Not to poke too much fun at you, but are you aware of the land area of Russia and the land area of South Ossetia, it what, represents less than 1% of Russia at a guess. So you are saying Russian agents infiltrated the US and Israeli government and got them to train and arm the Georgian military so that the Georgians would launch an attack upon Russian peacekeepers, during the Olympics and in the run up to the US elections.
Yes, it was all a Russian trap, clearly the work of Boris and Natasha and Moose and Squirrel fucked up and fell into the trap. All because of the enormous value of South Ossetia, the huge land area and the abundance of natural resources plus of course chemical 'X';D.
Well ass hat the easiest solution to that is double or triple or even , heaven forbid quadruple the minimum wage and they will end up paying far more taxes. Only a true republican would point the finger at poor bastards on minimum wage for not paying enough tax, that is really disgusting.
The rich have perverted the system to ensure those at the bottom get paid bugger all, in fact with out two jobs not sufficient to live ie. buy a house, pay hospital bills and buy food and clothes (pick one as they can't afford all three). Then the rich and greedy complain they pay the most tax when they earn by far the most money all as a result of their corruption of the political system via lobbyist.
The problem is I am Australian and in Australia there are no conspiracy crimes as it is well known, as was demonstrated here, that they are too readily abused by autocratic authorities. So bottom line, autocratic intimidation, the stomping on peoples rights and a fucking environmental bus not there to protest at all but to promote green solutions is pulled over the occupants, a family, is harassed because someone believes, they might possibly not be republicans.
So in Australia people are arrested because they actually commit a crime not because a bunch of other criminals, looking to get paid or pursuing reduced sentences, say they were thinking about committing one. As for denying a citizen access to public spaces because you don't like what they are going to say or, there is more than one which is the best indication especially when there are tens of thousands of protestors, there dissatisfaction with government policy.
So your bull shit is bullshit because they did not damage someone's property, in fact the police did they damage and 'wohoo' they conspired to commit the damage in a group, a clear case of armed riot if there ever was one, even the police are not above the law:P.
It is likely they went through a process of discovery. The discovered that keeping the software open source has very little impact upon maintaining competitive advantage on the hardware or making innovative leaps in hardware design and keeping those proprietary. For hardware producers, software is just another overhead and working to minimise that cost makes sense.
There is a real push to achieve low cost ubiquitous computing, UMPC's, smartphone/PDA etc. and every cost saving makes it far more achievable and obviously maintains reasonable profit margins for the hardware manufacturers.
At the moment hardware manufacturers find their profit margins squeezed while their products are carrying closed source proprietary software with 10 times the profit margin, it makes absolutely no business sense as a hard ware manufacturer to put up with this. I am sure most hardware manufacturers thought that M$'s idea of free hardware and 'renting' the software was a load of B$.
In this case it is likely just a simple stupidity by M$ management. They are likely paying bonuses for every patent successfully obtained, M$ lawyers are also gaining payment for every patent gained, ballmer the insurance salesmen that he is, is just to dim to differentiate between useful and useless patents and, establish clear guidelines for patent filing.
So just a rush to gain as many patents as possible in some hair brained B$ marketing scheme to pump up M$ stock values. When they start boasting about having 10,000 patents which investor is going to review them all to see in they have any meaningful value, so it is a quick and dirty way of pumping of the value of the M$ portfolio, of course in reality they are simply throwing away the shareholders money.
I really hate to break it to you but yes the state or your nation is generally bound to the competence or incompetence of your current administration. When crap like this occurs and they say nothing, then they are complicit. Of course not to throw all the blame upon the republican administration, although as the 'Administration' it is largely their responsibility but a share would also have to go to the US congress and Senate for failure to investigate these and similar abuses of justice.
The catch with it all in the US system, is most of the egregious behaviour falls to the State Governor to ensure the principles of law and justice are adhered to within the state excluding of course the political involvement of the FBI which is of course a federal abuse.
Of course your post has a clear political bias which manages to equate questionable arrests at public venues when people are attempting to express the political opinions, to pre-emptive raids in suburban neighbourhoods, complete with the blatant theft of computers and personal property (when the warrant is so clearly bull shit it is theft) added, to that the extreme danger of no knock, guns drawn warrants with trigger happy law enforcement with emphasis on force, represents to those communities and especially the victims of those raids (in this case they were definitely the victims and the police where clearly displaying criminal behaviour).
So if Republican administrations says nothing about it and gives it the tacit approval, then, yes, they are quite content for the authorities to stomp all over the people's rights. By the same token if the Democrats say nothing or fail to initiate an investigation of these abusive in the proper venue, then they can be painted with the same brush and, to bring it all home, if the typical US citizens fails to do something about it, then you can bloody well expect at lot worse to happen, good luck.
Which is likely why it was anonymous, as it's real intent was to damage the person it supposedly was promoting. In the political scene it has often proven advantageous to smear the person running for election based upon the fringe elements of their supporters and where that proves insufficient actually using agents provocateur. Pointless on slashdot as it was bound to get -1 troll.
From a foreigners point of view it seems rather, well, bizarre to focus to much attention on who the running mate is, what, do Americans hope the person running for president drops dead so that the vice president will take over before the person they are actually voting for can do too much damage (of course at McCains age that is not all that unlikely)?
The corporate mass media PR blitz I am sure is going to be huge and endlessly repetitive with it focus of the beauty pageant winning, sports woman running mate (they will pretend that McCain does not exist) but, it is interesting in that in affect it will be the exact opposite of the previous republican duo. Vote for the president but it is actually the vice president and his horde of lobbyists who are running the country and, now it will be vote the pretty running mate but it will be the president and his horde of lobbyists who will actually be running the country;D.
It likely has something to do with the fact that government is basically about the legislation and the application of law. That is basis of government, a bureaucracy that creates and applies laws based upon the morals of the 'majority' it's citizens, of course of late it has been based upon the immorality of a minority of it's rich citizens or corporate entities.
Then, just like this story, everybody knows that lies are more profitable than the truth except of course for the victims of those lies, which is why laws are meant to represent the honest majority and prosecute the criminal minority rather than the current trend of victimising the honest majority and protecting the criminal minority.
Be careful what you write. Make no mistake in today's modern corporate profit driven world the sickest kind of tactics will be used with a complete absence of shame to ensure competitiveness whilst maintaining maximum profitability. You just have to read some of the posts, where the claim is proffered that somehow 100% testing is more disingenuous that 1% testing where both tests might miss the full development of the disease.
There are numerous examples of US companies who produce GM products putting enormous pressure on the Australian government and Australian producers to switch to GM products because the clean green method is providing Australian producers with an enormous competitive advantage with higher profitability and, rather than cleaning up their own act they simply want to take away the competitive advantage that Australian producers have.
Given the sociopathic behaviour of corporations from around the world (it doesn't seem to make much difference which country they come from) in recent history, spreading agricultural diseases around the planet to boost profitability certainly falls within the bounds of imaginable behaviour:(.
The thing to bear in mind for an average family in the near future a broadband connection has to provide the following simultaneously. Four video VOIP connections, high definition legal streaming (certainly not low res youtube) to four different screens at the same time and various file downloads and uploads, including large emails with attached video, video instant messaging and, the legal purchase and burn of DVD content.
So 250 gig can get readily chewn up, of course can't complain, in Australia this is an example of one of the worst plans available http://my.bigpond.com/internetplans/broadband/adsl/plansandoffers/default.jsp, that's right a whole 200MB/month, that's right Mega Bytes, combined with the booby trap of $0.15/MB excess charges, on broadband, major bills for people who often can least afford it (incumbent monopoly phone company for them VOIP is an obscene word).
Not to utterly doubt your statement but M$ made exactly the same sort of statements about windows NT 4 and small business server, complete and utter bullshit then. So I would expect the same sort of disingenuous statements about the ease of administrating, maintaining, upgrading, repairing and securing to be made about the current version. Hell, you could find exactly the same sort of nonsense in forums during the whole windows NT period.
As for separate open office updates , should they switch to all FOSS software, the updates can all be done at the same time and it can all be automated via a chron job. So you are correct about at least one point having M$ in the system increases the administrative work load so it is best eliminated all together to simplify maintenance. As for school discounts, that tends to vary all the time, on again off again and be very regional and is not something that can be relied on in any meaningful way.
A full school can mean thousands of licences ie. hundreds of thousands of dollars thrown away or enough for a whole squad of system admins or qualified computer educators who can also do the system admin, now extend that out for hundreds of schools and millions of dollars and a veritable legion of qualified educator/admins.
To put quite plainly and simply the money is far better being spent on more skilled teachers than bloating the profits of one in this case foreign company.
One thing to bear in mind is whether you are the target audience or not. These kinds of tactics can be quite effective when targeted at the right intellectual group.
For a lot of people freedom equates to happiness. Freedom to choose what you want to do when you want to do when you want to do it or for the more intellectual types, freedom to think about what you want to think about when you want to think about it, ahh, the luscious flow of lost in thought brain chemicals. Work is always going to be a dirty four letter word.
Now, of course cooperative effort for mutually shared goals is always going to be fun regardless of high level of effort put in, while competition to sate greed is always going to suck regardless of the mind games being played or the level of avoidance used to mitigate the amount of effort required. Fuck the rich and greedy, let them dig their own ditches;D.
At a guess, some government systems that are not updated as often as they should be, not as well maintained as they could be or even not as securely configured as they should, say, banking and finance Linux, ISP, etc. install, were successfully attacked. As such a warning has to be issued to remind other slack admins to update their systems.
As for where the stolen SSH keys were originally obtained, a certain Olympic event springs to mind, so the effort might be fairly wide spread and a concerted attack to pick up as many poorly configured and maintained machines as possible.
Parallel networks might become all the rage, two completely separate systems. One internal with absolutely no external network connections, strictly hard wired and no unlogged file uploads and the other in the wild for internet and email, wireless, feeding cheap UMPC's, compromised, meh, take two aspirins and I'll look into it tomorrow;).
Obviously you do not understand the difference between a hypothesis and a theory, so just to clarify, it is not a theory only a hypothesis and I certainly do not have sufficient interest in the subject matter to do the considerable amount of work required to take if from a hypothesis to a fully fledged 'sicentific' theory. If you do, go for it or perhaps your limit of interest in the subject matter is just snide remarks;P.
Unfortunately a lot of the "911 was an inside job" speil seems to be misinformation, designed to hide those that profited as a result of the attack (very suspicious stock market trading just prior to the attack), a high degree of incompetence in preventing the attack, Saudi Arabia as being at the core of the attack, a real whiff of some parts of the current US administration being aware of the likelihood of an attack as well as the high level of corruption that is required to allow those buildings to be occupied when the required fire protection systems had not been properly installed as those are specifically inspected prior to a certificate of occupancy being issued (that is because of the extreme risk of complete failure that it represents).
In the case of google where the majority of the profit is all based upon selling advertising, keeping those sellers convinced of the benefits of that advertising becomes of prime importance. Maintaining a happy workforce is of prime importance, as too much leaking information or conflicting statistics will significantly harm the perceived value opf that advertising price, which in turn would cripples revenue.
Google's revenue has largely peaked and is only increasing as a result of purchased additions to the company and the tail end of overseas expansions. There has been a growing awareness amongst the sellers of the reducing sales benefits of addwords/spamwords which has them going back to more traditional advertising which is starting to hurt googles revenue.
Google has real trouble diversifying as those currently entranced in the senior executive positions have a locked in mind set, or privacy invasive and psychologically targeted advertising and, they really can not see beyond that. Employee troubles are largely just the result of the intensely psychologically manipulative work place losing it's bite, working 20% harder for 20% less, but you get free peanuts only lasts so long, before people actually check the numbers to figure out those two lots of twenty percent pay for a heck of a lot more than the few free perks they are getting.
Oddly enough changing lackeys can in fact change things. For example whilst they might both be corrupt, the more intelligent group remains aware that you don't fuck up the system when attempting to extract as much money out of it for yourself otherwise the system collapses and there is a whole lot less money to be made.
The other group represents the ignorant pigs at the trough, idiot children in a candy store or basically the sociopaths. Those whose greed destroys the system they are pillaging as they show no restraint with regard to their actions.
So the real difference is whilst you might be employing lackeys, the lackeys you are employing are actually skilled at the job you a employing them for, rather the just idiotically corrupt placements where it is inevitably that they will fuck the job up, "Brownie, you did a heck of a job", forcing everybody to lie about the results.
The intelligence of Neanderthals is not necessarily the driving force of their ability to compete with homosapien. They could have been equally as smart or even smarter on an individual basis. However their collective intelligence, the ability to operate in larger groups, rather than extended family groups, means the while individually they might have been smarter and stronger they ended up being outnumber on the field of conflict.
Also homosapiens were likely to have been more vengeful and fielded a larger group to pursue and Neanderthals after a hunting party skirmishes, which initially the Neanderthals might have won and collected their prize of long pig only to be latter pursued by a far larger group combative homospaiens.
So the difference is not in the individual intelligence but in the social collective intelligence, the group that worked together, that shared an extended tribal awareness and, that were willing to sacrifice themselves, their time and effort in support of the future goals of the group proved to be far more successfully as a group. Pretty much the same as it is today. The societies where the individuals are only out to gain as much as they can for themselves regardless of the harm to the group create more unsuccessful society than those a care, share and are willing to work for the collective good. The ratio between the greedy few and the more aware majority define the nature modern societies more so than the individual intelligence of it's members.
What they were a little light on was the focus on how well the fire rating of the structural elements had been done. There was a bit of information early on in the 11/9 saga that detailed the failure to properly fire rate the structural elements in all those buildings that collapsed. Corruption, shonky building inspection, greed to get the jobs finished and start earning rent, all lead to failure to properly achieve 240/240/240 fire ratings on structural components of those buildings.
I have done insurance inspections of steel framed buildings after a fire and massive beams become a twisted deformed mess like strands of liquorice draped about the place, oddly enough timber framed structures last better than unprotected steel framed structures (the timber chars and provides a temporary protective layer from the fire, large structural elements only).
The reason most knock-offs fail, is because people have already experienced that gaming style and flavour, juts changing some of the scenery will not drive people to basically buy the same game. So good game play, a new experience and as it turns out reasonable graphics and sound. Level design often makes or breaks games.
It is also an easy place to start, should you wish to create your own distribution. The are a large number of major corporations and government departments, that could create their own in house distribution, so this provides them a clean functional distribution that will be continually updated as a place to start.
Once you are into more than 10,000 seats your own distribution, containing only the software that you want it to contain, providing a secure basic company wide install and, can has a range of flavours to suit the various desks it ends up on, starts to make a lot of sense.
Also if your are into low cost appliance styled computers, this provides a easy to add onto distribution to suit your particular appliance, be it a home broadband modem/router/switch/family server or a smart phone/PDA or a budget UMPC or a TV with pretensions of being a computer/server. It would certainly serve a lot of compatibility issues.
In the 21st century, you'd go hunting for some dead tree? I do read the news from mass media outlets but, it all comes off the web and, I read more than one countries version of it. Now that really does show up the local/business/political biases on just about every news story and it does make the news appear more like a story rather than anything based in reality.
More than anything else, it also highlights the advertising as news stories and, the endless 'celebrity' drivel. I could not imagine dealing with the news 'sic' upon a regular basis unfiltered by the web any more. Every now and then I go for the unfiltered mass media variety of the news just to see what it is currently like, some where like Fox News, just to keep track of how pathetic it really is becoming.
You always have to remember there are many jobs where professionals are paid to fulfil the role not punch a time clock. Their success in the job is not measured by attendance, or the number of work related key presses per hour but by the role being fulfilled. Very good admins end up spending very little time administering the network because it runs properly, poor admins run poorly configured and maintained systems, hence they are continually busy trying to keep it running and fixing one disaster after another.
The bloggers role in modern political reporting is a very sad indictment of the corrupt state of mass media news reporting or as is closer to reality the fabrication of the news. Examples like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVNblG9PJMk which are used manipulate the political discourse are the reason that bloggers are coming to the fire as more independent sources of information or why major mass media news outlets are being viewed as just another blog.
Student discounts for software aren't really the developing trend. The shift will be to supply school notebooks complete with all (operating system, applications, simulations and digital texts) the required software in order to prevent the inevitable high corporate profit school budget blow out and this includes the back end server environment.
Schools the get sucked into buying piece meal will quickly see the discounts evaporative in the next cycle, 6 months or one year down track and be paying thousands of dollars for server and applications software per user.
Long term discounted supply has to be enforced. Which is exactly what FOSS supplies, free yesterday, free today, free tomorrow and naturally enough free in one, two, five, ten and even one hundred years time. People have had lots of experience getting burnt by disappearing corporate discounts, or hidden server software blow outs and enforced audited user licence fees complete with mandatory inspections.
So will the BSA be conducting random school yard audits to scan for illegally installed software on children's computers or will schools take the sensible easy approach use pre-installed FOSS and avoid the whole exorbitantly costly and privacy invasive issue.
The jobs in Mexico are all based upon low wage exploitative employment conditions. In order to enforce these conditions an aggressive hostile society is created and expanded upon.
Rather than work to improve conditions in Mexico the rich and greedy simply spend more and more upon protection services whilst corrupting the government so that they can exploit the majority.
This exploitation inevitably leads to greater violence in it's enforcement and naturally enough creates a more violent criminal society as a reaction to that enforcement.
It is only fitting that the rich and greedy suffer at the hands of the society that their stupidity creates, it is just a terrible shame that they drag their country down with them.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to poke too much fun at you, but are you aware of the land area of Russia and the land area of South Ossetia, it what, represents less than 1% of Russia at a guess. So you are saying Russian agents infiltrated the US and Israeli government and got them to train and arm the Georgian military so that the Georgians would launch an attack upon Russian peacekeepers, during the Olympics and in the run up to the US elections.
Yes, it was all a Russian trap, clearly the work of Boris and Natasha and Moose and Squirrel fucked up and fell into the trap. All because of the enormous value of South Ossetia, the huge land area and the abundance of natural resources plus of course chemical 'X' ;D.
Well ass hat the easiest solution to that is double or triple or even , heaven forbid quadruple the minimum wage and they will end up paying far more taxes. Only a true republican would point the finger at poor bastards on minimum wage for not paying enough tax, that is really disgusting.
The rich have perverted the system to ensure those at the bottom get paid bugger all, in fact with out two jobs not sufficient to live ie. buy a house, pay hospital bills and buy food and clothes (pick one as they can't afford all three). Then the rich and greedy complain they pay the most tax when they earn by far the most money all as a result of their corruption of the political system via lobbyist.
As for outlier, http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN1249465620080812 and, it is well known that the rich and greedy like to hide their income behind corporations.
The problem is I am Australian and in Australia there are no conspiracy crimes as it is well known, as was demonstrated here, that they are too readily abused by autocratic authorities. So bottom line, autocratic intimidation, the stomping on peoples rights and a fucking environmental bus not there to protest at all but to promote green solutions is pulled over the occupants, a family, is harassed because someone believes, they might possibly not be republicans.
So in Australia people are arrested because they actually commit a crime not because a bunch of other criminals, looking to get paid or pursuing reduced sentences, say they were thinking about committing one. As for denying a citizen access to public spaces because you don't like what they are going to say or, there is more than one which is the best indication especially when there are tens of thousands of protestors, there dissatisfaction with government policy.
So your bull shit is bullshit because they did not damage someone's property, in fact the police did they damage and 'wohoo' they conspired to commit the damage in a group, a clear case of armed riot if there ever was one, even the police are not above the law :P.
It is likely they went through a process of discovery. The discovered that keeping the software open source has very little impact upon maintaining competitive advantage on the hardware or making innovative leaps in hardware design and keeping those proprietary. For hardware producers, software is just another overhead and working to minimise that cost makes sense.
There is a real push to achieve low cost ubiquitous computing, UMPC's, smartphone/PDA etc. and every cost saving makes it far more achievable and obviously maintains reasonable profit margins for the hardware manufacturers.
At the moment hardware manufacturers find their profit margins squeezed while their products are carrying closed source proprietary software with 10 times the profit margin, it makes absolutely no business sense as a hard ware manufacturer to put up with this. I am sure most hardware manufacturers thought that M$'s idea of free hardware and 'renting' the software was a load of B$.
In this case it is likely just a simple stupidity by M$ management. They are likely paying bonuses for every patent successfully obtained, M$ lawyers are also gaining payment for every patent gained, ballmer the insurance salesmen that he is, is just to dim to differentiate between useful and useless patents and, establish clear guidelines for patent filing.
So just a rush to gain as many patents as possible in some hair brained B$ marketing scheme to pump up M$ stock values. When they start boasting about having 10,000 patents which investor is going to review them all to see in they have any meaningful value, so it is a quick and dirty way of pumping of the value of the M$ portfolio, of course in reality they are simply throwing away the shareholders money.
I really hate to break it to you but yes the state or your nation is generally bound to the competence or incompetence of your current administration. When crap like this occurs and they say nothing, then they are complicit. Of course not to throw all the blame upon the republican administration, although as the 'Administration' it is largely their responsibility but a share would also have to go to the US congress and Senate for failure to investigate these and similar abuses of justice.
The catch with it all in the US system, is most of the egregious behaviour falls to the State Governor to ensure the principles of law and justice are adhered to within the state excluding of course the political involvement of the FBI which is of course a federal abuse.
Of course your post has a clear political bias which manages to equate questionable arrests at public venues when people are attempting to express the political opinions, to pre-emptive raids in suburban neighbourhoods, complete with the blatant theft of computers and personal property (when the warrant is so clearly bull shit it is theft) added, to that the extreme danger of no knock, guns drawn warrants with trigger happy law enforcement with emphasis on force, represents to those communities and especially the victims of those raids (in this case they were definitely the victims and the police where clearly displaying criminal behaviour).
So if Republican administrations says nothing about it and gives it the tacit approval, then, yes, they are quite content for the authorities to stomp all over the people's rights. By the same token if the Democrats say nothing or fail to initiate an investigation of these abusive in the proper venue, then they can be painted with the same brush and, to bring it all home, if the typical US citizens fails to do something about it, then you can bloody well expect at lot worse to happen, good luck.
Which is likely why it was anonymous, as it's real intent was to damage the person it supposedly was promoting. In the political scene it has often proven advantageous to smear the person running for election based upon the fringe elements of their supporters and where that proves insufficient actually using agents provocateur. Pointless on slashdot as it was bound to get -1 troll.
From a foreigners point of view it seems rather, well, bizarre to focus to much attention on who the running mate is, what, do Americans hope the person running for president drops dead so that the vice president will take over before the person they are actually voting for can do too much damage (of course at McCains age that is not all that unlikely)?
The corporate mass media PR blitz I am sure is going to be huge and endlessly repetitive with it focus of the beauty pageant winning, sports woman running mate (they will pretend that McCain does not exist) but, it is interesting in that in affect it will be the exact opposite of the previous republican duo. Vote for the president but it is actually the vice president and his horde of lobbyists who are running the country and, now it will be vote the pretty running mate but it will be the president and his horde of lobbyists who will actually be running the country ;D.
It likely has something to do with the fact that government is basically about the legislation and the application of law. That is basis of government, a bureaucracy that creates and applies laws based upon the morals of the 'majority' it's citizens, of course of late it has been based upon the immorality of a minority of it's rich citizens or corporate entities.
Then, just like this story, everybody knows that lies are more profitable than the truth except of course for the victims of those lies, which is why laws are meant to represent the honest majority and prosecute the criminal minority rather than the current trend of victimising the honest majority and protecting the criminal minority.
Be careful what you write. Make no mistake in today's modern corporate profit driven world the sickest kind of tactics will be used with a complete absence of shame to ensure competitiveness whilst maintaining maximum profitability. You just have to read some of the posts, where the claim is proffered that somehow 100% testing is more disingenuous that 1% testing where both tests might miss the full development of the disease.
There are numerous examples of US companies who produce GM products putting enormous pressure on the Australian government and Australian producers to switch to GM products because the clean green method is providing Australian producers with an enormous competitive advantage with higher profitability and, rather than cleaning up their own act they simply want to take away the competitive advantage that Australian producers have.
Given the sociopathic behaviour of corporations from around the world (it doesn't seem to make much difference which country they come from) in recent history, spreading agricultural diseases around the planet to boost profitability certainly falls within the bounds of imaginable behaviour :(.
The thing to bear in mind for an average family in the near future a broadband connection has to provide the following simultaneously. Four video VOIP connections, high definition legal streaming (certainly not low res youtube) to four different screens at the same time and various file downloads and uploads, including large emails with attached video, video instant messaging and, the legal purchase and burn of DVD content.
So 250 gig can get readily chewn up, of course can't complain, in Australia this is an example of one of the worst plans available http://my.bigpond.com/internetplans/broadband/adsl/plansandoffers/default.jsp, that's right a whole 200MB/month, that's right Mega Bytes, combined with the booby trap of $0.15/MB excess charges, on broadband, major bills for people who often can least afford it (incumbent monopoly phone company for them VOIP is an obscene word).
Not to utterly doubt your statement but M$ made exactly the same sort of statements about windows NT 4 and small business server, complete and utter bullshit then. So I would expect the same sort of disingenuous statements about the ease of administrating, maintaining, upgrading, repairing and securing to be made about the current version. Hell, you could find exactly the same sort of nonsense in forums during the whole windows NT period.
As for separate open office updates , should they switch to all FOSS software, the updates can all be done at the same time and it can all be automated via a chron job. So you are correct about at least one point having M$ in the system increases the administrative work load so it is best eliminated all together to simplify maintenance. As for school discounts, that tends to vary all the time, on again off again and be very regional and is not something that can be relied on in any meaningful way.
A full school can mean thousands of licences ie. hundreds of thousands of dollars thrown away or enough for a whole squad of system admins or qualified computer educators who can also do the system admin, now extend that out for hundreds of schools and millions of dollars and a veritable legion of qualified educator/admins.
To put quite plainly and simply the money is far better being spent on more skilled teachers than bloating the profits of one in this case foreign company.
One thing to bear in mind is whether you are the target audience or not. These kinds of tactics can be quite effective when targeted at the right intellectual group.
For a lot of people freedom equates to happiness. Freedom to choose what you want to do when you want to do when you want to do it or for the more intellectual types, freedom to think about what you want to think about when you want to think about it, ahh, the luscious flow of lost in thought brain chemicals. Work is always going to be a dirty four letter word.
Now, of course cooperative effort for mutually shared goals is always going to be fun regardless of high level of effort put in, while competition to sate greed is always going to suck regardless of the mind games being played or the level of avoidance used to mitigate the amount of effort required. Fuck the rich and greedy, let them dig their own ditches ;D.
At a guess, some government systems that are not updated as often as they should be, not as well maintained as they could be or even not as securely configured as they should, say, banking and finance Linux, ISP, etc. install, were successfully attacked. As such a warning has to be issued to remind other slack admins to update their systems.
As for where the stolen SSH keys were originally obtained, a certain Olympic event springs to mind, so the effort might be fairly wide spread and a concerted attack to pick up as many poorly configured and maintained machines as possible.
Parallel networks might become all the rage, two completely separate systems. One internal with absolutely no external network connections, strictly hard wired and no unlogged file uploads and the other in the wild for internet and email, wireless, feeding cheap UMPC's, compromised, meh, take two aspirins and I'll look into it tomorrow ;).
Obviously you do not understand the difference between a hypothesis and a theory, so just to clarify, it is not a theory only a hypothesis and I certainly do not have sufficient interest in the subject matter to do the considerable amount of work required to take if from a hypothesis to a fully fledged 'sicentific' theory. If you do, go for it or perhaps your limit of interest in the subject matter is just snide remarks ;P.
Unfortunately a lot of the "911 was an inside job" speil seems to be misinformation, designed to hide those that profited as a result of the attack (very suspicious stock market trading just prior to the attack), a high degree of incompetence in preventing the attack, Saudi Arabia as being at the core of the attack, a real whiff of some parts of the current US administration being aware of the likelihood of an attack as well as the high level of corruption that is required to allow those buildings to be occupied when the required fire protection systems had not been properly installed as those are specifically inspected prior to a certificate of occupancy being issued (that is because of the extreme risk of complete failure that it represents).
In the case of google where the majority of the profit is all based upon selling advertising, keeping those sellers convinced of the benefits of that advertising becomes of prime importance. Maintaining a happy workforce is of prime importance, as too much leaking information or conflicting statistics will significantly harm the perceived value opf that advertising price, which in turn would cripples revenue.
Google's revenue has largely peaked and is only increasing as a result of purchased additions to the company and the tail end of overseas expansions. There has been a growing awareness amongst the sellers of the reducing sales benefits of addwords/spamwords which has them going back to more traditional advertising which is starting to hurt googles revenue.
Google has real trouble diversifying as those currently entranced in the senior executive positions have a locked in mind set, or privacy invasive and psychologically targeted advertising and, they really can not see beyond that. Employee troubles are largely just the result of the intensely psychologically manipulative work place losing it's bite, working 20% harder for 20% less, but you get free peanuts only lasts so long, before people actually check the numbers to figure out those two lots of twenty percent pay for a heck of a lot more than the few free perks they are getting.
Oddly enough changing lackeys can in fact change things. For example whilst they might both be corrupt, the more intelligent group remains aware that you don't fuck up the system when attempting to extract as much money out of it for yourself otherwise the system collapses and there is a whole lot less money to be made.
The other group represents the ignorant pigs at the trough, idiot children in a candy store or basically the sociopaths. Those whose greed destroys the system they are pillaging as they show no restraint with regard to their actions.
So the real difference is whilst you might be employing lackeys, the lackeys you are employing are actually skilled at the job you a employing them for, rather the just idiotically corrupt placements where it is inevitably that they will fuck the job up, "Brownie, you did a heck of a job", forcing everybody to lie about the results.
The intelligence of Neanderthals is not necessarily the driving force of their ability to compete with homosapien. They could have been equally as smart or even smarter on an individual basis. However their collective intelligence, the ability to operate in larger groups, rather than extended family groups, means the while individually they might have been smarter and stronger they ended up being outnumber on the field of conflict.
Also homosapiens were likely to have been more vengeful and fielded a larger group to pursue and Neanderthals after a hunting party skirmishes, which initially the Neanderthals might have won and collected their prize of long pig only to be latter pursued by a far larger group combative homospaiens.
So the difference is not in the individual intelligence but in the social collective intelligence, the group that worked together, that shared an extended tribal awareness and, that were willing to sacrifice themselves, their time and effort in support of the future goals of the group proved to be far more successfully as a group. Pretty much the same as it is today. The societies where the individuals are only out to gain as much as they can for themselves regardless of the harm to the group create more unsuccessful society than those a care, share and are willing to work for the collective good. The ratio between the greedy few and the more aware majority define the nature modern societies more so than the individual intelligence of it's members.
What they were a little light on was the focus on how well the fire rating of the structural elements had been done. There was a bit of information early on in the 11/9 saga that detailed the failure to properly fire rate the structural elements in all those buildings that collapsed. Corruption, shonky building inspection, greed to get the jobs finished and start earning rent, all lead to failure to properly achieve 240/240/240 fire ratings on structural components of those buildings.
I have done insurance inspections of steel framed buildings after a fire and massive beams become a twisted deformed mess like strands of liquorice draped about the place, oddly enough timber framed structures last better than unprotected steel framed structures (the timber chars and provides a temporary protective layer from the fire, large structural elements only).
The reason most knock-offs fail, is because people have already experienced that gaming style and flavour, juts changing some of the scenery will not drive people to basically buy the same game. So good game play, a new experience and as it turns out reasonable graphics and sound. Level design often makes or breaks games.
Once you are into more than 10,000 seats your own distribution, containing only the software that you want it to contain, providing a secure basic company wide install and, can has a range of flavours to suit the various desks it ends up on, starts to make a lot of sense.
Also if your are into low cost appliance styled computers, this provides a easy to add onto distribution to suit your particular appliance, be it a home broadband modem/router/switch/family server or a smart phone/PDA or a budget UMPC or a TV with pretensions of being a computer/server. It would certainly serve a lot of compatibility issues.
In the 21st century, you'd go hunting for some dead tree? I do read the news from mass media outlets but, it all comes off the web and, I read more than one countries version of it. Now that really does show up the local/business/political biases on just about every news story and it does make the news appear more like a story rather than anything based in reality.
More than anything else, it also highlights the advertising as news stories and, the endless 'celebrity' drivel. I could not imagine dealing with the news 'sic' upon a regular basis unfiltered by the web any more. Every now and then I go for the unfiltered mass media variety of the news just to see what it is currently like, some where like Fox News, just to keep track of how pathetic it really is becoming.
You always have to remember there are many jobs where professionals are paid to fulfil the role not punch a time clock. Their success in the job is not measured by attendance, or the number of work related key presses per hour but by the role being fulfilled. Very good admins end up spending very little time administering the network because it runs properly, poor admins run poorly configured and maintained systems, hence they are continually busy trying to keep it running and fixing one disaster after another.
The bloggers role in modern political reporting is a very sad indictment of the corrupt state of mass media news reporting or as is closer to reality the fabrication of the news. Examples like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVNblG9PJMk which are used manipulate the political discourse are the reason that bloggers are coming to the fire as more independent sources of information or why major mass media news outlets are being viewed as just another blog.
Student discounts for software aren't really the developing trend. The shift will be to supply school notebooks complete with all (operating system, applications, simulations and digital texts) the required software in order to prevent the inevitable high corporate profit school budget blow out and this includes the back end server environment.
Schools the get sucked into buying piece meal will quickly see the discounts evaporative in the next cycle, 6 months or one year down track and be paying thousands of dollars for server and applications software per user.
Long term discounted supply has to be enforced. Which is exactly what FOSS supplies, free yesterday, free today, free tomorrow and naturally enough free in one, two, five, ten and even one hundred years time. People have had lots of experience getting burnt by disappearing corporate discounts, or hidden server software blow outs and enforced audited user licence fees complete with mandatory inspections.
So will the BSA be conducting random school yard audits to scan for illegally installed software on children's computers or will schools take the sensible easy approach use pre-installed FOSS and avoid the whole exorbitantly costly and privacy invasive issue.
The jobs in Mexico are all based upon low wage exploitative employment conditions. In order to enforce these conditions an aggressive hostile society is created and expanded upon.
Rather than work to improve conditions in Mexico the rich and greedy simply spend more and more upon protection services whilst corrupting the government so that they can exploit the majority.
This exploitation inevitably leads to greater violence in it's enforcement and naturally enough creates a more violent criminal society as a reaction to that enforcement.
It is only fitting that the rich and greedy suffer at the hands of the society that their stupidity creates, it is just a terrible shame that they drag their country down with them.