Hmm, interesting, you liken infringing upon someone else's code, as some how them infecting you, talk about blaming the victim.
Lets be quite clear, proprietary code is the cancer, it eats up all code and ideas, patents and copyrights them preventing any one else from using them at all. It strives to achieve a monopoly and kill off all opposition regardless of the damage done. Not only that it stifles competition in coding quality, resulting in coding infections running rampant across networks, a weakening of the fitness for purpose of the code. See, a digital cancer.
Now open source represent actual healthy competition and evolution of the most secure, reliable and usable code. It allows a healthy diverse technological digital ecosystem to grow and flourish. It promotes 'open' and 'equal' access to all code resources, healthy and vital companies thrive in that environment. Of course they only thing that suffers is those cancerous old proprietary companies who find they are no longer able to implement monopolistic practices to starve out the vital elements of a healthy industry. Just like any tumorous growth, once effective treatment begins, in the case Free Open Source Software, first growth stops and, then the influence of the proprietary cancer shrinks and it either reverts to become a healthy part of the industry or it dies off and disappears all together.
See Free Open Source Software - equates to healthy technological development and closed source proprietary software is without doubt the cancer.
The tricky part is not the value of the virtual goods but the value input by the user in terms of subscription fees, time and equipment costs. Whilst the goods might be virtual, the user inputs are not and have real value. In this case based upon the article the penalty was extraordinarily lenient, considering the victim felt that their life was threatened and, it was armed robbery and assault.
The perpetrators of the crime would would also seem to lack any degree of normalcy considering their reported willingness to resort to extreme criminal activity to steal, virtual goods, which they could achieve just by playing a game ie, they valued another humans life as less than the value of imaginary digital goods, what would they be willing to do for goods of real tangible value?
Don't confuse the libertarian. They always seem to think all those regulations that controlled the excesses of capitalism mysteriously appeared on their own by accident. All those laws that were removed in the deregulation gold rush, were put in place as the direct result of failures resulting from unbridled capitalism, each failure and corrupt exploitation resulted in new laws to prevent their recurrence, of course those laws, as yet, could not ultimately prevent their removal.
The out of control lending was all about creating the illusion of profits and hence inflate the bonuses of grossly overpaid executives. It was all about a total disregard of the consequences, of people cashing in on other peoples savings, of management making millions while costing everyone else billions. It did not happen accidentally, it was inevitable and planned and executed by people who had no regard for the damage they caused, their sole interest was in how much in bonuses they could squeeze out before it all collapsed.
More to the point, who should they really be pursuing, the deranged viewer or the sadistic photographer. Of course the reality is it has nothing to do with child porn, or terrorism it is all about control. Control what people can read, controlling what people can say, controlling dissent, controlling criticism of those in power of being able to take control of the public mind scape to promote what profits them most.
At least they have giving up of the lie of trying to make an internet designed for adults suitable for toddlers. A bit hard to say content suitable for a 17 year old is also suitable for a 5 year old, precisely to what level do they really intend to censor the internet. Most important of all how much is going to cost, what corporations will be profiting by it, who will be sued for illegally blocking legal sites and, who will profit by illegally blocking legal sites.
You obviously have no idea how a regulated manual system works wnen the government is corrupt and already using force to sustain it's rule. In a manual system, there are volunteers from all parties attending the ballot process, including, sealing of empty ballot boxes, handing out of the ballots, monitoring the filling of the ballot boxes, unsealing and emptying of the ballot boxes, and counting of the ballots. Normally the voting and ballot counting occur at the same location avoiding transport of ballot box problems.
In addition to the volunteers from all parties doing all the work, their are paid officials who supervise and monitor the activities of the volunteers. In a lot of countries the election takes place on a Saturday, to ensure easy access for volunteers and well as of course for voters and enabling the use of the numerous school halls available around most countries for the voting and vote counting process.
So cheating is enormously difficult and only really happens in regional areas, where the volunteers are all from one party and the election official is also corrupt, catch is only one or a handful of polling booths out of thousands is corrupted and, in reality only has negligible impact upon the election as a whole (and the risk is huge and the penalties severe).
With electronic voting machines and electronic vote counting machines of paper ballots, all with secret unverifiable code, as well as unverifiable electronic chips (how many are removed from their plastic housing and microscopically scanned and analysed), the whole election can be rigged and the electorate has absolutely no means by which to verify the validity of the electronic election process and even with receipts of electronic votes, the winning party will simply deny the chain of legal possession of those receipts to verify their authenticity. Only a fool would think that stuffing one election box at one polling booth, would compare with hacking the voting machines, the transfer of the output of the vote counting machines to the data analysis location and of course the data output of the analysis device.
Elections are all about people governing other people, so people should be fully involved in the control of and verification of every part of the process. The election is the single most fundamental part of any democracy and every step should be taken to ensure it's safety and validity, from voter registration to the final vote tally.
What is bad of course, is that nobody pays for the loss of productivity and the months it takes to adapt. So if you find you dislike the ribbon and are slower on it, not only have your lost months of productivity adapting but you will continue to lose productivity and not via your choice. Of course I can't really tell never having seen or used the ribbon interface, everybody I know either uses XP or office 2003 or older in the M$ line. I also have observed considerable growth in Apple and Linux use, as well as OpenOffice.org.
People are now making the switch not necessarily because they want to but, because they know they have to, M$ is forcing them, so they are basically getting the shift over and done with as they recognise the change to be inevitable due to M$'s arrogance and general anti-consumer attitudes.
I mean really, evil customers (pirates) prefer XP and Office 2003 to Vista and Office 2007.
In your case of course is of course the presentation of an artful deception. What counts is not what percentage of total taxable revenue the rich or the poor pay but what percentage of their own individual income they pay. So some individual earning less than lets say $50,000 a year paying a higher percentage of tax than another individual earning $5,000,000 per year, seems hardly fair especially considering the sheer dollar volume of the remainder left after tacxes.
Another way of looking at it is, in a world of limited resources, certain individuals believe they are entitled to use not just 10 times, or even 100 times, but more than 1000 times the natural resources of the planet than the average person uses. This of course extends into their entitlement to generate pollution as well, some individuals actually believe they entitled to pollute at 1,000 times the average rate not as a result of their value to society but purely based upon their greed and their ability to exploit the rest of humanity.
Some individuals will even take pride in their ability to consume and pollute at 10,000 times the average, truly obscene stuff, now that is the reality and the truth. Of course the absurd belief system behind it is, that mass media and the gullible majority celebrate and aspire to it and, worship the people that do it, 'stupid is as stupid does'. Logically it makes considerable sense to tax the crap out of the rich and greedy in order to limit their ability to consume the planets natural resources and generate the pollution that is choking the life out of it and us;P.
So the new game playing model would be, wireless mesh networking on netbook computers, relatively simple easy to play games that people can share in the same room on separate, relatively disposable devices.
Of course as an older game player I do still enjoy graphically attractive, complex strategy games interspersed with simple dumb web flash games. I always derived more pleasure from learning a game, rather than playing it, RTFM, that'll be the day.
So to simplify the whole issue, kill off the whole idea of dead music and focus on live music, the kind of music that in reality does employ far more people and make for far greater enjoyment. Want to reward the musicians then pay to go to their live performances and in turn they should give away their dead tracks as advertising and promotional material.
When it is about trade marks and copyrights, it is not about other people using it, it is about other people using it to generate a profit. So for example using the gangs 'Mongol' logo on clothing and in movies and selling it at a profit. It obviously will have zero impact on gang members using it themselves upon their own articles of clothing or tattoos. As for some other 'idiot' trying to use it for a profit, good luck, talk about red rag to a bull.
It is just B$ politics as usual trying to create a new legal image for the copyright weasel in chief to somehow make acceptable the idea of confiscating a parents house when a child commits, yo ho ho, high seas piracy, really pathetic stuff. You can expect a whole load more copyright and trademark B$ to come down the 'pipe' as they start pushing for even more absurd criminal penalties for copying what ever crap content they decide to pursue. You know, three strikes your 'in' for life, copy three music tracks and the US is trying it's darndest to beats it's current imprisonment rate world record, go USA.
The funny thing is of course, you can envisage some republican Christian right fundamentalist, paying the fine for their child infringing the copyright of pornography, wow, so gullible.
A focus on storyline rather than game play, let me guess, MMO trickle ware, sold in instalments. In MMO, the game play should induce the players into creating the storyline, attempting to force feed it will only result in latter players being completely out of sync, existing players feeling creatively confined and the inevitable occasional boring story line turning off large numbers of players.
I've read the article as well, PUE is about as idiotic a metric as you can have, the ratio of energy used by computer equipment versus the energy used at the facility for all other uses. The only thing that really counts is the total amount of energy used to process a given number of calculations and data requests.
You can have a really great PUE just by using the most energy inefficient computers you can get. It just seems like the googlites and M$, are just chasing each other up their own wazoos in the pursuit of empty marketing hype, in pursuit of that cool factor, that their renown for privacy invasiveness is poisoning. Silly marketing like this will only further taint the image they are so busy trying to 'fabricate'.
Unless of course the network goes down, then zero access. It happens all the time, a ship drops and anchor in the wrong spot, somebody somewhere in the routing path configures the hardware wrong, power brownouts anywhere in that route and of course it is only in beta and the warranties are completely and absolutely less than worthless. Cloud computing is really all about data being distributed everywhere and not being locked into a limited number of locations where you have to pay rent to access it. Let's just call a spade a spade, rented access to your own data, ain't cloud computing it is greed computing.
The future in computer software is FOSS and service and support. So yes the typical end user can not really set and up maintain a stable, secure and reliable system and that is why they pay for service and support, when they do need high reliability and uptime and for the majority of businesses in certainly is cheap enough to achieve, they just need reliable access to people who can provide it for them.
As for the end user, easy simple access to most of their stuff, whether they are connected to the net or not is the most important, computers are not their life, they are just a means by which they can share photos, send a letter, browse the net, play a few games and maybe do a bit of shopping and bill paying.
The cloud computing that ballmer et all keep waffling on about only exists because it is the only model they can envisage where they can maintain inflated profit margins, the service and support and fully distributed computing is a much more competitive, high performance and low profit margin market. The performance aspect, is all about companies providing services must be seen to perform, must continually demonstrate high skill and reliability and any failures will soon be reported through their potential and existing client base. This is where M$ is most behind the eight ball, with a reputation for poor service and support, lying to customers, ignoring and denying customer feedback and, routinely distributing unreliable and faulty products.
Unfortunately that only happens in very small social environments (a village Of course the biggest bit of stupidity is the maverick politician, what a load of crap, under no circumstance could a maverick ever become a politician, it most definitely is not in their nature to sit in any kind of room bull shitting with a bunch of politicians for any period of time, to a maverick the very though would be offensive and repulsive to the highest possible degree. Any politician claiming to be a maverick is just a lying sack of, what they're trying to sell;).
Then you just employ lateral thinking. Google can place it's data centres on the coasts in regions where there is a scarcity of fresh water. Your typical reverse osmosis desalination plant is only around 20% effective and the waste water is returned to the sea. Google just needs to implement a high volume heat exchange in the waste water stream and they can sell the fresh water. So heat loss at a profit rather than at a loss and, it is major cities in a lot of locations that are looking for fresh water, so customers, staff and network infrastructure are all readily accessible. So a bit of clear thinking and you don't have a ship adrift at sea but a for more financially viable solution that supports the local community.
Now the amount of cooling water available will likely far exceed Googles requirements so that could sell access to it at a data park, where other companies with similar issues with only relatively low heat loss requirements could also gain access to low cost cooling solutions. Hmm, google, too many marketing and psychology PHDs and not enough engineering common sence.
Actually taking into account the location of John Riccitiello speech, The Nielsen Company and Dow Jones, Media and Money Conference, it is more like investors bend over. As he will clearly say anything and distort any fact in order to plump up the companies share price and his bonus regardless of the consequence when reality comes back to bite the new shareholders on the butt as the result of a whole bunch of disgruntled customers.
Talk about over the top 'a number of them launched a cabal online' a bloody cabal, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/cabal - 1. A conspiratorial group of plotters or intriguers:"Espionage is quite precisely it, a cabal of powerful men, working secretly" Frank Conroy.. You gaming terrorists you, see the harm you have caused, you tipped this poor guy into some delusional paranoid world where he is being pursued by political plotters.
1) Allocate all the IPv4 addresses. 2) Create a scarcity. 3) PROFIT
The biggest delay in the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is the profit that ISP's generate by renting access to them and of course IPv6 will be the big free internet address give away, even for the oft abused end users. So for them it really sucks, they have to spend money to switch from IPv4 to IPv6 so that they wont be able to make money by charging for IPv4 addresses. For the end users it is great.
The catch with that of course, while the group of Lords as in the House of Lords wanted to limit the power of the King they simultaneously wanted of protect their own power. Some elements of Jacqui Smith are as disgusting and as disingenuous as they come. Imagine The evil internet allowing people to share ideas, how terrible, no longer will the minority be able to lock in what will enter the public mindscape, especially bad, as the majority are often far more moral than the minority who currently control government who are well known for being both amoral and immoral as far as greed and lust are concerned.
Exactly what stops them from implementing technology and legal principles that have been around for decades ie. the establishing of wire taps when there is sufficient evidence of a crime being committed to put before a judge to substantiate the need of monitoring for each individual incident. The reality is politicians and senior bureaucrats have become dazzled by the power of the internet to monitor and control everyone all for the time, basically they as politicians are control freaks, psychologically they are definitively not representative of the majority of the population (any time they say that they are, they are emphatically lying), they are by their nature, a minority who desperately need to control the social environment around them. Whilst we may accept this as long as 'THEY' work in the public good and under a set of strict laws to control 'THEM', we should take in account
'THEIR'
behavioural peccadillos and ensure they do not stick us with a some terrible laws that they can pervert to fulfil their own deviant urges.
A simpler way of looking at it is small 'l' liberalism, as in the liberal arts and a more enlightened approach. A big L liberal, as in libertarianism combined with conservatism, basically government should not interfere in private ownership, except to enforce it though force of arms, private ownership would extend to slavery or the pretence where it is acceptable for a minority to own access to all natural resources and to lock up ownership of those resources upon an hereditary basis, basically excluding the majority from anything other than servitude (closet royalists).
You forget all about Windows NT, 4 versions as well as of course windows 2000 and considering that XP is an extension of windows 2000 Pro and Windows NT and that Windows ME was basically the dead end for the other code set, that really doesn't make any sense. It just sounds like more of a gamble, you know, lucky 7 and all that.
The M$ executive teams seems a bit lost at the moment, their typical B$ marketing campaign that worked so well in the past has basically self destructed as no one believes it any more, so they are going the superstitious route in trying to sell this version, expect lots of lucky horse shoes, rabbits feet, four leaf clovers and knock on wood (not ballmer's head of course), themes in this version.
Of course from the FOSS point of view, Windows 7 security, it's a crap shoot, roll a seven and you win, snakes eyes or box cars and crap(s) you loose, M$ security it's all in the odds, sometimes you win and sometimes you loose, so are you feeling lucky, then take the gamble on Windows 7 Security;D (don't believe me, then read the warranty before you buy it, not after).
However in this case by doing a comparisson and apples and oranges search they are merely obfuscating the output. So if you want to comapre google hits to Yahoo hits, you really have to take into account the other activities that Yahoo does that google does not, for example from the same site, http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2504, so Yahoo does browser gaming and google does not.
Also in another article http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1991 there is this interesting bit "Search term categorization: Developed jointly by Google and comScore with tens of thousands of queries categorized. comScore, in conjunction with Google, categorized the search terms", perhaps google and comScore might just be working a little too closely together for impartial output. Not implying that comScore sells a lot or reports to google but that google is likely to have a bias in creating test metrics where it knows it has an advantage and where there is an enormous financial impact in selling an perception of market advantage.
It is pretty obvious that the campaign to discredit spam has succeed, did you not pick up on "Mega-D botnet -- named after one of its pill products -- was made up of 35,000 computers and could send 10 billion e-mail messages a day". The botnet is now necessary to send spam upon any significant basis, otherwise their ISP will suspend their account and if their ISP fails to do this, then the ISP will finds all of it's email blocked.
The botnet represent criminal activity that goes far beyond sending spam and involves real significant penalties. It would seem the focuses now needs to shift beyond spam, to detecting the botnets, shutting them down and prosecuting the individuals who created them. How quickly this can be done will have a real impact upon spam, focusing upon the victims of spam and targeting them with derogatory comments really is of no benefit.
People with a sharper intellect and a more extension knowledge base, really have to understand and accept the 40 IQ points really does make for a significant difference of understanding and comprehension. So in creating a complex technological system, it falls upon the more intellectual specialised creators of the system, to ensure the system is sufficiently safe and easy to use for those individuals who are limited in their intellectual focus to the basic day to day use of those technological systems without having the the desire or sufficient time to learn all those intricacies of effective use.
If the average user can, they basically would use computers as effectively skilled users.
There is a much more significant benefit in schools using free open source software, and this extends far beyond the economic savings to the taxpayer in not having to pay for software licences or the savings to employers not having to train people in the use of free open source software, especially for typical everyday generic business activities, so they also avoid expensive repetitious licence costs.
The big advantage is students doing assignments can actually do work that is of benefit to the whole of society. There is more to open source software beyond the code (although suitably skilled students will be able to practice directly on open source code), there is usability analysis, documentation, administration, interface design, templates and well as teaching the principles of open source. These principles can then be extended into the preparation of open text books and other teaching resources and the updating of the same.
It is for more satisfying for students to see real world results for the academic activities. These advantages also extend themselves to the teaching staff, where their academic efforts can be directly implemented, not only within the teaching environment but also out into industry.
The long term goal of course should be for the government to create it's own standard Linux distribution, with input from all the public higher education institutions from all of the states, as well as from industry and, also of course also suitably individuals. Naturally enough this should also be done upon an international basis with other countries who also establishing an across the board open software technology infrastructure. The reason of course for a base standard is enable simple no cost compatibility as a basis for any commercial distributions, containing a service and support element.
Of course the only real difference in government distributions or even department of education distributions, is mainly that the computer is delivered in a known, controlled, complete state, ready to go and can readily be returned to that state. Of course it also looks better if all the suitably parochial logos appear in 'all' the right places, it does make a difference.
What they meant to write was , don't you think this money would better be spent on celebrities, mega yachts, private jets, luxury cars, mansions, exotic foods, alcohol, jewellery, fashion, makeup, hookers, drugs, oh yeah of course music CDs, you know all that bright shiny ego inflating crap, they were just too shamed and embarrassed to do so. Damn, that you should spend all that money on furthering human knowledge and understanding what a waste and seriously considering some of those specimens of humanity it really is a waste, oh well, I suppose you just have to focus on the few of us who see value in all knowledge because, basically you don't know how you can apply what you don't understand until you learn about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets be quite clear, proprietary code is the cancer, it eats up all code and ideas, patents and copyrights them preventing any one else from using them at all. It strives to achieve a monopoly and kill off all opposition regardless of the damage done. Not only that it stifles competition in coding quality, resulting in coding infections running rampant across networks, a weakening of the fitness for purpose of the code. See, a digital cancer.
Now open source represent actual healthy competition and evolution of the most secure, reliable and usable code. It allows a healthy diverse technological digital ecosystem to grow and flourish. It promotes 'open' and 'equal' access to all code resources, healthy and vital companies thrive in that environment. Of course they only thing that suffers is those cancerous old proprietary companies who find they are no longer able to implement monopolistic practices to starve out the vital elements of a healthy industry. Just like any tumorous growth, once effective treatment begins, in the case Free Open Source Software, first growth stops and, then the influence of the proprietary cancer shrinks and it either reverts to become a healthy part of the industry or it dies off and disappears all together.
See Free Open Source Software - equates to healthy technological development and closed source proprietary software is without doubt the cancer.
The perpetrators of the crime would would also seem to lack any degree of normalcy considering their reported willingness to resort to extreme criminal activity to steal, virtual goods, which they could achieve just by playing a game ie, they valued another humans life as less than the value of imaginary digital goods, what would they be willing to do for goods of real tangible value?
Don't confuse the libertarian. They always seem to think all those regulations that controlled the excesses of capitalism mysteriously appeared on their own by accident. All those laws that were removed in the deregulation gold rush, were put in place as the direct result of failures resulting from unbridled capitalism, each failure and corrupt exploitation resulted in new laws to prevent their recurrence, of course those laws, as yet, could not ultimately prevent their removal.
The out of control lending was all about creating the illusion of profits and hence inflate the bonuses of grossly overpaid executives. It was all about a total disregard of the consequences, of people cashing in on other peoples savings, of management making millions while costing everyone else billions. It did not happen accidentally, it was inevitable and planned and executed by people who had no regard for the damage they caused, their sole interest was in how much in bonuses they could squeeze out before it all collapsed.
More to the point, who should they really be pursuing, the deranged viewer or the sadistic photographer. Of course the reality is it has nothing to do with child porn, or terrorism it is all about control. Control what people can read, controlling what people can say, controlling dissent, controlling criticism of those in power of being able to take control of the public mind scape to promote what profits them most.
At least they have giving up of the lie of trying to make an internet designed for adults suitable for toddlers. A bit hard to say content suitable for a 17 year old is also suitable for a 5 year old, precisely to what level do they really intend to censor the internet. Most important of all how much is going to cost, what corporations will be profiting by it, who will be sued for illegally blocking legal sites and, who will profit by illegally blocking legal sites.
You obviously have no idea how a regulated manual system works wnen the government is corrupt and already using force to sustain it's rule. In a manual system, there are volunteers from all parties attending the ballot process, including, sealing of empty ballot boxes, handing out of the ballots, monitoring the filling of the ballot boxes, unsealing and emptying of the ballot boxes, and counting of the ballots. Normally the voting and ballot counting occur at the same location avoiding transport of ballot box problems.
In addition to the volunteers from all parties doing all the work, their are paid officials who supervise and monitor the activities of the volunteers. In a lot of countries the election takes place on a Saturday, to ensure easy access for volunteers and well as of course for voters and enabling the use of the numerous school halls available around most countries for the voting and vote counting process.
So cheating is enormously difficult and only really happens in regional areas, where the volunteers are all from one party and the election official is also corrupt, catch is only one or a handful of polling booths out of thousands is corrupted and, in reality only has negligible impact upon the election as a whole (and the risk is huge and the penalties severe).
With electronic voting machines and electronic vote counting machines of paper ballots, all with secret unverifiable code, as well as unverifiable electronic chips (how many are removed from their plastic housing and microscopically scanned and analysed), the whole election can be rigged and the electorate has absolutely no means by which to verify the validity of the electronic election process and even with receipts of electronic votes, the winning party will simply deny the chain of legal possession of those receipts to verify their authenticity. Only a fool would think that stuffing one election box at one polling booth, would compare with hacking the voting machines, the transfer of the output of the vote counting machines to the data analysis location and of course the data output of the analysis device.
Elections are all about people governing other people, so people should be fully involved in the control of and verification of every part of the process. The election is the single most fundamental part of any democracy and every step should be taken to ensure it's safety and validity, from voter registration to the final vote tally.
What is bad of course, is that nobody pays for the loss of productivity and the months it takes to adapt. So if you find you dislike the ribbon and are slower on it, not only have your lost months of productivity adapting but you will continue to lose productivity and not via your choice. Of course I can't really tell never having seen or used the ribbon interface, everybody I know either uses XP or office 2003 or older in the M$ line. I also have observed considerable growth in Apple and Linux use, as well as OpenOffice.org.
People are now making the switch not necessarily because they want to but, because they know they have to, M$ is forcing them, so they are basically getting the shift over and done with as they recognise the change to be inevitable due to M$'s arrogance and general anti-consumer attitudes.
I mean really, evil customers (pirates) prefer XP and Office 2003 to Vista and Office 2007.
In your case of course is of course the presentation of an artful deception. What counts is not what percentage of total taxable revenue the rich or the poor pay but what percentage of their own individual income they pay. So some individual earning less than lets say $50,000 a year paying a higher percentage of tax than another individual earning $5,000,000 per year, seems hardly fair especially considering the sheer dollar volume of the remainder left after tacxes.
Another way of looking at it is, in a world of limited resources, certain individuals believe they are entitled to use not just 10 times, or even 100 times, but more than 1000 times the natural resources of the planet than the average person uses. This of course extends into their entitlement to generate pollution as well, some individuals actually believe they entitled to pollute at 1,000 times the average rate not as a result of their value to society but purely based upon their greed and their ability to exploit the rest of humanity.
Some individuals will even take pride in their ability to consume and pollute at 10,000 times the average, truly obscene stuff, now that is the reality and the truth. Of course the absurd belief system behind it is, that mass media and the gullible majority celebrate and aspire to it and, worship the people that do it, 'stupid is as stupid does'. Logically it makes considerable sense to tax the crap out of the rich and greedy in order to limit their ability to consume the planets natural resources and generate the pollution that is choking the life out of it and us ;P.
Of course as an older game player I do still enjoy graphically attractive, complex strategy games interspersed with simple dumb web flash games. I always derived more pleasure from learning a game, rather than playing it, RTFM, that'll be the day.
So to simplify the whole issue, kill off the whole idea of dead music and focus on live music, the kind of music that in reality does employ far more people and make for far greater enjoyment. Want to reward the musicians then pay to go to their live performances and in turn they should give away their dead tracks as advertising and promotional material.
When it is about trade marks and copyrights, it is not about other people using it, it is about other people using it to generate a profit. So for example using the gangs 'Mongol' logo on clothing and in movies and selling it at a profit. It obviously will have zero impact on gang members using it themselves upon their own articles of clothing or tattoos. As for some other 'idiot' trying to use it for a profit, good luck, talk about red rag to a bull.
It is just B$ politics as usual trying to create a new legal image for the copyright weasel in chief to somehow make acceptable the idea of confiscating a parents house when a child commits, yo ho ho, high seas piracy, really pathetic stuff. You can expect a whole load more copyright and trademark B$ to come down the 'pipe' as they start pushing for even more absurd criminal penalties for copying what ever crap content they decide to pursue. You know, three strikes your 'in' for life, copy three music tracks and the US is trying it's darndest to beats it's current imprisonment rate world record, go USA.
The funny thing is of course, you can envisage some republican Christian right fundamentalist, paying the fine for their child infringing the copyright of pornography, wow, so gullible.
A focus on storyline rather than game play, let me guess, MMO trickle ware, sold in instalments. In MMO, the game play should induce the players into creating the storyline, attempting to force feed it will only result in latter players being completely out of sync, existing players feeling creatively confined and the inevitable occasional boring story line turning off large numbers of players.
I've read the article as well, PUE is about as idiotic a metric as you can have, the ratio of energy used by computer equipment versus the energy used at the facility for all other uses. The only thing that really counts is the total amount of energy used to process a given number of calculations and data requests.
You can have a really great PUE just by using the most energy inefficient computers you can get. It just seems like the googlites and M$, are just chasing each other up their own wazoos in the pursuit of empty marketing hype, in pursuit of that cool factor, that their renown for privacy invasiveness is poisoning. Silly marketing like this will only further taint the image they are so busy trying to 'fabricate'.
So gears allows you to continue to share work even with your internet connection down, hmm, digital telepathy perhaps ;).
Unless of course the network goes down, then zero access. It happens all the time, a ship drops and anchor in the wrong spot, somebody somewhere in the routing path configures the hardware wrong, power brownouts anywhere in that route and of course it is only in beta and the warranties are completely and absolutely less than worthless. Cloud computing is really all about data being distributed everywhere and not being locked into a limited number of locations where you have to pay rent to access it. Let's just call a spade a spade, rented access to your own data, ain't cloud computing it is greed computing.
The future in computer software is FOSS and service and support. So yes the typical end user can not really set and up maintain a stable, secure and reliable system and that is why they pay for service and support, when they do need high reliability and uptime and for the majority of businesses in certainly is cheap enough to achieve, they just need reliable access to people who can provide it for them.
As for the end user, easy simple access to most of their stuff, whether they are connected to the net or not is the most important, computers are not their life, they are just a means by which they can share photos, send a letter, browse the net, play a few games and maybe do a bit of shopping and bill paying.
The cloud computing that ballmer et all keep waffling on about only exists because it is the only model they can envisage where they can maintain inflated profit margins, the service and support and fully distributed computing is a much more competitive, high performance and low profit margin market. The performance aspect, is all about companies providing services must be seen to perform, must continually demonstrate high skill and reliability and any failures will soon be reported through their potential and existing client base. This is where M$ is most behind the eight ball, with a reputation for poor service and support, lying to customers, ignoring and denying customer feedback and, routinely distributing unreliable and faulty products.
Unfortunately that only happens in very small social environments (a village Of course the biggest bit of stupidity is the maverick politician, what a load of crap, under no circumstance could a maverick ever become a politician, it most definitely is not in their nature to sit in any kind of room bull shitting with a bunch of politicians for any period of time, to a maverick the very though would be offensive and repulsive to the highest possible degree. Any politician claiming to be a maverick is just a lying sack of, what they're trying to sell ;).
Then you just employ lateral thinking. Google can place it's data centres on the coasts in regions where there is a scarcity of fresh water. Your typical reverse osmosis desalination plant is only around 20% effective and the waste water is returned to the sea. Google just needs to implement a high volume heat exchange in the waste water stream and they can sell the fresh water. So heat loss at a profit rather than at a loss and, it is major cities in a lot of locations that are looking for fresh water, so customers, staff and network infrastructure are all readily accessible. So a bit of clear thinking and you don't have a ship adrift at sea but a for more financially viable solution that supports the local community.
Now the amount of cooling water available will likely far exceed Googles requirements so that could sell access to it at a data park, where other companies with similar issues with only relatively low heat loss requirements could also gain access to low cost cooling solutions. Hmm, google, too many marketing and psychology PHDs and not enough engineering common sence.
Actually taking into account the location of John Riccitiello speech, The Nielsen Company and Dow Jones, Media and Money Conference, it is more like investors bend over. As he will clearly say anything and distort any fact in order to plump up the companies share price and his bonus regardless of the consequence when reality comes back to bite the new shareholders on the butt as the result of a whole bunch of disgruntled customers.
Talk about over the top 'a number of them launched a cabal online' a bloody cabal,
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/cabal - 1. A conspiratorial group of plotters or intriguers:"Espionage is quite precisely it, a cabal of powerful men, working secretly" Frank Conroy..
You gaming terrorists you, see the harm you have caused, you tipped this poor guy into some delusional paranoid world where he is being pursued by political plotters.
More importantly
1) Allocate all the IPv4 addresses.
2) Create a scarcity.
3) PROFIT
The biggest delay in the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is the profit that ISP's generate by renting access to them and of course IPv6 will be the big free internet address give away, even for the oft abused end users. So for them it really sucks, they have to spend money to switch from IPv4 to IPv6 so that they wont be able to make money by charging for IPv4 addresses. For the end users it is great.
The catch with that of course, while the group of Lords as in the House of Lords wanted to limit the power of the King they simultaneously wanted of protect their own power. Some elements of Jacqui Smith are as disgusting and as disingenuous as they come. Imagine The evil internet allowing people to share ideas, how terrible, no longer will the minority be able to lock in what will enter the public mindscape, especially bad, as the majority are often far more moral than the minority who currently control government who are well known for being both amoral and immoral as far as greed and lust are concerned.
Exactly what stops them from implementing technology and legal principles that have been around for decades ie. the establishing of wire taps when there is sufficient evidence of a crime being committed to put before a judge to substantiate the need of monitoring for each individual incident. The reality is politicians and senior bureaucrats have become dazzled by the power of the internet to monitor and control everyone all for the time, basically they as politicians are control freaks, psychologically they are definitively not representative of the majority of the population (any time they say that they are, they are emphatically lying), they are by their nature, a minority who desperately need to control the social environment around them. Whilst we may accept this as long as 'THEY' work in the public good and under a set of strict laws to control 'THEM', we should take in account
'THEIR'
behavioural peccadillos and ensure they do not stick us with a some terrible laws that they can pervert to fulfil their own deviant urges.
A simpler way of looking at it is small 'l' liberalism, as in the liberal arts and a more enlightened approach. A big L liberal, as in libertarianism combined with conservatism, basically government should not interfere in private ownership, except to enforce it though force of arms, private ownership would extend to slavery or the pretence where it is acceptable for a minority to own access to all natural resources and to lock up ownership of those resources upon an hereditary basis, basically excluding the majority from anything other than servitude (closet royalists).
You forget all about Windows NT, 4 versions as well as of course windows 2000 and considering that XP is an extension of windows 2000 Pro and Windows NT and that Windows ME was basically the dead end for the other code set, that really doesn't make any sense. It just sounds like more of a gamble, you know, lucky 7 and all that.
The M$ executive teams seems a bit lost at the moment, their typical B$ marketing campaign that worked so well in the past has basically self destructed as no one believes it any more, so they are going the superstitious route in trying to sell this version, expect lots of lucky horse shoes, rabbits feet, four leaf clovers and knock on wood (not ballmer's head of course), themes in this version.
Of course from the FOSS point of view, Windows 7 security, it's a crap shoot, roll a seven and you win, snakes eyes or box cars and crap(s) you loose, M$ security it's all in the odds, sometimes you win and sometimes you loose, so are you feeling lucky, then take the gamble on Windows 7 Security ;D (don't believe me, then read the warranty before you buy it, not after).
However in this case by doing a comparisson and apples and oranges search they are merely obfuscating the output. So if you want to comapre google hits to Yahoo hits, you really have to take into account the other activities that Yahoo does that google does not, for example from the same site, http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2504, so Yahoo does browser gaming and google does not.
Also in another article http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1991 there is this interesting bit "Search term categorization: Developed jointly by Google and comScore with tens of thousands of queries categorized. comScore, in conjunction with Google, categorized the search terms", perhaps google and comScore might just be working a little too closely together for impartial output. Not implying that comScore sells a lot or reports to google but that google is likely to have a bias in creating test metrics where it knows it has an advantage and where there is an enormous financial impact in selling an perception of market advantage.
The botnet represent criminal activity that goes far beyond sending spam and involves real significant penalties. It would seem the focuses now needs to shift beyond spam, to detecting the botnets, shutting them down and prosecuting the individuals who created them. How quickly this can be done will have a real impact upon spam, focusing upon the victims of spam and targeting them with derogatory comments really is of no benefit.
People with a sharper intellect and a more extension knowledge base, really have to understand and accept the 40 IQ points really does make for a significant difference of understanding and comprehension. So in creating a complex technological system, it falls upon the more intellectual specialised creators of the system, to ensure the system is sufficiently safe and easy to use for those individuals who are limited in their intellectual focus to the basic day to day use of those technological systems without having the the desire or sufficient time to learn all those intricacies of effective use.
If the average user can, they basically would use computers as effectively skilled users.
The big advantage is students doing assignments can actually do work that is of benefit to the whole of society. There is more to open source software beyond the code (although suitably skilled students will be able to practice directly on open source code), there is usability analysis, documentation, administration, interface design, templates and well as teaching the principles of open source. These principles can then be extended into the preparation of open text books and other teaching resources and the updating of the same.
It is for more satisfying for students to see real world results for the academic activities. These advantages also extend themselves to the teaching staff, where their academic efforts can be directly implemented, not only within the teaching environment but also out into industry.
The long term goal of course should be for the government to create it's own standard Linux distribution, with input from all the public higher education institutions from all of the states, as well as from industry and, also of course also suitably individuals. Naturally enough this should also be done upon an international basis with other countries who also establishing an across the board open software technology infrastructure. The reason of course for a base standard is enable simple no cost compatibility as a basis for any commercial distributions, containing a service and support element.
Of course the only real difference in government distributions or even department of education distributions, is mainly that the computer is delivered in a known, controlled, complete state, ready to go and can readily be returned to that state. Of course it also looks better if all the suitably parochial logos appear in 'all' the right places, it does make a difference.
What they meant to write was , don't you think this money would better be spent on celebrities, mega yachts, private jets, luxury cars, mansions, exotic foods, alcohol, jewellery, fashion, makeup, hookers, drugs, oh yeah of course music CDs, you know all that bright shiny ego inflating crap, they were just too shamed and embarrassed to do so. Damn, that you should spend all that money on furthering human knowledge and understanding what a waste and seriously considering some of those specimens of humanity it really is a waste, oh well, I suppose you just have to focus on the few of us who see value in all knowledge because, basically you don't know how you can apply what you don't understand until you learn about it.