The flip side of this is, if it wasn't for likely government abuse with the support of unlimited profit corporations, this DNA sampling and recording could have enormous long term health benefits.
In fact there seems to be a lot of modern technology out there, that could have tremendous benefits for all of us but unfortunately there remains that core percentage of humanity that tends to congregate in politics and the upper echelons of corporation, those self serving sycopaths who would, in all seriousness kill and/or enslave the rest of us to pander to their own egos.
Hmm, so once they develop a DNA test that can specifically identify all those individuals and they are put away where they can do the rest of us no harm, I am all for it, I am sure given a couple of years we can readily replace the 90% of corporate executives and 75% of politicians that this test would eliminate.
Sounds more like mobile pork, bleed the taxpayer dry with endless upgrades and suicide runs. There just ain't no corporate profits in training modern professional soldiers. Robots, perfect, less soldiers and more multi-million dollar bits of equipment with limited warranties.
Of course when it comes to providing assistance in the event of natural disasters, the lack of trained personal will be missed, but it can always be contracted out, the loss of life of due to profits ahead of rapid response, well, that's just modern business.
Never confuse a persons opinion with a M$ microtrolls paid opinion. You only have to look at a years worth of forum lies with regard to Vista and compare that with the emails which contain the true opinion of the M$ executive team.
So for example all those complaints about the latest windows (P)OS basically are true, and the forum opinion being trolled across the internet are just a bunch of paid for lies.
Of course the ones I like best are, I really like Linux, but nobody should use it, or I really like openoffice.org but nobody should use or the always popular, I know windows isn't very good buy we should all use it because M$ has managed to force most hardware manufacturers to use it as the default OEM OS.
Most users are lazy so they really don't want to go through the hassle of changing OS's even if the OS is really noting but an interface between the applications and the hardware. OF course M$ and their abusive practices are the ones forcing the change, but people will doit at there on pace, they will hold on to an old copy of windows to use as a game console and switch over to Linux for more reliability in business.
Well, the way it is used has nothing to do with infringing content. It is all about guilty until proven innocent, paying a fine to the tune of thousands of dollars in legal defence regardless of the lack of validity of the so called evidence.
It is about threatening and intimidating the public via civil suits where it is cheaper to surrender and pay thousands of dollars to defend against false accusation that would even see the light of day in a criminal court but can be used in corrupted civil courts that are biased towards those with large amounts of money. It is about settling out of court when the RIAA/MPAA take on some by accident who can afford a proper legal defence and basically shoots down the false accusations.
What is really becoming really apparent, is that the copyright laws need to be completely reviewed in a public forum. What should or shouldn't be copyrighted. How long copyright should last and obviously whether it is still needed or would sufficient content be created with out it. Is copyright becoming an excessive burden upon society? Is copyright bleeding off too many resources that could be more successfully deployed else where in society. Is the greed that motivates a lot of copyrighted content producing a excess of antisocial destructive content and would reduced copyright protection actual result in an improvement in the social quality of the content ie. less profit more value to society. Of course the really big issue, with cheap publishing via the internet and P2P, should the parasitic publishers actually be targeted for elimination as they no longer add any value to the content and are certainly no longer required for it's distribution?
Get real the concept is stupid, five natural break pints in five minutes of content and what, you show ten minutes of commercials. It is all just a marketing scheme targeted at the sellers not at the buyers. With the current adwords/spamwords budget advertising reaching the end of life due to a lack of actuall retail sale, google is forced to search for a new marketing scheme.
For video content, the typical length to allow an add in the content is a least 20 minutes, 10 to start then adds ten to finish, so adds at the beginning and you often lose the end viewer right there and of course an add at the end is a complete loss.
At least they a giving up of the B$ target the consumer by invading their privacy and focusing on the content.
The big fail is they are trying to make up for a lack of staff skill by automating the process, which of course in reality will not work. The whole process needs careful analysis of the product and careful analysis of the target audience as a group (not individuals), and then of course viewing and judging the content 'style' as well as various specific articles to assemble the complete marketing image. Time cost and effort, not cheap quick and target the sellers and forget the buyers.
The killer for all these 'great' add schemes is there is simply a huge amount of content competing for attention, poising the content with too many adds, or adds that are to intrusive and you lose market share, faster than that add can gain customers, so a pointless effort.
Of course that was when the were only a few individuals actually actively opposed to their largely fraudulent and criminal behaviour. Now that the number of people that are actively working against the the activities of Co$, it's makes it much more difficult for them to engage in that costly and time consuming behaviour.
The other major change is the internet for not only putting on public display their harassing and threatening tactics but also for offering the existing members and victims of that organisation an alternative.
It is always important to reinforce the message that the activities are not against the law abiding members/victims of that organisation but against the organisers of the scam as well as those members that engage in criminal activities and knowingly support the duping of the innocent believers.
You really just don't get it. Your service does not travel across one companies infrastructure, it travels across many, all of whom can throttle you access or even cut it off at a whim. You want full service then you will have to pay more than one company for that service. Is your company just cheating you, how can you tell, they will just blame someone else, you will have absolutely now way of evaluating what kind of service you are actually getting.
Want to check a competitors rates, than get ready to drive there because all of your communications to them will be cut off. The internet is just a digital transmission service, allow bullshit throttling and cutting people off on that and they will shift across to the cell phone network, why not. Just think of the political advantages, the corporation doesn't like the candidate, there web page disappears as do all their emails. Corporation doesn't like a news story, watch it disappear from the network. Abandoning net neutrality is basically giving the telecommunications company the right to censor the internet as they see fit, and collectively via collusion sell the future of democracy to the highest bidder.
One minor correction, it is now 'apparently' (have to keep the the CO$ lawyers at bay) more uniformly recognised as CO$, the Con of $cientology, trading sanity for profits. That of course doesn't even really touch the scientology truly faithful, what is 'appearing' (ditto) to be nothing more than modern day 'coercive persuasion' slave labour force, from the FSSO (Flag Ship Service Organization) Free'sic'Winds to the Celebrity 'sic' Centres where these victims misguidedly service the depravations of their controllers and of course their fiscal supporters the 'Celebrity Artists'.
Well the add technically worked. The whole idea of using your name is to draw your attention to the add as you are already subconsciously keyed to look out for and be aware of the use of your name.
Now the big catch with this is, it shifts it from being a passive add to more like being a door to door salesperson, someone that specifically invades your personal private space, which is of course why you react to it as being invasive. So if you have a positive relationship already established with the company it is fine (but makes spending money on advertising somewhat pointless as you have already be sold) but if you have a neutral or poor relationship it will generate negative feelings and drive you away, or worse draw you to the seller in a hostile combative way (no point in marketing to that person ever again you are just wasting your money).
So this is all really about justifying why they are keeping all those personal records and maintaining the illusion to the sellers that your private information is really worth renting or buying. That whole marketing shtick is already starting to lose it's bite as sellers are realising there is now value in addwords or the like, and that adds really need to be passive, not too intrusive and leave a subconscious mark rather than being a conscious intrusion. Adds should blend in with the content on the page, still be distinct but not be intrusive.
Of course not to be too cynical I suppose it doesn't hurt the sales of in flight drinks at inflated prices and I am sure there is a highly profitable market for little containers of airport safe cosmetics also at highly inflated prices.
As far as I know by far the bulk of arrests have resulted from customers having their stuff stolen and refusing to be properly respectful to the TSA, and not knowing when to just shut and bend over and say please sir.
Actually you a little bet off track context sensitive marketing relates to the content and not the user. Main stream media are of course producers of content and for them it is better that the advertising be targeted at the quality of the content and in turn they can demonstrate an applicable user base, with some minor statistics to delineate the market group that user base represents.
Targeting the user as promulgated by the new webvertisers really doesn't work, there is absolutely no point compiling a years worth of statistics, what point is there in knowing consumer was looking at yesterday all that counts is what they are looking to buy today and tomorrow. Now days manipulative marketing has a very short shelf life and a nasty backlash because, the internet means the consumers are no longer isolated from each other and existing customers problems are readily shared with potential customers.
That is not to say modern mass webvertising is not popular and profitable to the marketing companies, they have sold the line really well, unfortunately that is all the really sell, the customers are really just the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Most of the customers are where they have been looking at specific content that interests them know, which is why you simply align your advertising to that content.
So mass media are looking to prevent the temporary loss of advertising market share to companies like google and it's low end budget market, which in reality is targeted at the sellers and not the buyers. So expect a more concerted anti privacy invasive webvertising attack by the old mass media stalwarts and as a side note they are also looking to protect themselves and their own families, all this privacy invasive stuff is getting way out of hand.
Repeat after me: Labour unions, people actually died to get you better wages and working conditions, and companies at that time were quite content to kill as many workers as necessary to keep wages down and working conditions cheap.
Democracy in action: if it were not for a more politically active population at that time those labour reforms still would not have materialised. Which is why modern corporations work so hard to disenfranchise the majority via mass media, you know all the corrupt stuff, you only have 1 vote it doesn't count so why bother, there is no point in voting because all political parties are the same, why vote for any candidate when they are all as corrupt as each other (all this while they prod a motivate their pet ignorant electorate to vote for the politician that will tell the religiously motivated what they want to hear while robbing them blind and as it turns out killing their children).
So yeah IT labour shortage is all about squeezing down on wages and working conditions, basically out sourcing is proving to be somewhat unreliable, and the process tends to mean you give away all your trade secrets to a future potential competitor but, those wages and labour conditions are still desirable so they are looking to import them by what ever means necessary. True the still will be the odd shortages in specific select areas of the market when a required level of experience and expertise is needed but they are few and far between.
That of course still doesn't govern the reason why. The reasons are, simply is the past you were forced to buy a windows OEM to get your computer so in affect you had you games console for free and for most gamers they already have a range of windows games they still want to play. For game companies, it is about profit, they will do the absolute minimum of work to generate a profit hence they will typical only target the majority audience and often they will only target a PC audience and rarely only target a specific console audience and generally will only do so for discounted licensing fees.
Indirectly Linux has hurt PC gaming sales because people who prefer Linux over windows have severely cut back on the number of games per year they are willing to buy and in some instances have switch to PS2/PS3(they would never xbox) gaming. At the moment when it comes to impulse buying, the I want now generation, they really are not any Linux games available at the local retail level.
So in swapping over from windows to linux, which is inevitable because of the budget end of the market, it will be light a light switch either on or off, light or dark, Linux or windows, there is now slow steady transition, it will simply appear to happen at a rush, and computers like the ASUS eeePC are what will herald the high volume low requirement gaming market, especially when playing wirelessly together, hmm, free local mesh network gaming.
Technically speaking there it is not really blatant advertising unless the article is repeated, or a manufacturer starts to plant hundreds of web sites. Of course should a manufacturer be foolish enough to being it products to light it will also have to accept counter edits that depict the truth rather than B$ marketing.
As for attempting to become a "trustworthy and credible" reference that would plainly be a mistake. Wikipedia is what it is a community created shared information resource, bogging it down in referencing to the nth degree, or blocking artciles until they can be properly sourced, or verifying and defining every inch of copyright in every photo and every sentence will just kill it.
It is light and interesting and covers a huge depth of material, all of which makes it a useful quick reference and more often that not it provides direct links to more detailed sources of knowledge. Why is people are always jumping up trying to recreate wikipedia in their image, it is popular because people like it the way it is, and it's existence does not prevent the creation of the anal retentive pedia, where every artcile is fully referenced, checked and held over fro a year while it is validated and cleared of disputes of copyright concerns, I am sure it will only take a century or two to get to where wikipedia was a some years ago;).
For the DVD and Vista comparison and to kill the lies and prevarications, DVD ready does not mean it can only play the DVDs at half speed. People have a expectation of performance, M$ advertises it's products showing it performing at a certain level, and basically lies, when those products can not perform as advertised.
So why are these people on welfare, why do they not contribute, why don't they learn, why don't they work. It is quite simple because they are incapable of doing so, they do lack the necessary mental skills and drive to be an effective part of the current type of society. So why pay them welfare, because on the whole they do less damage that way. Otherwise they simply resort to criminal activities. So while they still will commit criminal acts the extent of their criminal activity is reduced. Although sometimes I would think it might be better that for just a while the welfare state was suspended for just a while, so the criminal types could shoot all the reactionary red neck idiots while robbing them, thin down the idiotic myopically greed driven population but of course the criminals would also target the more clear thinking, socially conscious amongst the population.
Now all we need to do, is get the religious right wing out of that simple solution so that a suitable range of low cost pacifying substances (which would limit the drive for criminal activity) be made freely available to that population, substances that would simultaneously voluntarily limit their fecundity, there is no sane reason that the problem should continue to propagate into future generations. Of course you like some other reactionary individuals prefer the slave labour, chain gang and whip approach. For ownership to exist every person on this planet is entitled to a free subsistence life style, if they want more they have to contribute to the society that they are a part of, however at no stage and for no reason are human beings to be considered slaves to society, we have had quite enough of that, thank you very much.
Now the most interesting thing about this case, is during the whole episode, all internet connections between the US and overseas where being monitored by the NSA. Did no alarm bells go off when all this data was going from the US to China regardless of the intermediaries. So what exactly was the NSA monitoring, obviously nothing with regard to national security or military intelligence material or even information on military hardware.
It really does make what the NSA were doing look very suspicious and starts to look more like a domestic surveillance program searching for those who did not properly align themselves with the current administration. Opposition political leaders and political fund raisers, people who supported peace and not war, those that actually wanted to support the troops rather than just sending them off to bleed money out government and into the pockets of corporations whilst the soldiers bleed on the battlefield.
I wonder how much information got out about the corrupt nature of some of the practices going on in the pentagon that will later be used by the autocratic communist Chinese leadership to manipulate and control those in charge of the Us's national security. A whose who of those that will readily accept bribes regardless of the loss of life.
I bet there are a whole lot of people who now wish they had mandated the use of the NSA's SE Linux on desktops and file servers, the NSA really did now and attempted to do something constructive about the problems inherent in M$ windows before they were cut off by the corrupt M$ executive team and an equally corrupt republican administration.
Of course when it comes to getting you to believe what you read, what better than a whole bunch of ex-spurts (drips under pressure) to get you to spend time on marketing web sites. This is what the article is really all about, not comparing a whole lot of enthusiastic specialising amateurs who have a real a interest in the subject they are writing about to a whole bunch of professionals whose main drive is getting paid to write about stuff that will make them the most money.
So what is the difference between a skilled so called amateur who has learnt from the exact same sources and who has shared their pool of knowledge with other like minded amateurs, and the professional who has had their opinion altered by vested intrests and who has often had their opinion skewed by the closed circles they dwell in and even worse well defend knowledge they know to be wrong in order to preserve their own prestige and fiscal future.
For example knol is simply just googles reaction to more people using Wikipedia as a search engine, just plain simple greed and nothing more. If there was a real serious drive to create a more accurate on line reference, then universities would simply work together to create one based upon course content and research being conducted, if fact all of the work has already been done it just needs to be collated and shared. So what is stopping it, greed, ego or laziness. The new IP age where the real difference between 'amateurs' and professionals is that amateurs are happy to share, exchange and expand upon the knowledge for free and professionals, who are miserly, restrictive, secretive and neither want to share or exchange but only demand payment, and strangely enough what they produce will often be shaped by who pays them and how much they pay them.
Could it possibly have something to do with over stimulating nocturnal herbivorous insects and get then staying out after lights up, where in their frenzied and 'buzzed' out state, they more readily become a meal for the carnivorous types. So hyper bugs that stay up for just that one bite to many and, then they themselves get bitten.
So do the carnivorous typed prefer caffeinated meals, perhaps some human caffeine addicts can tells the rest of us how well they fair against mosquitoes and the like;).
Well at least there is that interesting and different reasoning for using and recommending M$ exchange and the pst file format.
Have emails that you don't want any more, regulatory authorities breathing down your neck, keeping embarrassing emails becoming a worry, then switch to M$ exchange, we guarantee to 'legally' corrupt and destroy all those pesky records of your corruption, not one incriminating email shall survive.
Based upon the latest M$ Vista email shenanigans, that exchange pst excuse doesn't seem applicable for them. Although it presents an interesting marketing slant, the current US administration is basically stating that M$ exchange is an unsafe and defective record keeping format and should not be used if you want to keep long term accurate records.
Just a reminder that the Air Force is a part of the government, so the copyright does exist but it is held by the public and, unless it is a matter of national security is subject to full public disclosure.
Now of course the US Air Force might be backing away from the video because in hindsight it makes them look stupid and childish but, it still exists and the US public is legally entitled to know what the US Air Force has in mind when it comes to disrupting and endangering their computer networks.
Unfortunately for M$ this also required a level of trust in the development community that simply does not exist any more. So M$ sees a successful product, tries to copy it and claim it as their innovation and with sufficient advertising and promoting the imaginary benefits, people used to give it a shot but after consistently abusing those customer, those customer have simply stopped going there.
Example for silverlight, how many people read it is silverfish, those slimly scaly critters that eat your carpet. It is all just becoming a joke, most developers are just laughing at M$ as they introduce new MSN web sites that attempt to force people to use silverfish and people just ignore the website. So what next M$ tries to buy Yahoo and make Yahoo a silverfish only website, now that would have been really interesting to watch that market base collapse.
Well that is plainly wrong. Time to lather up the lawyers. School of all types are about learning, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with posting answers that you have researched and come up with as you have demonstrably achieved the goal that schools set. I would quite readily take a university through the legal wringer for attempting to steal and ban 'my' work, let alone infringe upon my free speech rights.
Universities are not supervising children they are meant to be adults, the person producing the answers and publishing has done absolutely nothing wrong, the people copying and claiming those answers as there own are the only ones who merit criticism. That professor deserves a swift kick for an idiotic knee jerk reaction. You worried about what the students are or are not learning, punishments for cheating upon assignments are ridiculous, the whole point of an assignments is simply to facilitate learning, have more tests and all your problems are solved. Tests in reality reflect the real world, having the answers there and then not having two weeks to come up with them while your business grinds to a halt.
This issue just demonstrates that immaturity is a great amongst the staff as it is with the students and the use of assignments for grading purposes has got out of control.
All too complicated. It would be far simple to completely break up ICANN and simply replace it with mirrored domains and cooperative treaties between nations. ICANN is completely unnecessary it really is a pointless waste sucking up money and seems to be do into doing nothing more than creating a cloak of non-profitability, whilst those wholesaling the services gain control of it and seek monopoly driven unlimited profit.
There is absolute no reason each country can create their own core domain and then simply based upon treaties with other countries mirror which ever registered names they choose, where another country abuses the system, the simply override the mirror with their own names/IP entries.
If the internet balkanises it makes it more expensive for business so they will seek to keep the system under control, of course for business it again is showing signs of becoming expensive with one centralised group having total control. So a brohen up and distributed between nations ICANN makes more sense, no UN required at all, just a system of database mirrors and treaties.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact there seems to be a lot of modern technology out there, that could have tremendous benefits for all of us but unfortunately there remains that core percentage of humanity that tends to congregate in politics and the upper echelons of corporation, those self serving sycopaths who would, in all seriousness kill and/or enslave the rest of us to pander to their own egos.
Hmm, so once they develop a DNA test that can specifically identify all those individuals and they are put away where they can do the rest of us no harm, I am all for it, I am sure given a couple of years we can readily replace the 90% of corporate executives and 75% of politicians that this test would eliminate.
Of course when it comes to providing assistance in the event of natural disasters, the lack of trained personal will be missed, but it can always be contracted out, the loss of life of due to profits ahead of rapid response, well, that's just modern business.
So for example all those complaints about the latest windows (P)OS basically are true, and the forum opinion being trolled across the internet are just a bunch of paid for lies.
Of course the ones I like best are, I really like Linux, but nobody should use it, or I really like openoffice.org but nobody should use or the always popular, I know windows isn't very good buy we should all use it because M$ has managed to force most hardware manufacturers to use it as the default OEM OS.
Most users are lazy so they really don't want to go through the hassle of changing OS's even if the OS is really noting but an interface between the applications and the hardware. OF course M$ and their abusive practices are the ones forcing the change, but people will doit at there on pace, they will hold on to an old copy of windows to use as a game console and switch over to Linux for more reliability in business.
It is about threatening and intimidating the public via civil suits where it is cheaper to surrender and pay thousands of dollars to defend against false accusation that would even see the light of day in a criminal court but can be used in corrupted civil courts that are biased towards those with large amounts of money. It is about settling out of court when the RIAA/MPAA take on some by accident who can afford a proper legal defence and basically shoots down the false accusations.
What is really becoming really apparent, is that the copyright laws need to be completely reviewed in a public forum. What should or shouldn't be copyrighted. How long copyright should last and obviously whether it is still needed or would sufficient content be created with out it. Is copyright becoming an excessive burden upon society? Is copyright bleeding off too many resources that could be more successfully deployed else where in society. Is the greed that motivates a lot of copyrighted content producing a excess of antisocial destructive content and would reduced copyright protection actual result in an improvement in the social quality of the content ie. less profit more value to society. Of course the really big issue, with cheap publishing via the internet and P2P, should the parasitic publishers actually be targeted for elimination as they no longer add any value to the content and are certainly no longer required for it's distribution?
For video content, the typical length to allow an add in the content is a least 20 minutes, 10 to start then adds ten to finish, so adds at the beginning and you often lose the end viewer right there and of course an add at the end is a complete loss.
At least they a giving up of the B$ target the consumer by invading their privacy and focusing on the content.
The big fail is they are trying to make up for a lack of staff skill by automating the process, which of course in reality will not work. The whole process needs careful analysis of the product and careful analysis of the target audience as a group (not individuals), and then of course viewing and judging the content 'style' as well as various specific articles to assemble the complete marketing image. Time cost and effort, not cheap quick and target the sellers and forget the buyers.
The killer for all these 'great' add schemes is there is simply a huge amount of content competing for attention, poising the content with too many adds, or adds that are to intrusive and you lose market share, faster than that add can gain customers, so a pointless effort.
The other major change is the internet for not only putting on public display their harassing and threatening tactics but also for offering the existing members and victims of that organisation an alternative.
It is always important to reinforce the message that the activities are not against the law abiding members/victims of that organisation but against the organisers of the scam as well as those members that engage in criminal activities and knowingly support the duping of the innocent believers.
Want to check a competitors rates, than get ready to drive there because all of your communications to them will be cut off. The internet is just a digital transmission service, allow bullshit throttling and cutting people off on that and they will shift across to the cell phone network, why not. Just think of the political advantages, the corporation doesn't like the candidate, there web page disappears as do all their emails. Corporation doesn't like a news story, watch it disappear from the network. Abandoning net neutrality is basically giving the telecommunications company the right to censor the internet as they see fit, and collectively via collusion sell the future of democracy to the highest bidder.
One minor correction, it is now 'apparently' (have to keep the the CO$ lawyers at bay) more uniformly recognised as CO$, the Con of $cientology, trading sanity for profits. That of course doesn't even really touch the scientology truly faithful, what is 'appearing' (ditto) to be nothing more than modern day 'coercive persuasion' slave labour force, from the FSSO (Flag Ship Service Organization) Free'sic'Winds to the Celebrity 'sic' Centres where these victims misguidedly service the depravations of their controllers and of course their fiscal supporters the 'Celebrity Artists'.
Now the big catch with this is, it shifts it from being a passive add to more like being a door to door salesperson, someone that specifically invades your personal private space, which is of course why you react to it as being invasive. So if you have a positive relationship already established with the company it is fine (but makes spending money on advertising somewhat pointless as you have already be sold) but if you have a neutral or poor relationship it will generate negative feelings and drive you away, or worse draw you to the seller in a hostile combative way (no point in marketing to that person ever again you are just wasting your money).
So this is all really about justifying why they are keeping all those personal records and maintaining the illusion to the sellers that your private information is really worth renting or buying. That whole marketing shtick is already starting to lose it's bite as sellers are realising there is now value in addwords or the like, and that adds really need to be passive, not too intrusive and leave a subconscious mark rather than being a conscious intrusion. Adds should blend in with the content on the page, still be distinct but not be intrusive.
As far as I know by far the bulk of arrests have resulted from customers having their stuff stolen and refusing to be properly respectful to the TSA, and not knowing when to just shut and bend over and say please sir.
Targeting the user as promulgated by the new webvertisers really doesn't work, there is absolutely no point compiling a years worth of statistics, what point is there in knowing consumer was looking at yesterday all that counts is what they are looking to buy today and tomorrow. Now days manipulative marketing has a very short shelf life and a nasty backlash because, the internet means the consumers are no longer isolated from each other and existing customers problems are readily shared with potential customers.
That is not to say modern mass webvertising is not popular and profitable to the marketing companies, they have sold the line really well, unfortunately that is all the really sell, the customers are really just the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Most of the customers are where they have been looking at specific content that interests them know, which is why you simply align your advertising to that content.
So mass media are looking to prevent the temporary loss of advertising market share to companies like google and it's low end budget market, which in reality is targeted at the sellers and not the buyers. So expect a more concerted anti privacy invasive webvertising attack by the old mass media stalwarts and as a side note they are also looking to protect themselves and their own families, all this privacy invasive stuff is getting way out of hand.
Democracy in action: if it were not for a more politically active population at that time those labour reforms still would not have materialised. Which is why modern corporations work so hard to disenfranchise the majority via mass media, you know all the corrupt stuff, you only have 1 vote it doesn't count so why bother, there is no point in voting because all political parties are the same, why vote for any candidate when they are all as corrupt as each other (all this while they prod a motivate their pet ignorant electorate to vote for the politician that will tell the religiously motivated what they want to hear while robbing them blind and as it turns out killing their children).
So yeah IT labour shortage is all about squeezing down on wages and working conditions, basically out sourcing is proving to be somewhat unreliable, and the process tends to mean you give away all your trade secrets to a future potential competitor but, those wages and labour conditions are still desirable so they are looking to import them by what ever means necessary. True the still will be the odd shortages in specific select areas of the market when a required level of experience and expertise is needed but they are few and far between.
Indirectly Linux has hurt PC gaming sales because people who prefer Linux over windows have severely cut back on the number of games per year they are willing to buy and in some instances have switch to PS2/PS3(they would never xbox) gaming. At the moment when it comes to impulse buying, the I want now generation, they really are not any Linux games available at the local retail level.
So in swapping over from windows to linux, which is inevitable because of the budget end of the market, it will be light a light switch either on or off, light or dark, Linux or windows, there is now slow steady transition, it will simply appear to happen at a rush, and computers like the ASUS eeePC are what will herald the high volume low requirement gaming market, especially when playing wirelessly together, hmm, free local mesh network gaming.
As for attempting to become a "trustworthy and credible" reference that would plainly be a mistake. Wikipedia is what it is a community created shared information resource, bogging it down in referencing to the nth degree, or blocking artciles until they can be properly sourced, or verifying and defining every inch of copyright in every photo and every sentence will just kill it.
It is light and interesting and covers a huge depth of material, all of which makes it a useful quick reference and more often that not it provides direct links to more detailed sources of knowledge. Why is people are always jumping up trying to recreate wikipedia in their image, it is popular because people like it the way it is, and it's existence does not prevent the creation of the anal retentive pedia, where every artcile is fully referenced, checked and held over fro a year while it is validated and cleared of disputes of copyright concerns, I am sure it will only take a century or two to get to where wikipedia was a some years ago ;).
For the DVD and Vista comparison and to kill the lies and prevarications, DVD ready does not mean it can only play the DVDs at half speed. People have a expectation of performance, M$ advertises it's products showing it performing at a certain level, and basically lies, when those products can not perform as advertised.
Now all we need to do, is get the religious right wing out of that simple solution so that a suitable range of low cost pacifying substances (which would limit the drive for criminal activity) be made freely available to that population, substances that would simultaneously voluntarily limit their fecundity, there is no sane reason that the problem should continue to propagate into future generations. Of course you like some other reactionary individuals prefer the slave labour, chain gang and whip approach. For ownership to exist every person on this planet is entitled to a free subsistence life style, if they want more they have to contribute to the society that they are a part of, however at no stage and for no reason are human beings to be considered slaves to society, we have had quite enough of that, thank you very much.
It really does make what the NSA were doing look very suspicious and starts to look more like a domestic surveillance program searching for those who did not properly align themselves with the current administration. Opposition political leaders and political fund raisers, people who supported peace and not war, those that actually wanted to support the troops rather than just sending them off to bleed money out government and into the pockets of corporations whilst the soldiers bleed on the battlefield.
I wonder how much information got out about the corrupt nature of some of the practices going on in the pentagon that will later be used by the autocratic communist Chinese leadership to manipulate and control those in charge of the Us's national security. A whose who of those that will readily accept bribes regardless of the loss of life.
I bet there are a whole lot of people who now wish they had mandated the use of the NSA's SE Linux on desktops and file servers, the NSA really did now and attempted to do something constructive about the problems inherent in M$ windows before they were cut off by the corrupt M$ executive team and an equally corrupt republican administration.
So what is the difference between a skilled so called amateur who has learnt from the exact same sources and who has shared their pool of knowledge with other like minded amateurs, and the professional who has had their opinion altered by vested intrests and who has often had their opinion skewed by the closed circles they dwell in and even worse well defend knowledge they know to be wrong in order to preserve their own prestige and fiscal future.
For example knol is simply just googles reaction to more people using Wikipedia as a search engine, just plain simple greed and nothing more. If there was a real serious drive to create a more accurate on line reference, then universities would simply work together to create one based upon course content and research being conducted, if fact all of the work has already been done it just needs to be collated and shared. So what is stopping it, greed, ego or laziness. The new IP age where the real difference between 'amateurs' and professionals is that amateurs are happy to share, exchange and expand upon the knowledge for free and professionals, who are miserly, restrictive, secretive and neither want to share or exchange but only demand payment, and strangely enough what they produce will often be shaped by who pays them and how much they pay them.
So do the carnivorous typed prefer caffeinated meals, perhaps some human caffeine addicts can tells the rest of us how well they fair against mosquitoes and the like ;).
Have emails that you don't want any more, regulatory authorities breathing down your neck, keeping embarrassing emails becoming a worry, then switch to M$ exchange, we guarantee to 'legally' corrupt and destroy all those pesky records of your corruption, not one incriminating email shall survive.
Based upon the latest M$ Vista email shenanigans, that exchange pst excuse doesn't seem applicable for them. Although it presents an interesting marketing slant, the current US administration is basically stating that M$ exchange is an unsafe and defective record keeping format and should not be used if you want to keep long term accurate records.
Now of course the US Air Force might be backing away from the video because in hindsight it makes them look stupid and childish but, it still exists and the US public is legally entitled to know what the US Air Force has in mind when it comes to disrupting and endangering their computer networks.
Did you know that discovering the answer to that question is a criminal offence ;).
Example for silverlight, how many people read it is silverfish, those slimly scaly critters that eat your carpet. It is all just becoming a joke, most developers are just laughing at M$ as they introduce new MSN web sites that attempt to force people to use silverfish and people just ignore the website. So what next M$ tries to buy Yahoo and make Yahoo a silverfish only website, now that would have been really interesting to watch that market base collapse.
Universities are not supervising children they are meant to be adults, the person producing the answers and publishing has done absolutely nothing wrong, the people copying and claiming those answers as there own are the only ones who merit criticism. That professor deserves a swift kick for an idiotic knee jerk reaction. You worried about what the students are or are not learning, punishments for cheating upon assignments are ridiculous, the whole point of an assignments is simply to facilitate learning, have more tests and all your problems are solved. Tests in reality reflect the real world, having the answers there and then not having two weeks to come up with them while your business grinds to a halt.
This issue just demonstrates that immaturity is a great amongst the staff as it is with the students and the use of assignments for grading purposes has got out of control.
There is absolute no reason each country can create their own core domain and then simply based upon treaties with other countries mirror which ever registered names they choose, where another country abuses the system, the simply override the mirror with their own names/IP entries.
If the internet balkanises it makes it more expensive for business so they will seek to keep the system under control, of course for business it again is showing signs of becoming expensive with one centralised group having total control. So a brohen up and distributed between nations ICANN makes more sense, no UN required at all, just a system of database mirrors and treaties.