A couple years ago I had a Linux machine... it ran qmail, wu-ftpd, apache, ircd, sshd, 2 or 3 console sessions, X, enlightenment, xchat, netscape, gaim, and a few xterms...
And it was only a p233mmx with 64mb.
There's something really wrong with the contrast between that old machine and my 'newer, better' one.
I need that much juice. My Windows machine typically handles mIRC, Yahoo Messenger, 3D Studio Max, 3 or 4 IE instances, etc.
Of course, most of those programs are essentially idle at any given moment. But when I'm trying to render a massive 3dmax scene while switching over IRC to ramble libertarianesquely about the failings and dangers of big government, while at the same time opening/reading 3 or 4 web documents... my machine bogs down on me. Now, this machine is a P4-2.9GHz with a gig of RAM on SCSI disks... perhaps the extended speed and cache on the new CPU would make a difference.
At the same time, I could use one of these on my colo box, which is hosting 17 domains with about 3,000 pageloads per hour. Then again, I could always get something other than x86, if I weren't a cheap and ignorant bastard.
Perhaps the concern that insects would get into the workings and mess things up existed previously.
"John, you know, I was thinking about reliability issues, and it occured to me that rodents or insects could easily get inside. We should note this in the assessment report."
"You were right, John... we found a moth in one of the machines today. Made a note of it, as the first case where your prediction came true."
I've noticed that our entire society leans more toward fantasy, mysticism, and mythology, lately. Reality, or possible future realities, is becoming rare in any form of mass media. Even 'Reality TV' is horribly far from reality.
It has been suggested that we are entering a new 'Dark Ages', of sorts. This is perhaps in response to the fear, rational or not, of what near-future technology may bring - human cloning and a list of other 'scaries'.
What I find very interesting is this: In ages past, man feared nature, because of what he did not know. In this age, man is beginning to fear science, because of what he can know.
On a side note, a question that I'd like to ask, which is somewhat related:
How would you classify works such as OSC's Ender series? Obviously set in the future, but after Ender's Game (and a few pieces here and there in the next 3 books), they are mainly focused on personal, moral, and geopolitical issues, with little or no mention of any technologies or lifestyle changes. Even the 'nets' are simply categorized hub-style Internet groupings. It seems to me that the Ender books set in the near future (as opposed to the 3000-years-ahead future) read more like modern fantasy... almost like what you would get if you took the politics and war-making in the Lord of the Rings, and set them in modern times, while ignoring the rest of the story.
How is it a troll? I was serious - this is something I've been thinking of for a long time. The part that was *unique* was the part about a generic device-driver layer, and having the actual OS be on the personal memory device, so a person could have 'their own' computer wherever they go.
I've long envisioned something similar. At least in intent.
For a couple of years now, I've thought it would be neat to have a card or keychain attachment or something similarly small/portable, to store all of a person's files. Pictures, documents, etc..
Then I had another idea. What about having their *settings* stored as well? Their choice of options for various programs, or even the OS itself. Envision this for a moment: Windows 2007 or Slackware 12 having built-in or addable functions to read one of these cards/devices... and modify things like keymap, GUI color scheme, accessibility features...
Or even having programs themselves. So that any computer running the appropriate OS (and in this case, an OS could be a barebones software-hardware interface layer, meaning it could even be a *generic* OS) could load up the personalized settings, options, client programs, and personal files of anyone who popped in their card.
Once memory technologies can handle it, I think it would be very neat (as well as useful!) for computers to change dramatically... so that there is the hardware platform. On top of that is a generic device-driver layer. The OS, ANY OS, would be contained on your own card (or other device), to be plugged into a port on the machine. Your OS, your configuration, your software, your files... on any computer you sit down at.
Crazy. But just in case anyone tries to DO this... consider this post to be my prior art evidence, and prepare to pay royalties. Because this could be a powerful and profitable concept.
ANY delay in the release of an MS product is Good News. Regardless of their specific reason for the delay, it gives the developers more time to tweak and polish. Unfortunately, this may also mean they have more time to bloat and obfuscate.
I would argue with your assertion that "the pursuit of Happiness" is equivalent to "the protection of property".
Then please do so. Present your arguments, and your evidence.
And that still doesn't address my point about public-funded road building. Perhaps they should all be built by Ford, Nissan etc. and paid for by higher car prices?
Well now. Roads would be one area that may be open to public funding. But never through any kind of income tax - personal assessment taxes are too invasive and are, in essence, an end-run around the 4th Amendment.
A tiny sales tax on retail goods would be sufficient. And that tax would be *moral*, in the sense that you are purchasing something which was delivered via public roads - so you can contribute to the maintenance of those roads. Everyone purchases, or at the very least, consumes what others purchase for them, so no one gets shafted on the deal.
The above applies to city, county, and State roads. But what about interstate highways? Well, the Federal government has the power to regulate commerce between the States, and part of that is authority over navigable waterways. It says nothing about roads. Roads are not commerce and they aren't waterways. The Feds have no authority, although they may present a reasonable argument to play the part of negotiator or broker. It's entirely a State-to-State cooperative matter.
Amusing that you would put Card alongside Rand like that. Rand has always been one of my favorite writers... Hubbard? *shudder*.
And what's cultish about Card? I don't know anything about him except that he's a 'Mormon' who doesn't seem very Mormon-ish and likes to use Catholicism as a tool to enable him to blather a bit every couple dozen pages in every book of his I've read. hehehe. *shrug*
Orson Scott Card? I don't read a lot of scifi but i randomly picked up enders game a few months ago and am now finishing the last book (so far) in the series. ender series is still definitely scifi, but in a more vague sense, like rand's 'atlas shrugged' was scifi. but it's still an excellent series, which will given a movie treatment (enders game and enders shadow combined in one film) and which won the hugo and nebula awards back in the mid 80's....
I'm well aware of the benefits of private competitive schools.
My intention was the *idea* of public schools had merit, as it does offer some assurance that children would not remain ignorant forever. That said, America's educational standards fell apart in the late 1960's... right about the time we got this new thing called the Department of Education. And wasn't it the children of that time and the following decade who set us up for the moral and intellectual collapse that is strangling us today?
The concept is a good one. Or could have been.
So why can't Johnny read? Because he was educated by people who, as adult teachers, only learned half as much as *their* parents did - so how much is Johnny learning, when it's his turn? Just enough to push buttons at work, push buttons at home, and push buttons at the voting booth.
To an extent, this would be true. It comes down to property rights and copyright law. However, the Framers coudn't forsee the internet, and Thomas Jefferson said that all future interpretations of the Constitution should be limited to the language, usage, and definitions in use at the time of the framing. And Jefferson would never believe that government should punish me if I told you which store was selling the illegal knock-off of a patented or copyrighted item. The file-sharers are guilty - Kazaa is not (although KazaaLite *is*, just by existing). And Google most certainly is in the clear, Constitutionally speaking.
good point. had forgotten about that one. i could see forcing the removal of ACTUAL DOCUMENTS that contained illegitimate registration keys for commercial software... but not links to those documents, nor links to source code that doesn't rip copyrighted material, only decodes and plays it.
The power to lay and collect taxes is limited in that it only applies to the funding of government powers to execute responsibilities specifically enumerated in the Constitution.
I'm not anti-tax. What I'm against is government taking upon itself an ounce of power beyond what is necessary to secure the borders, enforce contracts, and prevent one man from killing or robbing another. The three legitimate functions of government are a police force to stop internal force/coercion, a military to stop external assaults, and a judiciary to arbitrate contract disputes and judge and punish criminals. (Legislature would fall under judicial, in a round-about sorta way, as it is responsible for deciding what *is* a crime - and it should not criminalize any act that victimless, such as prostitution or gay marriage)
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Show me where the Constitution gives the Federal government the power to do those things you listed. Please.
So a police force is legitimate for tax funding because it is an agent of government to repel attempts by others to use force or coercion to violate your rights.
Proper governments exist simply to stop one man from taking the life, freedom, or property of another.
Actually a Bushmaster.223 is a fine deer rifle. Essentially a fancy version of the.22 I shot my first deer with, which means it would be great for a jugular shot at 50 to 200 yards in light cover. One clean shot would drop the target fast and without much suffering or damage to the meat. Light enough to run with if your shot is off and the deer is hurt but on his feet and you want to take him down quickly.
Instead of corporate lethargy and resistance to change...
We'll have government beaurocracy and spy agencies trying to include sneaky backdoors!
Seriously, though, this doesn't excite me very much. Kinda like China's CPU... and DoD's Linux... although they may make interesting contributions and suggest different approaches to security. And I haven't read the article, so I'm wondering whether it'll be a joint effort with separate translations, or if they'll just go with English.
Same faulty argument commonly used against drug companies in complaint against high cost of medicine.
There are a lot more poor and middle class people than rich people. There is more profit to be made in small increments from a much larger customer pool than there ever would be in simply catering to and soaking the rich.
Look at car companies. Most car models and manufacturers target middle-class people for exactly the reason I explained above. The companies which do serve the upmarket consumers make more profit per unit, but sell far fewer units, and as a result have lower total revenues and usually lower net profit.
Everyone needs a telephone, so even a monopolistic company would realize that they could gain the most by pricing the service low enough so that most of the general population could afford it. And if they didn't, some investment banker would get together with some venture capital types and fund an independent telco in some medium-sized market, prove that the lower-margin-higher-volume strategy works, and then seed similar companies throughout other regional markets.
A monopoly cannot remain so unless it responds to the needs and limitations of the customer. Without customers, companies cannot exist.
Google is being pushed into all of this 'URLs are copyright violations' stuff based on the same ideas used to attack Napster and Kazaa. Essentially, Google is an 'enabler', a willing gateway to property crime. Napster and Kazaa let you search for the property itself. Google lets you search for the tools to search for the property you intend to steal.
Attacking Google is simply the next logical step, if one has already asserted the culpability of Napster.
However, I disagree with the idea that Sony is guilty of 'enabling' child pornography by making laptops and CD burners and camcorders. All are legitimate products turned to illegitimate uses. Just like Napster and Google.
And just like guns, for that matter. Suing gun manufacturers whenever someone chooses to turn a tool into the apparatus of crime is the same thing. And it's equally as wrong.
A side note about public libraries and such:
I've never been able to reconcile my views on individual sovereignty and property rights in relation to public libraries and schools. Thomas Jefferson and I had the same problem.
An individual should not be forced to pay taxes to fund a program for the benefit of others. Yet an uneducated populace is an easy target for propaganda and dictatorship.
Of course, I won't take the time to cover the property rights of authors and publishers in regards to the free lending (which amounts legally to 'public display') of copyrighted material.
Reuters. Midwest headquarters, Chicago. Stock trading workstations. Instead of taking a 14 dollar NIC off the shelf at the Radio Shack in the lobby of the building 3 blocks away, the company forced me to send the machine to London for NIC replacement. The customer lost his workstation for 3 weeks, during which time he was unable to conduct transactions on the Mercantile Exchange without calling a middleman and paying fees. Fees he had originally avoided by leasing one of our Globex machines. Fees I would have saved him by spending 14 dollars from my own pocket to have the machine fixed in under an hour, walking time to the store and back included. Not to mention the risk to his data during the trans-Atlantic flights, a risk I was not allowed to alleviate by tossing his drive in my machine back at the office and burning a couple CD's for him before shipping out the box. Which is why I quit.
That, and I taught my boss how to say a few bad words in his wife's native language (Polish), and it got him slapped so he quit talking to me in the smoking lounge.
Thanks for reminding me of the EULA issues with patches. I've spent the morning blaming the user for the most part, coupled with expressions of disdain for MS's general methodology... and had entirely forgotten that you can't fix the broken software you *paid* for unless you're willing to accept changes and additions to the licensing agreement which may be utterly unacceptable.
Microsoft and other companies should adopt the attitude that the only Agreement necessary for the usage of patches and fixes is to continue to abide by the original Agreement, and to apply those terms to the soon to be modified product. A customer's protection againt flaws in a product he has paid money for should not be dependent upon his delegation of new rights and powers to the company which failed to provide an adequate product for his dollars to begin with.
Turning off AutoUpdate is a scary thing, in the case of the casual user. This is one area where I wish there was *more* harrassment and hassle required before disabling could be accomplished. A big bold warning box as soon as that checkbox is clicked, and another when the changes are saved. Many of my non-technical friends have heard about the 'insecurity' or 'privacy concerns' that are 'inherent' in auto-installs such as AutoUpdate and virus definition updates... and so they figure out how to turn it off, not knowing that THAT is the most dangerous thing they could do.
The harm caused by a worm to the user who disables AutoUpdate is his own responsibility. But the warnings should be more clear and in more places, when one considers what you pointed: that the user's choice may very well prove harmful to countless others. It is his machine, it is his choice. But he should be compelled by the software itself to make that choice in a more educated fashion.
The only part that I feel the need to address is this:
Property law provides a mechanism called an 'easement' for the usage of another entity's property in cases where purchasing the necessary property would be prohibitively difficult or expensive, and where such usage would be for the benefit of the whole of the people. There is this caveat: the easement is inappropriate if it would interfere with the original property holder's legitimate and full use of his holdings.
If I own a piece of land and the electric company needs to put lines underground or overhead, they will be granted an easement with the restriction that such placement does not obstruct the usual and reasonable usage of my property. In this way, I lose nothing, and the only harm is the potential inconvenience while the lines are being run.
If, however, what I owned was a server and allocated bandwidth, no easement would ever be justifiably *coerced* upon me, as that server has limited processing power and trasmission capacities, which would be consumed partly by the secondary party.
The other important thing to note is that an electric company or a telephone company does not compete with a home-owner for marketshare. Technology companies do compete with each other. Any 'easement' granted to a 3rd party IM client developer would be similar to the idea of Person X buying a gun, and Person Y being forced to supply the bullets he himself will be shot with.
Slashdot Mirror
btw. i'm not sure what's so funny about what i said. someone wanna explain?
Yeah, really.
A couple years ago I had a Linux machine... it ran qmail, wu-ftpd, apache, ircd, sshd, 2 or 3 console sessions, X, enlightenment, xchat, netscape, gaim, and a few xterms...
And it was only a p233mmx with 64mb.
There's something really wrong with the contrast between that old machine and my 'newer, better' one.
I need that much juice. My Windows machine typically handles mIRC, Yahoo Messenger, 3D Studio Max, 3 or 4 IE instances, etc.
Of course, most of those programs are essentially idle at any given moment. But when I'm trying to render a massive 3dmax scene while switching over IRC to ramble libertarianesquely about the failings and dangers of big government, while at the same time opening/reading 3 or 4 web documents... my machine bogs down on me. Now, this machine is a P4-2.9GHz with a gig of RAM on SCSI disks... perhaps the extended speed and cache on the new CPU would make a difference.
At the same time, I could use one of these on my colo box, which is hosting 17 domains with about 3,000 pageloads per hour. Then again, I could always get something other than x86, if I weren't a cheap and ignorant bastard.
Perhaps the concern that insects would get into the workings and mess things up existed previously.
"John, you know, I was thinking about reliability issues, and it occured to me that rodents or insects could easily get inside. We should note this in the assessment report."
"You were right, John... we found a moth in one of the machines today. Made a note of it, as the first case where your prediction came true."
Hence "first bug".
I've noticed that our entire society leans more toward fantasy, mysticism, and mythology, lately. Reality, or possible future realities, is becoming rare in any form of mass media. Even 'Reality TV' is horribly far from reality.
It has been suggested that we are entering a new 'Dark Ages', of sorts. This is perhaps in response to the fear, rational or not, of what near-future technology may bring - human cloning and a list of other 'scaries'.
What I find very interesting is this: In ages past, man feared nature, because of what he did not know. In this age, man is beginning to fear science, because of what he can know.
On a side note, a question that I'd like to ask, which is somewhat related:
How would you classify works such as OSC's Ender series? Obviously set in the future, but after Ender's Game (and a few pieces here and there in the next 3 books), they are mainly focused on personal, moral, and geopolitical issues, with little or no mention of any technologies or lifestyle changes. Even the 'nets' are simply categorized hub-style Internet groupings. It seems to me that the Ender books set in the near future (as opposed to the 3000-years-ahead future) read more like modern fantasy... almost like what you would get if you took the politics and war-making in the Lord of the Rings, and set them in modern times, while ignoring the rest of the story.
How is it a troll? I was serious - this is something I've been thinking of for a long time. The part that was *unique* was the part about a generic device-driver layer, and having the actual OS be on the personal memory device, so a person could have 'their own' computer wherever they go.
I've long envisioned something similar. At least in intent.
... so that there is the hardware platform. On top of that is a generic device-driver layer. The OS, ANY OS, would be contained on your own card (or other device), to be plugged into a port on the machine. Your OS, your configuration, your software, your files... on any computer you sit down at.
For a couple of years now, I've thought it would be neat to have a card or keychain attachment or something similarly small/portable, to store all of a person's files. Pictures, documents, etc..
Then I had another idea. What about having their *settings* stored as well? Their choice of options for various programs, or even the OS itself. Envision this for a moment: Windows 2007 or Slackware 12 having built-in or addable functions to read one of these cards/devices... and modify things like keymap, GUI color scheme, accessibility features...
Or even having programs themselves. So that any computer running the appropriate OS (and in this case, an OS could be a barebones software-hardware interface layer, meaning it could even be a *generic* OS) could load up the personalized settings, options, client programs, and personal files of anyone who popped in their card.
Once memory technologies can handle it, I think it would be very neat (as well as useful!) for computers to change dramatically
Crazy. But just in case anyone tries to DO this... consider this post to be my prior art evidence, and prepare to pay royalties. Because this could be a powerful and profitable concept.
ANY delay in the release of an MS product is Good News. Regardless of their specific reason for the delay, it gives the developers more time to tweak and polish. Unfortunately, this may also mean they have more time to bloat and obfuscate.
I would argue with your assertion that "the pursuit of Happiness" is equivalent to "the protection of property".
Then please do so. Present your arguments, and your evidence.
And that still doesn't address my point about public-funded road building. Perhaps they should all be built by Ford, Nissan etc. and paid for by higher car prices?
Well now. Roads would be one area that may be open to public funding. But never through any kind of income tax - personal assessment taxes are too invasive and are, in essence, an end-run around the 4th Amendment.
A tiny sales tax on retail goods would be sufficient. And that tax would be *moral*, in the sense that you are purchasing something which was delivered via public roads - so you can contribute to the maintenance of those roads. Everyone purchases, or at the very least, consumes what others purchase for them, so no one gets shafted on the deal.
The above applies to city, county, and State roads. But what about interstate highways? Well, the Federal government has the power to regulate commerce between the States, and part of that is authority over navigable waterways. It says nothing about roads. Roads are not commerce and they aren't waterways. The Feds have no authority, although they may present a reasonable argument to play the part of negotiator or broker. It's entirely a State-to-State cooperative matter.
Amusing that you would put Card alongside Rand like that. Rand has always been one of my favorite writers... Hubbard? *shudder*.
And what's cultish about Card? I don't know anything about him except that he's a 'Mormon' who doesn't seem very Mormon-ish and likes to use Catholicism as a tool to enable him to blather a bit every couple dozen pages in every book of his I've read. hehehe. *shrug*
Orson Scott Card? I don't read a lot of scifi but i randomly picked up enders game a few months ago and am now finishing the last book (so far) in the series. ender series is still definitely scifi, but in a more vague sense, like rand's 'atlas shrugged' was scifi. but it's still an excellent series, which will given a movie treatment (enders game and enders shadow combined in one film) and which won the hugo and nebula awards back in the mid 80's....
anyone still reading card?
I'm well aware of the benefits of private competitive schools.
My intention was the *idea* of public schools had merit, as it does offer some assurance that children would not remain ignorant forever. That said, America's educational standards fell apart in the late 1960's... right about the time we got this new thing called the Department of Education. And wasn't it the children of that time and the following decade who set us up for the moral and intellectual collapse that is strangling us today?
The concept is a good one. Or could have been.
So why can't Johnny read? Because he was educated by people who, as adult teachers, only learned half as much as *their* parents did - so how much is Johnny learning, when it's his turn? Just enough to push buttons at work, push buttons at home, and push buttons at the voting booth.
To an extent, this would be true. It comes down to property rights and copyright law. However, the Framers coudn't forsee the internet, and Thomas Jefferson said that all future interpretations of the Constitution should be limited to the language, usage, and definitions in use at the time of the framing. And Jefferson would never believe that government should punish me if I told you which store was selling the illegal knock-off of a patented or copyrighted item. The file-sharers are guilty - Kazaa is not (although KazaaLite *is*, just by existing). And Google most certainly is in the clear, Constitutionally speaking.
good point. had forgotten about that one. i could see forcing the removal of ACTUAL DOCUMENTS that contained illegitimate registration keys for commercial software... but not links to those documents, nor links to source code that doesn't rip copyrighted material, only decodes and plays it.
The power to lay and collect taxes is limited in that it only applies to the funding of government powers to execute responsibilities specifically enumerated in the Constitution.
I'm not anti-tax. What I'm against is government taking upon itself an ounce of power beyond what is necessary to secure the borders, enforce contracts, and prevent one man from killing or robbing another. The three legitimate functions of government are a police force to stop internal force/coercion, a military to stop external assaults, and a judiciary to arbitrate contract disputes and judge and punish criminals. (Legislature would fall under judicial, in a round-about sorta way, as it is responsible for deciding what *is* a crime - and it should not criminalize any act that victimless, such as prostitution or gay marriage)
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Show me where the Constitution gives the Federal government the power to do those things you listed. Please.
MM, see:
"that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
So a police force is legitimate for tax funding because it is an agent of government to repel attempts by others to use force or coercion to violate your rights.
Proper governments exist simply to stop one man from taking the life, freedom, or property of another.
Actually a Bushmaster .223 is a fine deer rifle. Essentially a fancy version of the .22 I shot my first deer with, which means it would be great for a jugular shot at 50 to 200 yards in light cover. One clean shot would drop the target fast and without much suffering or damage to the meat. Light enough to run with if your shot is off and the deer is hurt but on his feet and you want to take him down quickly.
Instead of corporate lethargy and resistance to change...
We'll have government beaurocracy and spy agencies trying to include sneaky backdoors!
Seriously, though, this doesn't excite me very much. Kinda like China's CPU... and DoD's Linux... although they may make interesting contributions and suggest different approaches to security. And I haven't read the article, so I'm wondering whether it'll be a joint effort with separate translations, or if they'll just go with English.
Same faulty argument commonly used against drug companies in complaint against high cost of medicine.
There are a lot more poor and middle class people than rich people. There is more profit to be made in small increments from a much larger customer pool than there ever would be in simply catering to and soaking the rich.
Look at car companies. Most car models and manufacturers target middle-class people for exactly the reason I explained above. The companies which do serve the upmarket consumers make more profit per unit, but sell far fewer units, and as a result have lower total revenues and usually lower net profit.
Everyone needs a telephone, so even a monopolistic company would realize that they could gain the most by pricing the service low enough so that most of the general population could afford it. And if they didn't, some investment banker would get together with some venture capital types and fund an independent telco in some medium-sized market, prove that the lower-margin-higher-volume strategy works, and then seed similar companies throughout other regional markets.
A monopoly cannot remain so unless it responds to the needs and limitations of the customer. Without customers, companies cannot exist.
Google is being pushed into all of this 'URLs are copyright violations' stuff based on the same ideas used to attack Napster and Kazaa. Essentially, Google is an 'enabler', a willing gateway to property crime. Napster and Kazaa let you search for the property itself. Google lets you search for the tools to search for the property you intend to steal.
Attacking Google is simply the next logical step, if one has already asserted the culpability of Napster.
However, I disagree with the idea that Sony is guilty of 'enabling' child pornography by making laptops and CD burners and camcorders. All are legitimate products turned to illegitimate uses. Just like Napster and Google.
And just like guns, for that matter. Suing gun manufacturers whenever someone chooses to turn a tool into the apparatus of crime is the same thing. And it's equally as wrong.
A side note about public libraries and such: I've never been able to reconcile my views on individual sovereignty and property rights in relation to public libraries and schools. Thomas Jefferson and I had the same problem.
An individual should not be forced to pay taxes to fund a program for the benefit of others. Yet an uneducated populace is an easy target for propaganda and dictatorship.
Of course, I won't take the time to cover the property rights of authors and publishers in regards to the free lending (which amounts legally to 'public display') of copyrighted material.
Reuters. Midwest headquarters, Chicago. Stock trading workstations. Instead of taking a 14 dollar NIC off the shelf at the Radio Shack in the lobby of the building 3 blocks away, the company forced me to send the machine to London for NIC replacement. The customer lost his workstation for 3 weeks, during which time he was unable to conduct transactions on the Mercantile Exchange without calling a middleman and paying fees. Fees he had originally avoided by leasing one of our Globex machines. Fees I would have saved him by spending 14 dollars from my own pocket to have the machine fixed in under an hour, walking time to the store and back included. Not to mention the risk to his data during the trans-Atlantic flights, a risk I was not allowed to alleviate by tossing his drive in my machine back at the office and burning a couple CD's for him before shipping out the box. Which is why I quit.
That, and I taught my boss how to say a few bad words in his wife's native language (Polish), and it got him slapped so he quit talking to me in the smoking lounge.
Thanks for reminding me of the EULA issues with patches. I've spent the morning blaming the user for the most part, coupled with expressions of disdain for MS's general methodology... and had entirely forgotten that you can't fix the broken software you *paid* for unless you're willing to accept changes and additions to the licensing agreement which may be utterly unacceptable.
Microsoft and other companies should adopt the attitude that the only Agreement necessary for the usage of patches and fixes is to continue to abide by the original Agreement, and to apply those terms to the soon to be modified product. A customer's protection againt flaws in a product he has paid money for should not be dependent upon his delegation of new rights and powers to the company which failed to provide an adequate product for his dollars to begin with.
Turning off AutoUpdate is a scary thing, in the case of the casual user. This is one area where I wish there was *more* harrassment and hassle required before disabling could be accomplished. A big bold warning box as soon as that checkbox is clicked, and another when the changes are saved. Many of my non-technical friends have heard about the 'insecurity' or 'privacy concerns' that are 'inherent' in auto-installs such as AutoUpdate and virus definition updates... and so they figure out how to turn it off, not knowing that THAT is the most dangerous thing they could do.
The harm caused by a worm to the user who disables AutoUpdate is his own responsibility. But the warnings should be more clear and in more places, when one considers what you pointed: that the user's choice may very well prove harmful to countless others. It is his machine, it is his choice. But he should be compelled by the software itself to make that choice in a more educated fashion.
The only part that I feel the need to address is this:
Property law provides a mechanism called an 'easement' for the usage of another entity's property in cases where purchasing the necessary property would be prohibitively difficult or expensive, and where such usage would be for the benefit of the whole of the people. There is this caveat: the easement is inappropriate if it would interfere with the original property holder's legitimate and full use of his holdings.
If I own a piece of land and the electric company needs to put lines underground or overhead, they will be granted an easement with the restriction that such placement does not obstruct the usual and reasonable usage of my property. In this way, I lose nothing, and the only harm is the potential inconvenience while the lines are being run.
If, however, what I owned was a server and allocated bandwidth, no easement would ever be justifiably *coerced* upon me, as that server has limited processing power and trasmission capacities, which would be consumed partly by the secondary party.
The other important thing to note is that an electric company or a telephone company does not compete with a home-owner for marketshare. Technology companies do compete with each other. Any 'easement' granted to a 3rd party IM client developer would be similar to the idea of Person X buying a gun, and Person Y being forced to supply the bullets he himself will be shot with.