You missed the most appalling thing about this particular cable executives states of mind "An entire generation is growing up, if we don't figure out how to change that behaviour so it respects copyright and subscription revenue on the part of distributors". This ass hat seems intent on finding ways of taking over the minds of children and force them into becoming cable TV addicts willing to throw away all their income on feeding that addiction and note that he places the distributor ahead of the artist who he doesn't even mention.
That doesn't even tackle owned versus rented, all those DVD's. So between the internet (live, education, interaction and news) and DVD's (empty fluff entertainment) cable has no real space in the modern entertainment marketplace but, don't let that stop sociopath corporate executives from trying to come up with plans to take over the minds of children with modern mass media psychological marketing techniques (shame about that whole teenage rebellion thing).
You really have got it way wrong. Basically the device will allow you to pick up the highest possible purchasing commissions, working on say up to fifty percent between $8,250 and $30,000 all tax free and in cash, due to it's negligible manufacturing costs. Warning the only thing the device will never detect is bull shit, else the antennae would immediately wrap itself around the device, on the plus side the device is guaranteed to detect scientologists.
You seem to have made some very broad assumption about my belief structures and my principles of or lack of faith. There are broad metaphysical difference between the principles of the 'human' mind over matter and 'life' over matter, as well as general confusion about what is faith largely brought on by religious and cultural differences. Of course any thinking person just sees faith as a construct of society as it is not expressed in the rest, the bulk of life.
In evolutionary terms whilst the expression of faith certainly did have an impact upon human evolution (not really positive), the impact was driven by societies ie. express faith as we tell you or we will torture and kill you as an unbeliever, those who baulked were brutally killed, those who could blindly submit survived and of course those that could fake it also survived (many for profit preachers/politicians amongst them). I always find it threatening and offensive when people start to define my faith for me and, this is based upon the sound logic of paying attention to thousands of years of human history and millions of deaths all based upon that principle.
Hardly mind over matter, simply a bio-chemical organ that can be induced to produce a range of neurotransmitters and hormones based upon psychological states. Don't be fooled though, whilst reactions might be controllable and the negative impact that stress and tension has upon recovery can be alleviated when a supportive environment is provided, it will not change the nature of the ailment itself. So a placebo is not really a placebo but a psychological treatment to assure the patient and alleviate stress and tension, which allows natural healing processes to function more effectively.
Note dependent upon the background of the patient this can also include religious support as long as the belief is there and of course the illness falls within scope of natural healing processes which would otherwise be circumscribed by fear and stress. No mind over matter, no miracle cures although of course genetic diversity and probability allows for luck to cure the most lethal of ailments, you know one in a million don't bet on it though as you far more likely to end up in the 999,999 group.
Want to know why hard science fiction is dying, simple, the internet is killing it. I enjoy hard science fiction but I enjoy the wide open spaces of the internet even more. With only so many reading hours in the day open, the internet provides me a far broader range of stories from the real ie. news to the unreal, conspiracy theories, to everything in between. I have several hundred science fiction books that have gone largely unread for years, just don't have the time even though I can read a regular paperback in about 4 to 6 hours.
Between a passive story and the reality of the internet, there is no comparisson, the internet provides me with a far richer and more mentally stimulating experience, it truly does feed my mind. I wonder how many other hard science fiction readers have abandoned paperbacks for the internet and with them went their cash leaving a growing number of unread books left on shelves.
They also ignore the reality of saturation marketing, not just targeted at children generally but specifically adjusted to each childs profile to more effectively control the decisions and to more accurately distort the child's future psychological growth to more profitably align with the highest bidders marketing dollars.
Consider the real underlying nature of that profession. Adults trained as psychologists who use their education and skills to manipulate vulnerable children so that they can be more profitably be monetized. Not only do those adults shameless manipulate children against the child's best interest, these adults take pride in their ability to, let's see, create peer pressure responses where children who do not adhere to the current marketing promotions are ostracized and punished by other children, where future unhealthy psychological conditions are imprinted upon the children so they are forced to attempt buy the way out of the unhappiness forced upon them by adults and of course to get tchildren to manipulate the choices of their parents.
Considering the motivation, nothing but greed, the unfair advantage of adults manipulating children and the inherent harm that results, it really it is a matter of marketing executives molesting the minds of the world's children, psychological pedophiles of the worst order, it really is nasty stuff.
As for porn on the Internet, the reality is the Internet is an adult network not meant for children, if anybody is serious about a child safe Internet that is has to be completely separate from the interactions between adults and specifically monitored, secured and built around the education system and from which all marketing executives are specifically banned.
Wages are cents in the dollar. Working conditions are as cheap and unsafe as they can get. Wind turbines due to low manufacturing numbers have a high labor content as such, there is no way reasonable or acceptable way for US labor to compete and if they could of course the whole exercise becomes utterly pointless as they could not afford to pay the electricity generated killing the investment.
As long as government continue down the path of blind, deaf and dumb monkeys and don't accept the need to establish fair trade practices and import duties to ensure companies compete upon a equal basic, whether foreign or domestic, socio economic collapse is inevitable.
The WTO is nothing more than a tool of the rich to destroy the middle class, eliminating that threat to their hereditary power base and, turning the bulk of the worlds population into nothing more that working in poverty minimum wage slaves (counting India and China that is already true but the first world middle class have yet to feel the weight of the chain and the bite of the whip not since they put down the masters a century or so ago).
Perhaps you can tell me the difference between a phone call and a email. Phone calls are protected by wiretapping laws, it is a criminal offence to listen in to private phone calls or record them without the permission of all parties involved. Both phone calls and email are simply digital transmission over wire, both pass through other parties to get to the final destination, the only difference is the hardware and coding to encode, decode and interpret them.
Face it, the judge is an idiot of the first order, I mean come on has the boob never heard of ADSL. It completely ignores the fact that email servers are completely automated and require no human intervention to reach their destination. It is time for email software to make use of the DMCA and, incorporate a simple encryption technique that prevents the email from being read as plain text but require a simple for legal reasons only decryption technique with a default warning if the person is not the intended recipient, for email where the default recipient email address does not match the target email address.
Basically am encryption technique that is no more secure than you typical envelope but still providing the full legal security of a typical envelope, with the added bonus of the DMCA to beat them over the head with.
There are many mods and the early mods are far more likely to be the flip side of marketdroid trolls, the troll mod, who mod as directed by their marketing and PR firm. At least on slashdot they generally lose out after more real slash dotters with mod points out number them.
Number one on the true crap ware list will always be trial ware. About time for a class action law suit to be filed against computer computers for the time the user spends evaluating software or at the very least the time waster deleting unwanted software that was not declared at the point of sale.
Nerds are picked on because of fear and cowardice and that is not the fear and cowardice of the nerds that is the fear and cowardice of the jockstraps. Nerds are not as physically capable and easy targets, just look a geeks, basically nerds who are physically and mentally capable of fighting back but demonstrate the same disinterest is mass marketing cultural conformity, in practising the social deceits of modern society driven by mass consumerism and sex sells.
Why is being an introvert computer geek, evil and something that you need to force yourself to change, why does rebelling against mass consumerism and celebrity worship diminish anyone, really is over consuming, over polluting and being driven by the need to copulate as many times as possible with as many different people the worth while goals that mass media purports them to be?
Overall the biggest driver for the stupid picking on the smart, you can always exercise to increase you physical capability but a sub 100 will always be a sub 100, vote republican and they know they will never understand why;).
I think you really meant to say is that you eventually will accept windows 7 as a forced to buy OEM rather than insisting on more stable XP, rather than actually volunteering to pay for an upgrade upon existing hardware. For those people stuck with Vista, well, you got and are getting screwed. For those on XP watch out for auto windows update and that patch that makes XP just a little more unstable.
It has been more than a decade since I paid for any version of windows outside of an OEM and that has only been because it is the simplest way of turning a PC into a game console.
With movies and high definition, we have already pretty reached the desirable resolution limit with DVD, maybe with the scenery channel you want more but with typical content, all those flaws, poorly expressed emotions, botox I see dead faces, plastic surgery and the reality of actual appearance versus PR=B$, kinda makes a lot of content un-watchable at higher resolutions.
The reality behind this announcement, a lot of hard disk manufacturers trying to protect the share price of their companies stock, based upon that you should watch insider trading like a hawk on stocks with a highly bound to perceived long term value hard disk drive manufacturing.
Why is it that announcements like this often herald a large number of shorts and stock trades, just before a major announcement regarding technology changes, with just barely enough gap between the two to prevent prosecution and imprisonment.
Small usb memory drives are already approaching give away price and in terms of transport and shipping cost they are far cheaper to transport and more durable than a dvd. So not only and hard disk in trouble but optical drives are also looking down the digital gun barrel.
Perhaps you would also like to talk about all that closed source proprietary code that government espionage agencies all over the world have access to. In fact most governments are now refusing to you closed source proprietary code unless they have access to the code to scan for back doors not only put in by corporations for then own advantage but put in by governments via secret warrants and not disclosed for national security reasons.
The biggest difference between closed source and open source in government. When government start analysing, bug finding and error correcting private closed source code, they are in fact corruptly subsidising the business activity and profitability of one company ahead of all other companies. When are government conducts the same identical activity with open source, that investment is in fact return to every single member of the public and every company has access to and can make use of those efforts and expenditures.
As for intentional flaws in open source, what a load, most secure places do not run the latest version but let it run around in the wild for a few months, not only given them time to fully and publicly audit the code but also allowing time for faults to be discovered across the wider community. Want to know the biggest example of corruption in closed source proprietary software code, a glaring example of why it should never ever be trusted, Diebold voting software, those people actually even fought it out in court to hide their source code from the foolish governments that used it after it was proved to be extraordinarily and perceived by many to be purposefully faulty.
The reality is any downside of open source is inherently in closed source as well, on the other hand there are many downsides to closed source that are not associated with open source software.
Actually you have to be very careful about that. In most regions post purchase agreement are null and void, so unless the full conditions of licence on on the outside of the box, the the licence conditions for games are identical to all other copyrighted content, you own your copy for the life of copyright. All that rest of the conditions like EULA are simply a marketing lie and a legal bluff except of course for a very few blatantly corrupt constituencies.
The reason of comes games publishers are further ahead on digital distribution is of course games consoles (and the motivation to escape those licence fees), a better understanding of DRM and how it can be used to analyse and control the end users computer, check competing games, disable unlicensed content, prevent copying, disable undesirable software and devices, summarily alter conditions of contract and of course drop in adds when they believe they have sufficient lock in to get away with it. Now just because it is a game it doesn't stop them from also stretching their DRM into internet access and email monitoring for manipulative marketing purpose only of course.
It is most likely better for everyone if some hard legislation starts coming out to curb invasive and abusive practices before they get out of hand. As for me, after a trail of steam, once bitten forever shy, I'll stick to buying hard copy at a discount store. Publishers simply can not be trusted with that kind of access to private devices.
Of course to create the whole threat of 'cyber terror' they always claim, script kiddies taking over digitally controlled infrastructure. You know, take over the power plant and cause a melt down, disable traffic lights or even take control of air traffic control systems. The ultimate defeat of that crazy crap, has always been the same, if it doesn't need to be connected to the internet, then don't connect it to the internet.
Now if it is a system that lives depend on and some greedy idiot connected it to the internet, improperly secured, just to save a few bucks regardless of the risks and consequences, then they are criminally negligent and it is a toss up of who is more guilty of a crime in those circumstances then negligent admin or the script kiddie.
With the low cost of network infrastructure, creating parallel networks is the only sensible choice, internal secure and locked down hardwired and an 'external' network for email and internet access.
Today's modern executive with the golden parachute takes, the short term approach, today's stock market takes the short term approach, the whole capitalist system is in reality driven by the short term approach, boom and bust is the defining nature of capitalism, monopolies are the singular goal of capitalism, maximum profit regardless of consequence is the reality of capitalism and, capitalism will inherently pursue the lowest common denominator.
You are unwise to think anything but greed comes out of capitalism. The only 'private' restraints on capitalism were individual morals (only of private companies never public companies), honour, integrity and pride of workmanship and none of these have anything at all to do with any economic theory, they are all driven solely by individuals. Once those principles were abandoned as being unprofitable by the sly, shallow and greedy, then legislation was forced to step in and take the place of normal respectable morals and enforce some sort of reasonable behaviour. Naturally enough the sly, shallow and greedy sought to remove the legislation so they could basically squeeze as much profit out of the system as possible with a total disregard for the consequences.
The biggest obstruction to broadband access generally has not be the inability or the lack of capital to deploy the required infrastructure, it has been existing monopoly suppliers and corrupt governments. Much the same as the US the incumbents make use of their influence and campaigns donations to protect their position, and to maintain artificially high profit for as long as possible and even take steps to inflate them further, by specifically preventing the development of competition.
In developing countries this situation is exacerbated because unlike the US the do not feel the same sting and embarrassment from falling further and further behind in digital infrastructure development, so basically they are still running on 1000 percent or more mark-ups on the transfer of digital data.
It is pretty clear that advances in digital infrastructure have only been driven successful by governments, when left up to private enterprise, they have basically squeezed as much profit as possible out of existing deteriorating infrastructure, which doesn't get maintained properly because it is going to be done anyhow but hold of investing in new infrastructure for as long as possible so as not to devalue the exiting mess. This will continue until the existing infrastructure collapses or government steps in with some common sence, for the corporate executive team, is is all about today's bonus and the future collapse and penalties is somebody else's problem.
Spying also leads to corruption and blackmail, both of which readily escalate into violent crime. So you are exposing the development of criminal elements within other countries, people who will lie, cheat, steal and kill, in order to profit via industrial and government espionage. There is also a well recognised tie between organised crime and private espionage 'contractors', so you are also supporting the concept that governments sponsor organised crime in other countries and, well, tough luck for all the innocents who get harmed along the way.
When governments institute laws that attempt legalise the criminal activities of their agents in other countries, they are bound by the criminal injustice of those laws and the activities they promote. These concepts are all bound to the idea, that other countries citizens are somehow sub-human and are not entitled to justice and thus can be exploited, for what ever purpose profits your country.
Perhaps a fair counter balance might be, that upon the third strike, those that accused you are now required to now prove that "you" (not just a an IP address or MAC address) are guilty beyond a shadow of doubt in court, should they fail to do so, then they should face criminal charges for, bringing false witness and, civil penalties for slander and defamation as well a bearing full cost for the court case and investigation and well as any damages suffered by the falsely accused party with regards to loss of connection and the psychological harm of being disconnected from human digital interactivity.
No problem they only need to provide one link, a link to a non-copyrighted list, of torrents. Obviously putting the list out on torrent resolves many problems. The list then floats around the global torrent system and no one knows which portion of the list they are temporarily hosting or it's content.
Consider more from a Chinese government perspective. They wish to distribute computers to regional areas, rather than pay the full cost, they are getting rural farmer to pay a substantive portion of the price. Now because the government is distributing the computers to keep the copy-rightists happy they can not exactly distribute them with pirated copies of windows. So distributing them at a further discount with Linux means a substantive saving for the government and if those units end up with pirated software, meh, so what.
Of course as with most users, the real truth is is they will simply use the computers with what ever software comes with it.
Now from a security stand point with a range of governments all with windows source code, all looking for unknown or undeclared security holes in the windows with which to hack each other systems, having a growing base of more secure open source software, where governments also look for holes but actually fix them and incorporate those fixes back into the code, to keep themselves secure with default installs.
It's called coding, either M$ are capable or incapable. Both Itunes and the google toolbar are well known, the changes they make are readily discoverable and can be taken into account considering the millions upon millions of installations. Why the uninstall, nothing more than the marketing hope that consumers won't re-install them once they have been un-installed.
As for windows upgrades, I have a done many, sure most of them worked, 'for a time', but ultimately every one of them failed whether days or weeks later and took far longer to rebuild because of the unexpected collapse. Do it safe, do it clean and for the sake of safety and sanity, dual boot your system, that way you can always boot to Ubuntu et al to fix up a crippled windows install, hey it might only be for playing games but it can really be frustrating when you can't access you library of windows games to relieve the tensions;D.
They work really well, when they reflect in game sales. The reality is the petition is not about getting the company to change it is a straight up warning to the company, don;t make the change and not only loose that sale but also and often far more harmful that recommendation from what is often a dedicated gamer.
The games market is very competitive, any handicaps in this tight economic market, where people are limiting the amount they will spend on 'GAMES' will cripple sales and over the long run poison the whole COD game franchise.
That is pretty thin thinking. Oracle want the full software line up, from the operating system right through to the office quite, from personal users right through industry and into education and they want services and support. This is all about Oracle versus M$ and the hardware is secondary. Oracle big push will be in the educational market, a complete offering backend server systems to front end smart books. For business much the same idea, with the addition of either smart or dumb terminals in addition to the smart books.
The best place now for MySql is where it will most effectively be incorporated into OpenOffice for the individual users and small business. For the bigger end, it really is all about services and support upon a national or even global scale.
As for java http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ is making an end run around it, not that java wont continue to have a very important place in programming but ruby and of course http://rubyonrails.org/ are really going to take a big bite out of java for the bulk of typical relatively simple web programming but if you are talking about.net being squeezed into complete.nothingness you probably are totally correct.
This has nothing to do with software versus hardware, this is all about a tight economy. People and companies only have so much capital to spend on overheads, whether those overheads are spend on software, hardware or service and support is the question at hand. Quite simply from an IBM perspective and also of course 99.9999etc percent of companies that aren't M$ if that money is not spent of software licences it can be spent on something else.
The big thing now is service and support. Is minimising internal staff and contracting out a portion of service and support going to be a saving. How much will you save by cutting the cost of software licences and spending more money on quality service and support because of course the underlying reality is closed source proprietary software cost as much as FOSS to support (technically more because you have to audit software licence to avoid financial penalties and, of course forced pay through the nose upgrades and all the documentation is freely available for FOSS).
In this case IBM is enormously different from M$. IBM is freeing up tech overheads to be spent across the whole industry, of which they hope to get a significant portion but from which no one is excluded. M$ of course is continuing to use monopolistic and under handed tactics to squeeze out and 'kill' any other tech company, be it IBM, or Google(search), or Apple(phone and player) or Sony(game console), Yahoo(web portal) without doubt with regards to major tech corporations M$ has proven itself to be the most deceitful and disingenuous regardless of product type.
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You missed the most appalling thing about this particular cable executives states of mind "An entire generation is growing up, if we don't figure out how to change that behaviour so it respects copyright and subscription revenue on the part of distributors". This ass hat seems intent on finding ways of taking over the minds of children and force them into becoming cable TV addicts willing to throw away all their income on feeding that addiction and note that he places the distributor ahead of the artist who he doesn't even mention.
That doesn't even tackle owned versus rented, all those DVD's. So between the internet (live, education, interaction and news) and DVD's (empty fluff entertainment) cable has no real space in the modern entertainment marketplace but, don't let that stop sociopath corporate executives from trying to come up with plans to take over the minds of children with modern mass media psychological marketing techniques (shame about that whole teenage rebellion thing).
You really have got it way wrong. Basically the device will allow you to pick up the highest possible purchasing commissions, working on say up to fifty percent between $8,250 and $30,000 all tax free and in cash, due to it's negligible manufacturing costs. Warning the only thing the device will never detect is bull shit, else the antennae would immediately wrap itself around the device, on the plus side the device is guaranteed to detect scientologists.
You seem to have made some very broad assumption about my belief structures and my principles of or lack of faith. There are broad metaphysical difference between the principles of the 'human' mind over matter and 'life' over matter, as well as general confusion about what is faith largely brought on by religious and cultural differences. Of course any thinking person just sees faith as a construct of society as it is not expressed in the rest, the bulk of life.
In evolutionary terms whilst the expression of faith certainly did have an impact upon human evolution (not really positive), the impact was driven by societies ie. express faith as we tell you or we will torture and kill you as an unbeliever, those who baulked were brutally killed, those who could blindly submit survived and of course those that could fake it also survived (many for profit preachers/politicians amongst them). I always find it threatening and offensive when people start to define my faith for me and, this is based upon the sound logic of paying attention to thousands of years of human history and millions of deaths all based upon that principle.
Hardly mind over matter, simply a bio-chemical organ that can be induced to produce a range of neurotransmitters and hormones based upon psychological states. Don't be fooled though, whilst reactions might be controllable and the negative impact that stress and tension has upon recovery can be alleviated when a supportive environment is provided, it will not change the nature of the ailment itself. So a placebo is not really a placebo but a psychological treatment to assure the patient and alleviate stress and tension, which allows natural healing processes to function more effectively.
Note dependent upon the background of the patient this can also include religious support as long as the belief is there and of course the illness falls within scope of natural healing processes which would otherwise be circumscribed by fear and stress. No mind over matter, no miracle cures although of course genetic diversity and probability allows for luck to cure the most lethal of ailments, you know one in a million don't bet on it though as you far more likely to end up in the 999,999 group.
Want to know why hard science fiction is dying, simple, the internet is killing it. I enjoy hard science fiction but I enjoy the wide open spaces of the internet even more. With only so many reading hours in the day open, the internet provides me a far broader range of stories from the real ie. news to the unreal, conspiracy theories, to everything in between. I have several hundred science fiction books that have gone largely unread for years, just don't have the time even though I can read a regular paperback in about 4 to 6 hours.
Between a passive story and the reality of the internet, there is no comparisson, the internet provides me with a far richer and more mentally stimulating experience, it truly does feed my mind. I wonder how many other hard science fiction readers have abandoned paperbacks for the internet and with them went their cash leaving a growing number of unread books left on shelves.
They also ignore the reality of saturation marketing, not just targeted at children generally but specifically adjusted to each childs profile to more effectively control the decisions and to more accurately distort the child's future psychological growth to more profitably align with the highest bidders marketing dollars.
Consider the real underlying nature of that profession. Adults trained as psychologists who use their education and skills to manipulate vulnerable children so that they can be more profitably be monetized. Not only do those adults shameless manipulate children against the child's best interest, these adults take pride in their ability to, let's see, create peer pressure responses where children who do not adhere to the current marketing promotions are ostracized and punished by other children, where future unhealthy psychological conditions are imprinted upon the children so they are forced to attempt buy the way out of the unhappiness forced upon them by adults and of course to get tchildren to manipulate the choices of their parents.
Considering the motivation, nothing but greed, the unfair advantage of adults manipulating children and the inherent harm that results, it really it is a matter of marketing executives molesting the minds of the world's children, psychological pedophiles of the worst order, it really is nasty stuff.
As for porn on the Internet, the reality is the Internet is an adult network not meant for children, if anybody is serious about a child safe Internet that is has to be completely separate from the interactions between adults and specifically monitored, secured and built around the education system and from which all marketing executives are specifically banned.
Wages are cents in the dollar. Working conditions are as cheap and unsafe as they can get. Wind turbines due to low manufacturing numbers have a high labor content as such, there is no way reasonable or acceptable way for US labor to compete and if they could of course the whole exercise becomes utterly pointless as they could not afford to pay the electricity generated killing the investment.
As long as government continue down the path of blind, deaf and dumb monkeys and don't accept the need to establish fair trade practices and import duties to ensure companies compete upon a equal basic, whether foreign or domestic, socio economic collapse is inevitable.
The WTO is nothing more than a tool of the rich to destroy the middle class, eliminating that threat to their hereditary power base and, turning the bulk of the worlds population into nothing more that working in poverty minimum wage slaves (counting India and China that is already true but the first world middle class have yet to feel the weight of the chain and the bite of the whip not since they put down the masters a century or so ago).
Perhaps you can tell me the difference between a phone call and a email. Phone calls are protected by wiretapping laws, it is a criminal offence to listen in to private phone calls or record them without the permission of all parties involved. Both phone calls and email are simply digital transmission over wire, both pass through other parties to get to the final destination, the only difference is the hardware and coding to encode, decode and interpret them.
Face it, the judge is an idiot of the first order, I mean come on has the boob never heard of ADSL. It completely ignores the fact that email servers are completely automated and require no human intervention to reach their destination. It is time for email software to make use of the DMCA and, incorporate a simple encryption technique that prevents the email from being read as plain text but require a simple for legal reasons only decryption technique with a default warning if the person is not the intended recipient, for email where the default recipient email address does not match the target email address.
Basically am encryption technique that is no more secure than you typical envelope but still providing the full legal security of a typical envelope, with the added bonus of the DMCA to beat them over the head with.
There are many mods and the early mods are far more likely to be the flip side of marketdroid trolls, the troll mod, who mod as directed by their marketing and PR firm. At least on slashdot they generally lose out after more real slash dotters with mod points out number them.
Number one on the true crap ware list will always be trial ware. About time for a class action law suit to be filed against computer computers for the time the user spends evaluating software or at the very least the time waster deleting unwanted software that was not declared at the point of sale.
Nerds are picked on because of fear and cowardice and that is not the fear and cowardice of the nerds that is the fear and cowardice of the jockstraps. Nerds are not as physically capable and easy targets, just look a geeks, basically nerds who are physically and mentally capable of fighting back but demonstrate the same disinterest is mass marketing cultural conformity, in practising the social deceits of modern society driven by mass consumerism and sex sells.
Why is being an introvert computer geek, evil and something that you need to force yourself to change, why does rebelling against mass consumerism and celebrity worship diminish anyone, really is over consuming, over polluting and being driven by the need to copulate as many times as possible with as many different people the worth while goals that mass media purports them to be?
Overall the biggest driver for the stupid picking on the smart, you can always exercise to increase you physical capability but a sub 100 will always be a sub 100, vote republican and they know they will never understand why ;).
I think you really meant to say is that you eventually will accept windows 7 as a forced to buy OEM rather than insisting on more stable XP, rather than actually volunteering to pay for an upgrade upon existing hardware. For those people stuck with Vista, well, you got and are getting screwed. For those on XP watch out for auto windows update and that patch that makes XP just a little more unstable.
It has been more than a decade since I paid for any version of windows outside of an OEM and that has only been because it is the simplest way of turning a PC into a game console.
With movies and high definition, we have already pretty reached the desirable resolution limit with DVD, maybe with the scenery channel you want more but with typical content, all those flaws, poorly expressed emotions, botox I see dead faces, plastic surgery and the reality of actual appearance versus PR=B$, kinda makes a lot of content un-watchable at higher resolutions.
The reality behind this announcement, a lot of hard disk manufacturers trying to protect the share price of their companies stock, based upon that you should watch insider trading like a hawk on stocks with a highly bound to perceived long term value hard disk drive manufacturing.
Why is it that announcements like this often herald a large number of shorts and stock trades, just before a major announcement regarding technology changes, with just barely enough gap between the two to prevent prosecution and imprisonment.
Small usb memory drives are already approaching give away price and in terms of transport and shipping cost they are far cheaper to transport and more durable than a dvd. So not only and hard disk in trouble but optical drives are also looking down the digital gun barrel.
Perhaps you would also like to talk about all that closed source proprietary code that government espionage agencies all over the world have access to. In fact most governments are now refusing to you closed source proprietary code unless they have access to the code to scan for back doors not only put in by corporations for then own advantage but put in by governments via secret warrants and not disclosed for national security reasons.
The biggest difference between closed source and open source in government. When government start analysing, bug finding and error correcting private closed source code, they are in fact corruptly subsidising the business activity and profitability of one company ahead of all other companies. When are government conducts the same identical activity with open source, that investment is in fact return to every single member of the public and every company has access to and can make use of those efforts and expenditures.
As for intentional flaws in open source, what a load, most secure places do not run the latest version but let it run around in the wild for a few months, not only given them time to fully and publicly audit the code but also allowing time for faults to be discovered across the wider community. Want to know the biggest example of corruption in closed source proprietary software code, a glaring example of why it should never ever be trusted, Diebold voting software, those people actually even fought it out in court to hide their source code from the foolish governments that used it after it was proved to be extraordinarily and perceived by many to be purposefully faulty.
The reality is any downside of open source is inherently in closed source as well, on the other hand there are many downsides to closed source that are not associated with open source software.
Actually you have to be very careful about that. In most regions post purchase agreement are null and void, so unless the full conditions of licence on on the outside of the box, the the licence conditions for games are identical to all other copyrighted content, you own your copy for the life of copyright. All that rest of the conditions like EULA are simply a marketing lie and a legal bluff except of course for a very few blatantly corrupt constituencies.
The reason of comes games publishers are further ahead on digital distribution is of course games consoles (and the motivation to escape those licence fees), a better understanding of DRM and how it can be used to analyse and control the end users computer, check competing games, disable unlicensed content, prevent copying, disable undesirable software and devices, summarily alter conditions of contract and of course drop in adds when they believe they have sufficient lock in to get away with it. Now just because it is a game it doesn't stop them from also stretching their DRM into internet access and email monitoring for manipulative marketing purpose only of course.
It is most likely better for everyone if some hard legislation starts coming out to curb invasive and abusive practices before they get out of hand. As for me, after a trail of steam, once bitten forever shy, I'll stick to buying hard copy at a discount store. Publishers simply can not be trusted with that kind of access to private devices.
Of course to create the whole threat of 'cyber terror' they always claim, script kiddies taking over digitally controlled infrastructure. You know, take over the power plant and cause a melt down, disable traffic lights or even take control of air traffic control systems. The ultimate defeat of that crazy crap, has always been the same, if it doesn't need to be connected to the internet, then don't connect it to the internet.
Now if it is a system that lives depend on and some greedy idiot connected it to the internet, improperly secured, just to save a few bucks regardless of the risks and consequences, then they are criminally negligent and it is a toss up of who is more guilty of a crime in those circumstances then negligent admin or the script kiddie.
With the low cost of network infrastructure, creating parallel networks is the only sensible choice, internal secure and locked down hardwired and an 'external' network for email and internet access.
Today's modern executive with the golden parachute takes, the short term approach, today's stock market takes the short term approach, the whole capitalist system is in reality driven by the short term approach, boom and bust is the defining nature of capitalism, monopolies are the singular goal of capitalism, maximum profit regardless of consequence is the reality of capitalism and, capitalism will inherently pursue the lowest common denominator.
You are unwise to think anything but greed comes out of capitalism. The only 'private' restraints on capitalism were individual morals (only of private companies never public companies), honour, integrity and pride of workmanship and none of these have anything at all to do with any economic theory, they are all driven solely by individuals. Once those principles were abandoned as being unprofitable by the sly, shallow and greedy, then legislation was forced to step in and take the place of normal respectable morals and enforce some sort of reasonable behaviour. Naturally enough the sly, shallow and greedy sought to remove the legislation so they could basically squeeze as much profit out of the system as possible with a total disregard for the consequences.
The biggest obstruction to broadband access generally has not be the inability or the lack of capital to deploy the required infrastructure, it has been existing monopoly suppliers and corrupt governments. Much the same as the US the incumbents make use of their influence and campaigns donations to protect their position, and to maintain artificially high profit for as long as possible and even take steps to inflate them further, by specifically preventing the development of competition.
In developing countries this situation is exacerbated because unlike the US the do not feel the same sting and embarrassment from falling further and further behind in digital infrastructure development, so basically they are still running on 1000 percent or more mark-ups on the transfer of digital data.
It is pretty clear that advances in digital infrastructure have only been driven successful by governments, when left up to private enterprise, they have basically squeezed as much profit as possible out of existing deteriorating infrastructure, which doesn't get maintained properly because it is going to be done anyhow but hold of investing in new infrastructure for as long as possible so as not to devalue the exiting mess. This will continue until the existing infrastructure collapses or government steps in with some common sence, for the corporate executive team, is is all about today's bonus and the future collapse and penalties is somebody else's problem.
Spying also leads to corruption and blackmail, both of which readily escalate into violent crime. So you are exposing the development of criminal elements within other countries, people who will lie, cheat, steal and kill, in order to profit via industrial and government espionage. There is also a well recognised tie between organised crime and private espionage 'contractors', so you are also supporting the concept that governments sponsor organised crime in other countries and, well, tough luck for all the innocents who get harmed along the way.
When governments institute laws that attempt legalise the criminal activities of their agents in other countries, they are bound by the criminal injustice of those laws and the activities they promote. These concepts are all bound to the idea, that other countries citizens are somehow sub-human and are not entitled to justice and thus can be exploited, for what ever purpose profits your country.
Perhaps a fair counter balance might be, that upon the third strike, those that accused you are now required to now prove that "you" (not just a an IP address or MAC address) are guilty beyond a shadow of doubt in court, should they fail to do so, then they should face criminal charges for, bringing false witness and, civil penalties for slander and defamation as well a bearing full cost for the court case and investigation and well as any damages suffered by the falsely accused party with regards to loss of connection and the psychological harm of being disconnected from human digital interactivity.
No problem they only need to provide one link, a link to a non-copyrighted list, of torrents. Obviously putting the list out on torrent resolves many problems. The list then floats around the global torrent system and no one knows which portion of the list they are temporarily hosting or it's content.
Consider more from a Chinese government perspective. They wish to distribute computers to regional areas, rather than pay the full cost, they are getting rural farmer to pay a substantive portion of the price. Now because the government is distributing the computers to keep the copy-rightists happy they can not exactly distribute them with pirated copies of windows. So distributing them at a further discount with Linux means a substantive saving for the government and if those units end up with pirated software, meh, so what.
Of course as with most users, the real truth is is they will simply use the computers with what ever software comes with it.
Now from a security stand point with a range of governments all with windows source code, all looking for unknown or undeclared security holes in the windows with which to hack each other systems, having a growing base of more secure open source software, where governments also look for holes but actually fix them and incorporate those fixes back into the code, to keep themselves secure with default installs.
It's called coding, either M$ are capable or incapable. Both Itunes and the google toolbar are well known, the changes they make are readily discoverable and can be taken into account considering the millions upon millions of installations. Why the uninstall, nothing more than the marketing hope that consumers won't re-install them once they have been un-installed.
As for windows upgrades, I have a done many, sure most of them worked, 'for a time', but ultimately every one of them failed whether days or weeks later and took far longer to rebuild because of the unexpected collapse. Do it safe, do it clean and for the sake of safety and sanity, dual boot your system, that way you can always boot to Ubuntu et al to fix up a crippled windows install, hey it might only be for playing games but it can really be frustrating when you can't access you library of windows games to relieve the tensions ;D.
They work really well, when they reflect in game sales. The reality is the petition is not about getting the company to change it is a straight up warning to the company, don;t make the change and not only loose that sale but also and often far more harmful that recommendation from what is often a dedicated gamer.
The games market is very competitive, any handicaps in this tight economic market, where people are limiting the amount they will spend on 'GAMES' will cripple sales and over the long run poison the whole COD game franchise.
That is pretty thin thinking. Oracle want the full software line up, from the operating system right through to the office quite, from personal users right through industry and into education and they want services and support. This is all about Oracle versus M$ and the hardware is secondary. Oracle big push will be in the educational market, a complete offering backend server systems to front end smart books. For business much the same idea, with the addition of either smart or dumb terminals in addition to the smart books.
The best place now for MySql is where it will most effectively be incorporated into OpenOffice for the individual users and small business. For the bigger end, it really is all about services and support upon a national or even global scale.
As for java http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ is making an end run around it, not that java wont continue to have a very important place in programming but ruby and of course http://rubyonrails.org/ are really going to take a big bite out of java for the bulk of typical relatively simple web programming but if you are talking about .net being squeezed into complete .nothingness you probably are totally correct.
This has nothing to do with software versus hardware, this is all about a tight economy. People and companies only have so much capital to spend on overheads, whether those overheads are spend on software, hardware or service and support is the question at hand. Quite simply from an IBM perspective and also of course 99.9999etc percent of companies that aren't M$ if that money is not spent of software licences it can be spent on something else.
The big thing now is service and support. Is minimising internal staff and contracting out a portion of service and support going to be a saving. How much will you save by cutting the cost of software licences and spending more money on quality service and support because of course the underlying reality is closed source proprietary software cost as much as FOSS to support (technically more because you have to audit software licence to avoid financial penalties and, of course forced pay through the nose upgrades and all the documentation is freely available for FOSS).
In this case IBM is enormously different from M$. IBM is freeing up tech overheads to be spent across the whole industry, of which they hope to get a significant portion but from which no one is excluded. M$ of course is continuing to use monopolistic and under handed tactics to squeeze out and 'kill' any other tech company, be it IBM, or Google(search), or Apple(phone and player) or Sony(game console), Yahoo(web portal) without doubt with regards to major tech corporations M$ has proven itself to be the most deceitful and disingenuous regardless of product type.