Well to date the possible prison terms are sheer speculation by a journalist wishing to sensationalise the story. With all the crimes the individual is accused of the actual damages have to be taken into account. For example stealing test papers and the answer, what is the real dollar value other than the cost of the paper, except of course if the school had to go to the expense of redoing the exam, which doesn't seem to have happened.
Can you really 'steal' your own exam paper, beyond cheating of course, which is as yet not a criminal offence. There is of course hacking into a computer network, not real hacking of course as it was done via an obtained user name and password which has been blown out into some sort of identity theft, a some what exaggerated postulation.
So it really all boils down to how good a lawyer he can afford and how anal the prosecutor is in seeking a publicity generating penalty.
Actually WinME was a very successful release for M$. It was a double plus bonuses for M$, firstly it achieved it's specific goal of killing off the windows 98 line and secondly achieved higher profit by forcing users who got stuck with it to either pay for a win2kpro upgrade or a windows XP upgrade.
So you stop and think about the behaviour of ballmer over the years and whether or not the billy goat would do exactly that to his customers, you know the truth, yeah, M$=B$.
Now looking at the legal side is what makes it really interesting. While the end user certainly has a defence, as the computer was infected and was a company/government controlled computer with security features and updates supposedly set and typically the end user has specifically limited (non-administrator) access and control, the network/computer administrator should now be investigated.
For company/government controlled computers people should not forget that network/computer administrators can quite readily take over users computers and use them for what ever nefarious activities they want to and then blame the poor end user. In this case the administrator really and I mean really fucked up, I mean they found the child porn but missed the viruses et al, what, does the admin get such of kick looking for porn on there users computers that they forget to fulfil the security functions that they are actually paid for.
While the end user is certainly in the clear, the admin is in real trouble as now somehow they have to prove their innocence as the actual administrator of the infected (by whom ?) computer. Also the admin should be subject to criminal negligence charges as they bore false witness against the user as the admin should have detected the viruses et al prior to bearing witness against the end user, so some really serious stuff and the end user and their lawyer can really go to town on them.
So the real question for the future is, is it the end user's computer or the system administrator's computer, who has the greater control and hence who has the greater ownership? Running a far more secure OS like Linux will certainly do more to protect computer administrator's from future prosecutions, something to really think about.
That might just be a tad strong but certainly it is some what distasteful to work towards the destruction of humanity rather than working towards the betterment of humanity. While some defence, strong emphasis on defence, related technologies might be ok, unfourtunately the companies involved also tend to work on the most murderous offensive technologies and they have no qualms about exacerbating political tensions around the globe via lobbyists, 'stink' tanks (no misspelling there) for of corrupt pseudo intellectuals (who knew you could get a doctorate in bullshit) and utterly corrupt mass media marketing war and destruction as desirable.
After all there is a lot of private sector jobs that pay well, provide a good working environment and leave you feeling good about the work you are doing. If you of course prefer to work for the government and contribute to society as a whole (reduced pay but better job security and contributing to the society you are a part of), there is always the medical and education sectors (hey, we might all pick on government workers for fun but it mostly isn't true and mass media has jumped on the bandwagon because it has been paid to by extremely corrupt private corporations, who want to provide you with absolutely no service and charge ten times as much as the government would ever have).
Perhaps various governments might have to figure out a way to clearly separate defensive, non-aggresive technologies and companies from death at a profit companies, so they can attract better people for defence and as for offence well I'm sure there are enough jock strap wanna be computer drones to pick from, the typing monkeys thing, get enough of them and some sort of code will come out just look at M$ Vista for example;).
I gather you statement is satire as it of course directly relates to PSYOP as referenced in numerous places in the manual.
Abandon the rule of law, honour and integrity and you are the enemy and you become the terrorists.
The manual clearly advocates the use of criminal tactics in the earlier parts of the manual and then in appendix A acknowledges the rule of law and the proper treatment of prisoners the principles of which where clearly abandoned in Iraq.
The whole B$, pork barrelling concept of detecting people attempting to smuggle nukes out of airports is just utter B$. Why the fyck would they bother leaving the airport, it is a nuke after all. Most likely scenario, charter flight, nuke fitted in aircraft with a time delay and set to detonate upon descent when attempting to land once the desired optimum altitude for detonation is reached is reached.
Of course if they preferred a coastal city like New York et al then just fit it in a cargo ship with a simple time set detonation and remote detonation. Both examples would occur long before any detection techniques could even be commenced, and clearly reflect the sheer cynical greed of the military industrial complex in accelerating the spread of nuclear weapons by pushing for a first strike policy and then by inflating the terrorist nuclear threat and then adding the bullshit of needing to spend billions of dollars to detect nuclear weapons being smuggled around the country.
Like WTF, once they are in it is too late already, detonate upon arrival at which ever airport or seaport accepts direct arrivals from which ever corruptible second/third world shipping facility they choose to use. Don't wont wild nukes spread around the world, they promote negotiation and peace not war and cynical profiteering.
Also worth pointing out is the reason OLPC has yet to reach sales target is a lot of countries have you to commence the concept of having a computer on every students desk. This is an effort still in progress. What the OLPC project did was to help to create the hardware to fill that market.
That market is now coming together all based upon a similar hardware platform. The education laptop, the business ultra mobile PC, the 2nd pc, the travel PC all are basically various market segments of the same PC form factor and price range.
So as it turns out, ironically enough, the OLPC project biggest success would be to no longer be required as there would be many commercially available products that fit the need and economical prices.
There is no thing as accurate user targeting. For example, I am searching for a computer today, I buy it tomorrow, so exactly what is the point of feeding me computer adds the day after that. Targeted adds are just a marketing illusion because they are based upon historic records, what you wanted in the past not what you wanted in the future.
Matching adds to search entries of course has nothing to do with user data and of course matching adds to web content is by far the most sensible as viewing that content demonstrates a user active current interest.
Of course from my perspective it could be somewhat difficult to tell, as I have blocked all the invasive google scripts and cookies. Tell me do you go out and mindless buy everything that google targets at you? The reality is that google advertising is mostly targeting at people selling products and services rather than people buying them.
I read it much more as a confused ramble by someone who did not understand open source software at all. The nokia guy seems only to have a dictionary definition under standing of open source rather than a true understanding of it's principles and how it is applied.
In open source for a start there should be absolutely no fear of forks, intrinsically when each individual developer works on their own bit of code the a creating a minor short lived fork that disappears either when that code is accepted in a major repository or it is rejected and that developer decides to drop it. It can even reappear it that individual developer decides to rework and resubmit it only to disappear again once it is accepted.
As for getting open source coders to create the DRM layer for free, he really has no idea at all. He is just going to have to accept that Nokia and it's business partners will have to create the DRM layer themselves and tack in on top of the open source work created by others, others who a far more interested in users rights management.
Open source developers do not need to be educated at all, they will continue to work on what ever interests them at the time, they will work on what ever bit's of code they are being paid to work on, it is very doubtful that they will work on bits of code they have no personal interest in for free. I really think that Dr Ari Jaaksi is the one that is in need of some serious need of educating.
The reality is, that most people in the know view DRM as a serious security risk and the ability to remotely shut down personal devices or interfere with their performance is unacceptable. DRM is to readily subject to abuse and is the antitheses of user rights management, the users rights to control, make use of and secure their own personal electronic devices.
I think the special definition you are looking for is the GOP neocon corporatists and the gullible evangelists or the pseudo Christian lobbyist party. The republican party is dead, it died about eight years ago. Ron Paul is trying to recreate the republican party of old whilst trying to remain within the current broken framework, he is doomed to failure.
The only hope for the republican party to regain it's original conservative stance, is for the majority of the current leaders along with the corrupt corporate masters to end up behind bars where they belong.
As it stands the current republican leadership will continue to lie, cheat and steal to maintain their grip on power and profit, like a bunch of idiot children in a candy store gutsing down everything they can with a complete disregard for future consequences for the country.
Of course searching at the 'border' is nonsense. You are either outside of the country and not subject to searches by that country or inside the country and fully protected by all your rights as a citizen and the constitution. The lie that somehow the border has width is just that a lie, which abusers of power seek to masquerade their illegal searches as legal.
The confiscation of legally owned assets, based upon the assumption of guilt rather that the legally defined right of innocence is also a criminal abuse of power. Your data is yours and privacy should be enshrined unless there is sufficient existing evidence to legally justify a search warrant, otherwise it is a further diminishing of a citizens rights, rights that your forebears fought and died to gain and protect, forebears who lived with the daily abuses of personal privacy, and established those laws to protect the rights of future generations so that they would not have to suffer to the same intimate abusive indignities and personal humiliations.
How proud can you be as a parent when it is your child that has their personal property taken, when their privacy is invaded or, when they are stripped searched and molested. As a grandparent is it really ok to allow your fears to motivate the stripping away of your grand children's rights. Rights and personal privileges that you enjoyed and that your own grandparents fought to provide for you.
The notion that google good establish a monopoly on internet advertising is ludicrous. All google currently can achieve is an internet advertising broker. Most of the advertising still gets placed with the major web portal, google amongst others is just acting as a middle man as the market establishes itself and matures. Eventually the major portal will take the marketing direct as the did earlier in the piece and keep the middle man's profits for themselves.
Not also the idea of Yahoo selling it's search service is really stupid. For any major portal their search service does two very important things, where possible it points back to the portals own web site so rather than being a nothing sponsored text add it actually points back to a page with a range revenue earning adds and secondly the search statistics compiled are very important to major web portals as a guide to what content that should add to their own portal.
Search analysis is intrinsic for major portals in deciding how best to manage their content, what they should produce in house, what they should contract out to be added to their site, what external content should be embedded in their site, all should balance with the searches made to ensure their content remains relevant and that it is appropriate for the search engine to point back to their own site for the first few entries.
Google cant do this as it doesn't really have a portal to point to just a collection of web utilities all built around searching and cheap entry level web advertising. Yahoo is a major portal and has to be careful about empowering google with content while search apart for M$'s and Ballmers rantings is losing it's shine, especially as the old world media players and pushing further into the web portal market and are coming to grips the reality of web searching beyond google's marketing illusion. First entry of search result should always point back to your own portal, if it doesn't then you a missing needed content, it is daft to send a user to a page full of some else's advertising when they should be looking at the advertising your meant to be selling.
Actually the denial has far more politics associated with it. It is a mocking lie, a childish denial that the Chinese official knows no one will believe and emphasises that he and in turn the government of China doesn't care whether foreign countries believes it or not.
It is simply a public face denial because the government of China knows the current US administration will do nothing about as it might threaten the profits of several administration controlling corporations. So China via greed controls the activity of major US corporations who in turn control the activities of the US administration.
Hence an in your face mocking denial as the government of China has no respect for the US government and this time round did not even bother nabbing a few out of favour party members (there are always some available) to be used as scapegoats for the criminal hacking activities.
What is becoming popular now is to say wikipedia is a good place to start your research as it far more often than not has quality information as well as useful links to primary sources but just don't reference it and definitely extend your research beyond it.
As for Britannica seeking public contributions, obviously falling sales are having a significant affect, so the temptation to seek 'free' contributions which they will then claim as theirs and then sell them will be pretty high;).
Having gone back to university, I can tell you that I have found wikipedia to be the best source for quick answers, on every topic I have looked up. So after absorbing the quick easy answer, wikipedia also more often than not provided links to a primary source where more in depth answers could be obtained and suitable references obtained, so is Britannica in trouble, definitely, such is life. I love books but I would never consider buying a dead tree version of an encyclopaedia any more, as for a digital version, well, the reality is wikipedia is the best regardless of price, so congratulations and thank you:).
Far simpler to establish treaties so that countries can be penalised for failing to investigate and prosecute the individuals responsible. Those countries that are subject to attacks simply should document the attack, substantiate the cost of damages resulting from the attack and via the WTO claim a penalty from the source country togethor with punitive damages, where the source country can not substantially prove an effort to convict the perpetrators of the attack.
The is no excuse for any country to commit criminal acts in another country especially when those acts are already legally defined as being criminal acts if there were committed within the country originating the criminal acts.
So whether it is the criminal behaviour of the US military in Iraq or Chinese intelligence service computer network attacks against other countries or, even Israeli attacks into Palestine, the damage should be assessed and penalties applied. Law and order should apply to countries, government agencies and corporations upon an international basis just as it does to individuals on a local basis.
Trends for search are pointless unless the search is analyses based upon content. For example searching for McCain is an idiot, is substantially different to McNain is corrupt or McCain is a Bush clone or McCain is over the hill.
All the search trends need to indicate the context of the search and group the results by context in order to provide any meaning to the results.
Negative searches can in now way be used to indicate popularity in fact it would definitely indicate the opposite. Google trends is more about keeping google in the press and generating free advertising for google search and under it's current guise has little meaning.
Well, what can I say, I made a much more carefully considered swap, taking into account the productivity losses in swapping over application interfaces and that I would likely be using OpenOffice.org for the rest of my life, hopefully a considerable number of years to go;).
I believe you completely missed the point that spreadsheets, word processors etc have been out for at least 20 years, a lot of them considerably, including the ones I mentioned, more primitive than what is available in OpenOffice.org and all completely functional. Claiming qualifications on anonymous postings is beyond silly, believe me I'm the 'Pope';D.
The whole B$ M$ pricing scheme will be limited to smaller markets like Australia, where ASUS can swallow the lost market share resulting from twhat is coming off as an offensive marketing scheme to give B$ bragging/,marketing opportunities for M$ and M$ can readily absorb what it is likely costing them, neither one of the can accept it in larger markets. As a result the ASUS eee pc has lost the free marketing and cool factor from being a Linux specific device to become just another ho hum somewhat overpriced windows notebook.
For ACER the other big advantage of Linux on UMPCs is also likley to be low cost online software distribution, providing the user with cheap games/applications that will be already be perfectly configured for the software/hardware combination including networking, much like Lindows 'er' Linspire but of course ACER have the hardware advantage to more effectively extend their offering into low priced downloaded software so the OS and OfficeSuite etc, ie. the base software is still free and only additional proprietary games/applications are paid for.
I could bet that all the B$ ASUS pricing will disappear once competition starts to really hot up for UMPC's and the users desire for a computer that is ready to go without the need to pay for and install any additional software to be actually able to do something with a UMPC becomes a normal expectation. The whole idea of net appliances, it is all there ready to go and the users just needs to localise, personalise and add their data to be off and running.
Now of course add the likely 'surprise' application to drive low cost UMPC uptake, mesh networking and lan game play. Old pc games ported to Linux that suit multi-player networked game play.
The free office suit, openoffice.org plus of course all the other readily available FOSS applications that run on top of Linux will just be an excuse to justify the business expense of a second PC for many users and being cheap will help immensely. Now add in the education market globally and you are talking hundreds of millions of units
Anyone for a really cheap CASIO UMPC, Ubuntu notebook;).
I don't mean to be too picky but you do realise that it is june 2008 and having to look all the way back to january 2007 to try and find good numbers for Office 2007 is really pretty sad. So it looks like office 2003 did really bad in the first week as most people could not be bothered from upgrading from office 97/98 or 2000, I seem to recall that being the case. As for Office 2007 it appears like it bombed once people started to realise how many problems the interface changes would cause ie. within a couple of weeks of it's release.
I would think for most people the main reason to swap from M$ office to openoffice.org is to get away from forced upgrades via document compatibility, to escape tacked on interface changes trying to hide unnecessary upgrades, no I don't want to and never will use f**king M$ visual basic for macros so M$ can charge other companies for visual basic licences, escaping extra help, assistance and automatic features that actually kill productivity rather than help it, to gain access to complete manuals available for free online, to use an office suit that works across most operating systems including Linux, it is open source and as such openly and publicly audited and, and to gain access to the open document format as the naturally used format.
To be blunt, people who can't get open office to do the simplest task are either idiots or liars, gees, quite some number of years ago I managed to get visicalc and wordstar to perform quite complex tasks and after that I somehow managed also do the same with M$ Word prior to the windows GUI and even M$ Multiplan. Personally I was quite content with M$ Office 97 but M$ eliminated that as a choice so it was either keep making costly upgrades to the latest version of M$ Office or make a single upgrade to OpenOffice.org with simple incremental upgrades there in after plus all the other benefits, easy choice.
What is most humorous about that post in comparing the faults in xp against vista, is those exact same comparisons were made for the switch from win2kpro to xp and of course from nt to win2kpro. So lets all hear it for windows 7, 7 is not craps it's the lucky dice roll for a change. Finally a windows after a decade of trying that will actually maybe, possibly, mostly not have any faults, bugs, security failings, or DRM that the customers aren't interested in, just don't read the 'NON'-warranty EULA and have faith be a true believer.
I wonder how much pressure M$ will put on the various mass media outlets to block online polls that bag vista and promote xp.
Lest no forget corporation are just business facades behind which individuals hide. It really makes you wonder about the peole that lined up to the trough to feed on these abuses of the individual. People who are selling out their own children and future grandchildren, feeding upon the freedom of the next generations to bloat their own self indulgences.
They know the abuses that this technology will be put to, they know that people will suffer terribly as a result of their actions and, they know nothing but their own greed and contempt for the rest of humanity.
Well it is a bit worse in this case. As a government employee conducting political partisan efforts whilst at work implies the support of that government department and that the employee is not acting as an individual but as a representative of that government department and that government department is liable for those actions.
Now the tricky thing is, are the network administrators of that network also partially responsible for failing to block those activities where it was possible for them to do so.
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Can you really 'steal' your own exam paper, beyond cheating of course, which is as yet not a criminal offence. There is of course hacking into a computer network, not real hacking of course as it was done via an obtained user name and password which has been blown out into some sort of identity theft, a some what exaggerated postulation.
So it really all boils down to how good a lawyer he can afford and how anal the prosecutor is in seeking a publicity generating penalty.
So you stop and think about the behaviour of ballmer over the years and whether or not the billy goat would do exactly that to his customers, you know the truth, yeah, M$=B$.
For company/government controlled computers people should not forget that network/computer administrators can quite readily take over users computers and use them for what ever nefarious activities they want to and then blame the poor end user. In this case the administrator really and I mean really fucked up, I mean they found the child porn but missed the viruses et al, what, does the admin get such of kick looking for porn on there users computers that they forget to fulfil the security functions that they are actually paid for.
While the end user is certainly in the clear, the admin is in real trouble as now somehow they have to prove their innocence as the actual administrator of the infected (by whom ?) computer. Also the admin should be subject to criminal negligence charges as they bore false witness against the user as the admin should have detected the viruses et al prior to bearing witness against the end user, so some really serious stuff and the end user and their lawyer can really go to town on them.
So the real question for the future is, is it the end user's computer or the system administrator's computer, who has the greater control and hence who has the greater ownership? Running a far more secure OS like Linux will certainly do more to protect computer administrator's from future prosecutions, something to really think about.
After all there is a lot of private sector jobs that pay well, provide a good working environment and leave you feeling good about the work you are doing. If you of course prefer to work for the government and contribute to society as a whole (reduced pay but better job security and contributing to the society you are a part of), there is always the medical and education sectors (hey, we might all pick on government workers for fun but it mostly isn't true and mass media has jumped on the bandwagon because it has been paid to by extremely corrupt private corporations, who want to provide you with absolutely no service and charge ten times as much as the government would ever have).
Perhaps various governments might have to figure out a way to clearly separate defensive, non-aggresive technologies and companies from death at a profit companies, so they can attract better people for defence and as for offence well I'm sure there are enough jock strap wanna be computer drones to pick from, the typing monkeys thing, get enough of them and some sort of code will come out just look at M$ Vista for example ;).
Abandon the rule of law, honour and integrity and you are the enemy and you become the terrorists.
The manual clearly advocates the use of criminal tactics in the earlier parts of the manual and then in appendix A acknowledges the rule of law and the proper treatment of prisoners the principles of which where clearly abandoned in Iraq.
Of course if they preferred a coastal city like New York et al then just fit it in a cargo ship with a simple time set detonation and remote detonation. Both examples would occur long before any detection techniques could even be commenced, and clearly reflect the sheer cynical greed of the military industrial complex in accelerating the spread of nuclear weapons by pushing for a first strike policy and then by inflating the terrorist nuclear threat and then adding the bullshit of needing to spend billions of dollars to detect nuclear weapons being smuggled around the country.
Like WTF, once they are in it is too late already, detonate upon arrival at which ever airport or seaport accepts direct arrivals from which ever corruptible second/third world shipping facility they choose to use. Don't wont wild nukes spread around the world, they promote negotiation and peace not war and cynical profiteering.
That market is now coming together all based upon a similar hardware platform. The education laptop, the business ultra mobile PC, the 2nd pc, the travel PC all are basically various market segments of the same PC form factor and price range.
So as it turns out, ironically enough, the OLPC project biggest success would be to no longer be required as there would be many commercially available products that fit the need and economical prices.
Matching adds to search entries of course has nothing to do with user data and of course matching adds to web content is by far the most sensible as viewing that content demonstrates a user active current interest.
Of course from my perspective it could be somewhat difficult to tell, as I have blocked all the invasive google scripts and cookies. Tell me do you go out and mindless buy everything that google targets at you? The reality is that google advertising is mostly targeting at people selling products and services rather than people buying them.
In open source for a start there should be absolutely no fear of forks, intrinsically when each individual developer works on their own bit of code the a creating a minor short lived fork that disappears either when that code is accepted in a major repository or it is rejected and that developer decides to drop it. It can even reappear it that individual developer decides to rework and resubmit it only to disappear again once it is accepted.
As for getting open source coders to create the DRM layer for free, he really has no idea at all. He is just going to have to accept that Nokia and it's business partners will have to create the DRM layer themselves and tack in on top of the open source work created by others, others who a far more interested in users rights management.
Open source developers do not need to be educated at all, they will continue to work on what ever interests them at the time, they will work on what ever bit's of code they are being paid to work on, it is very doubtful that they will work on bits of code they have no personal interest in for free. I really think that Dr Ari Jaaksi is the one that is in need of some serious need of educating.
The reality is, that most people in the know view DRM as a serious security risk and the ability to remotely shut down personal devices or interfere with their performance is unacceptable. DRM is to readily subject to abuse and is the antitheses of user rights management, the users rights to control, make use of and secure their own personal electronic devices.
The only hope for the republican party to regain it's original conservative stance, is for the majority of the current leaders along with the corrupt corporate masters to end up behind bars where they belong.
As it stands the current republican leadership will continue to lie, cheat and steal to maintain their grip on power and profit, like a bunch of idiot children in a candy store gutsing down everything they can with a complete disregard for future consequences for the country.
The confiscation of legally owned assets, based upon the assumption of guilt rather that the legally defined right of innocence is also a criminal abuse of power. Your data is yours and privacy should be enshrined unless there is sufficient existing evidence to legally justify a search warrant, otherwise it is a further diminishing of a citizens rights, rights that your forebears fought and died to gain and protect, forebears who lived with the daily abuses of personal privacy, and established those laws to protect the rights of future generations so that they would not have to suffer to the same intimate abusive indignities and personal humiliations.
How proud can you be as a parent when it is your child that has their personal property taken, when their privacy is invaded or, when they are stripped searched and molested. As a grandparent is it really ok to allow your fears to motivate the stripping away of your grand children's rights. Rights and personal privileges that you enjoyed and that your own grandparents fought to provide for you.
Not also the idea of Yahoo selling it's search service is really stupid. For any major portal their search service does two very important things, where possible it points back to the portals own web site so rather than being a nothing sponsored text add it actually points back to a page with a range revenue earning adds and secondly the search statistics compiled are very important to major web portals as a guide to what content that should add to their own portal.
Search analysis is intrinsic for major portals in deciding how best to manage their content, what they should produce in house, what they should contract out to be added to their site, what external content should be embedded in their site, all should balance with the searches made to ensure their content remains relevant and that it is appropriate for the search engine to point back to their own site for the first few entries.
Google cant do this as it doesn't really have a portal to point to just a collection of web utilities all built around searching and cheap entry level web advertising. Yahoo is a major portal and has to be careful about empowering google with content while search apart for M$'s and Ballmers rantings is losing it's shine, especially as the old world media players and pushing further into the web portal market and are coming to grips the reality of web searching beyond google's marketing illusion. First entry of search result should always point back to your own portal, if it doesn't then you a missing needed content, it is daft to send a user to a page full of some else's advertising when they should be looking at the advertising your meant to be selling.
It is simply a public face denial because the government of China knows the current US administration will do nothing about as it might threaten the profits of several administration controlling corporations. So China via greed controls the activity of major US corporations who in turn control the activities of the US administration.
Hence an in your face mocking denial as the government of China has no respect for the US government and this time round did not even bother nabbing a few out of favour party members (there are always some available) to be used as scapegoats for the criminal hacking activities.
As for Britannica seeking public contributions, obviously falling sales are having a significant affect, so the temptation to seek 'free' contributions which they will then claim as theirs and then sell them will be pretty high ;).
Having gone back to university, I can tell you that I have found wikipedia to be the best source for quick answers, on every topic I have looked up. So after absorbing the quick easy answer, wikipedia also more often than not provided links to a primary source where more in depth answers could be obtained and suitable references obtained, so is Britannica in trouble, definitely, such is life. I love books but I would never consider buying a dead tree version of an encyclopaedia any more, as for a digital version, well, the reality is wikipedia is the best regardless of price, so congratulations and thank you :).
The is no excuse for any country to commit criminal acts in another country especially when those acts are already legally defined as being criminal acts if there were committed within the country originating the criminal acts.
So whether it is the criminal behaviour of the US military in Iraq or Chinese intelligence service computer network attacks against other countries or, even Israeli attacks into Palestine, the damage should be assessed and penalties applied. Law and order should apply to countries, government agencies and corporations upon an international basis just as it does to individuals on a local basis.
All the search trends need to indicate the context of the search and group the results by context in order to provide any meaning to the results.
Negative searches can in now way be used to indicate popularity in fact it would definitely indicate the opposite. Google trends is more about keeping google in the press and generating free advertising for google search and under it's current guise has little meaning.
Well, what can I say, I made a much more carefully considered swap, taking into account the productivity losses in swapping over application interfaces and that I would likely be using OpenOffice.org for the rest of my life, hopefully a considerable number of years to go ;).
I believe you completely missed the point that spreadsheets, word processors etc have been out for at least 20 years, a lot of them considerably, including the ones I mentioned, more primitive than what is available in OpenOffice.org and all completely functional. Claiming qualifications on anonymous postings is beyond silly, believe me I'm the 'Pope' ;D.
For ACER the other big advantage of Linux on UMPCs is also likley to be low cost online software distribution, providing the user with cheap games/applications that will be already be perfectly configured for the software/hardware combination including networking, much like Lindows 'er' Linspire but of course ACER have the hardware advantage to more effectively extend their offering into low priced downloaded software so the OS and OfficeSuite etc, ie. the base software is still free and only additional proprietary games/applications are paid for.
I could bet that all the B$ ASUS pricing will disappear once competition starts to really hot up for UMPC's and the users desire for a computer that is ready to go without the need to pay for and install any additional software to be actually able to do something with a UMPC becomes a normal expectation. The whole idea of net appliances, it is all there ready to go and the users just needs to localise, personalise and add their data to be off and running.
The free office suit, openoffice.org plus of course all the other readily available FOSS applications that run on top of Linux will just be an excuse to justify the business expense of a second PC for many users and being cheap will help immensely. Now add in the education market globally and you are talking hundreds of millions of units
Anyone for a really cheap CASIO UMPC, Ubuntu notebook ;).
I don't mean to be too picky but you do realise that it is june 2008 and having to look all the way back to january 2007 to try and find good numbers for Office 2007 is really pretty sad. So it looks like office 2003 did really bad in the first week as most people could not be bothered from upgrading from office 97/98 or 2000, I seem to recall that being the case. As for Office 2007 it appears like it bombed once people started to realise how many problems the interface changes would cause ie. within a couple of weeks of it's release.
To be blunt, people who can't get open office to do the simplest task are either idiots or liars, gees, quite some number of years ago I managed to get visicalc and wordstar to perform quite complex tasks and after that I somehow managed also do the same with M$ Word prior to the windows GUI and even M$ Multiplan. Personally I was quite content with M$ Office 97 but M$ eliminated that as a choice so it was either keep making costly upgrades to the latest version of M$ Office or make a single upgrade to OpenOffice.org with simple incremental upgrades there in after plus all the other benefits, easy choice.
I wonder how much pressure M$ will put on the various mass media outlets to block online polls that bag vista and promote xp.
They know the abuses that this technology will be put to, they know that people will suffer terribly as a result of their actions and, they know nothing but their own greed and contempt for the rest of humanity.
Now the tricky thing is, are the network administrators of that network also partially responsible for failing to block those activities where it was possible for them to do so.