To really cut through it all. Home much would it cost hardware developers if M$ just dumped vista and stuck to continually debugging and upgrading XP. M$ makes a lot of money by continually forcing pointless upgrades, upgrades that basically cost hardware developers billions of dollars in what ends up being thrown away code, M$ profits the hardware developers pay.
So the hardware developers at sending the big 'Fuck You' to M$, as they are well and truly sick of M$'s upgrade profits coming at their expense. In this case hardware developers really need to dig their heels in, and not create any drivers for windows 7 but also wind back of drivers for Vista. For them the best solution is to force M$ to the XP debug and upgrade route, thus they can largely stick with the same driver with only minimal additional expenditure of software. Of course you can add to that M$ not only costing them money but the ass hats are also charging them licence fees for compulsory bits and paying for compatibility checks to avoid customer threatening warnings about evil drivers (hmm, class action law suit).
This leaves hardware money to spend on Linux driver development for the expanding netbook market and of course for the Linux server market.
All the research really points to is that in young formative minds, the playing of violent video games fro hours on end, games where basically the solution to most problem is aggression will tend to reinforce that idea within those young minds that aggression is a viable solution to problems. Those games also tend to define the mores for interpersonal relationships and the way people express themselves beyond the simply game play. In addition a lot of those games can create a great sense of frustration, of being in able to complete the goals, or the games setting up arbitrary and very annoying roadblocks, the grinding repetition of activities until you get it just right.
Aggression is likely a two fold thing, the first of a young minds attitudes shifting to those expressed in the game and second the young mind acting out on the frustrations suffered when playing the game and being unable to share and reduce that frustration upon an interpersonal basis during game play.
I have seen people of all ages screaming and hurling abuse at the screen when being frustrated by a particularly annoying bit of game play, I fall victim to that myself. I wonder how much of that aggression I take away from computer and bring with me when I start interacting upon an interpersonal basis, so reacting to violence in the game or reacting to violence felt towards the game developers.
Inter personal relations force the continual of moderation behaviour in order to achieve cordial relations, playing computer games does not, the computer will continue to react in exactly the same way regardless of the way you express yourself, apart from occasional keyboard replacement.
What you meant to say, was that a google and yahoo partnership is big enough to create an anti-trust partnership. Google on it's own, while creating a successful marketing illusion, is not really all that big and lacks a wide range of web portal elements. Yahoo represents a broad web portal and it's share price much more realistically matches it's revenue base.
What this does is really point out how much of a failure M$ has been with MSN, while a part google yahoo partnership has antitrust overtones a full MSN yahoo partnership doesn't. It really does make MSN look rather insignificant.
Gooogle spam words a re losing their lustre, most of google revenue increase is coming from bought in companies and simply filling out international expansion and local market increase have been minimal. Google lacks a lot of elements of a web portal and has such has been chasing M$ into the clouds, to create a grand new hope of revenue increase rather than getting down to the nitty gritty of web portal expansion in a really tough competitive enviroment. AOL Time Warner, Disney, Newscorp, NYT are all fighting hard to expand into the web portal market and they will all eat away at google market share and the reality is Yahoo is already successfully surviving in the competitive market.
So who will thrive and who is 'fucked' is not so cut and dried, google has come up lame in recent diversification attempts, MSN continues to lose money hand over fist, the old world media players are still struggling, although they seem to be moving now. At a guess, google will start to suffer as it lacks depth and has real problems when it tries to expand into new product areas apart from buying in expertise at a high price, the old world media companies will slowly but surely bite into everyone else's and each other market share as they continue to gain internet experience, Yahoo will basically hold place (a not to insignificant achievement in the current market, stabilising internet opportunities and harsh financial times) and MSN will continue to bleed, as for the tens of thousands of other web properties across the globe, some will grow, some will die but all of them will trying hard to eat into the market share of the market leaders and will likely have some measure of success.
M$ will have to adopt the open source, service and support, web portal business model whether it wants to or not. Ballmer statement is much more about his own personal survival as the M$ CEO rather the given any indication of the future direction of M$. Ballmer has managed to produce the least successful version of M$ windows and M$ Office, xbox has been limping along and MSN is a disaster.
So the statement about using open source in the browser is just to big note himself, a means by which to gain business publicity, to preserve his identity as the CEO of M$. M$ is stuck, IS is way too tightly embedded with the OS, making it impossible to realisticly combine Firefox with windows or open the source code of M$ IE. Of course M$ are currently stuck with their investment in sliverfish, the flash replacement that nobody wants, so perhaps this is just another song and dance to accompany the relaunch of version 2 advertising for that product.
I M$ seriously want a long term future, they have to focus on MSN and, for that Ballmer has not been the solution, he has been the failure.
That is not really true. The reality as internet usage spread is, more violent, immature and angry people are using. These people are already violent and will if they feel insulted in the normal interpersonal public space, lash act and attempt to brutalise and dominate those who they feel have insulted them.
So these same violent individuals gain access to the internet and whom do they interact with, why the very people who they would normally bully if they met them out on the street or in any other public space, those people who would normally have to shut up and just take the violence and abuse.
Now when those innocent non-violent individuals meet the basically arse hole, failed jock strap, red necks in digital space, they recognise them by their communications mannerisms and do exactly what you would expect them to do, take the bloody piss out of them. A lot of those victims of bullying also get a little out of hand at times with the new found freedom to communicate, with out getting threatened or actually suffering violent physical harm.
So the problem exists outside of the internet and is not as a result of the internet. You want to end the problem, solve it at it's core root, eliminate those violent racists prejudiced are holes from the population base, detect it an early age via genetics, drug them up and keep the sedated for the rest of their lives and for heavens sake simply don't let them breed. Of course the republicans would loathe the idea, their would be no one left to vote for them;).
Actually it makes much more sense to run parallel computer infrastructure, something the NSA dose internally. Simply run two computers on two separate networks, one internal and one external with access to public resources. The external network can be on a computer by computer basis, so only the targeted computer, might go down or be taken over and beyond that it only leads back to the public network, simply done with netbooks on a wireless network for convenience.
The internal network would be hard wired with no direct connection to a public network, all data coming in would be filtered and analysed prior to entry and only specific locations would allow connection of portable media sources for input or output. It is cheap enough to do now and it follows KISS principles, a lot of governments already run 'airgap' internal networks as the only safe means by which any M$ products can be implemented in what is meant to be a secure secure environment.
A netbook is only really a laptop replacement, when the laptop is in the portable range and not spending most of it's life on a desk ala the 17" screen desknotes. What is happening is smart phones are being bound back to more portable size, the PDA sized phone and even the PDA itself are going to lose ground to the netbook. So compact smartphone, netbook and, desknote/desktop become the standard connected persons digital line up.
Likely the netbook will end up the most populus device in the western market, as it will end up on every school desktop and as the portable adjunct to the desktop device be it a notebook or a desktop. The netbook is going to end up being pretty abused, so durability (spills and drops), low cost (frequent replacement) and battery life are going to be the big drivers and, performance will take a back seat.
With hardware performance being limited to achieve the other goals that means the software must be really efficient, no bloat and fast, and lets forget silly stuff like it can run what ever bloated operating system, what counts is how well the applications on top of the operating system run, so the big comparisson will be Openoffice on Linux vs M$office2007 on Vista and which is more fit for purpose or even capable of running in an acceptable fashion.
Tag line, FOSS belt tightening. A lot of government departments around the world will be looking to assure taxpayers that they are working to achieve savings in these harsh economic times, as the general public become much more aware of FOSS, various Linux distributions, OpenOffice etc. this kind of public announcement is bound to become much more frequent as politicians will be desperate for positive stories to enhance their image. So the penguin is pretty cool at the moment even penguin waffles http://www.sunbeam.com.au/products/product_details.cfm?rec_id=467&sec_id=89&home_id=2.
What is really odd about all this, is it was launched by what is now the opposition party, the Liberal party (think of a fairly even mix between the US libertarian party and the Democrats, Australia doesn't really have anything like the Republicans except for fringe political parties). So normally you would expect them to back away from this, one can alone think that the proprietary creators of the filtering have done a truly spectacular and likely very 'generous' snow job, just think millions of licences, annual update costs, filtering updates, and the inevitable targeted biases in accidental filtering.
There seems to be this growing paranoia amongst those that perceive themselves as the ruling class, that the internet is truly taking their power away and redistributing amongst the masses. The reality is the mots radical and destructive ideas tend to filter themselves out of the internet through lack of 'genuine' interests, sure a lot of people will review them for a bit of a chuckle but that is all they get out of it. Filtering is pointless at the general access level, keep it out in the open, where the problem can be readily identified and where laws are being broken, the perpetrators prosecuted. Burying underground solves no problem and can leave the general public a bit naive when it comes to some of the problems out there that they via their government need to deal with.
You don't block people from viewing hate messages on the internet, you simply prosecute those who are inciting the violence and so controlling the guilty and not the innocent.
As for the false accusations of game piracy, well, as it happens because of shop lifters a lots of places selling games open up the boxes and remove the discs so they can maintain their retail displays while securing the property. Catch with that, a lot of employees then take the opportunity to 'borrow' (they fully intend to return it) and install the game. Nett results, customers walks into the store legally buys the game, which has been installed under the predefined registration number and, then try to install the game, he is either out of luck or is accused of being a software pirate.
As far the customer is concerned, which is a reasonable and fair expectation, it is the game publishers problem to resolve that issue with the retailer and the customer should spend no time nor effort in resolving the issue. Should the publisher demand that the customer return the disk, then the publisher should pay the customers costs and effort in doing the return.
Also there is lending your game to somebody else to install and play when you are not using it. Are you and your friends pirates or are you doing what you would normally do with any other property you legally own you own and what most people consider fair and reasonable.
Azure has far more to do with investors than it does with developers. It is all about creating the illusion of long term high profit margin revenue, that can be obtained by lock in style business practices. As M$ is struggling with both Vista and Office 2007, they need something more than the poor fiscal performance of xbox and the disaster of MSN. Google finds itself in a similar problem with regard to high share price limited growth opportunities in search and the inevitable break up of that market.
Crippled cloud solves their fiscal desires but really does nothing for the majority of the market, both of them are really lathering up the hype, advertising as news articles popping up all over the place especially in mass media, all trying to create a demand that doesn't really exist.
Realistically in tight economic times development will stagnate, companies will stick with what they have for as long as they can and only change when they are forced too and then that change will be targeted at long term solutions, where they have the greatest control over outlays and future investment cycles.
Unfortunately due to excessive abuses of the Iraqi civilian population by a military that abandoned any pretence of the rule of law and who considered it appropriate to apoint themselves as judge, jury and executioner, where in any constitution is aerial bombardment part of legal search, seizure and arrest. About the best thing the US can do now is to assemble a coalition of neighbouring nations who will assist in the stabilisation of Iraq and leave as they take over. They have managed to make themselves as unwelcome as possible and can no longer be a part of any successful solution.
It is pretty obvious that the US military industrial is already giving up on extracting significant profit out of the Iraqi crisis and do not see much potential in Afghanistan apart from a long drawn out 'police' action, where employing police will be far more successful than deploying soldiers and military equipment. Right now with the reactivation of the US 4th fleet as the US military industrial complex start to manoeuvre against a strengthening South American Union of nations who are now seeing greater growth and improving conditions as US influence was focused in other regions and has weakened to the point where the excessive influence of abusive exploitative foreign corporations and in turn corrupt foreign intelligence services has been curtailed.
Then you can add attempts to create a cold war with Russian complete with base accusations, threats of military actions and full blown insults. Russia will now take the simple expedient of supporting and assisting in the independence and defence of South American nations, not for any real gain, apart from extensive military sales but mainly to bleed the US who will inflate the threat and expend extensive resources defending against their inability to dominate their southern neighbours.
Africa also shows signs a becoming a problem as China wants to dominate that region in order to ruthlessly exploit it's resources and as destabilisation is an important part of that ruthless exploitation it is bound to get out of hand and cause severe problems for surrounding countries.
In this case it is note even about presenting a better case, it is all about a complete abuse of the system, why a company has basically set up a business to specifically target people who can not afford to defend themselves against the civil action and extorting money from them, Every time the RIAA has accidentally picked a litigant who can afford a legal defence they have lost, settled it out of court and buried it under non-disclosure agreements, except for one very notable case, that seeks to fully expose their pernicious behaviour.
It has to be the grossest and most public exploitation of the civil legal system, which emphatically displays the inequalities of a legal system, where one side simply needs to stretch out the case to the point where the other side cab not longer afford to defend themselves completely regardless of the merits of the case, in the case the defendants can not even afford the start of their defence let alone the tens of thousands of dollars to successfully conclude the case and win.
That the legal system and government have stood by and said nothing, whilst a legal firm has basically set up an extortion racket targeting tens of thousands of victims, makes them complicit accessories to a very public crime that makes a mockery of principles of equal justice for all.
Corporation can often be the worst researchers, everyone knows treating the symptoms is far more profitable than curing the disease. There are many areas of research where the results end up in the the public domain for the greater good. Examples are treating vermin species by introducing predators to reduce their numbers, this takes a considerable amount of research to be done successfully, generates absolutely no profit but can save billions.
Consider the rate of research that was achieved by government during two world wars, far faster than during any other periods, consider the internet the device you are using for to put out wrong headed comments or even the space race.
There seems to be this real crazy attitude that somehow citizens are not part of the government, or truly weird stuff like, you can't trust the government because it just just run by corporations for the benefit of corporations but you can quite illogically trust those corrupt corporations who are using their greed driven values to corrupt government.
Nor was government support available when the first caveman lit a fire or the first nomad made a wheel or the first hunter made a bow and arrow. Unfortunately most modern research is far more complex, far more costly, requires substantial facilities to conduct and many people working together to achieve. Not only that bust most modern research must be carefully regulated lest some researcher blinded by free market greed sets of a disaster.
Of course that does not stop the IRS from now pursuing him and charging him with failing to declare income, legal or otherwise. Apparently the US IRS does not pursue politicians when they are running for election but waits until the election is over and then target them whether they have won or not.
Brings to mind another Alaskan Politician and their custom zoned home that the sports centre built, once their run at running mate is over, it's likely they'll be the one pursued next. Why is it that the proteges of criminal politicians tend to commit much the same crimes.
Well obviously these robots do solve one great problem, there is just not enough corporate profit in a police dog and that's where the police robot comes in. Cheap solution, just fit a camera and radio harness to a trained dog.
This time around it appears like the googlites now feel threatened by, oh no, slashdot. So it just seems to be a tightly controlled sites, where a bunch of 'stink' tanks, get to put forward their own for profit views, promote themselves and at the same time try to give that whole 'knol' marketing B$ an air of legitimacy.
The whole site seems terribly stifled and completely lacks the open cook pot of slashdot, where thousands of ideas and opinions boil to the surface upon a continuous basis, all without the too chilling effect of too many facts or the need to try and create an 'air' of superior boringness;).
One silly discussion was performance based pay for teachers, how daft. Now the delusion is that offering teachers more money for better grades means that somehow they will alter genetics and improve the IQ of students and the reality is in order to increase their pay they will simply kick the lower performing students out of the class/school and endeavour to attract higher IQ students who will be more far profitable. The result, the worst students end up stuck with the worst teachers in the worst schools, with the worst pay and funding, hmm now that's going to be real successful. The worst students in reality need the best teachers and teaching environment in order to achieve any measure of successful outcome, the results will of course never be high scoring but of course it is all about preventing failures and the damage that it causes, crime and prison. So imagine, financially penalising highly skilled teachers and schools who are willing to take on the difficult low performing students.
So, knol discussions, people only really interested in hearing their own opinions and of course as a blatant vehicle for google self promotion and advertising.
The description makes the employees sound like a bunch of lawyer accounting types coming up with new and imaginative ways of of screwing billions of dollars out of the government, hmm, I thought the normal perks in that case were drugs and hookers, yow, I don't think game consoles are really going to cut it;).
Some people are really confused. Social security and the various welfare benefits are much more about running a stable, sociable, low stress society. For example universal health means, that we people are suffering, and parent worry about a child serious illness or injury, they do not also have to worry about how they are going to pay for it.
The underlying principles of effective social welfare nets are two fold, firstly there is the basic philosophical principle of society via declared ownership of all resource denying people the opportunity for a subsistence lifestyle basically forcing them into servitude to those with protected control of all resources and secondly and most importantly it is substantially cheaper to provide free health, free accommodation and a subsistence income than it is to imprison them when they break laws because they are incapable of effectively competing to gain access to those needed resources let alone the cost and suffering of the victims of crime.
How much more blatant does it have to be, three countries in a row, from north to south, an effective social welfare net and a low crime rate in the north, than as you go south the social welfare decreases as the crime rate increases, hmm, Canada - USA - Mexico, but this is ignored because of course greed always leads to blind ignorance.
The same ignorance is found when it comes to questions. The previous Australian government developed a stupid principle where they would not fund research unless it lead to profitable outcomes, net result, funding for permanent solutions that can't be sold but only given away to major problems was cut off in preference to solutions that could be sold to 'friendly' sic corporations that could sell them back to the public at an enormous profit ie. curing the disease rather than treating the symptoms or as in the case of fruit fly research, permanently eliminating the problem by effective genetic research rather than creating and continually selling for a profit pesticides that end up damaging the environment and farmers bank balances but generates an enormous profit for 'friendly' sic corporations.
Did I mention any party or any country. This is a global phenomena and the same corrupt individuals used the same methods to remove the same laws that had been implemented for the same reason upon a global basis. Corporate greed and corruption that extended well beyond any national boundaries.
I am not nor will I ever be a party barracker, I vote for the person who seems most appropriate for the role at the time or against the incumbent individual or party that has demonstrated incompetence.
What the crisis clearly does demonstrate is grossly excessive influence by private companies upon the functions of government, so not only should the finance laws be tightened up but also and more specifically the ability of corporations to influence government should be far more tightly monitored controlled, also the role of mass media's role in promoting the agenda of deregulation should also be looked into.
The real problem with electric car charging has always been battery technology. Even alternate renewable energy resources are hampered by a lack of truly effective battery technology. Long life, high energy capacity with rapid recharge. A real focus with government funded 'open' research to drive the development of better battery technology is where the government should focus it's efforts and not necessarily on it's own but in partnership with other countries.
To be fair, it is most likely just the way any true computer nerd/geek will express themselves, when they can afford to do so. What better than their own private lab, to explore their own ideas, as well as investigate new ones. So a self indulgence, likely but, it is still far better than spending it of private jets and mega yachts or on other ostentatious extravagances.
Who knows perhaps they might even explore new ideas in free open source software.
It is just an excuse to weaponise satellites, you know, it is only defensive and they 'need' to destroy other satellites before they can destroy our satellites. So they have been fucking around with recreating cold war military industrial spending as the B$ war in terrorism is petering out regardless of their best efforts to keep it going.
So they are determined to shift it into space where real money can spent without any benefit to anybody except the profit margins of arms manufacturers, those who live to create new and more profitable ways of killing the rest of us off.
They seem to be slowly but surely pushing the new threat out into space, hmm, the new military industrial profit centre, alien invasion. Perhaps they are slowly starting to shift their thinking for debunking aliens to promoting the xenophobic threat of alien contamination as they are running out of suitable threats upon our own grubby little polluted planet.
Your implication is that somehow Australian adults when exposed to this material will all turn into paedophile terrorists, which is in of itself ludicrous. The nature of Australia is defined by it's citizens, not by content being produced overseas. Australia is neither the home of terrorism nor a production centre for child porn, so censoring Australian seems a pointless and dangerous practice.
The very idea of instituting a centralised control of all digital communications that can be censored and controlled by the government of the day at a whim, of either corruption politicians or self aggrandising bureaucrats is of itself offensive. As for the notion that somehow controlling content of any kind can be done outside of the countries where it is produced is just idiotic, to tackle those problems it must be done at it's source.
There are already laws in place that define what content is suitable to distribute in Australia, just like all other laws it is up to each citizen to adhere to the laws, the government is not there to institute a system of continuous monitoring and controlling to force the public to the will of the politicians of the day. The government is their to institute laws that form the basis of the moral judgement of Australian adults and when these laws are infringed seek to restrain those individuals who break those laws, rather than pursuing and controlling those innocent of any illegal activity. History has demonstrated time and time again, institute a system that can be abused and it always will be.
The real focus should always be those distributing and creating damaging content, that is where the harm is caused. At least they have given up on the lie that they attempting make the internet safe for children, which is where the real focus should be. The money the government is throwing away upon proprietary lock in forever licenses would be far better off creating a separate school based internet that is specifically designed for children to access and that parents to lock internet access down to only that network a network that would be suitably monitored and restricted to create a safe digital environment for children. It is just a shame it does not feel the need for greed, not only for the corporations selling proprietary filtering software but also for manipulative corporate advertising targeted at children which of course would be censored out of a internet specifically created for children.
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So the hardware developers at sending the big 'Fuck You' to M$, as they are well and truly sick of M$'s upgrade profits coming at their expense. In this case hardware developers really need to dig their heels in, and not create any drivers for windows 7 but also wind back of drivers for Vista. For them the best solution is to force M$ to the XP debug and upgrade route, thus they can largely stick with the same driver with only minimal additional expenditure of software. Of course you can add to that M$ not only costing them money but the ass hats are also charging them licence fees for compulsory bits and paying for compatibility checks to avoid customer threatening warnings about evil drivers (hmm, class action law suit).
This leaves hardware money to spend on Linux driver development for the expanding netbook market and of course for the Linux server market.
All the research really points to is that in young formative minds, the playing of violent video games fro hours on end, games where basically the solution to most problem is aggression will tend to reinforce that idea within those young minds that aggression is a viable solution to problems. Those games also tend to define the mores for interpersonal relationships and the way people express themselves beyond the simply game play. In addition a lot of those games can create a great sense of frustration, of being in able to complete the goals, or the games setting up arbitrary and very annoying roadblocks, the grinding repetition of activities until you get it just right.
Aggression is likely a two fold thing, the first of a young minds attitudes shifting to those expressed in the game and second the young mind acting out on the frustrations suffered when playing the game and being unable to share and reduce that frustration upon an interpersonal basis during game play.
I have seen people of all ages screaming and hurling abuse at the screen when being frustrated by a particularly annoying bit of game play, I fall victim to that myself. I wonder how much of that aggression I take away from computer and bring with me when I start interacting upon an interpersonal basis, so reacting to violence in the game or reacting to violence felt towards the game developers.
Inter personal relations force the continual of moderation behaviour in order to achieve cordial relations, playing computer games does not, the computer will continue to react in exactly the same way regardless of the way you express yourself, apart from occasional keyboard replacement.
What you meant to say, was that a google and yahoo partnership is big enough to create an anti-trust partnership. Google on it's own, while creating a successful marketing illusion, is not really all that big and lacks a wide range of web portal elements. Yahoo represents a broad web portal and it's share price much more realistically matches it's revenue base.
What this does is really point out how much of a failure M$ has been with MSN, while a part google yahoo partnership has antitrust overtones a full MSN yahoo partnership doesn't. It really does make MSN look rather insignificant.
Gooogle spam words a re losing their lustre, most of google revenue increase is coming from bought in companies and simply filling out international expansion and local market increase have been minimal. Google lacks a lot of elements of a web portal and has such has been chasing M$ into the clouds, to create a grand new hope of revenue increase rather than getting down to the nitty gritty of web portal expansion in a really tough competitive enviroment. AOL Time Warner, Disney, Newscorp, NYT are all fighting hard to expand into the web portal market and they will all eat away at google market share and the reality is Yahoo is already successfully surviving in the competitive market.
So who will thrive and who is 'fucked' is not so cut and dried, google has come up lame in recent diversification attempts, MSN continues to lose money hand over fist, the old world media players are still struggling, although they seem to be moving now. At a guess, google will start to suffer as it lacks depth and has real problems when it tries to expand into new product areas apart from buying in expertise at a high price, the old world media companies will slowly but surely bite into everyone else's and each other market share as they continue to gain internet experience, Yahoo will basically hold place (a not to insignificant achievement in the current market, stabilising internet opportunities and harsh financial times) and MSN will continue to bleed, as for the tens of thousands of other web properties across the globe, some will grow, some will die but all of them will trying hard to eat into the market share of the market leaders and will likely have some measure of success.
So the statement about using open source in the browser is just to big note himself, a means by which to gain business publicity, to preserve his identity as the CEO of M$. M$ is stuck, IS is way too tightly embedded with the OS, making it impossible to realisticly combine Firefox with windows or open the source code of M$ IE. Of course M$ are currently stuck with their investment in sliverfish, the flash replacement that nobody wants, so perhaps this is just another song and dance to accompany the relaunch of version 2 advertising for that product.
I M$ seriously want a long term future, they have to focus on MSN and, for that Ballmer has not been the solution, he has been the failure.
So these same violent individuals gain access to the internet and whom do they interact with, why the very people who they would normally bully if they met them out on the street or in any other public space, those people who would normally have to shut up and just take the violence and abuse.
Now when those innocent non-violent individuals meet the basically arse hole, failed jock strap, red necks in digital space, they recognise them by their communications mannerisms and do exactly what you would expect them to do, take the bloody piss out of them. A lot of those victims of bullying also get a little out of hand at times with the new found freedom to communicate, with out getting threatened or actually suffering violent physical harm.
So the problem exists outside of the internet and is not as a result of the internet. You want to end the problem, solve it at it's core root, eliminate those violent racists prejudiced are holes from the population base, detect it an early age via genetics, drug them up and keep the sedated for the rest of their lives and for heavens sake simply don't let them breed. Of course the republicans would loathe the idea, their would be no one left to vote for them ;).
Actually it makes much more sense to run parallel computer infrastructure, something the NSA dose internally. Simply run two computers on two separate networks, one internal and one external with access to public resources. The external network can be on a computer by computer basis, so only the targeted computer, might go down or be taken over and beyond that it only leads back to the public network, simply done with netbooks on a wireless network for convenience.
The internal network would be hard wired with no direct connection to a public network, all data coming in would be filtered and analysed prior to entry and only specific locations would allow connection of portable media sources for input or output. It is cheap enough to do now and it follows KISS principles, a lot of governments already run 'airgap' internal networks as the only safe means by which any M$ products can be implemented in what is meant to be a secure secure environment.
A netbook is only really a laptop replacement, when the laptop is in the portable range and not spending most of it's life on a desk ala the 17" screen desknotes. What is happening is smart phones are being bound back to more portable size, the PDA sized phone and even the PDA itself are going to lose ground to the netbook. So compact smartphone, netbook and, desknote/desktop become the standard connected persons digital line up.
Likely the netbook will end up the most populus device in the western market, as it will end up on every school desktop and as the portable adjunct to the desktop device be it a notebook or a desktop. The netbook is going to end up being pretty abused, so durability (spills and drops), low cost (frequent replacement) and battery life are going to be the big drivers and, performance will take a back seat.
With hardware performance being limited to achieve the other goals that means the software must be really efficient, no bloat and fast, and lets forget silly stuff like it can run what ever bloated operating system, what counts is how well the applications on top of the operating system run, so the big comparisson will be Openoffice on Linux vs M$office2007 on Vista and which is more fit for purpose or even capable of running in an acceptable fashion.
Tag line, FOSS belt tightening. A lot of government departments around the world will be looking to assure taxpayers that they are working to achieve savings in these harsh economic times, as the general public become much more aware of FOSS, various Linux distributions, OpenOffice etc. this kind of public announcement is bound to become much more frequent as politicians will be desperate for positive stories to enhance their image. So the penguin is pretty cool at the moment even penguin waffles http://www.sunbeam.com.au/products/product_details.cfm?rec_id=467&sec_id=89&home_id=2.
What is really odd about all this, is it was launched by what is now the opposition party, the Liberal party (think of a fairly even mix between the US libertarian party and the Democrats, Australia doesn't really have anything like the Republicans except for fringe political parties). So normally you would expect them to back away from this, one can alone think that the proprietary creators of the filtering have done a truly spectacular and likely very 'generous' snow job, just think millions of licences, annual update costs, filtering updates, and the inevitable targeted biases in accidental filtering.
There seems to be this growing paranoia amongst those that perceive themselves as the ruling class, that the internet is truly taking their power away and redistributing amongst the masses. The reality is the mots radical and destructive ideas tend to filter themselves out of the internet through lack of 'genuine' interests, sure a lot of people will review them for a bit of a chuckle but that is all they get out of it. Filtering is pointless at the general access level, keep it out in the open, where the problem can be readily identified and where laws are being broken, the perpetrators prosecuted. Burying underground solves no problem and can leave the general public a bit naive when it comes to some of the problems out there that they via their government need to deal with.
You don't block people from viewing hate messages on the internet, you simply prosecute those who are inciting the violence and so controlling the guilty and not the innocent.
As for the false accusations of game piracy, well, as it happens because of shop lifters a lots of places selling games open up the boxes and remove the discs so they can maintain their retail displays while securing the property. Catch with that, a lot of employees then take the opportunity to 'borrow' (they fully intend to return it) and install the game. Nett results, customers walks into the store legally buys the game, which has been installed under the predefined registration number and, then try to install the game, he is either out of luck or is accused of being a software pirate.
As far the customer is concerned, which is a reasonable and fair expectation, it is the game publishers problem to resolve that issue with the retailer and the customer should spend no time nor effort in resolving the issue. Should the publisher demand that the customer return the disk, then the publisher should pay the customers costs and effort in doing the return.
Also there is lending your game to somebody else to install and play when you are not using it. Are you and your friends pirates or are you doing what you would normally do with any other property you legally own you own and what most people consider fair and reasonable.
Azure has far more to do with investors than it does with developers. It is all about creating the illusion of long term high profit margin revenue, that can be obtained by lock in style business practices. As M$ is struggling with both Vista and Office 2007, they need something more than the poor fiscal performance of xbox and the disaster of MSN. Google finds itself in a similar problem with regard to high share price limited growth opportunities in search and the inevitable break up of that market.
Crippled cloud solves their fiscal desires but really does nothing for the majority of the market, both of them are really lathering up the hype, advertising as news articles popping up all over the place especially in mass media, all trying to create a demand that doesn't really exist.
Realistically in tight economic times development will stagnate, companies will stick with what they have for as long as they can and only change when they are forced too and then that change will be targeted at long term solutions, where they have the greatest control over outlays and future investment cycles.
Unfortunately due to excessive abuses of the Iraqi civilian population by a military that abandoned any pretence of the rule of law and who considered it appropriate to apoint themselves as judge, jury and executioner, where in any constitution is aerial bombardment part of legal search, seizure and arrest. About the best thing the US can do now is to assemble a coalition of neighbouring nations who will assist in the stabilisation of Iraq and leave as they take over. They have managed to make themselves as unwelcome as possible and can no longer be a part of any successful solution.
It is pretty obvious that the US military industrial is already giving up on extracting significant profit out of the Iraqi crisis and do not see much potential in Afghanistan apart from a long drawn out 'police' action, where employing police will be far more successful than deploying soldiers and military equipment. Right now with the reactivation of the US 4th fleet as the US military industrial complex start to manoeuvre against a strengthening South American Union of nations who are now seeing greater growth and improving conditions as US influence was focused in other regions and has weakened to the point where the excessive influence of abusive exploitative foreign corporations and in turn corrupt foreign intelligence services has been curtailed.
Then you can add attempts to create a cold war with Russian complete with base accusations, threats of military actions and full blown insults. Russia will now take the simple expedient of supporting and assisting in the independence and defence of South American nations, not for any real gain, apart from extensive military sales but mainly to bleed the US who will inflate the threat and expend extensive resources defending against their inability to dominate their southern neighbours.
Africa also shows signs a becoming a problem as China wants to dominate that region in order to ruthlessly exploit it's resources and as destabilisation is an important part of that ruthless exploitation it is bound to get out of hand and cause severe problems for surrounding countries.
In this case it is note even about presenting a better case, it is all about a complete abuse of the system, why a company has basically set up a business to specifically target people who can not afford to defend themselves against the civil action and extorting money from them, Every time the RIAA has accidentally picked a litigant who can afford a legal defence they have lost, settled it out of court and buried it under non-disclosure agreements, except for one very notable case, that seeks to fully expose their pernicious behaviour.
It has to be the grossest and most public exploitation of the civil legal system, which emphatically displays the inequalities of a legal system, where one side simply needs to stretch out the case to the point where the other side cab not longer afford to defend themselves completely regardless of the merits of the case, in the case the defendants can not even afford the start of their defence let alone the tens of thousands of dollars to successfully conclude the case and win.
That the legal system and government have stood by and said nothing, whilst a legal firm has basically set up an extortion racket targeting tens of thousands of victims, makes them complicit accessories to a very public crime that makes a mockery of principles of equal justice for all.
Corporation can often be the worst researchers, everyone knows treating the symptoms is far more profitable than curing the disease. There are many areas of research where the results end up in the the public domain for the greater good. Examples are treating vermin species by introducing predators to reduce their numbers, this takes a considerable amount of research to be done successfully, generates absolutely no profit but can save billions.
Consider the rate of research that was achieved by government during two world wars, far faster than during any other periods, consider the internet the device you are using for to put out wrong headed comments or even the space race.
There seems to be this real crazy attitude that somehow citizens are not part of the government, or truly weird stuff like, you can't trust the government because it just just run by corporations for the benefit of corporations but you can quite illogically trust those corrupt corporations who are using their greed driven values to corrupt government.
Nor was government support available when the first caveman lit a fire or the first nomad made a wheel or the first hunter made a bow and arrow. Unfortunately most modern research is far more complex, far more costly, requires substantial facilities to conduct and many people working together to achieve. Not only that bust most modern research must be carefully regulated lest some researcher blinded by free market greed sets of a disaster.
Of course that does not stop the IRS from now pursuing him and charging him with failing to declare income, legal or otherwise. Apparently the US IRS does not pursue politicians when they are running for election but waits until the election is over and then target them whether they have won or not.
Brings to mind another Alaskan Politician and their custom zoned home that the sports centre built, once their run at running mate is over, it's likely they'll be the one pursued next. Why is it that the proteges of criminal politicians tend to commit much the same crimes.
Well obviously these robots do solve one great problem, there is just not enough corporate profit in a police dog and that's where the police robot comes in. Cheap solution, just fit a camera and radio harness to a trained dog.
This time around it appears like the googlites now feel threatened by, oh no, slashdot. So it just seems to be a tightly controlled sites, where a bunch of 'stink' tanks, get to put forward their own for profit views, promote themselves and at the same time try to give that whole 'knol' marketing B$ an air of legitimacy.
The whole site seems terribly stifled and completely lacks the open cook pot of slashdot, where thousands of ideas and opinions boil to the surface upon a continuous basis, all without the too chilling effect of too many facts or the need to try and create an 'air' of superior boringness ;).
One silly discussion was performance based pay for teachers, how daft. Now the delusion is that offering teachers more money for better grades means that somehow they will alter genetics and improve the IQ of students and the reality is in order to increase their pay they will simply kick the lower performing students out of the class/school and endeavour to attract higher IQ students who will be more far profitable. The result, the worst students end up stuck with the worst teachers in the worst schools, with the worst pay and funding, hmm now that's going to be real successful. The worst students in reality need the best teachers and teaching environment in order to achieve any measure of successful outcome, the results will of course never be high scoring but of course it is all about preventing failures and the damage that it causes, crime and prison. So imagine, financially penalising highly skilled teachers and schools who are willing to take on the difficult low performing students.
So, knol discussions, people only really interested in hearing their own opinions and of course as a blatant vehicle for google self promotion and advertising.
The description makes the employees sound like a bunch of lawyer accounting types coming up with new and imaginative ways of of screwing billions of dollars out of the government, hmm, I thought the normal perks in that case were drugs and hookers, yow, I don't think game consoles are really going to cut it ;).
Some people are really confused. Social security and the various welfare benefits are much more about running a stable, sociable, low stress society. For example universal health means, that we people are suffering, and parent worry about a child serious illness or injury, they do not also have to worry about how they are going to pay for it.
The underlying principles of effective social welfare nets are two fold, firstly there is the basic philosophical principle of society via declared ownership of all resource denying people the opportunity for a subsistence lifestyle basically forcing them into servitude to those with protected control of all resources and secondly and most importantly it is substantially cheaper to provide free health, free accommodation and a subsistence income than it is to imprison them when they break laws because they are incapable of effectively competing to gain access to those needed resources let alone the cost and suffering of the victims of crime.
How much more blatant does it have to be, three countries in a row, from north to south, an effective social welfare net and a low crime rate in the north, than as you go south the social welfare decreases as the crime rate increases, hmm, Canada - USA - Mexico, but this is ignored because of course greed always leads to blind ignorance.
The same ignorance is found when it comes to questions. The previous Australian government developed a stupid principle where they would not fund research unless it lead to profitable outcomes, net result, funding for permanent solutions that can't be sold but only given away to major problems was cut off in preference to solutions that could be sold to 'friendly' sic corporations that could sell them back to the public at an enormous profit ie. curing the disease rather than treating the symptoms or as in the case of fruit fly research, permanently eliminating the problem by effective genetic research rather than creating and continually selling for a profit pesticides that end up damaging the environment and farmers bank balances but generates an enormous profit for 'friendly' sic corporations.
Did I mention any party or any country. This is a global phenomena and the same corrupt individuals used the same methods to remove the same laws that had been implemented for the same reason upon a global basis. Corporate greed and corruption that extended well beyond any national boundaries.
I am not nor will I ever be a party barracker, I vote for the person who seems most appropriate for the role at the time or against the incumbent individual or party that has demonstrated incompetence.
What the crisis clearly does demonstrate is grossly excessive influence by private companies upon the functions of government, so not only should the finance laws be tightened up but also and more specifically the ability of corporations to influence government should be far more tightly monitored controlled, also the role of mass media's role in promoting the agenda of deregulation should also be looked into.
The real problem with electric car charging has always been battery technology. Even alternate renewable energy resources are hampered by a lack of truly effective battery technology. Long life, high energy capacity with rapid recharge. A real focus with government funded 'open' research to drive the development of better battery technology is where the government should focus it's efforts and not necessarily on it's own but in partnership with other countries.
To be fair, it is most likely just the way any true computer nerd/geek will express themselves, when they can afford to do so. What better than their own private lab, to explore their own ideas, as well as investigate new ones. So a self indulgence, likely but, it is still far better than spending it of private jets and mega yachts or on other ostentatious extravagances.
Who knows perhaps they might even explore new ideas in free open source software.
It is just an excuse to weaponise satellites, you know, it is only defensive and they 'need' to destroy other satellites before they can destroy our satellites. So they have been fucking around with recreating cold war military industrial spending as the B$ war in terrorism is petering out regardless of their best efforts to keep it going.
So they are determined to shift it into space where real money can spent without any benefit to anybody except the profit margins of arms manufacturers, those who live to create new and more profitable ways of killing the rest of us off.
They seem to be slowly but surely pushing the new threat out into space, hmm, the new military industrial profit centre, alien invasion. Perhaps they are slowly starting to shift their thinking for debunking aliens to promoting the xenophobic threat of alien contamination as they are running out of suitable threats upon our own grubby little polluted planet.
Your implication is that somehow Australian adults when exposed to this material will all turn into paedophile terrorists, which is in of itself ludicrous. The nature of Australia is defined by it's citizens, not by content being produced overseas. Australia is neither the home of terrorism nor a production centre for child porn, so censoring Australian seems a pointless and dangerous practice.
The very idea of instituting a centralised control of all digital communications that can be censored and controlled by the government of the day at a whim, of either corruption politicians or self aggrandising bureaucrats is of itself offensive. As for the notion that somehow controlling content of any kind can be done outside of the countries where it is produced is just idiotic, to tackle those problems it must be done at it's source.
There are already laws in place that define what content is suitable to distribute in Australia, just like all other laws it is up to each citizen to adhere to the laws, the government is not there to institute a system of continuous monitoring and controlling to force the public to the will of the politicians of the day. The government is their to institute laws that form the basis of the moral judgement of Australian adults and when these laws are infringed seek to restrain those individuals who break those laws, rather than pursuing and controlling those innocent of any illegal activity. History has demonstrated time and time again, institute a system that can be abused and it always will be.
The real focus should always be those distributing and creating damaging content, that is where the harm is caused. At least they have given up on the lie that they attempting make the internet safe for children, which is where the real focus should be. The money the government is throwing away upon proprietary lock in forever licenses would be far better off creating a separate school based internet that is specifically designed for children to access and that parents to lock internet access down to only that network a network that would be suitably monitored and restricted to create a safe digital environment for children. It is just a shame it does not feel the need for greed, not only for the corporations selling proprietary filtering software but also for manipulative corporate advertising targeted at children which of course would be censored out of a internet specifically created for children.