More likely the reality is, that google is looking to make a big push for the education market. Google docs (definitely not an online version), google android, google books, google knol (not really going anywhere), gmail (a wee bit to invasive to use on children) and of course search, maps etc..
Get them when they are young and you have them for life, as long as you don't get greedy and bugger it up. So how far away will gserver (the android MCP - that's tron - not a windrone pro, trust those boobs to use choose those initials) be, the easy to use Linux based school server.
The internet is really the cheapest form of entertainment and social networks are a part of that. Cheaper even than public transport to visit and interact with friends or find new friends. Social networks are the most effective means by which people can share their problems and look for solutions and, where solutions are not forth coming at least escape from their problems for a time.
What is really happening is the activity is just spreading down the line from computer geeks and nerds to the 'er' dumbest jock strap and cheer leader and, of course everyone in between.
In troubling economic times it also is the safest form of human interaction, a digital barrier between potential victims and their attackers (as long as they 'do not' make direct personal contact) or even random acts of violence travelling to that point of social interaction. For parents it provides a safer means by which their children can interact with other children and sometimes the parents of those children.
So all in all, relatively safe, cheap and of course immediately convenient, hardly surprising that it is becoming a major form of human interaction.
Now if you are going to get down to the nitty gritty, how about reading the warranty 'er' end used licence agreement on the windows operating system. You know the bit, where it says that they do not warrant the operating system is free of viruses (illegal content) when they sell it to you. Now the law wants to make every person 100% legally responsible for all the content on a computer when the operating system supplier will emphatically not take any responsibility for the security, stability or reliability for that software when thy initially supply it to the consumer.
As it stands now, just the contents of a hard disk drive should never ever be considered the sole defining evidence of a persons innocence or guilt for any crime because only the most competent computer security experts are capable of keeping a computer secure and safe when connected to the internet and they must make continued efforts to keep it that way. So the law and the courts are turning a blind eye to the reality of the situation.
How many computer geeks out there actually believe that the typical computer using noob should be held legally liable for the activity of their computer, so when it is used in a botnet to commit credit card fraud should that family spend the next five years in jail for the crime they have committed for which they must now prove innocence. You can't even claim that there was no evidence of a virus, as the operating system warranty itself states that they may exist (benefit of the doubt) and of course a smart criminal will clean up any evidence that leads to them after using someone else's device in a major crime.
So the police hook up a device based upon using a operating system that does not warrant that it is free of viruses, to a suspects PC, and claim that the device is now free of viruses when the manufacturer directly refutes that claim, so the police will try to claim they did not infect the suspects machine and put the illegal content on that computer. A a very minimum I would hope they use publicly audited software, open source and not closed source proprietary software that the manufacturer believes already contains viruses as per their warranty and that includes the whole and complete evidence chain.
Taxing an activity implies that you retain possession of the proceeds of that activity. So download a track, they report it and require that you erase it, you no longer have it and are thus you no longer pay tax on it. Sales tax is based upon the sale of an item, not it's perceived value or the method by which you obtained it. Take for example a wedding video. What would be the defined value of the recording to the families involved, thousands of dollars, so what sales tax should people pay who receive a copy of that video? So what tax should the bride and groom collect from people who receive a copy?
Bear in mind that the RIAA et al wanted hardware that would break all recordings that contained copyrighted content, so wedding videos that were recorded while copyrights content was playing in the background where to be unplayable until every person who viewed the video paid a copyright licence fee to view that video into perpetuity and, of course now the required sales tax, so christenings, birthdays, anniversaries all are technically required to pay tens of thousands of dollars in copyright fees and now sales tax.
The buyer never directly pays sales tax, the seller is required by law to add the value of sales tax to the sale price of the product, collect that sales tax and pay it too the government, so it is the seller who is charged with tax evasion, because regardless of the sales price of the product and percentage of that total price paid by the buyer must be paid by the seller to pay the legislated value of sales.
Hmm, so the RIAAs buddies are subject to legal penalties for failing to collect and pay the required sales on all content viewed by civil, not criminal law infringing means, hmm, sounds like a good way to get the government more money and to eliminate the pigopolists, so win win. Of course throwing all those people in jail for not paying tax on their various highly valued family videos might be a bit extreme;).
A little be better would be do donate the page to charity. So first up a digital answering machine for when you are not digitally there, with what ever information you are willing to put up about yourself and your household, generally fairly minimal. Beyond that, issues, so what ever issues you wish to promote or link to, so you like wikipedia, a nice graphical link to wikipedia, you like the red cross then a neat graphical link to the red cross site etc. The more links to the more socially worthwhile web sites the better their public exposure.
You could also drop in a little, leave a message slot ie. people you know drop by your digital home or even you actual home, they can leave a little vid mail message.
The reality is a high capacity, long life and low cost batteries will have a major change across the whole of society, from the obvious reduction in pollution of urban environment with all electric transport (the electricity could be generated hundreds of kilometres away from high population urban centres) an extreme improvement in human health, the making of intermittent alternate energy resources far more viable by storing between 20 to 48 hours of average energy needs at the point of use the home, 24 hour batteries for computers all portable all of the time and, much more effectively mobilising and empowering the disabled as in the energy required for bionic limbs.
So in reality better batteries are one of the most important current goals in human society upon a global basis and, should be a real focus of government and should be done upon an open patent basis to prevent the economic losses that would be felt through out the whole of human society by paying for inflated patent costs and delaying the application of what is vital technology.
Of course the catch with using triangular shaped keys on a touch screen, is the dead space between keys is now far greater then the live space for the keys. So technically while you are far less likely to hit the wrong key you are also far more likely to hit dead space. So tapping the screen twice as often to get the same key strokes versus the occasional incorrect key stroke.
I bet I can guess which will annoy the users the most, they will tend to blame themselves for pressing the wrong key and blamer the device for missing the key. He should forget apple and go with M$, M$ are always good for pulling bonehead maneuvers.
Eight years of illegal imprisonment and, so far the get to use laptops but likely not to keep them and free access to junk food, damn those must be some pretty pricey computers and some really good junk food. Just give them free access to civil suit lawyers and a couple of years to make use of them. Once they are millionaires there will be plenty of countries who want to take them;).
Of course if you had any dinosaurs left you could check to see whether major arteries were enclosed in musculature which assisted pumping the blood. Of course this evolutionary trait would be restricted only to major sauropods due to the inherent energy waste where it is not required and then perhaps only in the neck.
Side issue is if the judge rules against the evidence, the judge immediately implies that criminal charges should be brought against media sentry for illegally gaining that evidence and the RIAA for conspiring with media sentry in those criminal endeavours.
No FPS shooter is an island. They must compete for customer $ and customer time (time is a critical issue). So Crysis short and a bit boring with some real logic breaks. Pretty but the gameplay isn't as good as say, STALKER, Call of Duty, Half Life 2 or even Far Cry to name just a few games.
So reality versus the reviews, just check the number of public multi-player servers and the number of people playing.
If they want to check the email ask them for the user name and password and read it out to them, if they don't trust you with that why would you trust them with your PC.
If you are fussy about bad files on strange usb drives get them to wait while you scan the usb with anti virus software, they will likely give up before it has finished, claim it is auto configured that way.
The other one of course is simply make busy with your PC and claim that unfortunately you don't have the time.
Turn off all auto play features on the USB drive, plug in the USB drive and when they don't see anything come up, like typical end users expect, claim it temporarily isn't working, bugger.
Checking web sites, only turn on wireless access when you want to use it the rest of time, eep no access, bugger.
Of course the catch all on notebooks, sorry battery is way down wish I could help but, by the time we get to a power point you could most probably use a computer from one of the labs or library.
Art types can be very manipulative implying that if you do not serve them you create negative connotations in the supposed relationship, so when they ask you for a favour, have some favours you need in reserve and, request that favour first, should they refuse, discus the reason for their refusal of your request and imply they are fostering a negative relationship, continue to discuss until they give up and go away.
Well the reality is, it is not about what they are planning to charge it is about economically excluding other content distribution companies from potential customers and establishing a content distribution monopoly.
This is forcing a legislative stance, where bandwidth providers will only be allowed to supply bandwidth and absolutely nothing else, otherwise the will always attempt to restrict use of that bandwidth so as to increase profits well beyond reasonable terms for cost of provision of that bandwidth to arbitrary content valuations, invented access restrictions and claiming access to their customers as a profit centre whilst hiding constraints and disruptions of their customers services from those customers.
The same laws that applied to controlling telephony or even public roads have to be applied to the internet to ensure what has become a vital public service remains so.
The behaviour exists because we have become convinced that it will bring happiness. Of course it does not actually bring happiness but only substitutes for a period of time because we have been convinced it 'should', up until it the idea collapses and people either successfully mature and leave it behind or it leads too inevitably psychological collapse and various psychological illnesses.
What has happened is the psychologically deviant, psychopaths and sociopath have gained positions of power and used mass media and psychological manipulation aka modern marketing to make their aberrant behaviour not only socially acceptable but desirable. So a gross distortion of acceptable behaviour an extension of the child like behaviour of selfishness and everything is mine attitude ie. a failure to mature into responsible caring and sharing adults, a basic element of a human society rather than a random distribution of self serving animals, dog eat dog or more accurately lizard eat lizard as dogs do actually maintain caring and sharing social groups.
The strangest thing about the Government of China's censorship over the last twenty years, in remained in place and even tightened up as the government transitioned from a communist country to a corporate fascist country. So a country that switched from blind political ideology and the unquestioning worship and obedience of those in power to blind greed and the unquestioning worship and obedience of those in power.
So in the last twenty years the 'currency' of power has changed but they have remained locked in the absence of freedom and democracy, for the majority of course. The minority who run things are still driven by greed, lust for power and bloated destructive ego's, a rogue government by any ones description.
So you have censorship occurring in western mass media where no change is highlighted in the political system of China because it suits the greed of those western corporations who participate in the ruthless exploitation of the majority of Chinese people and the long term destruction of China's ecosystem through pollution. So 'communist' propaganda has been gone for some time to be replaced by the more slick slime of modern corporate PR.
Of course the only software missing in that list is Linux and it's central role in the birth and continuing growth of open source software. Hard to figure out what you would drop from the list to give it space. Obviously it has far greater influence than a minesweeper honourable mention but, then again you don't have an email client or email server on the list.
So where is multitasking, multiuser, etc. whilst in the background and not 'seen' by users it forms the basis of all shared computer activities.
The reality is more likely laziness and ego, of believing they are above the law. They just couldn't be bothered doing the appropriate paper work and now as a result are spending tens of thousands of dollars repairing no longer secret cables, which have now been identified as bring emphatically secret by the cables being hidden and subject to high risk of being accidentally dug up. Of course as a contractor you could sue the government for any delays caused by the government delaying access while they repair the undeclared cable.
Of course future fact might be a lot stranger than future fiction. Aren't we due for our next 20,000 year ice age, so a future with decidedly more icy overtones. Struggling for control of strained resources, adapting to civilisation changing climate change, conflict over changing zones of habitability and the future direction of greed and selfish venality.
Can capitalism and ruthless exploitation survive or is it ultimately self destructive upon an extinction basis, where technology deployed to feed the ego of the minority at the expense of the majority ends up extinguishing both. Can humanity create more socially conscious technology distributed upon a basis of need rather than greed and balance out it's use of finite resources where those who consume it beyond any reasonable or even sane measure are reviled rather than celebrated.
I would hope that future forecasts would focus upon a cleaner and healthier management of our civilisation, of putting the increases in human productivity to better use than glorying the excesses of the rich and greedy, perhaps a society that makes using of increasing rather than decreasing leisure time to enhance knowledge and understanding across not only via the internet but also by direct qualitative education ie. learning as a desirable and popular leisure activity, a step back from societies that consider education to be restricted and privileged resource than a fundamental part of being a fully functioning citizen.
Do you know what is most interesting about why it is so complex to program fro windows. It is not by accident or by incompetence, it is doe on purpose so that you will buy M$'s proprietary tools, you will pay M$ to check your program across versions and you will also pay M$ for licence fees for access to various DLLs to reduce your programming load and to be able to properly access hidden and proprietary interfaces. So windows complex and obfuscated by design and with intent to promote higher profitability.
As for the complexity of Linux versions to choose from, developers simply pick what they feel is the most popular version and focus their development efforts on that version. So release that one first and if demand warrants it, release other versions latter or simply provide sufficient access for your program so that it can be adapted for other versions by those people that support other versions.
Primary rational for the starter edition is the price of the underlying hardware. It is a really hard push to sell basic software that exceeds the price of the hardware, it really does not make any sense at all. So starter office suite, starter OS, starter media suite, starter graphics etc etc. or full featured free open source software. So it ain't third world piracy it is first world common sense and it really makes no sense at all that basic software should exceed the cost of the hardware by a factor of three or more.
Especially when the netbook real forte is as a second PC, doubling up on the cost of those licences is a real struggle and really costly.
Hmm, interesting but I bet you can edit those downloaded pages to make them look like whatever you wanted them to look like, so no one will really accept them either. What is needed is a specific agency which will record and display all public notices, perhaps even with an archived hardcopy, some thing like www.publicnotices.gov.* Something that was fully search able and, with email subscriptions for personally relevant notifications.
Putting it up on local website doesn't really count as publishing it, as it is not really 'published' until an end user pulls it down, putting it up upon an independent web site ie. publishing it, really does need to occur and that publishing web site really should be able to demonstrate long term record keeping, independence and notice authentication and verification.
Whilst you might argue that it is more complex to change software you are really going to struggle to defend the no bid part of service and support. Clearly when service and support contracts, often full of holes for extra charges are handed out with no public review or bidding process, some soft corruption is occurring in the tendering process.
You know the stuff, exclusive meetings between the sales team and public officials, often off site at select restaurants, many free samples of software sometimes with hardware, job shuffles from public to private and back again. This stuff really goes beyond incompetence in the purchasing team or even a total lackadaisical attitude towards IT infrastructure development within an agency, it really shows an intent to circumvent the system. So in this case is M$ likely to be dirty, most probably and obviously the cosy relationship needs to be broken up, not so much by personalizing M$ but definitely where public servants have broken the rules on multi million dollar contracts with unspecified additional costs over three years, dismissal should be considered and even criminal charges subject to a full investigation.
Well not really FUD. This was obviously a whole marketing tactic targeted at M$ silver light. Adobe wanting to create an atmosphere of goodwill and to keep M$ out made a press announcement they felt would be popular and keep their streaming products in the forefront.
Now as it turned out M$ silver light, turned out to be M$ silverfish, nobody really wants to touch it they just pretty much throw moth balls at it. So Adobe, the greedy little blighters felt they could get away with going back upon their public announcement and try to squeeze as much money out of the protocol as they can.
In this case not only do Adobe leave themselves open to a law suit for any time and effort invested by all other companies and individuals based upon that announcement, they have also created an opening for M$ to squeeze back into that market, now where was that download site for silverfish;).
Slashdot Mirror
More likely the reality is, that google is looking to make a big push for the education market. Google docs (definitely not an online version), google android, google books, google knol (not really going anywhere), gmail (a wee bit to invasive to use on children) and of course search, maps etc..
Get them when they are young and you have them for life, as long as you don't get greedy and bugger it up. So how far away will gserver (the android MCP - that's tron - not a windrone pro, trust those boobs to use choose those initials) be, the easy to use Linux based school server.
The internet is really the cheapest form of entertainment and social networks are a part of that. Cheaper even than public transport to visit and interact with friends or find new friends. Social networks are the most effective means by which people can share their problems and look for solutions and, where solutions are not forth coming at least escape from their problems for a time.
What is really happening is the activity is just spreading down the line from computer geeks and nerds to the 'er' dumbest jock strap and cheer leader and, of course everyone in between.
In troubling economic times it also is the safest form of human interaction, a digital barrier between potential victims and their attackers (as long as they 'do not' make direct personal contact) or even random acts of violence travelling to that point of social interaction. For parents it provides a safer means by which their children can interact with other children and sometimes the parents of those children.
So all in all, relatively safe, cheap and of course immediately convenient, hardly surprising that it is becoming a major form of human interaction.
Now if you are going to get down to the nitty gritty, how about reading the warranty 'er' end used licence agreement on the windows operating system. You know the bit, where it says that they do not warrant the operating system is free of viruses (illegal content) when they sell it to you. Now the law wants to make every person 100% legally responsible for all the content on a computer when the operating system supplier will emphatically not take any responsibility for the security, stability or reliability for that software when thy initially supply it to the consumer.
As it stands now, just the contents of a hard disk drive should never ever be considered the sole defining evidence of a persons innocence or guilt for any crime because only the most competent computer security experts are capable of keeping a computer secure and safe when connected to the internet and they must make continued efforts to keep it that way. So the law and the courts are turning a blind eye to the reality of the situation.
How many computer geeks out there actually believe that the typical computer using noob should be held legally liable for the activity of their computer, so when it is used in a botnet to commit credit card fraud should that family spend the next five years in jail for the crime they have committed for which they must now prove innocence. You can't even claim that there was no evidence of a virus, as the operating system warranty itself states that they may exist (benefit of the doubt) and of course a smart criminal will clean up any evidence that leads to them after using someone else's device in a major crime.
So the police hook up a device based upon using a operating system that does not warrant that it is free of viruses, to a suspects PC, and claim that the device is now free of viruses when the manufacturer directly refutes that claim, so the police will try to claim they did not infect the suspects machine and put the illegal content on that computer. A a very minimum I would hope they use publicly audited software, open source and not closed source proprietary software that the manufacturer believes already contains viruses as per their warranty and that includes the whole and complete evidence chain.
Taxing an activity implies that you retain possession of the proceeds of that activity. So download a track, they report it and require that you erase it, you no longer have it and are thus you no longer pay tax on it. Sales tax is based upon the sale of an item, not it's perceived value or the method by which you obtained it. Take for example a wedding video. What would be the defined value of the recording to the families involved, thousands of dollars, so what sales tax should people pay who receive a copy of that video? So what tax should the bride and groom collect from people who receive a copy?
Bear in mind that the RIAA et al wanted hardware that would break all recordings that contained copyrighted content, so wedding videos that were recorded while copyrights content was playing in the background where to be unplayable until every person who viewed the video paid a copyright licence fee to view that video into perpetuity and, of course now the required sales tax, so christenings, birthdays, anniversaries all are technically required to pay tens of thousands of dollars in copyright fees and now sales tax.
The buyer never directly pays sales tax, the seller is required by law to add the value of sales tax to the sale price of the product, collect that sales tax and pay it too the government, so it is the seller who is charged with tax evasion, because regardless of the sales price of the product and percentage of that total price paid by the buyer must be paid by the seller to pay the legislated value of sales.
Hmm, so the RIAAs buddies are subject to legal penalties for failing to collect and pay the required sales on all content viewed by civil, not criminal law infringing means, hmm, sounds like a good way to get the government more money and to eliminate the pigopolists, so win win. Of course throwing all those people in jail for not paying tax on their various highly valued family videos might be a bit extreme ;).
A little be better would be do donate the page to charity. So first up a digital answering machine for when you are not digitally there, with what ever information you are willing to put up about yourself and your household, generally fairly minimal. Beyond that, issues, so what ever issues you wish to promote or link to, so you like wikipedia, a nice graphical link to wikipedia, you like the red cross then a neat graphical link to the red cross site etc. The more links to the more socially worthwhile web sites the better their public exposure.
You could also drop in a little, leave a message slot ie. people you know drop by your digital home or even you actual home, they can leave a little vid mail message.
The reality is a high capacity, long life and low cost batteries will have a major change across the whole of society, from the obvious reduction in pollution of urban environment with all electric transport (the electricity could be generated hundreds of kilometres away from high population urban centres) an extreme improvement in human health, the making of intermittent alternate energy resources far more viable by storing between 20 to 48 hours of average energy needs at the point of use the home, 24 hour batteries for computers all portable all of the time and, much more effectively mobilising and empowering the disabled as in the energy required for bionic limbs.
So in reality better batteries are one of the most important current goals in human society upon a global basis and, should be a real focus of government and should be done upon an open patent basis to prevent the economic losses that would be felt through out the whole of human society by paying for inflated patent costs and delaying the application of what is vital technology.
Heh, Heh, of course bionic eyes are worthless without high capacity batteries, hmm ;).
Of course the catch with using triangular shaped keys on a touch screen, is the dead space between keys is now far greater then the live space for the keys. So technically while you are far less likely to hit the wrong key you are also far more likely to hit dead space. So tapping the screen twice as often to get the same key strokes versus the occasional incorrect key stroke.
I bet I can guess which will annoy the users the most, they will tend to blame themselves for pressing the wrong key and blamer the device for missing the key. He should forget apple and go with M$, M$ are always good for pulling bonehead maneuvers.
Eight years of illegal imprisonment and, so far the get to use laptops but likely not to keep them and free access to junk food, damn those must be some pretty pricey computers and some really good junk food. Just give them free access to civil suit lawyers and a couple of years to make use of them. Once they are millionaires there will be plenty of countries who want to take them ;).
Of course if you had any dinosaurs left you could check to see whether major arteries were enclosed in musculature which assisted pumping the blood. Of course this evolutionary trait would be restricted only to major sauropods due to the inherent energy waste where it is not required and then perhaps only in the neck.
A bionic eye might be better than a car that does better than 100mpg but would it be better than high capacity long life batteries and electric cars?
Side issue is if the judge rules against the evidence, the judge immediately implies that criminal charges should be brought against media sentry for illegally gaining that evidence and the RIAA for conspiring with media sentry in those criminal endeavours.
No FPS shooter is an island. They must compete for customer $ and customer time (time is a critical issue). So Crysis short and a bit boring with some real logic breaks. Pretty but the gameplay isn't as good as say, STALKER, Call of Duty, Half Life 2 or even Far Cry to name just a few games.
So reality versus the reviews, just check the number of public multi-player servers and the number of people playing.
You can do a bit better than that.
If they want to check the email ask them for the user name and password and read it out to them, if they don't trust you with that why would you trust them with your PC.
If you are fussy about bad files on strange usb drives get them to wait while you scan the usb with anti virus software, they will likely give up before it has finished, claim it is auto configured that way.
The other one of course is simply make busy with your PC and claim that unfortunately you don't have the time.
Turn off all auto play features on the USB drive, plug in the USB drive and when they don't see anything come up, like typical end users expect, claim it temporarily isn't working, bugger.
Checking web sites, only turn on wireless access when you want to use it the rest of time, eep no access, bugger.
Of course the catch all on notebooks, sorry battery is way down wish I could help but, by the time we get to a power point you could most probably use a computer from one of the labs or library.
Art types can be very manipulative implying that if you do not serve them you create negative connotations in the supposed relationship, so when they ask you for a favour, have some favours you need in reserve and, request that favour first, should they refuse, discus the reason for their refusal of your request and imply they are fostering a negative relationship, continue to discuss until they give up and go away.
Well the reality is, it is not about what they are planning to charge it is about economically excluding other content distribution companies from potential customers and establishing a content distribution monopoly.
This is forcing a legislative stance, where bandwidth providers will only be allowed to supply bandwidth and absolutely nothing else, otherwise the will always attempt to restrict use of that bandwidth so as to increase profits well beyond reasonable terms for cost of provision of that bandwidth to arbitrary content valuations, invented access restrictions and claiming access to their customers as a profit centre whilst hiding constraints and disruptions of their customers services from those customers.
The same laws that applied to controlling telephony or even public roads have to be applied to the internet to ensure what has become a vital public service remains so.
The behaviour exists because we have become convinced that it will bring happiness. Of course it does not actually bring happiness but only substitutes for a period of time because we have been convinced it 'should', up until it the idea collapses and people either successfully mature and leave it behind or it leads too inevitably psychological collapse and various psychological illnesses.
What has happened is the psychologically deviant, psychopaths and sociopath have gained positions of power and used mass media and psychological manipulation aka modern marketing to make their aberrant behaviour not only socially acceptable but desirable. So a gross distortion of acceptable behaviour an extension of the child like behaviour of selfishness and everything is mine attitude ie. a failure to mature into responsible caring and sharing adults, a basic element of a human society rather than a random distribution of self serving animals, dog eat dog or more accurately lizard eat lizard as dogs do actually maintain caring and sharing social groups.
The strangest thing about the Government of China's censorship over the last twenty years, in remained in place and even tightened up as the government transitioned from a communist country to a corporate fascist country. So a country that switched from blind political ideology and the unquestioning worship and obedience of those in power to blind greed and the unquestioning worship and obedience of those in power.
So in the last twenty years the 'currency' of power has changed but they have remained locked in the absence of freedom and democracy, for the majority of course. The minority who run things are still driven by greed, lust for power and bloated destructive ego's, a rogue government by any ones description.
So you have censorship occurring in western mass media where no change is highlighted in the political system of China because it suits the greed of those western corporations who participate in the ruthless exploitation of the majority of Chinese people and the long term destruction of China's ecosystem through pollution. So 'communist' propaganda has been gone for some time to be replaced by the more slick slime of modern corporate PR.
Of course the only software missing in that list is Linux and it's central role in the birth and continuing growth of open source software. Hard to figure out what you would drop from the list to give it space. Obviously it has far greater influence than a minesweeper honourable mention but, then again you don't have an email client or email server on the list.
So where is multitasking, multiuser, etc. whilst in the background and not 'seen' by users it forms the basis of all shared computer activities.
The reality is more likely laziness and ego, of believing they are above the law. They just couldn't be bothered doing the appropriate paper work and now as a result are spending tens of thousands of dollars repairing no longer secret cables, which have now been identified as bring emphatically secret by the cables being hidden and subject to high risk of being accidentally dug up. Of course as a contractor you could sue the government for any delays caused by the government delaying access while they repair the undeclared cable.
Of course future fact might be a lot stranger than future fiction. Aren't we due for our next 20,000 year ice age, so a future with decidedly more icy overtones. Struggling for control of strained resources, adapting to civilisation changing climate change, conflict over changing zones of habitability and the future direction of greed and selfish venality.
Can capitalism and ruthless exploitation survive or is it ultimately self destructive upon an extinction basis, where technology deployed to feed the ego of the minority at the expense of the majority ends up extinguishing both. Can humanity create more socially conscious technology distributed upon a basis of need rather than greed and balance out it's use of finite resources where those who consume it beyond any reasonable or even sane measure are reviled rather than celebrated.
I would hope that future forecasts would focus upon a cleaner and healthier management of our civilisation, of putting the increases in human productivity to better use than glorying the excesses of the rich and greedy, perhaps a society that makes using of increasing rather than decreasing leisure time to enhance knowledge and understanding across not only via the internet but also by direct qualitative education ie. learning as a desirable and popular leisure activity, a step back from societies that consider education to be restricted and privileged resource than a fundamental part of being a fully functioning citizen.
Do you know what is most interesting about why it is so complex to program fro windows. It is not by accident or by incompetence, it is doe on purpose so that you will buy M$'s proprietary tools, you will pay M$ to check your program across versions and you will also pay M$ for licence fees for access to various DLLs to reduce your programming load and to be able to properly access hidden and proprietary interfaces. So windows complex and obfuscated by design and with intent to promote higher profitability.
As for the complexity of Linux versions to choose from, developers simply pick what they feel is the most popular version and focus their development efforts on that version. So release that one first and if demand warrants it, release other versions latter or simply provide sufficient access for your program so that it can be adapted for other versions by those people that support other versions.
Primary rational for the starter edition is the price of the underlying hardware. It is a really hard push to sell basic software that exceeds the price of the hardware, it really does not make any sense at all. So starter office suite, starter OS, starter media suite, starter graphics etc etc. or full featured free open source software. So it ain't third world piracy it is first world common sense and it really makes no sense at all that basic software should exceed the cost of the hardware by a factor of three or more.
Especially when the netbook real forte is as a second PC, doubling up on the cost of those licences is a real struggle and really costly.
Hmm, interesting but I bet you can edit those downloaded pages to make them look like whatever you wanted them to look like, so no one will really accept them either. What is needed is a specific agency which will record and display all public notices, perhaps even with an archived hardcopy, some thing like www.publicnotices.gov.* Something that was fully search able and, with email subscriptions for personally relevant notifications.
Putting it up on local website doesn't really count as publishing it, as it is not really 'published' until an end user pulls it down, putting it up upon an independent web site ie. publishing it, really does need to occur and that publishing web site really should be able to demonstrate long term record keeping, independence and notice authentication and verification.
Whilst you might argue that it is more complex to change software you are really going to struggle to defend the no bid part of service and support. Clearly when service and support contracts, often full of holes for extra charges are handed out with no public review or bidding process, some soft corruption is occurring in the tendering process.
You know the stuff, exclusive meetings between the sales team and public officials, often off site at select restaurants, many free samples of software sometimes with hardware, job shuffles from public to private and back again. This stuff really goes beyond incompetence in the purchasing team or even a total lackadaisical attitude towards IT infrastructure development within an agency, it really shows an intent to circumvent the system. So in this case is M$ likely to be dirty, most probably and obviously the cosy relationship needs to be broken up, not so much by personalizing M$ but definitely where public servants have broken the rules on multi million dollar contracts with unspecified additional costs over three years, dismissal should be considered and even criminal charges subject to a full investigation.
Well not really FUD. This was obviously a whole marketing tactic targeted at M$ silver light. Adobe wanting to create an atmosphere of goodwill and to keep M$ out made a press announcement they felt would be popular and keep their streaming products in the forefront.
Now as it turned out M$ silver light, turned out to be M$ silverfish, nobody really wants to touch it they just pretty much throw moth balls at it. So Adobe, the greedy little blighters felt they could get away with going back upon their public announcement and try to squeeze as much money out of the protocol as they can.
In this case not only do Adobe leave themselves open to a law suit for any time and effort invested by all other companies and individuals based upon that announcement, they have also created an opening for M$ to squeeze back into that market, now where was that download site for silverfish ;).