Talking about responsibility, how about M$'s responsibility to it's share holders. What about all that advertising, press releases and even SEC rtaements upon which investors based their investment decisions. The Operating system is meant to be M$'s flagship product, it's main source of profits and revenue.
These emails paint a wildly different picture of the future financial viability of Vista and the revenue it was meant to generate versus M$'s public disclosures. A clear case of fraudulent misrepresentation of the qualities of the main product in order to inflate M$'s share price and in turn Ballmer's and Gates personal wealth. How many other M$ executives profited by this deceit, selling shares based upon insider information about the poor qualities of the main M$ product and it's likely impact upon future revenues which is already evidenced by heavy discounting.
So will the SEC sit on it's hands or will it start to consider that mass media advertising, press releases, and web site advertising that is designed to mislead customers is also intended to mislead investors.
You now how really really stupid that is. You see in every business I have ever been involved in, the only thing that counts is applications. The OS shoudl be invisible and have absolutely no impact upon productivity at all. Open applications and copy files, that is it.
Now unreliability and instability cause far more problems for everybody, becuase if your cant retrain a staff member or lack the competence to adjust the desktop layout and file structure to match what they are used to, well than you are either lying or incompetent.
This is just typical of the continuation of M$=B$ marketing, whilst I can accept it in applications, in the OS, it is just a lie. The majority of staff, do not configure the system, do not update the system, do not update drivers, do not adjust network configurations and do not install and configure applications.
The cost of using any OS has been and always will be down to reliability, stability and security. How much work is lost when the system crashes, how much productive time is lost will the system is rebuilt, and how much productivity is lost due to stuff frustration as a result of system bugs,and of course how long does it take to patch the system and the cost of failed patches. Security of course is another big issue and by far the most important one.
I could just imagine your office, two identically coloured desktops, and two indentical icons located in exactly the same spot for the same application and you have spend thousands retraining your idiot staff because they get confused by the different boot screens.
The ASUS eePC is a completely different unit. It is the second PC/Notebook, as is not really being sold as the primary PC. The big cathc with mobile phones and PDA is screen real estate, whilst far more portable than a notebook, they lack sufficient screen area to be really leisure machines, capable of simple game play, browsing and emailing.
Larger more expensive notebooks are simply too expensive to haul around with you for leisure activities, to float around in the back of the car or in the bottom of a back pack. So they will really not have such a great impact upon notebook sales, but they are likely to split the sales of PDA between smaller form factor smart phones and the larger form factor ASUS eeePC and it's ilk.
Now whilst they are sufficiently different from larger full featured full powered notebooks, their availability at a price will still have a impact upon the price of larger units and force that price down as manufacturers look to fit in the gap between the 15" and 7" screen sizes and start adjusting the price to suit. It is going to have a real impact upon the overpriced high profit ultra portable 12" notebook range and, likely kill it all together.
It really is all about the M$ executive justifying their existence. They have to generate sufficient sales of Vista otherwise they are seen as failures. Just look at the XP OEM, from all the major manufacturers, you can't really buy it, what you buy is Vista and then get an option for a downgrade to XP.
Why would they bother with that additional step, why simply so M$ can continue with the bull shit marketing about the number of Vista units sold, those XP downgrades are counted as Vista sales, just more typical M$ lies.
I would query than, why M$ consistently lies, in press releases, advertising, and forums. Perhaps what most people view as decent behaviour diverges from what M$ executive views as, well, basically they just don't seem to give a rats about the truth and honesty as long as they make ever more money.
I suppose If I had a dime for every lie M$ has told to every customer, I guess I'd be as rich as gates and ballmer combined, odd that;).
Vista was not meant to be an improvement. Vista was simply the wedge to establish xbox style licensing into the OS via restrictive DRM. First up was pay us a fee and the OS will protect your content, be it a game, sound track or movie, the next stage was quite simply pay us a fee or your content wont run, be it a game, music, movie, any commercial software or even and especially all computer hardware and peripherals.
Attempting to incorporate that into the OS, that in turn has to run on an open platform proved beyond them, most of the knew it wouldn't work, but ballmer's greed and insane desire to control the worlds techonology keep it going.
What these email really reflect, is ballmers ego with gates's backing driving out any business common sense and simply putting forward ballmer's lack of vision and his consistent manipulative deceit. In ballmers mind, he has to be bigger than his predecessor, he has to be more powerful, he is not some girly nerd/geek, and he will do anything he can to lock in and force an ever greater expansion of M$'s monopoly.
Who is kidding who. This has far more to do with the cost of recruiting soldiers. Of trying to get high quality people, those that can actually retain a sense of honour and integrity, and trying to keep them in service.
For that to happen, they want to control the marketing message that gets in and gets out. What service is really like, what are the abuses that servicemen can expect from their officers, what is the real level or competence or more likely incompetence reflected in behaviour of serving military officers. How acceptable are living conditions for servicemen and the families. What can they really expect post service, whether that be voluntary or through injury.
A military full of low performing, low IQ thugs and criminals, represents a greater danger to itself and the country it is meant to serve, rather than being a danger to enemy combatants. So in a voluntary army, either you attempt to get out and maintain a glossy, not true to life image of military service and ease recruiting difficulties or put of with high cost recruiting and some really low quality recruits, or of course attempt a complete systemic revue of military culture, of the nature, functions and operations of military service.
The mushroom route seems to be the current preferred option (keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit);).
Simpler than that. The university or school no longer provides internet access. Instead it creates a separate external entity that is a licensed ISP, that provides internet connections for staff and students, thus giving the school the same protections as a common carrier, whilst still providing a cost effective service.
The insane bat shit logic of penalising and punishing students, for what questionable content publishers deem to be non profit enhancing services provided by schools.
What will state governments do next, mandate that schools become licensed distributors of RIAA/MPAA protected content, and that the revenue be used for funding the school.
Actually, it seems to be more about creating a single point of monitoring and control in all ISP's accessible, monitored and controlled by what ever political party happens to be in control at the time. The current basis for access, monitoring and control at the moment is pornography, which apparently is more dangerous than violence.
Of course the government wants to dress it up as protection for the children. The reality is of course it is a straight forward attempt to monitor and control the rest of society. Politicians by the very nature a control freaks and this is a straight forward example of it. Let me see, monitor and filter pornography, which is the greater threat terrorism or pornography, and so by extension monitoring and filtering for political dissent against the ruling political party becomes more palatable because it will cause even greater harm to children.
The reality is filtering the internet will not make is safe or suitable for children, it is an uncontrolled interactive environment. If they genuinely wanted to make a child safe internet then they would create a separate inter school network that would be controlled and monitored and be advertising restrictive, but of course that would block the junk food corporations, the music publishers and the fashion industry from jamming their advertising into the minds of impressionable children, which in reality is the greater harm.
This is all just dress up and lies, to control and monitor adults and their interactions, the real threat to long term sustained political power and endless corporate profits. Is Australian labour drifting to the communist (Maoist and Stalinist) ideal of the party controlled social interactions or is Rudd just another corporate puppet a closet Howard?
anything that does not involve a completely separate children internet is just political bullshit, just like saying content that is suitable for a sixteen year is suitable for a six year old, or that large numbers of children from widely varying age groups can safely left to interact upon their own without supervision.
Actually not to be too picky but in terms of how things are in the US, you actually have to go on a state by state basis, as there is substantial difference in the economic, social, cultural and political nature of each of the states within the United States, often far more pronounced than you would find in other countries due to the whole illogical 'States Rights' power play and the perceived social detachment from the 'Federal' government.
Of course this is far more pronounced in the EU, being a coalition of independent countries, some of which are prospering far more than others but overall all the countries of the EU are doing better economically and politically than they were prior to the union.
So to pick out the worst in the US you just need to focus on the most ineffectual and corrupt state governments and their influence on the Federal government, and pretty much the same can be done with Europe. Now if you are looking for the best, well, it is pretty hard for the US to top Europe, because no matter how hard you might wish, the worst state governments (corruption, cronyism, mismanagement and, religiosity in lieu of substance) still drag down the whole Federal government and in turn every other state government but in EU the worst countries have no where near the same impact on the better performing countries.
Well I assume you have heard of that rotten apple in the barrel, whilst you wont ever get rid of 'em all, you gotta keep lookin' for 'em an' chuckin' out the rotten ones lest the whole rest o' the barrel go bad.
So wikileaks is part and parcel of the whole internet revised democracy thing, bear in mind in is still way in the early stages of political reformation but it is happening.
The wholesale cleaning out of the rampantly greedy and corrupt from government and corporations, it's going to take some time but it is happening, and yes, the corrupt greedy self serving arse holes and going down kicking and screaming after all for a lot of them an extended prison term is in the offing.
Nah, I don't think it is even that. Just vapour ware, another idiotic ballmer marketing campaign. Buy M$, we are going to be more stable, secure and reliable, more Linux, 'er' 'um', Unix like, in the next version, we promise. You see we will be doing all this 'er' stuff and we will 'allow you' to do all this other 'stuff', we will, really we will.
If they were in any way serious, they would simply use Linux, it free and it is readily available, anything else is just monopoly greed driven stupidity. Ballmer's stuck himself in a hole that he dug with his own mouth and ego and, he just can't get out.
They have been trotting this stuff out upon a regular basis, we will be more open, we will be more interoperable, and then a month latter it's all your code belongs to us, it's our IP, it's our innovation, "we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender"(Winston Churchill, must be a bald thing).
They just really don't get it, you don't compete with Linux, it's free, it's open source, you either use it or you don't. How stupid are they really, why pay to develop your own, when it is readily available to use for free. I mean sure, if your some kind of nutter control freak having your customers define how you provide service and support and the nature of product you supply can be offensive but what is it with M$, the whole rest of the company can't stand up to ballmer's delusions.
I thought it was all goggle's way of saying, they will do everything in their legal and moral power to protect your privacy from baseless, invasive government search warrants, that vile offensive government incursion into your private life, if they're just not willing to pay for it, well then, they're just no bloody going get it. Googles guarantee to you, you privacy is not available --- 'for free';).
Perhaps I'm a little be out of the loop here, but why is it exactly, that you would forbid your government from doing things, but merrily allow, a for profit privately controlled, you will buy this crap now, marketing corporation to get the stuff in the first place, and that's oddly enough stuff you don't want your government to prying into even where there's at least some sense of legal overview and public disclosure of abuse !?
One wonders, whether the German government would be better off actively trying to rebrand the symbol to it's original use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika rather than trying to ban it. It is really difficult to use symbols of racism and totalitarianism when you can associate with their original, non 'pure', non violent intent.
The reality is, all the privacy invasive spying has nothing to do with the government controlling and monitoring the people, but has everything to do with a single political party, a group of corrupt antidemocratic criminals, monitoring and controlling the people, so that the self appointed 'deciders' of everything that is ungodly and unjust can bloat their pockets and egos.
Any political party that gets heavily involved in this crap, they themselves need to be monitored, controlled and cleansed of their impurities, long before they can do it to the rest of us.
Generally speaking, you can more stupidly but effectively create a terrorist force by simply creating a high stress constant threat of life existence, complete with random humiliation and the brutal loss of family members all with no hope of a better future. Pretty much the situation that has been created in Iraq.
Those kinds of stresses inevitably lead to the mental break down of individuals making them far more susceptible to those who would manipulate them into self destructive behaviours. Of course the worst thing about that kind of sustained flagrant abuse, is it will create a generation of people and take decades to resolve.
The track record for creating terrorists/freedom fighters by this route of invasion and brutal occupation, is pretty much rock solid, with genocide (the substantial eradication and eviction of the indigenous population) being the only way to resolve the situation (the current choice ?), other than of course getting the fuck out, paying reparations and making sure all those who committed crimes during the occupation are caught, prosecuted and convicted (it only makes sense as you really do not want these deranged individuals back in the general population without extensive rehabilitation).
For me the only time I ever need to open a series of tabs, is the 'open all in tabs' option in bookmarks, just as a quick way to check if they are all still live.
Speed of opening was largely down to bandwidth at both ends, as for comparing with IE, what, are you nucking futs, why would I bother.
The only thing IE is good for is upgrading my PC games console, so it not quite as unstable and insecure as it was prior to the latest patch bug fix cycle, well, mostly;).
I have been using Firefox3B3 it definitely is quicker and leaner, so start porting those add ons already, it would be interesting to see what impact they have.
It has more to do with the selective use of information to create a false image, also useful to know when a person does not have a legally effective alibi. And as beneficial to the corrupt is the blackmail of parents by the disclosure of the behaviour of their children, whether that behaviour would reflect badly on the parents or just to protect the future of their misbehaving children.
So the whole thing about privacy is not what you want to keep secret, but about those people who want to keep secret from you but simultaneously want to know everything about you and your family. Why do all those freak privacy people pry into everybody lives, is it really so effective to tailor marketing campaigns, so they are my psychologically targeted at specific individuals, and thus drone like they a forced to mindlessly buy products, or perhaps where you can not effective manipulate the parents directly perhaps more effective psychological manipulation can be targeted via their children.
Isn't the typical view of a arse hole slime ball portrayed as someone who tells you all the private information about yourself whilst you know nothing about them and how they can manipulate that information, as it has been viewed for thousands of years, yet suddenly with the advent of the googlites et al. your private email is a postcard, your web searching is something to be used to target you even your medical records will be under the auctioneers hammer, your privacy for sale to the highest bidder.
So the real question is not about what right we have to privacy, but what god damned right those arse holes have to invade it, collate it, digitally anal-yse it and to manipulate it and thus seek control over your, what, shopping habits, and maybe voting habits. To gauge over the long term how the right assemblage of messages can most effectively manipulate your behaviour and choices, and thus in affect eliminate any real free conscious choice.
Odd, last time I bothered to ring M$ for service and support the very first thing they wanted before they even asked what the problem was, my credit card details == no, none, nulla nil, free service and support. Oh, they did say I would get a refund, refund mind you, they still would charge me first, if it was a fault in the program.
Most likely because the XBox sold at a loss and the HD-DVD expansion sold at a profit. M$ is very much into not selling the full kit, just look at the Vista (P)OS, even if you buy the sold called 'full' retail version, you still do not get a full manual or a complete help file, as well as of course no free service and support.
Entirely false. Class action law suits do not add one cent to the price of a product. I am sick of this same lie being spread over and over again, just like piracy does not add one cent to the price of a product. It is all supply and demand, greedy corporations charge as much as they possible can, there is absolutely no limit to their greed, 100%, 1000%, 10000% markups not a problem at all.
It is well known that M$ puts a huge margin of the price of windows, which is why it so agressively and currptly purseus a monopoly to protect the absurd profit margins. So the more 'profit' eating, capital reserve draining class action law suits the better, who cares if it only enricghes a bunch of lawyers, as long as it bleeds M$ dry, and maybe, just maybe, finally forces some respect out of M$ for the customer.
Of course that is not what really is happening. What happened is Vista SP1 actually incorporated code that would stop a range of competing products from running, 'Microsoft blocks these programs from starting'. So M$ knew there were problems that they incorporated into SP1, tested those programs to confirm failure and then added additional code to prevent the programs from running. Now that is the reality, not some story about bugs in other peoples programs.
I would assume legal transcripts of trials would provide the best knowledge ie. evidence that was obtained and the defence against that evidence. Of course that would be a pretty geeky view point, whereas buying a couple of paperbacks sounds more like filling an idle interest in psychology and history.
The only interesting thing about the books is how they can so readily be used to create a false image. Books on terrorism does not equal terrorist, just like books on chemistry or biology does not mean your are creating weapons of mass destruction.
So should this be done by a government agency or by a private agency. When it comes to private corporations far more money can be made for their shareholders when the withhold or distort the information. This kind of collation of private data should never be done by private agencies as it is so readily subject to abuse. Fantasy marketing delusions never match the harsh reality of insatiable greed.
The reality is that the private medical data is far more likely to be used by insurance agency to deny cover to high risk citizens or by employment agencies to deny employment to patients with possible health risks, or credit agency to deny credit to high risk health patients.
Great stuff for blackmail too, where one member of a couple gets a venereal disease.
It really is stupidly foolish to claim high minded ideals from corporations, if it ain't in writing and guaranteed then it never ever happens. Plenty of share holding googlites have often posted that googles only aim and responsibility is to generate the maximum returns possible for it's shareholders, and I suppose the spreading of high minded ideals without any written guarantees are just part of a cynical marketing exercise to help bring that about.
In the history of M$, when have they ever failed to ship a product early (and yet delayed) full of bugs and quite content to use the first year customers a free beta testers.
Perhaps Valentine knew just how anti-customer Vista really was and wanted to leave prior to release so as to reduce excessive damage to his reputation.
To think Vista is anything other than Ballmer's baby, his first (P)OS is plainly mistaken.
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Most likely M$ is just trying to get more people to install 'Silverfish', you can pretty well bet that it will be locked to it.
These emails paint a wildly different picture of the future financial viability of Vista and the revenue it was meant to generate versus M$'s public disclosures. A clear case of fraudulent misrepresentation of the qualities of the main product in order to inflate M$'s share price and in turn Ballmer's and Gates personal wealth. How many other M$ executives profited by this deceit, selling shares based upon insider information about the poor qualities of the main M$ product and it's likely impact upon future revenues which is already evidenced by heavy discounting.
So will the SEC sit on it's hands or will it start to consider that mass media advertising, press releases, and web site advertising that is designed to mislead customers is also intended to mislead investors.
Now unreliability and instability cause far more problems for everybody, becuase if your cant retrain a staff member or lack the competence to adjust the desktop layout and file structure to match what they are used to, well than you are either lying or incompetent.
This is just typical of the continuation of M$=B$ marketing, whilst I can accept it in applications, in the OS, it is just a lie. The majority of staff, do not configure the system, do not update the system, do not update drivers, do not adjust network configurations and do not install and configure applications.
The cost of using any OS has been and always will be down to reliability, stability and security. How much work is lost when the system crashes, how much productive time is lost will the system is rebuilt, and how much productivity is lost due to stuff frustration as a result of system bugs,and of course how long does it take to patch the system and the cost of failed patches. Security of course is another big issue and by far the most important one.
I could just imagine your office, two identically coloured desktops, and two indentical icons located in exactly the same spot for the same application and you have spend thousands retraining your idiot staff because they get confused by the different boot screens.
Larger more expensive notebooks are simply too expensive to haul around with you for leisure activities, to float around in the back of the car or in the bottom of a back pack. So they will really not have such a great impact upon notebook sales, but they are likely to split the sales of PDA between smaller form factor smart phones and the larger form factor ASUS eeePC and it's ilk.
Now whilst they are sufficiently different from larger full featured full powered notebooks, their availability at a price will still have a impact upon the price of larger units and force that price down as manufacturers look to fit in the gap between the 15" and 7" screen sizes and start adjusting the price to suit. It is going to have a real impact upon the overpriced high profit ultra portable 12" notebook range and, likely kill it all together.
Why would they bother with that additional step, why simply so M$ can continue with the bull shit marketing about the number of Vista units sold, those XP downgrades are counted as Vista sales, just more typical M$ lies.
I suppose If I had a dime for every lie M$ has told to every customer, I guess I'd be as rich as gates and ballmer combined, odd that ;).
Attempting to incorporate that into the OS, that in turn has to run on an open platform proved beyond them, most of the knew it wouldn't work, but ballmer's greed and insane desire to control the worlds techonology keep it going.
What these email really reflect, is ballmers ego with gates's backing driving out any business common sense and simply putting forward ballmer's lack of vision and his consistent manipulative deceit. In ballmers mind, he has to be bigger than his predecessor, he has to be more powerful, he is not some girly nerd/geek, and he will do anything he can to lock in and force an ever greater expansion of M$'s monopoly.
For that to happen, they want to control the marketing message that gets in and gets out. What service is really like, what are the abuses that servicemen can expect from their officers, what is the real level or competence or more likely incompetence reflected in behaviour of serving military officers. How acceptable are living conditions for servicemen and the families. What can they really expect post service, whether that be voluntary or through injury.
A military full of low performing, low IQ thugs and criminals, represents a greater danger to itself and the country it is meant to serve, rather than being a danger to enemy combatants. So in a voluntary army, either you attempt to get out and maintain a glossy, not true to life image of military service and ease recruiting difficulties or put of with high cost recruiting and some really low quality recruits, or of course attempt a complete systemic revue of military culture, of the nature, functions and operations of military service.
The mushroom route seems to be the current preferred option (keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit);).
The insane bat shit logic of penalising and punishing students, for what questionable content publishers deem to be non profit enhancing services provided by schools.
What will state governments do next, mandate that schools become licensed distributors of RIAA/MPAA protected content, and that the revenue be used for funding the school.
Of course the government wants to dress it up as protection for the children. The reality is of course it is a straight forward attempt to monitor and control the rest of society. Politicians by the very nature a control freaks and this is a straight forward example of it. Let me see, monitor and filter pornography, which is the greater threat terrorism or pornography, and so by extension monitoring and filtering for political dissent against the ruling political party becomes more palatable because it will cause even greater harm to children.
The reality is filtering the internet will not make is safe or suitable for children, it is an uncontrolled interactive environment. If they genuinely wanted to make a child safe internet then they would create a separate inter school network that would be controlled and monitored and be advertising restrictive, but of course that would block the junk food corporations, the music publishers and the fashion industry from jamming their advertising into the minds of impressionable children, which in reality is the greater harm.
This is all just dress up and lies, to control and monitor adults and their interactions, the real threat to long term sustained political power and endless corporate profits. Is Australian labour drifting to the communist (Maoist and Stalinist) ideal of the party controlled social interactions or is Rudd just another corporate puppet a closet Howard?
anything that does not involve a completely separate children internet is just political bullshit, just like saying content that is suitable for a sixteen year is suitable for a six year old, or that large numbers of children from widely varying age groups can safely left to interact upon their own without supervision.
Of course this is far more pronounced in the EU, being a coalition of independent countries, some of which are prospering far more than others but overall all the countries of the EU are doing better economically and politically than they were prior to the union.
So to pick out the worst in the US you just need to focus on the most ineffectual and corrupt state governments and their influence on the Federal government, and pretty much the same can be done with Europe. Now if you are looking for the best, well, it is pretty hard for the US to top Europe, because no matter how hard you might wish, the worst state governments (corruption, cronyism, mismanagement and, religiosity in lieu of substance) still drag down the whole Federal government and in turn every other state government but in EU the worst countries have no where near the same impact on the better performing countries.
So wikileaks is part and parcel of the whole internet revised democracy thing, bear in mind in is still way in the early stages of political reformation but it is happening.
The wholesale cleaning out of the rampantly greedy and corrupt from government and corporations, it's going to take some time but it is happening, and yes, the corrupt greedy self serving arse holes and going down kicking and screaming after all for a lot of them an extended prison term is in the offing.
If they were in any way serious, they would simply use Linux, it free and it is readily available, anything else is just monopoly greed driven stupidity. Ballmer's stuck himself in a hole that he dug with his own mouth and ego and, he just can't get out.
They have been trotting this stuff out upon a regular basis, we will be more open, we will be more interoperable, and then a month latter it's all your code belongs to us, it's our IP, it's our innovation, "we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender"(Winston Churchill, must be a bald thing).
They just really don't get it, you don't compete with Linux, it's free, it's open source, you either use it or you don't. How stupid are they really, why pay to develop your own, when it is readily available to use for free. I mean sure, if your some kind of nutter control freak having your customers define how you provide service and support and the nature of product you supply can be offensive but what is it with M$, the whole rest of the company can't stand up to ballmer's delusions.
Perhaps I'm a little be out of the loop here, but why is it exactly, that you would forbid your government from doing things, but merrily allow, a for profit privately controlled, you will buy this crap now, marketing corporation to get the stuff in the first place, and that's oddly enough stuff you don't want your government to prying into even where there's at least some sense of legal overview and public disclosure of abuse !?
The reality is, all the privacy invasive spying has nothing to do with the government controlling and monitoring the people, but has everything to do with a single political party, a group of corrupt antidemocratic criminals, monitoring and controlling the people, so that the self appointed 'deciders' of everything that is ungodly and unjust can bloat their pockets and egos.
Any political party that gets heavily involved in this crap, they themselves need to be monitored, controlled and cleansed of their impurities, long before they can do it to the rest of us.
Those kinds of stresses inevitably lead to the mental break down of individuals making them far more susceptible to those who would manipulate them into self destructive behaviours. Of course the worst thing about that kind of sustained flagrant abuse, is it will create a generation of people and take decades to resolve.
The track record for creating terrorists/freedom fighters by this route of invasion and brutal occupation, is pretty much rock solid, with genocide (the substantial eradication and eviction of the indigenous population) being the only way to resolve the situation (the current choice ?), other than of course getting the fuck out, paying reparations and making sure all those who committed crimes during the occupation are caught, prosecuted and convicted (it only makes sense as you really do not want these deranged individuals back in the general population without extensive rehabilitation).
Speed of opening was largely down to bandwidth at both ends, as for comparing with IE, what, are you nucking futs, why would I bother.
The only thing IE is good for is upgrading my PC games console, so it not quite as unstable and insecure as it was prior to the latest patch bug fix cycle, well, mostly ;).
I have been using Firefox3B3 it definitely is quicker and leaner, so start porting those add ons already, it would be interesting to see what impact they have.
So the whole thing about privacy is not what you want to keep secret, but about those people who want to keep secret from you but simultaneously want to know everything about you and your family. Why do all those freak privacy people pry into everybody lives, is it really so effective to tailor marketing campaigns, so they are my psychologically targeted at specific individuals, and thus drone like they a forced to mindlessly buy products, or perhaps where you can not effective manipulate the parents directly perhaps more effective psychological manipulation can be targeted via their children.
Isn't the typical view of a arse hole slime ball portrayed as someone who tells you all the private information about yourself whilst you know nothing about them and how they can manipulate that information, as it has been viewed for thousands of years, yet suddenly with the advent of the googlites et al. your private email is a postcard, your web searching is something to be used to target you even your medical records will be under the auctioneers hammer, your privacy for sale to the highest bidder.
So the real question is not about what right we have to privacy, but what god damned right those arse holes have to invade it, collate it, digitally anal-yse it and to manipulate it and thus seek control over your, what, shopping habits, and maybe voting habits. To gauge over the long term how the right assemblage of messages can most effectively manipulate your behaviour and choices, and thus in affect eliminate any real free conscious choice.
Odd, last time I bothered to ring M$ for service and support the very first thing they wanted before they even asked what the problem was, my credit card details == no, none, nulla nil, free service and support. Oh, they did say I would get a refund, refund mind you, they still would charge me first, if it was a fault in the program.
Most likely because the XBox sold at a loss and the HD-DVD expansion sold at a profit. M$ is very much into not selling the full kit, just look at the Vista (P)OS, even if you buy the sold called 'full' retail version, you still do not get a full manual or a complete help file, as well as of course no free service and support.
It is well known that M$ puts a huge margin of the price of windows, which is why it so agressively and currptly purseus a monopoly to protect the absurd profit margins. So the more 'profit' eating, capital reserve draining class action law suits the better, who cares if it only enricghes a bunch of lawyers, as long as it bleeds M$ dry, and maybe, just maybe, finally forces some respect out of M$ for the customer.
Of course that is not what really is happening. What happened is Vista SP1 actually incorporated code that would stop a range of competing products from running, 'Microsoft blocks these programs from starting'. So M$ knew there were problems that they incorporated into SP1, tested those programs to confirm failure and then added additional code to prevent the programs from running. Now that is the reality, not some story about bugs in other peoples programs.
I would assume legal transcripts of trials would provide the best knowledge ie. evidence that was obtained and the defence against that evidence. Of course that would be a pretty geeky view point, whereas buying a couple of paperbacks sounds more like filling an idle interest in psychology and history.
The only interesting thing about the books is how they can so readily be used to create a false image. Books on terrorism does not equal terrorist, just like books on chemistry or biology does not mean your are creating weapons of mass destruction.
Just like web searches have been used for the same thing, will this addon http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/TrackMeNot/faq.html#options and it's random searches one day get me in trouble.
The reality is that the private medical data is far more likely to be used by insurance agency to deny cover to high risk citizens or by employment agencies to deny employment to patients with possible health risks, or credit agency to deny credit to high risk health patients.
Great stuff for blackmail too, where one member of a couple gets a venereal disease.
It really is stupidly foolish to claim high minded ideals from corporations, if it ain't in writing and guaranteed then it never ever happens. Plenty of share holding googlites have often posted that googles only aim and responsibility is to generate the maximum returns possible for it's shareholders, and I suppose the spreading of high minded ideals without any written guarantees are just part of a cynical marketing exercise to help bring that about.
Perhaps Valentine knew just how anti-customer Vista really was and wanted to leave prior to release so as to reduce excessive damage to his reputation.
To think Vista is anything other than Ballmer's baby, his first (P)OS is plainly mistaken.