Now that's got to be a really arbitrary response. The reality is on some results google will be better and on others MSN Search will be better. Catch is when you want to get to the place you searched for, google street view is way ahead on anything available at MSN Search (I sticking with that name, the way M$ keeps changing the name it's going to be the simplest one to stick with). Of course as is the norm with M$, some results will be censored out of existence and as such really bad.
As for stitching up customers, well that has always been the norm for paid for referrals, who the hell do you thinks pays for those referrals, you do when you buy the product, with computers and M$ at the helm, the process just gets automated. It just demonstrates the typical marketing lies, the illusion of the bargain, the trust I'm your friend deceit and believes us we tell the truth about our advertiser's products.
You really have to look at the underlying reality and the sheer cost of paying for all those lost referrals. For a start, M$ is basically now admitting they have lost yet again with another search re-branding, bing the insurance salesman of search engines is dead in the water and M$ are being forced to spend more money on in a desperate bid to gain market share, obviously the Yahoo deal is not working out so well.
For de-indexing M$ would have to pay much the same price what Google receives for each add click, for each and every missing search referral, 24/7 ie. M$ would have to pay more in de-indexing fees than Google total add add-words click revenue line, considerably more as most referral are driven by search and not add words.
It all sounds feasible until you put some numbers behind it and find it would cost M$ more for each de-indexed site than Google would make of any add revenue for that site (bearing in mind for most searches like 90% the end user doesn't about the site their just after an answer) and the the site itself would still end up losing more add revenue potential by the lost search referrals.
Now M$ will want it's adds to show up on sites M$ has paid ant-google de-idexing fees for which means M$ will push the up the head of the search ranking to try to recover some money, catch is competitors not being paid for indexing will disappear of the front page, giving them a powerful incentive to promote google where they can still gain the first page of search results.
Perhaps they need to consider http://www.greenparty.org.uk/. Green parties the world over seem to be the new balance to labour parties that have drifted a little to far to the right. The right wing parties of the rich and greedy have drifted off into the ether, into a world of rage and hate as they desperately try and retain power over everything and know they are losing. Add to that there are always independents (not recent closet right wingers) but people who have had a long history of independence.
Specifically targeting those individual politicians who have demonstrated their corruption and their contempt of the rights, values and well being of the majority citizens, and driving them permanently from political office with a concerted political campaign is the way to go. You don't need to target the whole party just do a little aggressive weeding to remove the worst pests and replace them with someone more concerned about the people rather than their own Swiss et al bank account.
The biggest difference between bribery and corruption in China and in the West. When the finally do prosecute the people who took bribes and corrupted government they also pursue those people who paid the bribes, in fact the greater focus is on the one paying the bribe. In China where corruption charges are largely driven by politics (the majority are corrupt when your out of favour, you just get convicted for it) the people paying the bribes are pretty much forgotten about.
As for China being a large market, that is a delusion, it might be a populace market but when you wages are cents on the dollar compared to western wages, that $40 game even when your forced to work a twelve hour day 6 days a week, is a whole lot of money letting alone dumping on top the cost of hardware and for online stuff and network connections.
Which is why those in control of the corporo-fascist power structure like to so fiercely protect what little there is of it. China's market is pure and simple the ruthless exploitation of it's work force and environment in which they live and, this will continue until it collapse under the socio-economic and environmental pressures.
Whether they did or did not put a back door in windows is arbitrary. What is of concern is a government department doing free work to improve the profitability of a single corporation against the corporate interests of every other competing corporation. Remember the screams coming out of Redmond when the NSA produce SE Linux, taht would be made available for free to all taxpayers.
Now you have the NSA and the department of defence attempting to prop up the security incompetence of a corporation at tax payer expense so that corporation can now turn around and charge their customers for work their customers already paid for.
If M$ is to security incompetent to produce reliable software, no government departments should be steeping ion to to their work for them they should simply stop using their software rather the propping up the company at taxpayer expense.
Besides everybody knows backdoors belong in hardware not software, any tech person with more than half a brain dual boots and uses the Linux side of things for anything they want to keep safe and secure, the windows side is built to power a game console and that's all it should be used for.
Point of fact, for quite some time they were saying that windows ME was better than windows 98 second edition (in fact right up until xp was due to be released) and windows vista was better than XP (right up until windows 7 was due to be released). Here's betting they, in the not too distant future (couple of years or so), they say windows 7 is crap and you really need to upgrade to windows 'whatever' for more reliability, stability and security;D.
Do you actually have any idea of where you are posting. Do you know anything at all about slashdot, obviously not. Down at the bottom of the page you will find a link to http://geek.net/, now at this web site you will find some more links, specifically too http://sourceforge.net/, just one more link to go http://sourceforge.net/about, thats right 230,000 open source software projects. Now I don't know if you have done any coding but I can assure that the simplest project at source forge is far most complex, time consuming and takes far greater effort than the most difficult and complex lesson plan, in fact no comparison at all. See, it can be done, by people who want to do it.
There are open text books currently being produced, I'll let you do some research and find the sites, I think you need the practice, hint, they have been mentioned on slashdot several times so you can start you search right here.
Well, just maybe, you might get the point of an 'open' lesson plane, of sharing the effort, of literally tens of thousands of teachers covering exactly the same material, with some slight variations ie. download a 95% there lesson plan, read review and tweak, whoa your done or, more likely download a lesson plan and you are done. Some of you arts type seem to become too much like the people you spend a whole lot of time with, teenagers, me now, no deep forward planing or thinking.
Gees, try to save people time, money and effort and they are too locked in to a very narrow almost child like vision of their own reality. I know, I needed to produce a fully detailed lesson plan on how open development systems work and the principles of shared effort and enlightened self interest, rather than just a quick slashdot comment. So yeah the principle is for the bulk of lesson plans a peer produced and reviewed lesson plan would be readily available, free, gratis, practically no effort at all.
More to the point any effort to stifle publication, thanks to the internet often produces the exact opposite affect. Now thanks to the law suit and wikipedia. I know of that case and of course the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect, if seems the internet never stops giving.
Nothing like going to court to turn a page from one amongst a billion others into something far more interesting and keeping it in the public eye for years and years afterwards. Yes, Barbara your house is more than just a little ostentatious and is over consumptive of the planet's resource and likely an excessive polluter to boot;D.
Putin seems more to be an astute and dangerous adversary rather than being anyone's fool. He is becoming a bit invisible at the moment as seems to be appearing a little weaker and less popular. Perhaps answering this 'challenge' and conducting a public purge of all of the clumsiest and most inept corrupt government officials will significantly enhance his image and popularity.
I've got the feeling that this officer is significantly safer than some of the corrupt officials and their financial supporters are at this time. Nothing like a brutal and calculated purge to improve the quality, intelligence and real loyalty of those that remain;).
There is a huge difference between banning the manufacture and commercialisation of a product and making the possession and use of a product illegal.
So should unhealthy products, that are addictive and bad for human health be limited in their 'commercial' viability, of course, should possession and use be made illegal, of course not.
Should corporations be fined hundreds of millions of dollars and their executives imprisoned for the rest of their lives when they knowingly produce and sell addictive toxic products, absolutely, should the users be penalised considering they are already victims, absolutely not.
So either tax the life out of noxious junk food and beverages or make their 'commercial production' and 'commercial sale' (where the return for the fines justify prosecution) illegal. Now of course limited production, with auditing and monitoring of production facilities, sold at regulated premises with all advertising and commercialisation being strictly illegal, taxed specifically for the purpose of treating harmful consequences and addiction and, with strictly controlled and audited profit structures (you do not ever want it to be a desirable commercial business venture), puts yet another light on it.
Simplest easiest answer is often the most obvious. Corporations do not hire people, they are a fabricated illusions created of binary bits and paper. Personal managers on high salaries hire people, personal managers with four year degrees like to hire computer staff with four year degrees, reason why, mutual justification of higher salary levels for people with four year degrees.
I know people will say that the broader training of the university course creates better adaptability and retrain-ability (truth is that will always be down to the actual individual) but vocational schools train specifically for the job the student is hired for based on direct feed back from the companies doing the hiring and are immediately more productive. As companies tend to immediately hire and fire according to need, hmm, differentiating between vocational and university seems to be more about squeezing down pay rates more than anything else.
Separation seems to be mid sized business focus on vocational, where the company owners are doing the hiring and large corporation tend for university where personal managers with degrees are doing the hiring, all with a slight fudge for mid sized companies owned by people with computer degrees or run by their children with computer degrees.
Robing Peter to pay Paul is pointless and stupid. Obviously lesson plans produced at government funded public schools should be kept free and open so that they can be effectively refined and tailored for specific environments. A shared resource granting a community benefit in creating and maintaining the best possible lesson plans.
This technology as a whole sounds like it is past it 's use by date, a USB thumb drive will last a very long time when you only write to it once and a 4gb drive is already way less than half the price http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-SDCZ6-4096-A11-Retail-Package/dp/B000EWHEM6 and the writing technology is available pretty much every where. Unless they can seriously ramp up the storage capacity than this start up is likely to last a whole lot less than the thousand years they claim their media can last.
From a user perspective, a user that uses https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2497 cookiemanager and for web sites that suck, no cookies for you. I don't really see a problem with requiring permission from the user to store a file on their computer for your use, after all I go through that process every time I browse the net and visit a web site for the first time added to that I also use http://noscript.net/ and no cookies definitely no scripts.
So should you be required to gain permission to run a script something which if often entails far greater risk than a simple limited size text file cookie. So web more web sites that didn't use script or cookies would certainly simplify my browsing time.
Well in this case it should be a reminder of why one needs to be a bit proactive and force far more reasonable solutions. Obviously any laws and notification should be made publicly available and the onus is really on those who administer the law to esnure they make all reasonable efforts to keep citizens informed. This kind of failure should be actively pursued especially where it can be readily demonstrated that other localities have no problem http://www.austlii.edu.au/ provide all available laws for public perusal.
The Federal government should ensure that all states laws are made publicly available and the states should ensure that all local municipalities make their laws publicly available.
Open Office works really well for me, I have been using it for many years with out any problems and prefer it of 'to annoyingly unhelpful' M$ office and document compatibility of Open Office over the long term is really helpful (last version I bothered with M$O was 97).
Obviously in a work place where piracy is a problem shifting them to free open source solutions makes sense as it is pretty obvious they will not pay for proprietary software licences. Of course the system admin should make the switch and focus on providing more support for the free open source solutions and as much as possible leave the pirates to fend for themselves.
Resolving the 'we pirate everything' office is more of a long term goal, application by application done over years and initial priority is to de-pirate hardware you are directly responsible for to ensure that should they finally get caught holding the bag. Keeping in mind copyright in the office content with no for profit redistribution is a civil rather than criminal and nothing to get too uptight about.
Funny the press release leaves of whiff of, yeah we use open source to create a working model and then edit it enough so that it no longer to closely resembles the original code, it is part of the code audit review process. So this time it accidentally skipped the rewrite and the inevitable other guy did it excuse crops up. Of course when M$ is forced to provide source code to governments who wouldn't accept it other wise, this kind of stuff could get pretty embarrassing.
That is all that google news search provides a headline with about a paragraph that explains that headline. Murdoch is simply fabricating a lie to hide his true intentions, it really is what News Corp is all about presenting illusions and deceits as the truth. What he hates is google news search along with everybody else's news search provides a choice of which news site to read a particular news story.
Think News Corp sucks and Fox News is nothing but B$=PR marketing as news engine, then when given the choice you will choose an alternate site, especially when you are given not one but often hundreds of choices ie. http://news.google.com.au/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=au&hl=en&q=rupert+murdoch 4,056 choices and the Christian Science Monitor happens to be the first choice. Now that is what Murdoch hates, he want to control the news, to define what is and is not news and in his own deceitful style define what is and is not the truth. A sick enterprise that wants to sell fear and hate because that charged environment draws more viewers, doesn't matter if it all lies as long as it sells.
The problem is the lies on the Fox network can all to readily be debunked by easy access to hundreds even thousands of other news sites that present reality rather than marketing fantasy and, this compounds the problem. Not only do you have many news sites to choose from but people are actively avoiding Fox ie. thumbing it down in stumbleupon parlance or even filtering it out in customise google http://www.customizegoogle.com/. In fact quickly looking through the search results none of their sites appears in the search results, does that mean News Corp is wining;D.
Now, doesn't that really depend upon your measure of success. Say for example you just want to be generally healthy and happy, have very little desire to dominate and control others, well, that doesn't really require all that much effort at all, in fact excess effort tends to detract and not add to that lifestyle. As it turns out of fact you need to spend more time preventing other over achieving 'successful' types from attempting to destroy your peaceful lifestyle in order to feed their ego and fear driven control freak lifestyle.
Hmm, lonely at the top, could it possibly be because they are the enemy of a generally healthy and happy societies rather than their friend. After all by the measure of wealth you are only as successful ie. rich as the majority is poor, and you don't so much strive to have more as you strive for everyone else to have less, it's called profit. Work to live, live to work or even live to force others to work 'ew'.
Technically speaking as XMBC main forte seems to be media shifting which is allowed under fair use versus MythTV which records transmitted content (as well as media shifting) which typical is not allowed, then MythTV is more the tool of the, avast yeah 'lan'lubbers.
Being a bit 'slack' I am still curious as to where you can buy off the shelf HTPC linux based and either or both XMBC or MythTV running.
As for secure computers until the OS is hard wired it will always be a problem. With computers being consumer level appliances, it is now getting to the stage, where an open source OS can be built right into the CPU, for near instant on, assured reboot and really fast OS execution. The hardware over the last few years could be very effectively functional for decades (usefulness rather than survivability).
Certainly a really stable secure Linux kernel could achieve the next logical step and be built right into the CPU as one of it's cores, whether to build the Gnome GUI in there as well is the next question.
You should play closer attention to your constitution. Right there along states rights are citizens rights, and the state can not take away citizens rights which have precedence. You are only ever a temporary resident of a state, you are always a citizen of the federal government. Not state has the right to disenfranchise citizens or attempt to take away the rights of citizens granted by the federal government. No state can claim the right to disown or own any citizen and on the flip side all federal citizens at all times can claim ownership of all states.
States powers come second to citizens rights granted by the federal government. It is an always will be the responsibility to protect all citizens from corruption of government whether it be at state or county level. It is very apparent that some states are being run for the sole benefit of corporations who don't pay taxes, who can pollute at will, who can abuse the rights of workers, and who devalue the lives of citizens below that of their profits. The states can corruptly bitch and moan at the orders of the rich and greedy all they want, but they have no power over the rights of citizens granted by the federal government and the constitution.
There is a poison pill in that idea in some countries have barratry laws http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barratry and losers pays. So while it is possible to play the I have more money to spend on lawyers than you do upon an individual basis, attempting to do it on a mass scale will inevitably blow up in your face, and result in a bunch of successful appeals and massive Punitive damages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages, which is of course why the RIAA et al did not play lets sue everyone in Australia, Canada and the UK etc.
Right o then, here you go. What if I were to create a digital emulation of the vocalisation capabilities of a person, adjustable for enunciations, accents and, tonal variations ie. a electronic singing simulation combine that with adjustable musical instrument simulations and via that method produce new content that sounds very similar to existing content, hell I could even strive for photo realistic animation for a whole music video entertainment experience.
Would it be copyright infringement if is was difficult to differentiate from existing historic recorded content, how about if it was of superior quality ie had added tonal and visual qualities beyond the historic recordings? As each year goes by the superiority of animations over actual drugged up drunken minstrels is going to be hard to argue against, except of course for 'live' entertainment but 'live' where the artists get the money doesn't really help your cause much either, now does it.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that's got to be a really arbitrary response. The reality is on some results google will be better and on others MSN Search will be better. Catch is when you want to get to the place you searched for, google street view is way ahead on anything available at MSN Search (I sticking with that name, the way M$ keeps changing the name it's going to be the simplest one to stick with). Of course as is the norm with M$, some results will be censored out of existence and as such really bad.
As for stitching up customers, well that has always been the norm for paid for referrals, who the hell do you thinks pays for those referrals, you do when you buy the product, with computers and M$ at the helm, the process just gets automated. It just demonstrates the typical marketing lies, the illusion of the bargain, the trust I'm your friend deceit and believes us we tell the truth about our advertiser's products.
You really have to look at the underlying reality and the sheer cost of paying for all those lost referrals. For a start, M$ is basically now admitting they have lost yet again with another search re-branding, bing the insurance salesman of search engines is dead in the water and M$ are being forced to spend more money on in a desperate bid to gain market share, obviously the Yahoo deal is not working out so well.
For de-indexing M$ would have to pay much the same price what Google receives for each add click, for each and every missing search referral, 24/7 ie. M$ would have to pay more in de-indexing fees than Google total add add-words click revenue line, considerably more as most referral are driven by search and not add words.
It all sounds feasible until you put some numbers behind it and find it would cost M$ more for each de-indexed site than Google would make of any add revenue for that site (bearing in mind for most searches like 90% the end user doesn't about the site their just after an answer) and the the site itself would still end up losing more add revenue potential by the lost search referrals.
Now M$ will want it's adds to show up on sites M$ has paid ant-google de-idexing fees for which means M$ will push the up the head of the search ranking to try to recover some money, catch is competitors not being paid for indexing will disappear of the front page, giving them a powerful incentive to promote google where they can still gain the first page of search results.
Perhaps they need to consider http://www.greenparty.org.uk/. Green parties the world over seem to be the new balance to labour parties that have drifted a little to far to the right. The right wing parties of the rich and greedy have drifted off into the ether, into a world of rage and hate as they desperately try and retain power over everything and know they are losing. Add to that there are always independents (not recent closet right wingers) but people who have had a long history of independence.
Specifically targeting those individual politicians who have demonstrated their corruption and their contempt of the rights, values and well being of the majority citizens, and driving them permanently from political office with a concerted political campaign is the way to go. You don't need to target the whole party just do a little aggressive weeding to remove the worst pests and replace them with someone more concerned about the people rather than their own Swiss et al bank account.
The biggest difference between bribery and corruption in China and in the West. When the finally do prosecute the people who took bribes and corrupted government they also pursue those people who paid the bribes, in fact the greater focus is on the one paying the bribe. In China where corruption charges are largely driven by politics (the majority are corrupt when your out of favour, you just get convicted for it) the people paying the bribes are pretty much forgotten about.
As for China being a large market, that is a delusion, it might be a populace market but when you wages are cents on the dollar compared to western wages, that $40 game even when your forced to work a twelve hour day 6 days a week, is a whole lot of money letting alone dumping on top the cost of hardware and for online stuff and network connections.
Which is why those in control of the corporo-fascist power structure like to so fiercely protect what little there is of it. China's market is pure and simple the ruthless exploitation of it's work force and environment in which they live and, this will continue until it collapse under the socio-economic and environmental pressures.
Whether they did or did not put a back door in windows is arbitrary. What is of concern is a government department doing free work to improve the profitability of a single corporation against the corporate interests of every other competing corporation. Remember the screams coming out of Redmond when the NSA produce SE Linux, taht would be made available for free to all taxpayers.
Now you have the NSA and the department of defence attempting to prop up the security incompetence of a corporation at tax payer expense so that corporation can now turn around and charge their customers for work their customers already paid for.
If M$ is to security incompetent to produce reliable software, no government departments should be steeping ion to to their work for them they should simply stop using their software rather the propping up the company at taxpayer expense.
Besides everybody knows backdoors belong in hardware not software, any tech person with more than half a brain dual boots and uses the Linux side of things for anything they want to keep safe and secure, the windows side is built to power a game console and that's all it should be used for.
Point of fact, for quite some time they were saying that windows ME was better than windows 98 second edition (in fact right up until xp was due to be released) and windows vista was better than XP (right up until windows 7 was due to be released). Here's betting they, in the not too distant future (couple of years or so), they say windows 7 is crap and you really need to upgrade to windows 'whatever' for more reliability, stability and security ;D.
Do you actually have any idea of where you are posting. Do you know anything at all about slashdot, obviously not. Down at the bottom of the page you will find a link to http://geek.net/, now at this web site you will find some more links, specifically too http://sourceforge.net/, just one more link to go http://sourceforge.net/about, thats right 230,000 open source software projects. Now I don't know if you have done any coding but I can assure that the simplest project at source forge is far most complex, time consuming and takes far greater effort than the most difficult and complex lesson plan, in fact no comparison at all. See, it can be done, by people who want to do it.
There are open text books currently being produced, I'll let you do some research and find the sites, I think you need the practice, hint, they have been mentioned on slashdot several times so you can start you search right here.
Well, just maybe, you might get the point of an 'open' lesson plane, of sharing the effort, of literally tens of thousands of teachers covering exactly the same material, with some slight variations ie. download a 95% there lesson plan, read review and tweak, whoa your done or, more likely download a lesson plan and you are done. Some of you arts type seem to become too much like the people you spend a whole lot of time with, teenagers, me now, no deep forward planing or thinking.
Gees, try to save people time, money and effort and they are too locked in to a very narrow almost child like vision of their own reality. I know, I needed to produce a fully detailed lesson plan on how open development systems work and the principles of shared effort and enlightened self interest, rather than just a quick slashdot comment. So yeah the principle is for the bulk of lesson plans a peer produced and reviewed lesson plan would be readily available, free, gratis, practically no effort at all.
More to the point any effort to stifle publication, thanks to the internet often produces the exact opposite affect. Now thanks to the law suit and wikipedia. I know of that case and of course the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect, if seems the internet never stops giving.
Nothing like going to court to turn a page from one amongst a billion others into something far more interesting and keeping it in the public eye for years and years afterwards. Yes, Barbara your house is more than just a little ostentatious and is over consumptive of the planet's resource and likely an excessive polluter to boot ;D.
Putin seems more to be an astute and dangerous adversary rather than being anyone's fool. He is becoming a bit invisible at the moment as seems to be appearing a little weaker and less popular. Perhaps answering this 'challenge' and conducting a public purge of all of the clumsiest and most inept corrupt government officials will significantly enhance his image and popularity.
I've got the feeling that this officer is significantly safer than some of the corrupt officials and their financial supporters are at this time. Nothing like a brutal and calculated purge to improve the quality, intelligence and real loyalty of those that remain ;).
There is a huge difference between banning the manufacture and commercialisation of a product and making the possession and use of a product illegal.
So should unhealthy products, that are addictive and bad for human health be limited in their 'commercial' viability, of course, should possession and use be made illegal, of course not.
Should corporations be fined hundreds of millions of dollars and their executives imprisoned for the rest of their lives when they knowingly produce and sell addictive toxic products, absolutely, should the users be penalised considering they are already victims, absolutely not.
So either tax the life out of noxious junk food and beverages or make their 'commercial production' and 'commercial sale' (where the return for the fines justify prosecution) illegal. Now of course limited production, with auditing and monitoring of production facilities, sold at regulated premises with all advertising and commercialisation being strictly illegal, taxed specifically for the purpose of treating harmful consequences and addiction and, with strictly controlled and audited profit structures (you do not ever want it to be a desirable commercial business venture), puts yet another light on it.
Simplest easiest answer is often the most obvious. Corporations do not hire people, they are a fabricated illusions created of binary bits and paper. Personal managers on high salaries hire people, personal managers with four year degrees like to hire computer staff with four year degrees, reason why, mutual justification of higher salary levels for people with four year degrees.
I know people will say that the broader training of the university course creates better adaptability and retrain-ability (truth is that will always be down to the actual individual) but vocational schools train specifically for the job the student is hired for based on direct feed back from the companies doing the hiring and are immediately more productive. As companies tend to immediately hire and fire according to need, hmm, differentiating between vocational and university seems to be more about squeezing down pay rates more than anything else.
Separation seems to be mid sized business focus on vocational, where the company owners are doing the hiring and large corporation tend for university where personal managers with degrees are doing the hiring, all with a slight fudge for mid sized companies owned by people with computer degrees or run by their children with computer degrees.
Robing Peter to pay Paul is pointless and stupid. Obviously lesson plans produced at government funded public schools should be kept free and open so that they can be effectively refined and tailored for specific environments. A shared resource granting a community benefit in creating and maintaining the best possible lesson plans.
The only thing greed ever feeds is more greed.
This technology as a whole sounds like it is past it 's use by date, a USB thumb drive will last a very long time when you only write to it once and a 4gb drive is already way less than half the price http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-SDCZ6-4096-A11-Retail-Package/dp/B000EWHEM6 and the writing technology is available pretty much every where. Unless they can seriously ramp up the storage capacity than this start up is likely to last a whole lot less than the thousand years they claim their media can last.
From a user perspective, a user that uses https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2497 cookiemanager and for web sites that suck, no cookies for you. I don't really see a problem with requiring permission from the user to store a file on their computer for your use, after all I go through that process every time I browse the net and visit a web site for the first time added to that I also use http://noscript.net/ and no cookies definitely no scripts.
So should you be required to gain permission to run a script something which if often entails far greater risk than a simple limited size text file cookie. So web more web sites that didn't use script or cookies would certainly simplify my browsing time.
Well in this case it should be a reminder of why one needs to be a bit proactive and force far more reasonable solutions. Obviously any laws and notification should be made publicly available and the onus is really on those who administer the law to esnure they make all reasonable efforts to keep citizens informed. This kind of failure should be actively pursued especially where it can be readily demonstrated that other localities have no problem http://www.austlii.edu.au/ provide all available laws for public perusal.
The Federal government should ensure that all states laws are made publicly available and the states should ensure that all local municipalities make their laws publicly available.
Open Office works really well for me, I have been using it for many years with out any problems and prefer it of 'to annoyingly unhelpful' M$ office and document compatibility of Open Office over the long term is really helpful (last version I bothered with M$O was 97).
Obviously in a work place where piracy is a problem shifting them to free open source solutions makes sense as it is pretty obvious they will not pay for proprietary software licences. Of course the system admin should make the switch and focus on providing more support for the free open source solutions and as much as possible leave the pirates to fend for themselves.
Resolving the 'we pirate everything' office is more of a long term goal, application by application done over years and initial priority is to de-pirate hardware you are directly responsible for to ensure that should they finally get caught holding the bag. Keeping in mind copyright in the office content with no for profit redistribution is a civil rather than criminal and nothing to get too uptight about.
Funny the press release leaves of whiff of, yeah we use open source to create a working model and then edit it enough so that it no longer to closely resembles the original code, it is part of the code audit review process. So this time it accidentally skipped the rewrite and the inevitable other guy did it excuse crops up. Of course when M$ is forced to provide source code to governments who wouldn't accept it other wise, this kind of stuff could get pretty embarrassing.
That is all that google news search provides a headline with about a paragraph that explains that headline. Murdoch is simply fabricating a lie to hide his true intentions, it really is what News Corp is all about presenting illusions and deceits as the truth. What he hates is google news search along with everybody else's news search provides a choice of which news site to read a particular news story.
Think News Corp sucks and Fox News is nothing but B$=PR marketing as news engine, then when given the choice you will choose an alternate site, especially when you are given not one but often hundreds of choices ie. http://news.google.com.au/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=au&hl=en&q=rupert+murdoch 4,056 choices and the Christian Science Monitor happens to be the first choice. Now that is what Murdoch hates, he want to control the news, to define what is and is not news and in his own deceitful style define what is and is not the truth. A sick enterprise that wants to sell fear and hate because that charged environment draws more viewers, doesn't matter if it all lies as long as it sells.
The problem is the lies on the Fox network can all to readily be debunked by easy access to hundreds even thousands of other news sites that present reality rather than marketing fantasy and, this compounds the problem. Not only do you have many news sites to choose from but people are actively avoiding Fox ie. thumbing it down in stumbleupon parlance or even filtering it out in customise google http://www.customizegoogle.com/. In fact quickly looking through the search results none of their sites appears in the search results, does that mean News Corp is wining ;D.
Now, doesn't that really depend upon your measure of success. Say for example you just want to be generally healthy and happy, have very little desire to dominate and control others, well, that doesn't really require all that much effort at all, in fact excess effort tends to detract and not add to that lifestyle. As it turns out of fact you need to spend more time preventing other over achieving 'successful' types from attempting to destroy your peaceful lifestyle in order to feed their ego and fear driven control freak lifestyle.
Hmm, lonely at the top, could it possibly be because they are the enemy of a generally healthy and happy societies rather than their friend. After all by the measure of wealth you are only as successful ie. rich as the majority is poor, and you don't so much strive to have more as you strive for everyone else to have less, it's called profit. Work to live, live to work or even live to force others to work 'ew'.
Technically speaking as XMBC main forte seems to be media shifting which is allowed under fair use versus MythTV which records transmitted content (as well as media shifting) which typical is not allowed, then MythTV is more the tool of the, avast yeah 'lan'lubbers.
Being a bit 'slack' I am still curious as to where you can buy off the shelf HTPC linux based and either or both XMBC or MythTV running.
To solve your problems http://mediakey.dk/~cc/itunes-on-linux-ubuntu/ and http://www.real.com/rhapsody/linux, there you go, iTunes and Rhapsody on Linux.
As for secure computers until the OS is hard wired it will always be a problem. With computers being consumer level appliances, it is now getting to the stage, where an open source OS can be built right into the CPU, for near instant on, assured reboot and really fast OS execution. The hardware over the last few years could be very effectively functional for decades (usefulness rather than survivability).
Certainly a really stable secure Linux kernel could achieve the next logical step and be built right into the CPU as one of it's cores, whether to build the Gnome GUI in there as well is the next question.
You should play closer attention to your constitution. Right there along states rights are citizens rights, and the state can not take away citizens rights which have precedence. You are only ever a temporary resident of a state, you are always a citizen of the federal government. Not state has the right to disenfranchise citizens or attempt to take away the rights of citizens granted by the federal government. No state can claim the right to disown or own any citizen and on the flip side all federal citizens at all times can claim ownership of all states.
States powers come second to citizens rights granted by the federal government. It is an always will be the responsibility to protect all citizens from corruption of government whether it be at state or county level. It is very apparent that some states are being run for the sole benefit of corporations who don't pay taxes, who can pollute at will, who can abuse the rights of workers, and who devalue the lives of citizens below that of their profits. The states can corruptly bitch and moan at the orders of the rich and greedy all they want, but they have no power over the rights of citizens granted by the federal government and the constitution.
There is a poison pill in that idea in some countries have barratry laws http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barratry and losers pays. So while it is possible to play the I have more money to spend on lawyers than you do upon an individual basis, attempting to do it on a mass scale will inevitably blow up in your face, and result in a bunch of successful appeals and massive Punitive damages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages, which is of course why the RIAA et al did not play lets sue everyone in Australia, Canada and the UK etc.
Right o then, here you go. What if I were to create a digital emulation of the vocalisation capabilities of a person, adjustable for enunciations, accents and, tonal variations ie. a electronic singing simulation combine that with adjustable musical instrument simulations and via that method produce new content that sounds very similar to existing content, hell I could even strive for photo realistic animation for a whole music video entertainment experience.
Would it be copyright infringement if is was difficult to differentiate from existing historic recorded content, how about if it was of superior quality ie had added tonal and visual qualities beyond the historic recordings? As each year goes by the superiority of animations over actual drugged up drunken minstrels is going to be hard to argue against, except of course for 'live' entertainment but 'live' where the artists get the money doesn't really help your cause much either, now does it.