved. Suppose they only get a few more "sales" here and there. Is that kind of increase in revenue worth getting millions of dollars in legal fees and fines shoved up their ass? Besides if it is a largescale operation, the chances that Wal-Mart would catch on very quickly is very high.
First the Eolas lawsuit, now this. What is going to take for Bill Gates to wake up and say that suing OpenOffice developers isn't worth being able to lose $1.06B to a company that actually has the legal resources to wage a protracted war with Microsoft? If Sun loses this, the Microsoft had better be willing to settle in a very generous was or Kodak will go after them. $1.06B for Sun, since Microsoft has much, much more money it could just as easily be $5B from Microsoft.
This is all starting to become like nuclear weapons in and after the cold war. First it seemed like no big deal, hell it was even a requirement to be a big player to have nukes. Now all these little players are getting them, and Eolas and Kodak IMO are no different or better than the rogue states getting their own arsenals of nukes. Now the big boys are getting attacked so, what do they do? Disarm by pushing for the elimination of all software and business method patents, to keep these guys from having legal nukes to use against them, or do they just pray that not enough ankle biters will get enough patents to bankrupt them in independent and coordinated lawsuits?
I have been using Linux off and on as a desktop, but have been using MacOS X as my main desktop for about 2 years now. You can't even compare the two. Linux with KDE or GNOME is, no offense to those projects, barely a 9 year old child's bicycle with training wheels, while OSX is a Harley. Linux is barely at the point that Windows was with Windows 2000, and it isn't showing much signs of competing with XP-SP2 and Longhorn.
.app bundle to the hard disk, with Linux you either have to use some vendor specific tool to manage the myriad dependencies or run rpm manually. Linux is a great desktop, provided you want to only use the software that you are given by the distributor and/or have someone to maintain it for you. OSX, all that is quite unnecessary.
OSX is a very fast desktop oriented OS and it is the only desktop OS capable of really competing in a market whose needs go beyond the strictly utilitarian, like the home market. When a complete novice wants to install something from a CD on OSX all they do is drag the
I like Linux, but it really isn't there yet. The majority of the people I know at least, would be scared to death of it.
The most common complaint about Syllable I have seen is the one that I also have, it just doesn't boot natively on my hardware. An OS that won't boot on a stock Asus motherboard with a AthlonXP 2400, Radeon9000 and plain ol' IDE drives is not going to make a dent even with Linux users.
:-P
I would love to try my hand at helping to port software over, even if it is nothing more than working on helping to get Python ported over and write native bindings for Syllable. But I don't have the time to hack away at a hobbyist OS that won't even boot on common hardware. If it only works in VMWare, it might as well not work at all for me. Even the hacked new distros of BeOS booted on that hardware for God's sake!
The syllable guys need to spend more of their time working on getting such basic necessities as actually having it bootable on all common hardware before they even think of challenging Windows. Firefox is a bad project to compare Syllable to because Firefox is built on an incredibly mature foundation that is over 5 years and millions of dollars of corporate R&D money in the making. Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't Mozilla proper actually closing in on 6-7 years old now?
What would really help is if some of the Linux kernel hackers would take a break from Linux and work on the Syllable kernel. OSS does need a plan B for the desktop, and going from Fedora or Mandrake to Debian sadly doesn't count
Some nerd is thinking, "where can I get THAT kind of power for my beanie....."
If so many people are shitcanning their copies of Linux for Windows it means that the threat of desktop Linux to Windows is still nowhere near as bad as it could be.
Intelligent cars that can be programmed could be easily controlled by the government. In a worst case scenario this could effectively eliminate public protests and in and of itself could eliminate the remainder of what little we have of freedom of association. When the government can program your car, it can tell it where it can't go.
Oh come on. In this day and age if you share copyrighted goods online and have no clue that it is illegal then you are helpless because of a mental disability, not your financial state. While I have some sympathy for those who get caught, I just have to say you brought this on yourselves.
Until the law is changed, you know what you are up against if you share files you have no right to. We can disagree with what the RIAA is doing all day, and I certainly don't think that sharing a few songs is worth $5000 in fees, more like $1 or so for each song IMO, but these people are merely stupid, not helpless.
It slowed down Microsoft's monopoly engine long enough for Linux to rise, Apple to recover and release a very successful new OS and for groups like Mozilla to start fighting against Microsoft. Does anyone really want the court to hand a "victory" to those of us not fond of Microsoft? Does anyone think that Netscape or Sun or any of the other plaintiffs were really good, noble, altruistic companies that didn't salivate at the thought of filling in the vacuum left by a devastated Microsoft?
The way I see it, the case was good for another reason as well. It forced debate on both sides of the political spectrum, especially the right. Many conservatives were floored when Robert Bork, a well-respected conservative legal authority, agreed with Ralph Nader on Microsoft's trial. It helped bring new ideas and attitudes into respectability on the right, and it allowed left-leaning libertarians to point to a good example of how unfettered corporate power is still a real danger.
I would go so far as to say that the case did its job just fine, and coupled with Microsoft's recent security problems, a door is opening for free market enterprise once more. I will go so far as to say that there are a lot more Firefox users out there than we'd have previously guessed. I read comments all the time on sites like FreeRepublic which aren't known for their technical insight saying how Firefox kicks ass. In fact, of the dozens or so on threads about Firefox, most are overwhelmingly "I can't believe I ever used IE now that I have Firefox."
Microsoft, like Rome, didn't build their Empire in a day, and thus we won't dismantle it in a day. It'll take several more years of whittling away at them on multiple fronts. We just have to learn from history and be more civilized and cooperative if we win, than the barbarians were when they took down the Roman Empire.