You might forget that MS is not a security company.
True, but this is like excusing someone who fits front doors after they fit a load which have no locks (and are marketted as having locks) because they're not a security company, just a front door company.
You tell them they should focus more on security than making a GUI that can be used equally well if you have perfect vision or are blind or anywhere in between.
Having recently installed Windows XP for some testing (the last version of Windows I used was Win98) I can tell you that the Windows XP interface is absolutely horrendous - Win98's was actually reasonably intuitive but I can't say the same about XP. Infact after having to set up XP I have come to the conclusion that anyone who claims XP is more userfriendly than a modern Linux distribution is sadly mistaken.
this vulnerability happened after SP2 was released.
Uh.. huh?!? This is a vulnerability that was known about in a number of operating systems and fixed in Linux in the kernel 2.0 days...
MS has been working a lot on connectivity over the last year or so with some protocol enhancements and increased IPv6 support.
Ok, I actually _use_ IPv6, both on my internal network and on the internet at large. After hearing that MS had implemented a wonderful IPv6 stack I tried it out (XP SP2)... Imagine my surprise when I found that yes, there is a wonderful shiny IPv6 stack, but it's almost completely useless since none of the standard MS services actually support IPv6 at all. Thats right, you can't do any stuff like terminal services (RDP) or file sharing (SMB/CIFS), etc over IPv6. By comparison, Linux had a good IPv6 stack in 1998 and most services now support it natively (exceptions are NFS and CUPS).
So no, I can't accept the idea that MS are slacking on security because they're at the forefront of IPv6 development since they're not even at the level Linux's IPv6 support was at 7 years ago. And even if this was a reason for them slacking on the security side, security is _the most important thing_ to have on a networked system, so it's still not an excuse.
I certainly hope you're happy with your front door that has a pretend painted-on lock.
"Leaking" a program is not good advertising, good advertising is hyping something up and not letting anybody peek behind the curtain. For your premiere episode you want to keep people curious.
I'm not convinced - leaking just the first episode shortly before the series is due to begin means that those interested download it and watch it and if it's good they'll help hype it up and produce more publicity for the actual series. If it sucks then noone will watch it after the first episode anyway.
Also, almost without exception, those features that are common to both (a great many of which were browser innovations by Opera itself) are far better implemented in Opera than they are in FireFox.
Disclaimer: I am a FireFox user.
Unfortunately, FireFox is more standards complient than Opera (yes, I know that every time I say this on Slashdot some Opera fanboys flame me for daring to suggest that their precious browser might be flawed, but it happens to be true). Having done a fair amount of standards complient web development I can tell you that Opera _does_ have some quite major flaws in it's standards compliance (which may be an intentional "feature" to try and be IE compatable). Firefox and Safari both have minor bugs in their box models but by no means as bad as Opera and IE. (Admittedly Safari has got an annoyingly broken object tag which makes it neigh on impossible to use the object tag to embed Flash, and I really wish Apple would fix it).
Funny how people always bitch about products when they dont have X feature, etc.. But when they include all of those nice features everyone wants they bitch about how bloated it has become..
Isn't this why extensions were invented? I think what is possibly needed is the ability to select extensions at install-time (with some sensible defaults of common stuff) instead of having to install extensions individually after installation.
Most distributions do not ship the stock kernel, they ship a kernel with a number of patches. This is not a Linux(TM) kernel, it is a derived work of the Linux(TM) kernel.
Except Linus has no problem with this - he has openly stated that he _wants_ the packagers to patch and stablise the kernel for the end-lusers.
By your reasoning, if I had a Ferrari and I changed the stereo I would nolonger be able to call it a Ferrari because it's now a derived work... (Sorry, every slashdot arguement has to ahve a car analogy:)
What is the problem here? Does an Oort cloud 'shine'? If the interstellar spaces were crowded with planet-sized bodies, would these 'shine'? Can't this 'missing matter' merely be rocky or icy crud between the stars?
IANAAP (Not an astrophysacist) but as I understand it, if an object doesn't reflect light then it absorbs it and reradiates the energy at different wavelengths (i.e. you'd be able to see the 'crud' as surely as you would see something reflective, just at different wavelengths).
Take, for example, a black object (the roof of a house, a black car, your black T-shirt, whatever) baking in the sun: It doesn't reflect much sunlight, most is absorbed. But point an infrared camera at it and you'd see all that energy it's absorbing coming off it as infrared radiation.
I've never understood this. After, say, 5 failed attempts, shouldn't the login be disabled for a certain time period or until the account owner is contacted?
It isn't on most systems. And it may infact be a bad idea - if you want to DoS a system then you could just make a few logins with incorrect passwords and suddenly the legitimate user can't log in (without contacting a sysadmin to reenable the account, who may not be available).
It helps somewhat if on a regular basis laptops* with VPN account on them get stolen.
No, the only thing that helps there is changing the stolen passwords/keys *immediately* - wait for your enforced bi-monthly password change and it's too late.
That's EXACTLY what you want. The people that WANT the BBC will pay for it.
The BBC's charter is to produce stuff that commercial stations wouldn't find viable - turning the BBC into a purely commercial station abolishes this position and you'll end up with the channels filled with reality TV shit because that's what has the highest revenue:production cost ratio.
There are many good reasons for the BBC not to be funded by direct taxation, chief among them is the huge influence over the BBC's posture and programming which that would give to the government of the day.
Funding from general taxation doesn't necessarilly require the government to have direct power over _how much_ money they get.
That would turn the BBC into just another commercial station, which is not what you want. I've previously posted this but I'll copy + paste here:
The whole point of funding through the licence fee is to allow the BBC to do things that a commercial channel wouldn't find viable - I resent them spending the licence fee on programs that are very commercially viable (Football, Eastenders, Fame Acadamy, etc). Especially when they go into bidding wars for sporting events against other (particularly free-to-air) channels.
IMHO the BBC should own both non-commercial, licence funded channels and commercial self-funded channels. Minority stuff can be paid for out of the licence fee whilest the really popular stuff can go on the commercial channels (and they could even plough those commercial revenues back into the non-commercial channels). This would also mean that the licence can be used to fund the first series of programs and if they are very successful they can be moved to the commercial channels and the revenues used to fund more new programs.
Something like 10% of the licence goes on licence collecting (including TV detector vans, intimidating people who don't own TVs, etc). Since a large proportion of the licence goes on non-TV related services (radio, web site, etc) it would seem fairer to collect the money through general taxation instead of specifically targetting TV owners. This would also reduce the amount of money that needs to be spent doing the actual collection.
Strong passwords get stolen, when people give them out
The first problem here is that these people should be properly trained not to give out their passwords and disciplined if they get caught doing it (yes, I know this doesn't solve the problem).
The second problem is that if you hand me your password, I'm going to try using it reasonably recently aren't I? I'm not going to wait for a few months until your system has forced you to cycle the password.
what is to prevent Vonage or some other such company from setting up on port 80?
They can happilly set up on *UDP* port 80, but doing VoIP over TCP (which is what HTTP uses) is completely insane.
On a VoIP connection, if you lose a packet or it arrives late, you want to just drop that fraction of a second of audio - if you're using TCP then it would notice the packet hadn't arrived and freeze the whole connection whilest doing retries, etc - in general it would be very bad. (It's something that Skype does - need I say more).
Personally I think device tax is silly way to pay for a public service - it should come out of direct taxation instead.
I agree entirely - charging a licence for computers incase you might be watching TV on it is like charging a licence for coffee because you might be drinking coffee while watching the TV.
I pay for the BBC already, so expanding it to my computer (where I actually access it most) is fine by me.
What about businesses? Almost every business has a computer in the office - I'm not sure that a vast percentage have a TV. So suddenly they're forcing businesses to pay a new tax. IMHO a fairer way is to fund the BBC through general taxation since a large chunk of what the licence fee pays for isn't even TV related.
Places where it will enhance the functionality of a specific part of the site, and there must always be a good fallback for when people don't have flash - i.e. I use Zoomify on my photo gallery pages but it falls back to a perfectly good static image if someone doesn't have Flash installed.
And yes, I agree entirely that Google is so successful because they don't annoy people (also why I use Google AdSense on my site) - I can only hope that one day the advertisers who insist on using Flash movies (especially the ones that play music at you while you're trying to read an article!) might finally realise this.
No, most security experts will tell you this is a very stupid thing to require people to do. Your password system should enforce strong passwords anyway. Enforcing strong passwords which have to change every month just encourages people to write them on a post-it and stick it to their monitor because no one can remember passwords that change that regularly unless they're really simple.
What's more, it doesn't actually do much for the security anyway: if someone hands random people their password then you're pretty much screwed anyway - people aren't going to wait until after the password change to try and use that password. If someone is brute-forcing passwords then they stand the same mathematical chance of hitting the new password as they did with the old password so no more security there. Infact, the only security it gives you is if someone steals your encrypted password file and it's going to take them a few months to crack. But if random people can get the password database then you've got bigger security concerns than weak passwords.
For good comedy you need to listen to the radio - BBC Radio 4 has some excellent comedy and satire programmes.
I wholly agree with you here. Although it's annoying they don't put any of them on when I'm driving to/from work. (This may be a Good Thing since when I listen to radio 4 comedy while driving I usually end up laughing so much I'm in danger of crashing:)
Do you get a constant stream of phone calls and red letters from the Television Licensing Authority demanding that you buy a license? Do they keep sending a man round to your house to intimidate you and ask you why you haven't got a license? Do they keep making you sign forms to declare that you haven't got a TV set? Have they put up a huge poster on the nearest billboard to your house declaring that someone in your street hasn't got a TV license?
After leaving university I was without a TV for a period of about 2 months (i.e. not very long). The TV Licencing Authority took to sending me letters with "YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW" printed on the _outside_ of the envelope in big red lettering. I had no money at the time so didn't do anything about it but I would be kind of curious what would happen if someone took them to court for libel.
The whole point of funding through the licence fee is to allow the BBC to do things that a commercial channel wouldn't find viable - I resent them spending the licence fee on programs that are very commercially viable (Football, Eastenders, Fame Acadamy, etc). Especially when they go into bidding wars for sporting events against other (particularly free-to-air) channels.
IMHO the BBC should own both non-commercial, licence funded channels and commercial self-funded channels. Minority stuff can be paid for out of the licence fee whilest the really popular stuff can go on the commercial channels (and they could even plough those commercial revenues back into the non-commercial channels). This would also mean that the licence can be used to fund the first series of programs and if they are very successful they can be moved to the commercial channels and the revenues used to fund more new programs.
Something like 10% of the licence goes on licence collecting (including TV detector vans, intimidating people who don't own TVs, etc). Since a large proportion of the licence goes on non-TV related services (radio, web site, etc) it would seem fairer to collect the money through general taxation instead of specifically targetting TV owners. This would also reduce the amount of money that needs to be spent doing the actual collection.
One thing that really bugs me is that IMHO the quality of BBC programming has really gone down - there are a number of good programs still, such as Rough Science and the Ray Mears shows, but I certainly haven't seen any good comedy since Red Dwarf VI finished (please don't talk about The Office - it's not good, it's not funny, it just makes me cringe).
They will try to take some story and blow it up to be something that it is not.
Additionally, when I see a news report about a field in which I am an expert I usually find it massively inaccurate and full of fundamentally flawed arguements... So I'm left thinking that the other stuff they report is just as inaccurate but I'm just not knowledgable enough in that field to notice.
To get back to the point: I find it hard to accept that aid organizations struggle to get funding, while something like a web browser so easily gets a lot of money for advertizing.
I think you'll find that many aid organistations get far more in donations than the Mozilla Foundation gets.
Also, why is paying a large organisation to produce and market software ok, but donating a (probably smaller) amount to a free and open organisation wrong? Given the choice, I would rather give my money to the Mozilla Foundation rather than Microsoft because The Mozilla Foundation (and similar projects) are ethical and they actually seem to give a damn about their users. Giving the Mozilla Foundation money that would otherwise have been given to Microsoft doesn't take any money away from the charities (although it might increase the amount of money they get since donations to the Mozilla Foundation are unlikely to be anywhere near the amount that people would usually pay to MS so there's more money available in people's pockets).
Compare Microsoft's marketting budget (paid for by their customers) against the Mozilla Foundation's marketting budget (paid for by _some_ of their consumers) and I think you'll find MS's is a lot bigger. Also compare the marketting budget of some aid organisations - that's probably bigger too.
I think you need to look out of your very narrow-minded view of the world. I totally agree on Microsoft being a little rough in some of their business practices, even unethical at times. Still, they are only convicted monopolists, which hardly constitutes a criminal offense.
Uh.. huh? I think you misread my post - I said that as far as I was concerned in this case it *didn't matter* whether or not they are criminals. In my mind their business practices are unethical and a judge telling me they are/aren't criminals too isn't going to make a lot of difference to my opinion.
The money from the foundation is extremely important for a lot of people, and it does real good for people with AIDS, or starving people, and so on. When you compare the good side to the bad side
Yes, he gives money to good causes, which is a good thing.... money he got (and is still getting) through unethical means. I don't see why someone who gets money through unethical means at the expense of other people should get an award for not keeping all of it for themselves. If he actually stopped being unethical then it would certainly add weight to an arguement in his favor since it shows he has seen the error of his ways. But continuing to be unethical shows that this is not the case. Or are we rewarding continuing bad behaviour if some good comes out of it? What kind of an example is that?
I can hardly believe the amount of money ploughed into projects like the stupid Firefox ad in NYT, when charity projects and aid organizations at the same time struggle to keep their head above the water. Some people seem to have problems measuring the relative importance of different issues.
I'm sorry, but I think you're incredibly short sighted. Did it ever occur to you that people who support projects like Mozilla also may give to charity?
By the same token, if you go out to see a film you're diverting funds that you could've spent supporting a charity into a frivolous activity. That piece of chocolate cake you bought? you sure as hell don't need the nutricional content in it so why didn't you give that money to a charity instead since it would be more useful to them. That time you spent complaining on slashdot about people not having exactly the same world-view as you could probably be better spent helping a charity too...
Do some research on some of the Railroad robber barons of the late 19th century. They did some really nasty things, but some of them (the ones who did nasty things), also gave lots of money to charity and founded charities and supported the arts and were remembered for that. As I mentioned in a previous post, Dale Carnagie fits into this catagory.
Just because some bad people have done some good things in the past doesn't make it right.
Slashdot Mirror
You might forget that MS is not a security company.
True, but this is like excusing someone who fits front doors after they fit a load which have no locks (and are marketted as having locks) because they're not a security company, just a front door company.
You tell them they should focus more on security than making a GUI that can be used equally well if you have perfect vision or are blind or anywhere in between.
Having recently installed Windows XP for some testing (the last version of Windows I used was Win98) I can tell you that the Windows XP interface is absolutely horrendous - Win98's was actually reasonably intuitive but I can't say the same about XP. Infact after having to set up XP I have come to the conclusion that anyone who claims XP is more userfriendly than a modern Linux distribution is sadly mistaken.
this vulnerability happened after SP2 was released.
Uh.. huh?!? This is a vulnerability that was known about in a number of operating systems and fixed in Linux in the kernel 2.0 days...
MS has been working a lot on connectivity over the last year or so with some protocol enhancements and increased IPv6 support.
Ok, I actually _use_ IPv6, both on my internal network and on the internet at large. After hearing that MS had implemented a wonderful IPv6 stack I tried it out (XP SP2)... Imagine my surprise when I found that yes, there is a wonderful shiny IPv6 stack, but it's almost completely useless since none of the standard MS services actually support IPv6 at all. Thats right, you can't do any stuff like terminal services (RDP) or file sharing (SMB/CIFS), etc over IPv6. By comparison, Linux had a good IPv6 stack in 1998 and most services now support it natively (exceptions are NFS and CUPS).
So no, I can't accept the idea that MS are slacking on security because they're at the forefront of IPv6 development since they're not even at the level Linux's IPv6 support was at 7 years ago. And even if this was a reason for them slacking on the security side, security is _the most important thing_ to have on a networked system, so it's still not an excuse.
I certainly hope you're happy with your front door that has a pretend painted-on lock.
"Leaking" a program is not good advertising, good advertising is hyping something up and not letting anybody peek behind the curtain. For your premiere episode you want to keep people curious.
I'm not convinced - leaking just the first episode shortly before the series is due to begin means that those interested download it and watch it and if it's good they'll help hype it up and produce more publicity for the actual series. If it sucks then noone will watch it after the first episode anyway.
Also, almost without exception, those features that are common to both (a great many of which were browser innovations by Opera itself) are far better implemented in Opera than they are in FireFox.
Disclaimer: I am a FireFox user.
Unfortunately, FireFox is more standards complient than Opera (yes, I know that every time I say this on Slashdot some Opera fanboys flame me for daring to suggest that their precious browser might be flawed, but it happens to be true). Having done a fair amount of standards complient web development I can tell you that Opera _does_ have some quite major flaws in it's standards compliance (which may be an intentional "feature" to try and be IE compatable). Firefox and Safari both have minor bugs in their box models but by no means as bad as Opera and IE. (Admittedly Safari has got an annoyingly broken object tag which makes it neigh on impossible to use the object tag to embed Flash, and I really wish Apple would fix it).
Funny how people always bitch about products when they dont have X feature, etc.. But when they include all of those nice features everyone wants they bitch about how bloated it has become..
Isn't this why extensions were invented? I think what is possibly needed is the ability to select extensions at install-time (with some sensible defaults of common stuff) instead of having to install extensions individually after installation.
Most distributions do not ship the stock kernel, they ship a kernel with a number of patches. This is not a Linux(TM) kernel, it is a derived work of the Linux(TM) kernel.
:)
Except Linus has no problem with this - he has openly stated that he _wants_ the packagers to patch and stablise the kernel for the end-lusers.
By your reasoning, if I had a Ferrari and I changed the stereo I would nolonger be able to call it a Ferrari because it's now a derived work... (Sorry, every slashdot arguement has to ahve a car analogy
What is the problem here? Does an Oort cloud 'shine'? If the interstellar spaces were crowded with planet-sized bodies, would these 'shine'? Can't this 'missing matter' merely be rocky or icy crud between the stars?
IANAAP (Not an astrophysacist) but as I understand it, if an object doesn't reflect light then it absorbs it and reradiates the energy at different wavelengths (i.e. you'd be able to see the 'crud' as surely as you would see something reflective, just at different wavelengths).
Take, for example, a black object (the roof of a house, a black car, your black T-shirt, whatever) baking in the sun: It doesn't reflect much sunlight, most is absorbed. But point an infrared camera at it and you'd see all that energy it's absorbing coming off it as infrared radiation.
I've never understood this. After, say, 5 failed attempts, shouldn't the login be disabled for a certain time period or until the account owner is contacted?
It isn't on most systems. And it may infact be a bad idea - if you want to DoS a system then you could just make a few logins with incorrect passwords and suddenly the legitimate user can't log in (without contacting a sysadmin to reenable the account, who may not be available).
It helps somewhat if on a regular basis laptops* with VPN account on them get stolen.
No, the only thing that helps there is changing the stolen passwords/keys *immediately* - wait for your enforced bi-monthly password change and it's too late.
It's not EXACTLY what we want. We want high quality ad-free programming. Show me a purely commercial station that does that...
Errm, I think you wanted to reply to the grandparent of your message...
From what I've seen sent over on BBC America, that appears to already be the case. Just how many home- and self-improvement shows can they produce?
Umm, isn't BBC America not licence funded (i.e. commercial)? I think that probably makes my point.
That's EXACTLY what you want. The people that WANT the BBC will pay for it.
The BBC's charter is to produce stuff that commercial stations wouldn't find viable - turning the BBC into a purely commercial station abolishes this position and you'll end up with the channels filled with reality TV shit because that's what has the highest revenue:production cost ratio.
There are many good reasons for the BBC not to be funded by direct taxation, chief among them is the huge influence over the BBC's posture and programming which that would give to the government of the day.
Funding from general taxation doesn't necessarilly require the government to have direct power over _how much_ money they get.
Actually, the fairest way is by subscription.
That would turn the BBC into just another commercial station, which is not what you want. I've previously posted this but I'll copy + paste here:
The whole point of funding through the licence fee is to allow the BBC to do things that a commercial channel wouldn't find viable - I resent them spending the licence fee on programs that are very commercially viable (Football, Eastenders, Fame Acadamy, etc). Especially when they go into bidding wars for sporting events against other (particularly free-to-air) channels.
IMHO the BBC should own both non-commercial, licence funded channels and commercial self-funded channels. Minority stuff can be paid for out of the licence fee whilest the really popular stuff can go on the commercial channels (and they could even plough those commercial revenues back into the non-commercial channels). This would also mean that the licence can be used to fund the first series of programs and if they are very successful they can be moved to the commercial channels and the revenues used to fund more new programs.
Something like 10% of the licence goes on licence collecting (including TV detector vans, intimidating people who don't own TVs, etc). Since a large proportion of the licence goes on non-TV related services (radio, web site, etc) it would seem fairer to collect the money through general taxation instead of specifically targetting TV owners. This would also reduce the amount of money that needs to be spent doing the actual collection.
Strong passwords get stolen, when people give them out
The first problem here is that these people should be properly trained not to give out their passwords and disciplined if they get caught doing it (yes, I know this doesn't solve the problem).
The second problem is that if you hand me your password, I'm going to try using it reasonably recently aren't I? I'm not going to wait for a few months until your system has forced you to cycle the password.
what is to prevent Vonage or some other such company from setting up on port 80?
They can happilly set up on *UDP* port 80, but doing VoIP over TCP (which is what HTTP uses) is completely insane.
On a VoIP connection, if you lose a packet or it arrives late, you want to just drop that fraction of a second of audio - if you're using TCP then it would notice the packet hadn't arrived and freeze the whole connection whilest doing retries, etc - in general it would be very bad. (It's something that Skype does - need I say more).
Personally I think device tax is silly way to pay for a public service - it should come out of direct taxation instead.
I agree entirely - charging a licence for computers incase you might be watching TV on it is like charging a licence for coffee because you might be drinking coffee while watching the TV.
I pay for the BBC already, so expanding it to my computer (where I actually access it most) is fine by me.
What about businesses? Almost every business has a computer in the office - I'm not sure that a vast percentage have a TV. So suddenly they're forcing businesses to pay a new tax. IMHO a fairer way is to fund the BBC through general taxation since a large chunk of what the licence fee pays for isn't even TV related.
http://www.happytreefriends.com/
In all seriousness though, I believe that there is a place for Flash, but not nearly as many places as a lot of designers seem to think:
And yes, I agree entirely that Google is so successful because they don't annoy people (also why I use Google AdSense on my site) - I can only hope that one day the advertisers who insist on using Flash movies (especially the ones that play music at you while you're trying to read an article!) might finally realise this.
Change your password regularly.
No, most security experts will tell you this is a very stupid thing to require people to do. Your password system should enforce strong passwords anyway. Enforcing strong passwords which have to change every month just encourages people to write them on a post-it and stick it to their monitor because no one can remember passwords that change that regularly unless they're really simple.
What's more, it doesn't actually do much for the security anyway: if someone hands random people their password then you're pretty much screwed anyway - people aren't going to wait until after the password change to try and use that password. If someone is brute-forcing passwords then they stand the same mathematical chance of hitting the new password as they did with the old password so no more security there. Infact, the only security it gives you is if someone steals your encrypted password file and it's going to take them a few months to crack. But if random people can get the password database then you've got bigger security concerns than weak passwords.
For good comedy you need to listen to the radio - BBC Radio 4 has some excellent comedy and satire programmes.
:)
I wholly agree with you here. Although it's annoying they don't put any of them on when I'm driving to/from work. (This may be a Good Thing since when I listen to radio 4 comedy while driving I usually end up laughing so much I'm in danger of crashing
Do you get a constant stream of phone calls and red letters from the Television Licensing Authority demanding that you buy a license? Do they keep sending a man round to your house to intimidate you and ask you why you haven't got a license? Do they keep making you sign forms to declare that you haven't got a TV set? Have they put up a huge poster on the nearest billboard to your house declaring that someone in your street hasn't got a TV license?
After leaving university I was without a TV for a period of about 2 months (i.e. not very long). The TV Licencing Authority took to sending me letters with "YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW" printed on the _outside_ of the envelope in big red lettering. I had no money at the time so didn't do anything about it but I would be kind of curious what would happen if someone took them to court for libel.
The whole point of funding through the licence fee is to allow the BBC to do things that a commercial channel wouldn't find viable - I resent them spending the licence fee on programs that are very commercially viable (Football, Eastenders, Fame Acadamy, etc). Especially when they go into bidding wars for sporting events against other (particularly free-to-air) channels.
IMHO the BBC should own both non-commercial, licence funded channels and commercial self-funded channels. Minority stuff can be paid for out of the licence fee whilest the really popular stuff can go on the commercial channels (and they could even plough those commercial revenues back into the non-commercial channels). This would also mean that the licence can be used to fund the first series of programs and if they are very successful they can be moved to the commercial channels and the revenues used to fund more new programs.
Something like 10% of the licence goes on licence collecting (including TV detector vans, intimidating people who don't own TVs, etc). Since a large proportion of the licence goes on non-TV related services (radio, web site, etc) it would seem fairer to collect the money through general taxation instead of specifically targetting TV owners. This would also reduce the amount of money that needs to be spent doing the actual collection.
One thing that really bugs me is that IMHO the quality of BBC programming has really gone down - there are a number of good programs still, such as Rough Science and the Ray Mears shows, but I certainly haven't seen any good comedy since Red Dwarf VI finished (please don't talk about The Office - it's not good, it's not funny, it just makes me cringe).
They will try to take some story and blow it up to be something that it is not.
Additionally, when I see a news report about a field in which I am an expert I usually find it massively inaccurate and full of fundamentally flawed arguements... So I'm left thinking that the other stuff they report is just as inaccurate but I'm just not knowledgable enough in that field to notice.
To get back to the point: I find it hard to accept that aid organizations struggle to get funding, while something like a web browser so easily gets a lot of money for advertizing.
I think you'll find that many aid organistations get far more in donations than the Mozilla Foundation gets.
Also, why is paying a large organisation to produce and market software ok, but donating a (probably smaller) amount to a free and open organisation wrong? Given the choice, I would rather give my money to the Mozilla Foundation rather than Microsoft because The Mozilla Foundation (and similar projects) are ethical and they actually seem to give a damn about their users. Giving the Mozilla Foundation money that would otherwise have been given to Microsoft doesn't take any money away from the charities (although it might increase the amount of money they get since donations to the Mozilla Foundation are unlikely to be anywhere near the amount that people would usually pay to MS so there's more money available in people's pockets).
Compare Microsoft's marketting budget (paid for by their customers) against the Mozilla Foundation's marketting budget (paid for by _some_ of their consumers) and I think you'll find MS's is a lot bigger. Also compare the marketting budget of some aid organisations - that's probably bigger too.
I think you need to look out of your very narrow-minded view of the world. I totally agree on Microsoft being a little rough in some of their business practices, even unethical at times. Still, they are only convicted monopolists, which hardly constitutes a criminal offense.
Uh.. huh? I think you misread my post - I said that as far as I was concerned in this case it *didn't matter* whether or not they are criminals. In my mind their business practices are unethical and a judge telling me they are/aren't criminals too isn't going to make a lot of difference to my opinion.
The money from the foundation is extremely important for a lot of people, and it does real good for people with AIDS, or starving people, and so on. When you compare the good side to the bad side
Yes, he gives money to good causes, which is a good thing.... money he got (and is still getting) through unethical means. I don't see why someone who gets money through unethical means at the expense of other people should get an award for not keeping all of it for themselves. If he actually stopped being unethical then it would certainly add weight to an arguement in his favor since it shows he has seen the error of his ways. But continuing to be unethical shows that this is not the case. Or are we rewarding continuing bad behaviour if some good comes out of it? What kind of an example is that?
I can hardly believe the amount of money ploughed into projects like the stupid Firefox ad in NYT, when charity projects and aid organizations at the same time struggle to keep their head above the water. Some people seem to have problems measuring the relative importance of different issues.
I'm sorry, but I think you're incredibly short sighted. Did it ever occur to you that people who support projects like Mozilla also may give to charity?
By the same token, if you go out to see a film you're diverting funds that you could've spent supporting a charity into a frivolous activity.
That piece of chocolate cake you bought? you sure as hell don't need the nutricional content in it so why didn't you give that money to a charity instead since it would be more useful to them.
That time you spent complaining on slashdot about people not having exactly the same world-view as you could probably be better spent helping a charity too...
Do some research on some of the Railroad robber barons of the late 19th century. They did some really nasty things, but some of them (the ones who did nasty things), also gave lots of money to charity and founded charities and supported the arts and were remembered for that. As I mentioned in a previous post, Dale Carnagie fits into this catagory.
Just because some bad people have done some good things in the past doesn't make it right.