Gees, but if you but if you block the articles you wont be able to complain about them, now how is that going to work for you? Personally the by line in the heading doesn't seem to say much at all except to provide a couple of quotes from the web page. So it would seem your complaint is with that article or perhaps the use of the word monetize.
Maybe you will be happier here http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/exec/ozzie/03-05-08MIX.mspx, talk about monetize on the brain, the word appears 12 times, PR jargon much, I personally prefer gouge as much profit out of the customer as possible, it really is far more accurate than monetize (look, monetize has been way over abused and now just comes of as really lame PR=B$).
This article of course is all about IE8 and M$ silverfish, written by M$ for M$ (I know this will also irritate you). Honestly if you don't like articles about M$ (see done it again) don't read them, or go here http://forums.microsoft.com/ for your stories.
PS as it seems you have missed it, the way people gauge the value of an thread on a forum is via the number of replies and reads, so you are promoting Kdawson threads rather than demoting them by reading those articles and posting in them.
Now if the could selectively get rid of good memories, that would be really useful. Do the same fun thing over and over again, for the very first time, cool. Watch the same sci fi series or movies for the first time over and over again, no more clichés, really cool;).
Simple comet defence, in fact I already pointed it out once as a simple satellite defence system. Simply create massive mirror arrays, say about a 1.5m by 1.5m mirror hooked up with electronics so you can accurately gauge the position of a mirror and encrypted wireless electronics to control mirror facing. Your looking at some where between $250 and $500 per mirror. Now the mirrors do even need to be in one location but can be distributed through out the country and we are not talking 2,000 or 5,000 thousands square metres, you are looking at something more like 200,000 to 500,000 square metres of mirror, serious energy output during daylight hours and as threatening impacts can be discovered with no just days but weeks, months even years notice, it gives you a considerable amount of time to vaporise the surface of that object and used the released energy to alter it's trajectory. Done upon a global basis you can achieve a few million square metres and achieve 24 hour per day course adjustment, all with minimal energy input but with massive energy output.
So now you can be a part of the , "Meteor Defence Grid" (or satellite) and buy and fit a mirror to your roof;) (and you will also be helping to cool the planet).
Of course internet sales taxes are only really balancing out lost brick and mortar taxes, so you are in some ways you avoiding local sales by making an online purchase from an inter state location and of course corporations being the engines of greed they are will have not qualms about relocating the 'er' router, to the location where the least sales tax is charged.
Really tricky problem to solve especially with foreign digital sales. The reality is states will have to surrender some of their power to the federal government, as they are the only ones who can provide a solution and, that is all of the states, something tells me that just ain't going to happen, so expect lots of noise every few years and very little action;).
I used to get weird contacts with all sorts of idiotic conditions. Best way to handle them, is to put the pressure back on them. Negotiate everything else and leave those until the final second, when the vendors are counting the money in their head and, then take out a large felt pen put a solid line through the conditions your don't like and initial each line with a pen and see if the salesman and in turn the sales manager can walk away from the sale and the commission.
Always remember that the sales staff are fighting to get every cent they can out of their 'own' company, any lost sale is personally bad for them and any future problems with the contract, months or years down track is 'somebody else's problem'. Other interesting things are, give an opportunity to their sales manager to demonstrate how much better they are at negotiating with the customer than the salesmen, even though they give you everything you want, they are still getting the sale when the salesmen failed and, of course simply call their bluff and see if they are truly willing to sue the customer in front of every other potential customer.
Every country that has established exploitative labour has never just changed as the country 'er' the minority rich and greedy developed. It has always resulted in extreme violence and in modern times armed conflict. Trade laws need to be implemented that so that a tax is placed upon goods that are produced under conditions that are illegal in the country for whom the goods are intended, you can not have free trade without fair trade.
The reality is the only way to allow conditions to improve peacefully in countries like China is to force the issue via legislation, either pay for better, less polluted and safer conditions, equal to what is mandated in your own country and the conditions under which you and your industries are forced to compete or, pay the tax equivalent.
No that is just plain wrong, don't support their lie in any way. They absolutely don't want to trade liberty for security, they want to trade 'your' liberty for 'their' control over you. Control over what you read or see, write or say, in any digital format. They have found that as a result of the internet, our voice is louder than theirs, that the majority view point now creates itself and dominates the minority view point that dominated mass media.
Want a more secure internet, simple step one no more plain modems, all modems should incorporate a hardware fire wall based upon open source software, open source so that the public can see what is going on. Step two, simply use more secure software, that tightens up on internet access and that is a simple as using a better operating system, again open source is forced as the public has a right to know what is going on in a very integral part of their digital lives, what is basically becoming an essential service, no more secrets and no more lies.
It is always a terrible idea to brand all politicians as the same. Some are simply more corrupt and more incompetent than others and hence far more destructive. Whilst they all likely share similar traits, control freaks, ego, ambition, some can retain greater control of the excesses than others. So while some might end up doing stupid and self destructive things and can't resist but dip their hand in the till or favour at least some what skilled family and friends with plum jobs, they are not complete idiots about it and show a measure of restraint.
Others of course are just completely bereft of morals and have a complete disregard for the consequences of their actions as long as they enrich and empower themselves during the process, even if they destroy everything about them, people, infrastructure, the economy, they really just don't care. The most amusing thing that crops to mind is politicians wanting to display the ten commandments, what do they want to keep fucking score and see how many they can break in one day, it should be pretty obvious by now that some of them have readily managed to break all ten in the one day.
The only defence you have against them, is fighting tooth and nail to ensure that when they get caught breaking the law that, justice finally prevails and they spend the rest of their lives in prison free of corrupt pardons and, the rule is here, the bigger they are, the harder they must fall.
Interestingly enough, spread out the stimulus package distinctly favours open source. The main reason is does, is of course the money invested and the benefits gained tend to be far more wide spread and can reach into every community. The catch with proprietary software is it ends up favouring one on two communities only. So favour and invest in Linux and other open source suites and the benefits are spread across the whole country.
Favour and invest in M$ windows et al and you end up wildly biased to one company, in one city, in one state and you are specifically excluding everyone else and not only is it costing more, a huge chunk of it ends up being wasted as profits for billionaires and that's not 5 percent or 10 percent, that's around half of it.
Of course support for an OS should last as long for the first customer who bought it as the last customer who bought. What B$, the somehow support evaporates from the day the software was first released to market, rather than from the day a person bought it. That has to be the biggest lie, cheat and theft in modern history, especially when you pay the same price, regardless of the killing off of support in an attempt to force you to buy an upgrade. Face it M$ are lying, cheating, thieves, so sue them hard, sue them often and class action them into extinction.
Really that a customer cannot make use of the time and effort and costs associated with learning an OS and must abandon that knowledge to feed the greed of a company forcing upgrades. Support ends when either they have fixed every bug in the system or governments around the world change software copyright laws, support ends so does copyright protection. Don't want to support it. Then out to the public domain it goes and people can support it themselves.
To be more accurate. The assets minus inflated executives pay and luxurious office accommodation as well as exorbitant transport requirements are far more valuable.
So high revenues hiding high debt and high level mismanagement along with questionable investment decisions come to an end during a recession regardless of product qualities or non-executive staff performance.
The real question is which company is going to take advantage of the situation and stock up on bargain basement game libraries, as well as leaned down development studios.
Dual boot 'business' machines has less to do with compatibility and likely more to do with, windows for 'public' work and Linux for private 'er' stuff;).
The reality is of course, just consider them training machines designed to fit a niche, a really big niche, in fact most of the future market, the big swap over from windows to linux.
Of course in this particular case, regardless of which package is more secure, after the Bush years, the US is still looked down upon. So reverse psychology perhaps, a US company telling the UK government what to do, will do more damage that good to the M$ cause in the current political climate.
As for the survey and report, "examined 11 of the most common Java open source packages" http://www.fortify.com/news-events/releases/2008/2008-07-21.jsp, so, a whole lot of bullshit going on there, because the techworld article kind of failed to mention that, and for a very profitable pro M$ reasons, I would guess. So it has nothing to do with Linux, Open Office etc. etc. etc. So, by the way, what exactly are the twelve most common (what does that world all of a sudden bring to mind conmen) java packages.
I think I made it clear enough, that XP would have been much closer to the performance of Linux if M$ had stuck with it and not pursued objectives that had nothing to do with the performance or usability of the operating system, they choose to abandon the development effort and, years of trial and error correction put into XP, basically throwing away that investment capital, so a very poor management choice that has nothing to do with the skill of M$ coders.
So your telling us, that the US's ability to turn the whole fucking planet into a nuclear waste land is not sufficient a deterrent that US arms manufactures need that extra few hundred billion dollars to develop space based weapons. Fucking hell, the next arms race, as countries all over the world develop larger and larger mirror arrays to reflect and focus light on 'ALL' orbiting satellites that cross their country.
One sunny day and all the sats go dark, after of course brightening up for just a few seconds. When the technology to take down satellites is so simple don't force the issue;).
The other major point of course is that at the time of use of DDT to control pests, the US was a well developed country, with high capital resource, and a very inclusive liberal minded government. So a major concentrated effort could be conducted over the whole country, it was not a third world country. This kind of solution will fail in a third world country as it will be done upon a patchy basis ensuring resistance occurs.
Lateral thinking might be the key. Cure the mosquito rather than curing people. So introduce a resistance to the parasite into the affected mosquito species. Some genetic engineering to ensure that resistance to the protozoan is a dominant trait and breeds true so that over a few generations they become the dominant form and their ability to act as a vector for transmitting the disease is eliminated. It is far 'easier' legally and morally speaking to experiment upon mosquitoes than people hence a solution is likely to be found far sooner.
P.S. Let's just drop this whole liberal ideology nonsense, it is nothing more than some whacked out political marketing scheme to isolate and silence segments of the population that disagree with them. No different to the same whacked out political marketing scheme where a bunch of conmen decide to market themselves as conservatives, when it quite obvious they are not interested in conserving anything (except of course their own power and profits) and only interested in exploiting everything and everyone. Let's leave that crap behind and focus on the issues.
Technically, windows version 7, is not a beta, it is vista under a new marketing scheme. So to claim windows version 7 as a beta is to say that vista as released to the public was only a alpha grade product and, as has been demonstrated in the past, M$ yet again used the general public as pay for the privilege product testers.
So the Linux kernel has a major advantage as it's development has not been distorted under some greedy, let's force everyone to upgrade scheme. The Linux kernel has been developed upon a much sounder incremental, test and evaluation basis, as such it is inevitable that it will out perform windows in every aspect.
So that Linux outperforms windows ain't that big a story, it is to be expected. M$ might have keep pace if they had simply continued to get the bugs out of XP and upgrade it in various areas but, greed for forced upgrade profits and future xbox style licensing schemes drove them down a destructive path (destructive as far as customer reliability, stability and performance requirements are concerned).
Windows will never go open source. For windows to go open source M$, has to compete in the service and support market and it has to compete based upon it's past reputation. Based upon M$'s track record of marketing deceits, failure to disclose product faults, supplying product with know faults add to that a clear history of treating the customer with arrogance and contempt makes it nearly impossible to compete in what is a customer orientated and controlled market segment.
It is too late for them to change the damage has been done, M$ Office will not go to Linux and Windows will not go open source. M$ knows this, which is why they were looking to shift business models for the OS from charging for it, to giving it away free but having the whole system locked up with DRM controls so you would have to pay a M$ licence fee for every bit of hardware, software and content you attempt to use with the OS, well at least, that is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that ballmer is chasing. With Vista dying and everyone seeing windows versions 7 as nothing but vista re marketed with a thick coat of makeup (kind of reminds me of that lipstick on a pig bit), that ballmer dream is turning into a nightmare.
No, the best way is to simply break it down into sensible portions.
1. Access 2. National/International Cabling 3. Regional cabling 4. Local Cabling 5. Connections 6. Back End.
Access can be quite simple defined as the conduit both major and minor put into the public streets for people to install cable and establish connections. This is where the government needs to focus it efforts, much like public roads, this conduit would provide access for commercially provided services ie. more than one company can put cable into the conduit and pay rent for the space the use and in turn charge for access to that cable. Other companies can do the connections to the cable ie. licensed local contractors. Other companies can then be involved in providing back end services.
So getting over that first hump and providing easy access is the important part. Companies can then wire up regions and compete for them as they choose, any gaps in the provision of services can be done by the government, paid for by the conduit access fees.
Federal, state and local governments are by far in the best position to provide the public space necessary for the conduit and local government already has sufficient expertise in laying pipe work (storm water systems etc.).
In this case, the legal rights of a minor has been infringed, in many ways this crosses international borders as the privacy rights of minors are protected pretty well universally. Whilst it may be very expensive for google to review every video uploaded and have a dramatic affect upon profit margins, that is no excuse to break the law. So some one else uploads it, but google makes money by selling views of it via advertising, basically google and in turn it's executives are screwed.
Any other old world hard copy publishing house would be bound by the same laws, being digital is no escape. Google are the publisher they are at fault, they made the money, now someone must pay the penalty. Easy answer is, if your going to be a google video or you tube executive make sure you charge enough to pay for the fines and/or periods of imprisonment, funnily enough that is probably already true.
Let's just put this nonsense to rest. The government is going to be only as good or bad as the amount of effort you, yes YOU, put into it. The governments failings are your failings, Bush and Cheney and their corruption of government agency after government agency is the fault of US citizens. Some people made the effort to force change (in a non-violent manner) some people resisted the effort change (in a very violent manner) and most people just went along with it. The government is not some foreign or 'alien' thing it is the people and what they want or are willing to put up with.
Gumby, what the fuck do you think punishment is, it is a rehabilitative technique used to modify behaviour, it is just been proven to be not all that effective. Carrot and the stick, what, don't tell me you have never heard of it.
In this case while Gates did make a error in judgement, that error was based upon a lack of knowledge not intent. The biggest errors was made by those people that ignored their own knowledge and experience or failed to consult sufficiently knowledgeable and qualified people, to ensure any changes made were appropriate and applied effectively. They lazily accepted what ever Gates idea was with insufficient review because he was rich and willing to pay for some of the expense.
So the failure is not so much in Gates, who simply drew some wrong conclusions based upon the information and understanding he had, the failure is most definitely in those that blindly implemented them. As I said being rich does not make you an automatic genius in all areas of society and anybody who ignores their own knowledge and experience and fawningly accepts and implements the ideas of the rich in vain attempts to curry favour are the real problem. Not someone who attempts to make and pay for improvements but lacks sufficient knowledge in that specialist area to make effective changes.
It is parasitical because it does not add anything functional to society. Farms add food, builders add homes and business premises, manufacturers add useful products, electronics facilitate greater productivity, educators provide the knowledge to continue and advance the functions of society, administrators attempt to improve productivity and avoid wasted effort, miners add raw products for other industries and, of course energy producers make those other activities far more productive.
Whilst you most definitely can say that music fulfils a psychological need in humans and provides a lot of pleasure. The reality is, this can be done far better by people coming together, you know singing around a camp fire, or be down the pub for a sing around a piano or even dancing to a live band. Sitting in a room listening to 'dead' music, trying to relive past memories, actual pleasurable activities where the music you a now listening to was just background or, as is often the reality listening to it because mass media marketing has convinced you that you must else you are, let's see, hmm, a geek or a nerd;).
Even funnier, that you a rebelling by listening to the music that attacks the society that you are a part of, after of course you have worked and, paid for what ever music they have told you to listen to, else you peer group will spurn you because they have been convinced it is appropriate;D. Sadly there is no doubt that modern mass media music publishing industry is truly parasitical in nature and the capital wasted on it would be put to far better used expended in other parts of society, hmm, like free health care.
An important lesson for you, a wealthy individual who made their money using illegal business tactics and whose company developed an admitted reputation for deceiving it's customers and who happens to have absolutely no qualifications in the area concerned should not be able to get in the position where the set government policy by the application of their wealth. In this case it takes far more than admitting your mistake and hubris to make up to the damage to to thousands of children's education not only the ones to date but also future students who will suffer until the problems introduced by by an unqualified person are corrected.
Federal oversight of education is absolutely required to ensure standards are maintained, that material taught in schools is valid and not just then opinions of unqualified local yokels. It is the height of idiocy to allow local community control of education. Consider working through from primary, to secondary top tertiary education and then through to a professional career. Imagine billy bobs country village school house handing out college degrees in medicine based up religious ideologies and backwoods superstitions. Imagine a child leaving his backwards county high school with their opinion based education attending university only to find their knowledge is completely inadequate and completely wrong headed in some areas and they fail. Imagine the damage to a child leaving a school in one state and attending a school in another state, only to be put back several grades because of the inadequacies of their education to date.
Slashdot Mirror
Gees, but if you but if you block the articles you wont be able to complain about them, now how is that going to work for you? Personally the by line in the heading doesn't seem to say much at all except to provide a couple of quotes from the web page. So it would seem your complaint is with that article or perhaps the use of the word monetize.
Maybe you will be happier here http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/exec/ozzie/03-05-08MIX.mspx, talk about monetize on the brain, the word appears 12 times, PR jargon much, I personally prefer gouge as much profit out of the customer as possible, it really is far more accurate than monetize (look, monetize has been way over abused and now just comes of as really lame PR=B$).
This article of course is all about IE8 and M$ silverfish, written by M$ for M$ (I know this will also irritate you). Honestly if you don't like articles about M$ (see done it again) don't read them, or go here http://forums.microsoft.com/ for your stories.
PS as it seems you have missed it, the way people gauge the value of an thread on a forum is via the number of replies and reads, so you are promoting Kdawson threads rather than demoting them by reading those articles and posting in them.
Now if the could selectively get rid of good memories, that would be really useful. Do the same fun thing over and over again, for the very first time, cool. Watch the same sci fi series or movies for the first time over and over again, no more clichés, really cool ;).
Simple comet defence, in fact I already pointed it out once as a simple satellite defence system. Simply create massive mirror arrays, say about a 1.5m by 1.5m mirror hooked up with electronics so you can accurately gauge the position of a mirror and encrypted wireless electronics to control mirror facing. Your looking at some where between $250 and $500 per mirror. Now the mirrors do even need to be in one location but can be distributed through out the country and we are not talking 2,000 or 5,000 thousands square metres, you are looking at something more like 200,000 to 500,000 square metres of mirror, serious energy output during daylight hours and as threatening impacts can be discovered with no just days but weeks, months even years notice, it gives you a considerable amount of time to vaporise the surface of that object and used the released energy to alter it's trajectory. Done upon a global basis you can achieve a few million square metres and achieve 24 hour per day course adjustment, all with minimal energy input but with massive energy output.
So now you can be a part of the , "Meteor Defence Grid" (or satellite) and buy and fit a mirror to your roof ;) (and you will also be helping to cool the planet).
Of course internet sales taxes are only really balancing out lost brick and mortar taxes, so you are in some ways you avoiding local sales by making an online purchase from an inter state location and of course corporations being the engines of greed they are will have not qualms about relocating the 'er' router, to the location where the least sales tax is charged.
Really tricky problem to solve especially with foreign digital sales. The reality is states will have to surrender some of their power to the federal government, as they are the only ones who can provide a solution and, that is all of the states, something tells me that just ain't going to happen, so expect lots of noise every few years and very little action ;).
I used to get weird contacts with all sorts of idiotic conditions. Best way to handle them, is to put the pressure back on them. Negotiate everything else and leave those until the final second, when the vendors are counting the money in their head and, then take out a large felt pen put a solid line through the conditions your don't like and initial each line with a pen and see if the salesman and in turn the sales manager can walk away from the sale and the commission.
Always remember that the sales staff are fighting to get every cent they can out of their 'own' company, any lost sale is personally bad for them and any future problems with the contract, months or years down track is 'somebody else's problem'. Other interesting things are, give an opportunity to their sales manager to demonstrate how much better they are at negotiating with the customer than the salesmen, even though they give you everything you want, they are still getting the sale when the salesmen failed and, of course simply call their bluff and see if they are truly willing to sue the customer in front of every other potential customer.
Every country that has established exploitative labour has never just changed as the country 'er' the minority rich and greedy developed. It has always resulted in extreme violence and in modern times armed conflict. Trade laws need to be implemented that so that a tax is placed upon goods that are produced under conditions that are illegal in the country for whom the goods are intended, you can not have free trade without fair trade.
The reality is the only way to allow conditions to improve peacefully in countries like China is to force the issue via legislation, either pay for better, less polluted and safer conditions, equal to what is mandated in your own country and the conditions under which you and your industries are forced to compete or, pay the tax equivalent.
No that is just plain wrong, don't support their lie in any way. They absolutely don't want to trade liberty for security, they want to trade 'your' liberty for 'their' control over you. Control over what you read or see, write or say, in any digital format. They have found that as a result of the internet, our voice is louder than theirs, that the majority view point now creates itself and dominates the minority view point that dominated mass media.
Want a more secure internet, simple step one no more plain modems, all modems should incorporate a hardware fire wall based upon open source software, open source so that the public can see what is going on. Step two, simply use more secure software, that tightens up on internet access and that is a simple as using a better operating system, again open source is forced as the public has a right to know what is going on in a very integral part of their digital lives, what is basically becoming an essential service, no more secrets and no more lies.
It is always a terrible idea to brand all politicians as the same. Some are simply more corrupt and more incompetent than others and hence far more destructive. Whilst they all likely share similar traits, control freaks, ego, ambition, some can retain greater control of the excesses than others. So while some might end up doing stupid and self destructive things and can't resist but dip their hand in the till or favour at least some what skilled family and friends with plum jobs, they are not complete idiots about it and show a measure of restraint.
Others of course are just completely bereft of morals and have a complete disregard for the consequences of their actions as long as they enrich and empower themselves during the process, even if they destroy everything about them, people, infrastructure, the economy, they really just don't care. The most amusing thing that crops to mind is politicians wanting to display the ten commandments, what do they want to keep fucking score and see how many they can break in one day, it should be pretty obvious by now that some of them have readily managed to break all ten in the one day.
The only defence you have against them, is fighting tooth and nail to ensure that when they get caught breaking the law that, justice finally prevails and they spend the rest of their lives in prison free of corrupt pardons and, the rule is here, the bigger they are, the harder they must fall.
Interestingly enough, spread out the stimulus package distinctly favours open source. The main reason is does, is of course the money invested and the benefits gained tend to be far more wide spread and can reach into every community. The catch with proprietary software is it ends up favouring one on two communities only. So favour and invest in Linux and other open source suites and the benefits are spread across the whole country.
Favour and invest in M$ windows et al and you end up wildly biased to one company, in one city, in one state and you are specifically excluding everyone else and not only is it costing more, a huge chunk of it ends up being wasted as profits for billionaires and that's not 5 percent or 10 percent, that's around half of it.
Of course support for an OS should last as long for the first customer who bought it as the last customer who bought. What B$, the somehow support evaporates from the day the software was first released to market, rather than from the day a person bought it. That has to be the biggest lie, cheat and theft in modern history, especially when you pay the same price, regardless of the killing off of support in an attempt to force you to buy an upgrade. Face it M$ are lying, cheating, thieves, so sue them hard, sue them often and class action them into extinction.
Really that a customer cannot make use of the time and effort and costs associated with learning an OS and must abandon that knowledge to feed the greed of a company forcing upgrades. Support ends when either they have fixed every bug in the system or governments around the world change software copyright laws, support ends so does copyright protection. Don't want to support it. Then out to the public domain it goes and people can support it themselves.
To be more accurate. The assets minus inflated executives pay and luxurious office accommodation as well as exorbitant transport requirements are far more valuable.
So high revenues hiding high debt and high level mismanagement along with questionable investment decisions come to an end during a recession regardless of product qualities or non-executive staff performance.
The real question is which company is going to take advantage of the situation and stock up on bargain basement game libraries, as well as leaned down development studios.
Dual boot 'business' machines has less to do with compatibility and likely more to do with, windows for 'public' work and Linux for private 'er' stuff ;).
The reality is of course, just consider them training machines designed to fit a niche, a really big niche, in fact most of the future market, the big swap over from windows to linux.
Of course in this particular case, regardless of which package is more secure, after the Bush years, the US is still looked down upon. So reverse psychology perhaps, a US company telling the UK government what to do, will do more damage that good to the M$ cause in the current political climate.
As for the survey and report, "examined 11 of the most common Java open source packages" http://www.fortify.com/news-events/releases/2008/2008-07-21.jsp, so, a whole lot of bullshit going on there, because the techworld article kind of failed to mention that, and for a very profitable pro M$ reasons, I would guess. So it has nothing to do with Linux, Open Office etc. etc. etc. So, by the way, what exactly are the twelve most common (what does that world all of a sudden bring to mind conmen) java packages.
I think I made it clear enough, that XP would have been much closer to the performance of Linux if M$ had stuck with it and not pursued objectives that had nothing to do with the performance or usability of the operating system, they choose to abandon the development effort and, years of trial and error correction put into XP, basically throwing away that investment capital, so a very poor management choice that has nothing to do with the skill of M$ coders.
So your telling us, that the US's ability to turn the whole fucking planet into a nuclear waste land is not sufficient a deterrent that US arms manufactures need that extra few hundred billion dollars to develop space based weapons. Fucking hell, the next arms race, as countries all over the world develop larger and larger mirror arrays to reflect and focus light on 'ALL' orbiting satellites that cross their country.
One sunny day and all the sats go dark, after of course brightening up for just a few seconds. When the technology to take down satellites is so simple don't force the issue ;).
The other major point of course is that at the time of use of DDT to control pests, the US was a well developed country, with high capital resource, and a very inclusive liberal minded government. So a major concentrated effort could be conducted over the whole country, it was not a third world country. This kind of solution will fail in a third world country as it will be done upon a patchy basis ensuring resistance occurs.
Lateral thinking might be the key. Cure the mosquito rather than curing people. So introduce a resistance to the parasite into the affected mosquito species. Some genetic engineering to ensure that resistance to the protozoan is a dominant trait and breeds true so that over a few generations they become the dominant form and their ability to act as a vector for transmitting the disease is eliminated. It is far 'easier' legally and morally speaking to experiment upon mosquitoes than people hence a solution is likely to be found far sooner.
P.S. Let's just drop this whole liberal ideology nonsense, it is nothing more than some whacked out political marketing scheme to isolate and silence segments of the population that disagree with them. No different to the same whacked out political marketing scheme where a bunch of conmen decide to market themselves as conservatives, when it quite obvious they are not interested in conserving anything (except of course their own power and profits) and only interested in exploiting everything and everyone. Let's leave that crap behind and focus on the issues.
Technically, windows version 7, is not a beta, it is vista under a new marketing scheme. So to claim windows version 7 as a beta is to say that vista as released to the public was only a alpha grade product and, as has been demonstrated in the past, M$ yet again used the general public as pay for the privilege product testers.
So the Linux kernel has a major advantage as it's development has not been distorted under some greedy, let's force everyone to upgrade scheme. The Linux kernel has been developed upon a much sounder incremental, test and evaluation basis, as such it is inevitable that it will out perform windows in every aspect.
So that Linux outperforms windows ain't that big a story, it is to be expected. M$ might have keep pace if they had simply continued to get the bugs out of XP and upgrade it in various areas but, greed for forced upgrade profits and future xbox style licensing schemes drove them down a destructive path (destructive as far as customer reliability, stability and performance requirements are concerned).
Windows will never go open source. For windows to go open source M$, has to compete in the service and support market and it has to compete based upon it's past reputation. Based upon M$'s track record of marketing deceits, failure to disclose product faults, supplying product with know faults add to that a clear history of treating the customer with arrogance and contempt makes it nearly impossible to compete in what is a customer orientated and controlled market segment.
It is too late for them to change the damage has been done, M$ Office will not go to Linux and Windows will not go open source. M$ knows this, which is why they were looking to shift business models for the OS from charging for it, to giving it away free but having the whole system locked up with DRM controls so you would have to pay a M$ licence fee for every bit of hardware, software and content you attempt to use with the OS, well at least, that is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that ballmer is chasing. With Vista dying and everyone seeing windows versions 7 as nothing but vista re marketed with a thick coat of makeup (kind of reminds me of that lipstick on a pig bit), that ballmer dream is turning into a nightmare.
No, the best way is to simply break it down into sensible portions.
1. Access
2. National/International Cabling
3. Regional cabling
4. Local Cabling
5. Connections
6. Back End.
Access can be quite simple defined as the conduit both major and minor put into the public streets for people to install cable and establish connections. This is where the government needs to focus it efforts, much like public roads, this conduit would provide access for commercially provided services ie. more than one company can put cable into the conduit and pay rent for the space the use and in turn charge for access to that cable. Other companies can do the connections to the cable ie. licensed local contractors. Other companies can then be involved in providing back end services.
So getting over that first hump and providing easy access is the important part. Companies can then wire up regions and compete for them as they choose, any gaps in the provision of services can be done by the government, paid for by the conduit access fees.
Federal, state and local governments are by far in the best position to provide the public space necessary for the conduit and local government already has sufficient expertise in laying pipe work (storm water systems etc.).
In this case, the legal rights of a minor has been infringed, in many ways this crosses international borders as the privacy rights of minors are protected pretty well universally. Whilst it may be very expensive for google to review every video uploaded and have a dramatic affect upon profit margins, that is no excuse to break the law. So some one else uploads it, but google makes money by selling views of it via advertising, basically google and in turn it's executives are screwed.
Any other old world hard copy publishing house would be bound by the same laws, being digital is no escape. Google are the publisher they are at fault, they made the money, now someone must pay the penalty. Easy answer is, if your going to be a google video or you tube executive make sure you charge enough to pay for the fines and/or periods of imprisonment, funnily enough that is probably already true.
Let's just put this nonsense to rest. The government is going to be only as good or bad as the amount of effort you, yes YOU, put into it. The governments failings are your failings, Bush and Cheney and their corruption of government agency after government agency is the fault of US citizens. Some people made the effort to force change (in a non-violent manner) some people resisted the effort change (in a very violent manner) and most people just went along with it. The government is not some foreign or 'alien' thing it is the people and what they want or are willing to put up with.
Gumby, what the fuck do you think punishment is, it is a rehabilitative technique used to modify behaviour, it is just been proven to be not all that effective. Carrot and the stick, what, don't tell me you have never heard of it.
In this case while Gates did make a error in judgement, that error was based upon a lack of knowledge not intent. The biggest errors was made by those people that ignored their own knowledge and experience or failed to consult sufficiently knowledgeable and qualified people, to ensure any changes made were appropriate and applied effectively. They lazily accepted what ever Gates idea was with insufficient review because he was rich and willing to pay for some of the expense.
So the failure is not so much in Gates, who simply drew some wrong conclusions based upon the information and understanding he had, the failure is most definitely in those that blindly implemented them. As I said being rich does not make you an automatic genius in all areas of society and anybody who ignores their own knowledge and experience and fawningly accepts and implements the ideas of the rich in vain attempts to curry favour are the real problem. Not someone who attempts to make and pay for improvements but lacks sufficient knowledge in that specialist area to make effective changes.
It is parasitical because it does not add anything functional to society. Farms add food, builders add homes and business premises, manufacturers add useful products, electronics facilitate greater productivity, educators provide the knowledge to continue and advance the functions of society, administrators attempt to improve productivity and avoid wasted effort, miners add raw products for other industries and, of course energy producers make those other activities far more productive.
Whilst you most definitely can say that music fulfils a psychological need in humans and provides a lot of pleasure. The reality is, this can be done far better by people coming together, you know singing around a camp fire, or be down the pub for a sing around a piano or even dancing to a live band. Sitting in a room listening to 'dead' music, trying to relive past memories, actual pleasurable activities where the music you a now listening to was just background or, as is often the reality listening to it because mass media marketing has convinced you that you must else you are, let's see, hmm, a geek or a nerd ;).
Even funnier, that you a rebelling by listening to the music that attacks the society that you are a part of, after of course you have worked and, paid for what ever music they have told you to listen to, else you peer group will spurn you because they have been convinced it is appropriate ;D. Sadly there is no doubt that modern mass media music publishing industry is truly parasitical in nature and the capital wasted on it would be put to far better used expended in other parts of society, hmm, like free health care.
An important lesson for you, a wealthy individual who made their money using illegal business tactics and whose company developed an admitted reputation for deceiving it's customers and who happens to have absolutely no qualifications in the area concerned should not be able to get in the position where the set government policy by the application of their wealth. In this case it takes far more than admitting your mistake and hubris to make up to the damage to to thousands of children's education not only the ones to date but also future students who will suffer until the problems introduced by by an unqualified person are corrected.
Federal oversight of education is absolutely required to ensure standards are maintained, that material taught in schools is valid and not just then opinions of unqualified local yokels. It is the height of idiocy to allow local community control of education. Consider working through from primary, to secondary top tertiary education and then through to a professional career. Imagine billy bobs country village school house handing out college degrees in medicine based up religious ideologies and backwoods superstitions. Imagine a child leaving his backwards county high school with their opinion based education attending university only to find their knowledge is completely inadequate and completely wrong headed in some areas and they fail. Imagine the damage to a child leaving a school in one state and attending a school in another state, only to be put back several grades because of the inadequacies of their education to date.