It was more that 'building' PC,s is was fabrication of the parts that constituted the PC. Dell is largely a middle man, contracting the hardware out to ODM, other device manufacturers, and all Dell do is some final optioning. Even service and support is contracted out. So it really is the journalist demonstrating their ignorance and implying that the Soviet President lacks knowledge about Dells business segment. The reality is you don't really want middle men sucking up resources when you are trying to develop your own industries.
So it really wasn't appropriate for Dell to publicly offer charity to the president of Russia at that particular forum, culturally speaking huge mistake and he got his head bitten off for doing it. Personally I think Putin would likely have taken it in the way a US corporate executive normally presents it to a bought and paid for US politician and, found it to be particularly unpalatable. It all comes off as a condescending arrogant journalist, sticking up for a condescending arrogant corporate executive and just another non-conservative dig at Russia and their political leaders for being 'refusniks' and not towing the neocon line. Oh my god, a foreign political leader publicly told a major US corporate executive where to shove it when being talked down to.
So to solve the problem you charge by the hour rather than by the month. People will not pay for bots to play the game when it is costing them access time, problem solved.
Of course people are not going to be happy paying by the hour when they end up spending many hours in fact most of the time being mindless worker drones, pretty much paying for the privilege of being a factory production line worker, hmm, it is a tricky problem isn't it;D.
You know, sometimes it is really surprising what those PR=B$ marketing people are able to achieve and sell.
Ahh, Finish person, perhaps you don't understand how low the US minimum wage is, or how US food stamps (look it up, believe me, it will shock you) will not pay for that digital tuner. In harsh US economic times it becomes a choice between many cheap junk food meals and a digital TV tuner, the poor have to choose the junk food.
This means that the digital tuners can not be bought and that mass media marketing and corporations will lose their lock on the minds of the poor and suffering and the poor, heaven forbid, will start thinking for themselves, now you can't have that happen, not even for a week or so, it would be a bloody, literally speaking, disaster.
As a reader, I have found that there is so much active content to read online, that reading science fiction no longer seems so fulfilling. Sure it used to be a great escape, an enjoyable way to stimulate the mind and stretch the imagination, I have got shelves full of the stuff that demonstrate how much I really did enjoy it and still do, it's just that I haven't added to in for years. It is just that the net is so much more stimulating.
In the choice between passively taking in the input from one mind to stimulate and keep active your own mind versus participating in the interaction between millions of minds across thousands of subjects which is far more, hmm, tasty and succulent, so many flavours, colours and textures. Guess which choice a lot of geeks/nerds are tending to make.
It is to cut off the downward spiral. As people buy less, companies need to produce less hence they lay off unneeded staff, those now out of work staff of course substantially cut back on their spending, which means that companies selling to them need to produce less and naturally enough sack more staff etc. Countries with a substantive and effective social welfare have a automatic brake upon that downward spiral to slow it down and keep the system ticking over until it recovers. With out a social welfare net, you either go the downward spiral, with major increases in crime and, destructive civil unrest or indulge in corporate welfare which turns out to be far more expensive, as it doesn't just have to supply the basic essentials upon a reasonable basis but actually has to still feed the greed and ego of corporate executives.
So keeping a greater than $10,000,000.00 salary of a CEO propped up plus all the other associated costs of making possible, works out to be a whole lot of minimum wage salaries $6.55 per hour, or $13,624 per year, 734 of them and that is as an absolute minimum. Now add in all those other corporate executives all sucking up way more than the minimum wage and that pays for all the social welfare (the fundamental goals of which is to reduce crime and suffering and to help stabilise an economy) you will ever need.
So social welfare is far cheaper than corporate welfare but there are a whole bunch of greedy corporate executives and thousands of lobbyists who will do everything they can top keep the system that strangely enough profits them personally at everybody else's expense, locked in place.
Technically it is much harder for windows users to complain ie. was it the hardware, was it a driver, was it the application you were using, was it some background dll, was it the power supply. It can be really hard to tell, especially when the company that supplies the OS routinely lies about it's failures and won't disclose all the discovered and unpatched faults in it's software.
When using open source software the ability to track down the fault and chastise the offender is a whole lot easier, so it happens far more often.
Funnily enough, not to say that M$ would lie, cheat and steal clock cycles in it's testing but, every OS I have ever used can be made to run faster simply by tweaking the default configuration. So let's try this on, a default windows XP install, is thirty percent faster than vista warmed over under the new marketing guise of windows 7 (likely optimised configuration), which in turn is only slightly faster than a default install of vista.
Not to be cynical but I'm betting that a default install of windows marketing version 7 is no faster than a default install vista. So the vista marketing campaign along with it's DRM continues just in another guise, that the claims and marketing for windows version 7 are practically identical to the claims and marketing for vista is 'er' purely accidental and M$ really truly does not believe that the general public is that stupid.
The reality is the business model is dead. The publisher is no longer required to publish the music, the creators of the music can simply do it themselves. The time period in history for charging for 'dead' music rather than live music is over, get over it already. It was basically a parasitical business segment in society and basically did nothing to add to the economy it just basically lived off it.
So when it is gone, it means that money spent upon that parasitical part of the economy will simply be spent in other often more substantial, productive and, as it turns out less destructive areas of the economy. So distributed music media is going the direction of the vinyl record. The only thing the music publishing industry ever really provided was a massive public relations equals bull shit mass marketing engine of greed, oh yeah and how could I forget, 'sex, drugs and rock and roll'.
So tell me, why is it that supposedly conservative politicians and politically motivated religious groups around the world want to prop up that particular industry. I mean, is there some sort of serious mental disconnect between them and that whole 'sex, drugs and rock and roll' thing, the industry is famed for it and even goes out of it's way to promote, sell it and, in reality specifically targets the most vulnerable group in society with that message, children.
I really think people should take a deep breath and look at historical precedent. E-mail or electronic mail, to use it full term, at work is the same as sending an old written letter, using company stationary, with a company letterhead in a company marked envelope and using a company stamp. Originally employees by far the majority of employees did not fold, envelope stuff, stamp lick and post the correspondence, mots of them didn't even type the message.
All letters from a company where reviewed by other staff members prior to being sent, as such, the same really applies to modern email. It just needs to be made clear to the staff upon a continual basis that all company email will be reviewed to ensure to complies with company policy as the company is responsible for all communications leaving that company.
As for staff members, with mobile cellular internet access, carrying in a net book for conducting private communications is the go, in your lunch break of course;). Now that, of course the company can not touch. To be clear, monitoring of company communications oddly enough has to be restricted to defined company premises, otherwise arse hole corporate executives will want to pay for their employees domestic phone service so that the corporation can claim it as a company asset and monitor the employees 24/7.
As for threatening to leave, that is yet another definitive demonstration of why the size of corporations should be limited by law, every effort should be made to ensure that an single corporation going bankrupt or leaving the country only has a very limited impact on the economy. So beyond a certain size, let the share holders foot the bill rather than the general public for a corruptly run billion dollar corporation.
What is the more correct conclusion, is when the system is failing but has potential, you review and alter the system so as to reduce the failure potential. Privatised for profit prisons will always be a failure at rehabilitation, as rehabilitation costs money and in reality eliminates the future profit potential of current inmates (no repeat offenders).
Corporations are simple amoral engines of greed, their priority is to charge as much as possible while spending the least amount possible, hence locking up convicted inmates in the cheapest way possible that they are legally able to get away with. So low cost guards basically low IQ thugs in uniform who often derive perverted sexual fulfilment from abusing people, rather then properly trained correctional (note the term) services officers, which of course would 'cost' a corporation two to three times as much, where as of course repeat offenders only cost the public ten to one hundred times that in damages, pain and suffering, so corporate profits first the publics interest last and keep those returning profits from repeat offenders coming in.
The reality is that a prison should in fact be the most law abiding place in society, otherwise the supervision and rehabilitation is demonstrated to be a total failure. Rather than blocking transmissions that should be tracking them to find the contraband then pursuing the trail of evidence to apprehend all those involved and of course turn the smuggling prison guard into an inmate and demonstrate the effectiveness of law enforcing institution and it's staff. Jamming the signals, the cheap solution which is basically giving up on enforcing law within in prison.
I prefer silverfish, mainly because of M$ being such a marketing driven company it is bound to niggle at them and I find the thought, well, to be blunt quite humorous. Also I feel that my very mild poke at the M$ marketing team is still far less than the years of M$ abuse at the FOSS movement ie. a cancer, terrorists use it, hackers prefer it et al, and, those where not from some random poster's on a forum (that has funny mods) but from the senior executives of the company and spread in every commercial mass media outlet they could spread their message of well, hate, with absolutely no humour or even satire intended, just a message of greed.
So forgive me my sense of humour and I will definitely 'not ever' take your criticism to heart;).
You really don't get it. This is the introduction to their term of office, it should be seen to be unbiased, putting a link on that page to a commercial web site immediately implies a preference by the administration for the product they are now directly advertising and promoting. It has very little to do with M$ and everything to do with demonstrating political maturity and independence, especially right at the very beginning of their term of office.
'Seen to be clean' should be a priority especially after the shameless and very public corporate biases of the previous administration. So quite simply as many formats for viewing as will clearly demonstrate no biases and this could quite simply be done by making the content available the most popular methods, rather than locking it down to one not very popular method that specifically excludes the use of competing products.
Not really. What it means is most larger corporations hire add agencies to do their dirty work for them, add agencies who have a permanent core of on call liars to poison forums and review sites. This is much more effective for spreading lies as of course the liars are permanent staff and only need to be recruited once to spread lies for decades, plus there is the benefit of plausible deniability should the 'agency' get caught.
M$ promoted blogvertising to achieve the same affect but bloggers backed away from it because getting caught once meant they destroyed their reputation and future add value for one far to small payment. Where as the forum trolls just create a new identity, one amongst many and start again but they do tend to suffer from ID number creep.
Actually the most likely reality is someone really cheap (as in how much he was paid by the political party versus how much he was paid by 'er' someone else) came in to do that part of web site and made some choices that where motivated less by their loyalty to the future administration and more by their loyatly to silverfish. A political web site is a political web site, everything about it is part of the message not just the content.
So the Obama camp is already starting to learn some lessons of how it can be manipulated to promote greed based corporate ideals. Of how it's message can be hijacked to promote some deceitful corporations agenda.
It is a major flub, a demonstration of being exploited by corporate intrests right at the very beginning of their term, a painful lesson to be learned but one they need to remember. Not all of their staff, will in reality be their staff and many of them will be their to serve other peoples interests and not the interests of the government they claim to be serving.
Now just to be picky on the whole issue. Government can actually spend large sums on stimulus packages with out spending any additional money. So rather than blowing things up and trying to kill people ie. spending huge sums of money of high profit arms manufacture that money could more effectively be used upon building up domestic civilian infrastructure and, increasing it's usability and functionality which, naturally enough will enhance the future economy.
So rather destroying tax payers funds in one pointless war after another and having a military that seems intent upon inventing threats and demanding ever more destructive and expensive technology, spend in upon areas of the economy where it provides lasting returns. So you spend less of missles, bombs and their 'delivery systems, and the arms manufacturers suffer major profit drops and some people end up out of work but that same money ends up employing far more people in other areas of the economy and that provide real lasting benefits.
In the case the government is enforcing choice not eliminating choice. FOSS software provide continuous choice by it very design. Do I use the software the way it is, do I make changes to suit my needs, do I choose to upgrade, do I choose to change document formats, do I choose to throw away billions of dollars on software licences. So let's just all back away from the M$ lie.
To select closed source proprietary software with restricted document choice kills all future choices except one, on all other choices you must obey they dictates of corporation who will manipulate changes in software to maximise their profits and hence your costs and the only choice you get is when to finally get off the upgrade treadmill and make the crossgrade to FOSS where you get to choose the future direction of your software stack depending upon the effort you want to put into it.
The reality is, for all the other countries in the world, their choice is whether to throw away money on foreign debt, literally billions of dollars on software licences to 'ONE' US company or to search for an alternative where that money can instead be invested into the local community and be used to develop technological expertise in their own economy. It is very difficult not to end up looking corrupt when foreign governments bleed their own economies to pointlessly enrich the billionaires of M$ when free substantially better solutions are available.
I disagree about the elitist attitude. Since when is intelligence and the application of knowledge considered elitists on a nerd/geek forum, lest keep the idiotic redneck point of view on myspace et al where it belongs, the elitists are the rich, greedy and pseudo celebrities. So Nicholos kicked off the OLPC which focused some real attention on bridging the global digital divide and the importance of being able to provide accessible low cost computing to make the knowledge of the world available to the children of the world.
As it is the OLPC really helped to kick off the growth of Linux on netbooks and establish it it as the future of education for children upon a global basis. As for the future of the OLPC well M$ did put the kybosh on it that by whispering sweet 'nothings' into Nicholos's ear with the intent of souring the project because of course low cost PCs in the hundred dollar range is the death of an operating system, office suite combination that basically quadruples the fully function cost of that hardware.
So the OLPC project brought focus to the problem and did it's job in demonstrating what could be done and now a range of hardware software solutions are evolving to provide the needed solution, low cost netbooks with a FOSS software stack for the education market.
So what you are saying is, it is impossible for 'GOD' to create a universe that functions like this, well it would seem, that in your opinion, that the supreme being of the universe has clear Christian defined limitations upon it's skills, abilities and knowledge and ain't all that supreme after all.
Technically speaking by your own beliefs, either the supreme being can create any kind of universe including an evolutionary living universe or they lack the intellectual capability to do so and would appear to be limited in their abilities based upon the intelligence and imagination of those who claim to speak upon the supreme being's behalf.
Hmm, so if a preacher can't understand it, 'GOD' cant create it, interesting, now doesn't that really define religions.
So how about going with fines instead of taxes. Traffic offences penalties, should be charged as a percentage of annual income so that all people, including visitors, pay a penalty that reflects equal suffering and that is specifically being used to manipulate behaviour.
Some really nice big fines for the rich and greedy. A lot of the current penalties represent a fairly large percentage of the minimum wage and using those percentages as a basis, people earning more than $100,000 per year will end up paying fines in the tens of thousands of dollars. So double benefit, taxation income shortfall fulfilled and the wealthy finally are being motivated to adhere to the law upon the same 'in reality' basis as the poor.
Imagine traffic police specifically targeting luxury vehicles because that's where the real money is, rather than other more dubious human profiling tactics.
Not to mention document compatibility. Office 97 was fine, having to continually pay for upgrades just to open documents was throwing money away, especially when they dumped simple macro languages for VBA just so they could charge for extra software licenses was just too annoying. At the end it was simpler to switch to OpenOffice to escape unwanted upgrades, document compatibilities, relearning menu structures on every upgrade so they could sell new manuals and resource kits and, months of lost productivity on every forced upgrade.
Of course switching programs is always a bugger until all the short cuts become automatic but then doing it once to shift programs is better than continually being forced to on upgrades.
Actually the whole thing is pretty silly. As a virtual environment only develops an IP address and a bank of servers at a hosting service. To develop a town, now is the time to focus on life style, a well behaved responsive police force, easy access to public services and, a clean healthy environment.
Distance working is all about providing an hospitable socially interactive environment where remote workers can log out and tune into a comfortable easygoinglifestyle. People need to develop the idea of separating the servers and their tech orientated staff to creative staff who can be accessing those servers and crafting virtual environments from any where in the world and in terms of creativity not the low labour cost high crime environments but places worth living in. An escape from high stress and crime countries to more relaxed and easy going life styles that will stimulate and nurture creativity.
The cloud is just a marketing lie, to try to hide the continual cost of closed source proprietary software. In fact the whole article reflects the continued blatant lie of M$, that open source competes with M$. Opem source is open to everyone, should M$ choose to they can adhere to what is becoming a globally accepted international application and document standard and supply software, the choose to refuse.
In the current economic climate, sending billions of dollars overseas to one foreign corporation, on an annual basis is clearly unreasonable especially when that cost is quite simply wasted and will have to be repeated again and again into the future. Not just the operating system, but also the Office suite, file server software licence fees, mail server software licences, web server software licences and M$ say they can save money by adding educational software lock in on the cloud with either annual licensing fees or, the mind positively boggles but, you expect it with US companies, giving a corporation full access to minors including psychological analysis of the children's documents for targeted marketing solutions force fed in the classroom.
That's the whole basis of the cloud either pay continually for access to your data and the required applications or subject yourself to a continuous stream of marketing effluent both are ludicrous propositions.
Which of course you would have to believe if you where willing to subject yourself to very intimate psychological analysis so that a prgram go intuit what you meant rather than what you typed. While it might be OK for a program on you own private PC to hold the kind of data necessary to reform your search complete with localisation input, blocks, filters and language adjustment in order to send an accurately refined search query to the search engine databases.
Giving that level of psychological access to a for profit, http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/corporate/tenthings.html "You can make money without doing evil", like WTF is that really meant to mean but "you can make more if you are evil" is crazy and attempting gain that sort of psychological access to minors could be considered criminal. Corporations personalties change with the wind, along with changes n majority share holders, who the current executive team is and, of course the cycles of greed that crop up every time the share price starts to lag, especially when it is tied to unrealistic PE ratios which demand high continual increases quarterly revenue numbers.
Then of course, would the Economist http://www.economist.com/ seriously consider whether proper formatting for mathematical, engineering, physics etc. formulas in a written document was all that important to a netbook. Seriously, this is all about a quick simple selection, a cheap fit for purpose notebook, costing a couple of hundred dollars and fully ready to go and, that will enable the majority of people from 6 to 60 to do all the basic daily tasks versus spending four times as much to do it the M$ way, extra hardware, Vista and M$ Office plus proprietary photo and video editing software etc.
However in this case while it certainly seems as if the student did exceed the guidelines and policies of that particular schools acceptable use policy. The policy in itself utterly fails as it most improperly fails to ascribe particular levels of punishments for the degree of infringement. In this case where the student pays for their education and suffers considerable harm in the loss the that investment capital as well as damage to their reputation, the policy set carefully set out 'contractual' penalties that properly balance out to the harm caused by the infringement of "Guidelines & Policies" especially as guidelines itself is an extremely soft legal term and hardly balances with the fear and intimidation created by a 'disciplinary' hearing and a threat of suspension.
Appropriate response in this case would simply be a warning 'email' and a remedial course in the schools acceptable use 'guidelines' and policies. Now the student might consider a quick legal slap up the side of the head for the school administrators for the psychological harm and suffering in the use of threat and intimidation by the school for a minor infringement of a 'guideline', especially such a lose document that fails to detail the ramifications of varying levels of infringement.
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It was more that 'building' PC,s is was fabrication of the parts that constituted the PC. Dell is largely a middle man, contracting the hardware out to ODM, other device manufacturers, and all Dell do is some final optioning. Even service and support is contracted out. So it really is the journalist demonstrating their ignorance and implying that the Soviet President lacks knowledge about Dells business segment. The reality is you don't really want middle men sucking up resources when you are trying to develop your own industries.
So it really wasn't appropriate for Dell to publicly offer charity to the president of Russia at that particular forum, culturally speaking huge mistake and he got his head bitten off for doing it. Personally I think Putin would likely have taken it in the way a US corporate executive normally presents it to a bought and paid for US politician and, found it to be particularly unpalatable. It all comes off as a condescending arrogant journalist, sticking up for a condescending arrogant corporate executive and just another non-conservative dig at Russia and their political leaders for being 'refusniks' and not towing the neocon line. Oh my god, a foreign political leader publicly told a major US corporate executive where to shove it when being talked down to.
So to solve the problem you charge by the hour rather than by the month. People will not pay for bots to play the game when it is costing them access time, problem solved.
Of course people are not going to be happy paying by the hour when they end up spending many hours in fact most of the time being mindless worker drones, pretty much paying for the privilege of being a factory production line worker, hmm, it is a tricky problem isn't it ;D.
You know, sometimes it is really surprising what those PR=B$ marketing people are able to achieve and sell.
Ahh, Finish person, perhaps you don't understand how low the US minimum wage is, or how US food stamps (look it up, believe me, it will shock you) will not pay for that digital tuner. In harsh US economic times it becomes a choice between many cheap junk food meals and a digital TV tuner, the poor have to choose the junk food.
This means that the digital tuners can not be bought and that mass media marketing and corporations will lose their lock on the minds of the poor and suffering and the poor, heaven forbid, will start thinking for themselves, now you can't have that happen, not even for a week or so, it would be a bloody, literally speaking, disaster.
As a reader, I have found that there is so much active content to read online, that reading science fiction no longer seems so fulfilling. Sure it used to be a great escape, an enjoyable way to stimulate the mind and stretch the imagination, I have got shelves full of the stuff that demonstrate how much I really did enjoy it and still do, it's just that I haven't added to in for years. It is just that the net is so much more stimulating.
In the choice between passively taking in the input from one mind to stimulate and keep active your own mind versus participating in the interaction between millions of minds across thousands of subjects which is far more, hmm, tasty and succulent, so many flavours, colours and textures. Guess which choice a lot of geeks/nerds are tending to make.
It is to cut off the downward spiral. As people buy less, companies need to produce less hence they lay off unneeded staff, those now out of work staff of course substantially cut back on their spending, which means that companies selling to them need to produce less and naturally enough sack more staff etc. Countries with a substantive and effective social welfare have a automatic brake upon that downward spiral to slow it down and keep the system ticking over until it recovers. With out a social welfare net, you either go the downward spiral, with major increases in crime and, destructive civil unrest or indulge in corporate welfare which turns out to be far more expensive, as it doesn't just have to supply the basic essentials upon a reasonable basis but actually has to still feed the greed and ego of corporate executives.
So keeping a greater than $10,000,000.00 salary of a CEO propped up plus all the other associated costs of making possible, works out to be a whole lot of minimum wage salaries $6.55 per hour, or $13,624 per year, 734 of them and that is as an absolute minimum. Now add in all those other corporate executives all sucking up way more than the minimum wage and that pays for all the social welfare (the fundamental goals of which is to reduce crime and suffering and to help stabilise an economy) you will ever need.
So social welfare is far cheaper than corporate welfare but there are a whole bunch of greedy corporate executives and thousands of lobbyists who will do everything they can top keep the system that strangely enough profits them personally at everybody else's expense, locked in place.
Technically it is much harder for windows users to complain ie. was it the hardware, was it a driver, was it the application you were using, was it some background dll, was it the power supply. It can be really hard to tell, especially when the company that supplies the OS routinely lies about it's failures and won't disclose all the discovered and unpatched faults in it's software.
When using open source software the ability to track down the fault and chastise the offender is a whole lot easier, so it happens far more often.
Not to be cynical but I'm betting that a default install of windows marketing version 7 is no faster than a default install vista. So the vista marketing campaign along with it's DRM continues just in another guise, that the claims and marketing for windows version 7 are practically identical to the claims and marketing for vista is 'er' purely accidental and M$ really truly does not believe that the general public is that stupid.
The reality is the business model is dead. The publisher is no longer required to publish the music, the creators of the music can simply do it themselves. The time period in history for charging for 'dead' music rather than live music is over, get over it already. It was basically a parasitical business segment in society and basically did nothing to add to the economy it just basically lived off it.
So when it is gone, it means that money spent upon that parasitical part of the economy will simply be spent in other often more substantial, productive and, as it turns out less destructive areas of the economy. So distributed music media is going the direction of the vinyl record. The only thing the music publishing industry ever really provided was a massive public relations equals bull shit mass marketing engine of greed, oh yeah and how could I forget, 'sex, drugs and rock and roll'.
So tell me, why is it that supposedly conservative politicians and politically motivated religious groups around the world want to prop up that particular industry. I mean, is there some sort of serious mental disconnect between them and that whole 'sex, drugs and rock and roll' thing, the industry is famed for it and even goes out of it's way to promote, sell it and, in reality specifically targets the most vulnerable group in society with that message, children.
I really think people should take a deep breath and look at historical precedent. E-mail or electronic mail, to use it full term, at work is the same as sending an old written letter, using company stationary, with a company letterhead in a company marked envelope and using a company stamp. Originally employees by far the majority of employees did not fold, envelope stuff, stamp lick and post the correspondence, mots of them didn't even type the message.
All letters from a company where reviewed by other staff members prior to being sent, as such, the same really applies to modern email. It just needs to be made clear to the staff upon a continual basis that all company email will be reviewed to ensure to complies with company policy as the company is responsible for all communications leaving that company.
As for staff members, with mobile cellular internet access, carrying in a net book for conducting private communications is the go, in your lunch break of course ;). Now that, of course the company can not touch. To be clear, monitoring of company communications oddly enough has to be restricted to defined company premises, otherwise arse hole corporate executives will want to pay for their employees domestic phone service so that the corporation can claim it as a company asset and monitor the employees 24/7.
As for threatening to leave, that is yet another definitive demonstration of why the size of corporations should be limited by law, every effort should be made to ensure that an single corporation going bankrupt or leaving the country only has a very limited impact on the economy. So beyond a certain size, let the share holders foot the bill rather than the general public for a corruptly run billion dollar corporation.
Corporations are simple amoral engines of greed, their priority is to charge as much as possible while spending the least amount possible, hence locking up convicted inmates in the cheapest way possible that they are legally able to get away with. So low cost guards basically low IQ thugs in uniform who often derive perverted sexual fulfilment from abusing people, rather then properly trained correctional (note the term) services officers, which of course would 'cost' a corporation two to three times as much, where as of course repeat offenders only cost the public ten to one hundred times that in damages, pain and suffering, so corporate profits first the publics interest last and keep those returning profits from repeat offenders coming in.
The reality is that a prison should in fact be the most law abiding place in society, otherwise the supervision and rehabilitation is demonstrated to be a total failure. Rather than blocking transmissions that should be tracking them to find the contraband then pursuing the trail of evidence to apprehend all those involved and of course turn the smuggling prison guard into an inmate and demonstrate the effectiveness of law enforcing institution and it's staff. Jamming the signals, the cheap solution which is basically giving up on enforcing law within in prison.
I prefer silverfish, mainly because of M$ being such a marketing driven company it is bound to niggle at them and I find the thought, well, to be blunt quite humorous. Also I feel that my very mild poke at the M$ marketing team is still far less than the years of M$ abuse at the FOSS movement ie. a cancer, terrorists use it, hackers prefer it et al, and, those where not from some random poster's on a forum (that has funny mods) but from the senior executives of the company and spread in every commercial mass media outlet they could spread their message of well, hate, with absolutely no humour or even satire intended, just a message of greed.
So forgive me my sense of humour and I will definitely 'not ever' take your criticism to heart ;).
You really don't get it. This is the introduction to their term of office, it should be seen to be unbiased, putting a link on that page to a commercial web site immediately implies a preference by the administration for the product they are now directly advertising and promoting. It has very little to do with M$ and everything to do with demonstrating political maturity and independence, especially right at the very beginning of their term of office.
'Seen to be clean' should be a priority especially after the shameless and very public corporate biases of the previous administration. So quite simply as many formats for viewing as will clearly demonstrate no biases and this could quite simply be done by making the content available the most popular methods, rather than locking it down to one not very popular method that specifically excludes the use of competing products.
Not really. What it means is most larger corporations hire add agencies to do their dirty work for them, add agencies who have a permanent core of on call liars to poison forums and review sites. This is much more effective for spreading lies as of course the liars are permanent staff and only need to be recruited once to spread lies for decades, plus there is the benefit of plausible deniability should the 'agency' get caught.
M$ promoted blogvertising to achieve the same affect but bloggers backed away from it because getting caught once meant they destroyed their reputation and future add value for one far to small payment. Where as the forum trolls just create a new identity, one amongst many and start again but they do tend to suffer from ID number creep.
Actually the most likely reality is someone really cheap (as in how much he was paid by the political party versus how much he was paid by 'er' someone else) came in to do that part of web site and made some choices that where motivated less by their loyalty to the future administration and more by their loyatly to silverfish. A political web site is a political web site, everything about it is part of the message not just the content.
So the Obama camp is already starting to learn some lessons of how it can be manipulated to promote greed based corporate ideals. Of how it's message can be hijacked to promote some deceitful corporations agenda.
It is a major flub, a demonstration of being exploited by corporate intrests right at the very beginning of their term, a painful lesson to be learned but one they need to remember. Not all of their staff, will in reality be their staff and many of them will be their to serve other peoples interests and not the interests of the government they claim to be serving.
Now just to be picky on the whole issue. Government can actually spend large sums on stimulus packages with out spending any additional money. So rather than blowing things up and trying to kill people ie. spending huge sums of money of high profit arms manufacture that money could more effectively be used upon building up domestic civilian infrastructure and, increasing it's usability and functionality which, naturally enough will enhance the future economy.
So rather destroying tax payers funds in one pointless war after another and having a military that seems intent upon inventing threats and demanding ever more destructive and expensive technology, spend in upon areas of the economy where it provides lasting returns. So you spend less of missles, bombs and their 'delivery systems, and the arms manufacturers suffer major profit drops and some people end up out of work but that same money ends up employing far more people in other areas of the economy and that provide real lasting benefits.
In the case the government is enforcing choice not eliminating choice. FOSS software provide continuous choice by it very design. Do I use the software the way it is, do I make changes to suit my needs, do I choose to upgrade, do I choose to change document formats, do I choose to throw away billions of dollars on software licences. So let's just all back away from the M$ lie.
To select closed source proprietary software with restricted document choice kills all future choices except one, on all other choices you must obey they dictates of corporation who will manipulate changes in software to maximise their profits and hence your costs and the only choice you get is when to finally get off the upgrade treadmill and make the crossgrade to FOSS where you get to choose the future direction of your software stack depending upon the effort you want to put into it.
The reality is, for all the other countries in the world, their choice is whether to throw away money on foreign debt, literally billions of dollars on software licences to 'ONE' US company or to search for an alternative where that money can instead be invested into the local community and be used to develop technological expertise in their own economy. It is very difficult not to end up looking corrupt when foreign governments bleed their own economies to pointlessly enrich the billionaires of M$ when free substantially better solutions are available.
I disagree about the elitist attitude. Since when is intelligence and the application of knowledge considered elitists on a nerd/geek forum, lest keep the idiotic redneck point of view on myspace et al where it belongs, the elitists are the rich, greedy and pseudo celebrities. So Nicholos kicked off the OLPC which focused some real attention on bridging the global digital divide and the importance of being able to provide accessible low cost computing to make the knowledge of the world available to the children of the world.
As it is the OLPC really helped to kick off the growth of Linux on netbooks and establish it it as the future of education for children upon a global basis. As for the future of the OLPC well M$ did put the kybosh on it that by whispering sweet 'nothings' into Nicholos's ear with the intent of souring the project because of course low cost PCs in the hundred dollar range is the death of an operating system, office suite combination that basically quadruples the fully function cost of that hardware.
So the OLPC project brought focus to the problem and did it's job in demonstrating what could be done and now a range of hardware software solutions are evolving to provide the needed solution, low cost netbooks with a FOSS software stack for the education market.
So what you are saying is, it is impossible for 'GOD' to create a universe that functions like this, well it would seem, that in your opinion, that the supreme being of the universe has clear Christian defined limitations upon it's skills, abilities and knowledge and ain't all that supreme after all.
Technically speaking by your own beliefs, either the supreme being can create any kind of universe including an evolutionary living universe or they lack the intellectual capability to do so and would appear to be limited in their abilities based upon the intelligence and imagination of those who claim to speak upon the supreme being's behalf.
Hmm, so if a preacher can't understand it, 'GOD' cant create it, interesting, now doesn't that really define religions.
So how about going with fines instead of taxes. Traffic offences penalties, should be charged as a percentage of annual income so that all people, including visitors, pay a penalty that reflects equal suffering and that is specifically being used to manipulate behaviour.
Some really nice big fines for the rich and greedy. A lot of the current penalties represent a fairly large percentage of the minimum wage and using those percentages as a basis, people earning more than $100,000 per year will end up paying fines in the tens of thousands of dollars. So double benefit, taxation income shortfall fulfilled and the wealthy finally are being motivated to adhere to the law upon the same 'in reality' basis as the poor.
Imagine traffic police specifically targeting luxury vehicles because that's where the real money is, rather than other more dubious human profiling tactics.
Not to mention document compatibility. Office 97 was fine, having to continually pay for upgrades just to open documents was throwing money away, especially when they dumped simple macro languages for VBA just so they could charge for extra software licenses was just too annoying. At the end it was simpler to switch to OpenOffice to escape unwanted upgrades, document compatibilities, relearning menu structures on every upgrade so they could sell new manuals and resource kits and, months of lost productivity on every forced upgrade.
Of course switching programs is always a bugger until all the short cuts become automatic but then doing it once to shift programs is better than continually being forced to on upgrades.
Actually the whole thing is pretty silly. As a virtual environment only develops an IP address and a bank of servers at a hosting service. To develop a town, now is the time to focus on life style, a well behaved responsive police force, easy access to public services and, a clean healthy environment.
Distance working is all about providing an hospitable socially interactive environment where remote workers can log out and tune into a comfortable easygoinglifestyle. People need to develop the idea of separating the servers and their tech orientated staff to creative staff who can be accessing those servers and crafting virtual environments from any where in the world and in terms of creativity not the low labour cost high crime environments but places worth living in. An escape from high stress and crime countries to more relaxed and easy going life styles that will stimulate and nurture creativity.
The cloud is just a marketing lie, to try to hide the continual cost of closed source proprietary software. In fact the whole article reflects the continued blatant lie of M$, that open source competes with M$. Opem source is open to everyone, should M$ choose to they can adhere to what is becoming a globally accepted international application and document standard and supply software, the choose to refuse.
In the current economic climate, sending billions of dollars overseas to one foreign corporation, on an annual basis is clearly unreasonable especially when that cost is quite simply wasted and will have to be repeated again and again into the future. Not just the operating system, but also the Office suite, file server software licence fees, mail server software licences, web server software licences and M$ say they can save money by adding educational software lock in on the cloud with either annual licensing fees or, the mind positively boggles but, you expect it with US companies, giving a corporation full access to minors including psychological analysis of the children's documents for targeted marketing solutions force fed in the classroom.
That's the whole basis of the cloud either pay continually for access to your data and the required applications or subject yourself to a continuous stream of marketing effluent both are ludicrous propositions.
Which of course you would have to believe if you where willing to subject yourself to very intimate psychological analysis so that a prgram go intuit what you meant rather than what you typed. While it might be OK for a program on you own private PC to hold the kind of data necessary to reform your search complete with localisation input, blocks, filters and language adjustment in order to send an accurately refined search query to the search engine databases.
Giving that level of psychological access to a for profit, http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/corporate/tenthings.html "You can make money without doing evil", like WTF is that really meant to mean but "you can make more if you are evil" is crazy and attempting gain that sort of psychological access to minors could be considered criminal. Corporations personalties change with the wind, along with changes n majority share holders, who the current executive team is and, of course the cycles of greed that crop up every time the share price starts to lag, especially when it is tied to unrealistic PE ratios which demand high continual increases quarterly revenue numbers.
Then of course, would the Economist http://www.economist.com/ seriously consider whether proper formatting for mathematical, engineering, physics etc. formulas in a written document was all that important to a netbook. Seriously, this is all about a quick simple selection, a cheap fit for purpose notebook, costing a couple of hundred dollars and fully ready to go and, that will enable the majority of people from 6 to 60 to do all the basic daily tasks versus spending four times as much to do it the M$ way, extra hardware, Vista and M$ Office plus proprietary photo and video editing software etc.
However in this case while it certainly seems as if the student did exceed the guidelines and policies of that particular schools acceptable use policy. The policy in itself utterly fails as it most improperly fails to ascribe particular levels of punishments for the degree of infringement. In this case where the student pays for their education and suffers considerable harm in the loss the that investment capital as well as damage to their reputation, the policy set carefully set out 'contractual' penalties that properly balance out to the harm caused by the infringement of "Guidelines & Policies" especially as guidelines itself is an extremely soft legal term and hardly balances with the fear and intimidation created by a 'disciplinary' hearing and a threat of suspension.
Appropriate response in this case would simply be a warning 'email' and a remedial course in the schools acceptable use 'guidelines' and policies. Now the student might consider a quick legal slap up the side of the head for the school administrators for the psychological harm and suffering in the use of threat and intimidation by the school for a minor infringement of a 'guideline', especially such a lose document that fails to detail the ramifications of varying levels of infringement.