Actually his mistake was in his contract with the conference people, he should simply have reversed the process and made the company complete the paperwork. They send him the application, he fills it out and sends it back to them and leaves all further hassles, paperwork and costs up to them ie. their government, their problem.
Like all corporations the personality of M$ is the personality of it's management, in the case of ballmer a lying insurance salesman. So the question is not whether you can trust M$, obviously replace the current pathetic liars with decent and honest management with integrity as their defining characteristic,and you could trust them, but can you trust ballmer, the communist, viral, terrorist, cancer man, absolutely not.
The reality is of course, if they completely open the source code for windows or office, it would not alter their copyright or patent protection in the US, however it would high light all the bad code, accidental and purposeful incorporated there in.
I look forward to Microsoft making genuine contributions to Source Forge and genuine non-proprietary contributions to OLPC, and even to Linux and I dare say they will, once ballmer is gone and instead of looking back into the past they start reaching for the future and launch successful new products that the marketplace wants rather than a string of ballmer lead failures.
I think the whole big government, small government stuff needs to be redefined to match reality.
Small government, a government controlled by a greedy self obsessed minority to control and exploit the majority.
Big government, a government controlled by the majority, to ensure it provides for and serves the majority and basically locks away that lying, deceitful, corrupt, minority who otherwise endeavour to turn the rest of us into slaves.
In the past twenty years, those definitions have been far more accurate, than the political advertising that suggests the opposite.
Actually government controlled utilities provide the best by far when it came to all of the utilities in terms of service and support and for residential customers provided the cheapest services. Any time private enterprise has taken over a service has resulted in considerably reduced service and support, and increases cost to the retail consumer, it's called profit, sure the actually cost of providing those services drops but because of monopolies the greedy ass hats keep that money and charge more to boot.
Yes, perhaps I should have been a little clearer, democratic governments ended slavery. After all a monarchy or any totalitarian 'government' is just slavery from the top down, free enterprise as defined, for the boss at least ie. I do not consider any corporate or totalitarian structure to be a government, in my mind I only ever really consider democracies to be actuall governments.
You really did wildly shift your argument, is was all about government enforced regulation of a market (provision of Internet bandwidth), a controlled market, not a free market, so hospital services would be deplorable under a free marker and can only be effective under a tightly controlled and regulated market.
Consider this, organised crime is a true expression of free enterprise, slavery is a true expression of free enterprise, government enforcement and regulation where required to curb/end both practices.
So yes, all government regulations take away freedoms, freedom to lie, freedom to cheat, freedom to steal, freedom to kill, because corporations are just the people who hide in the shadows making the decisions and with out laws to force something resembling moral behaviour out of them, they would be even more corrupt than they already are.
Should there be more regulation, definitely, and specifically the deregulation that corrupt governments allowed at the end of the 20th century should be re-regulated, we have truly seen the consequences for those corrupt decisions.
How many systems would have failed if left to private enterprise would be a mess today, the rail system, the telephone system, the postal system, private enterprise left to it's own devices would have made all of them far worse, why, because private enterprise loves a monopoly and if left to it's own devices will endeavour to force one and eliminate all choice so as to maximise the profit margin.
Some of the silly shit that comes out about private enterprise. Hunt for the cheapest bargain, sure, trial and error for the cheapest DVD player. 1st try the unit fails with in weeks of it's thirty day guarantee, 2nd try next unit fails within months of its 90 day guarantee, 3rd try unit still going a years later after 90 day guarantee has expired. Now do that with a critical hospital operation and hunt for the best bargain, what, it doesn't work after the 1st try because your dead, well I'll be fucked, there definitely seems a bloody good reason to ensure hospitals are heavily regulated to 'ENSURE' they provide reliable services.
Government regulation forces reliable services out of corporations, advertising allows unreliable services to be delivered by corporations, they just lie about the quality.
Catch with a.kids TLD is, sex education classes suitable for a sixteen year old are not suitable for a six year old or news for a young adult of almost 18 showing US soldiers sexually molesting, torturing and murdering innocent civilians also isn't suitable for a child of almost 8, and light horror recreational videos suitable for a fifteen year old would give a five year old nightmares.
That is the biggest hole in the whole silly censor the internet debate, any children's access must be age specific and in terms of countries those age specific ranges need to be varied. So a TLD is insufficient. Also it has to be extended to cover IRC and social networks, which need to be specifically monitored, by trained adults.
Who censors or controls it in the US I absolutely do not care, not being in the US. At any stage the parent can turn it off, to allow the child supervised by the parent access to the open Internet, so your argument is a nonsense. It is basically a set and forget thing for parents who do not have the time or do not sufficiently care to supervise their child's access to the Internet and a far superior solution to attempting to censor an adult's access to the Internet so that it is fit for children of all ages.
TLDs don't really work, because they are just a database entry and you can enter the IP address direct. A completely separate system is required with an add on to the browser that forces a restricted set of IP addresses from an updated and registered database.
The problem with it is although most people do actually care about it, greedy corporations actively oppose a system that would prevent them from marketing their products to children, from alkypop drinks to junk food, a white list would completely block all unsuitable commercials, so it is not the cost, ten of millions of dollars, it is the threat to lost revenue tens of billions of dollars, for all the crap that is targeted and marketed at children.
Besides you do not really need international consensus as it can be locked off at a national level, which will be required. For example, whilst the US would accept junk food/drink adds etc. targeted at children most other modern democracies would reject them.
It does not need to be international, it would be after all a restricted children's Internet, basically educational with some approved children's recreational content. At any stage should the parent choose to, they can allow the child access to the 'open' Internet for international content.
It is a required solution but it will require considerable pressure to be placed upon politicians to approve it because of extreme commercial pressures against it (corporate greed).
What they are really opposed to, is of course a children's only version of the Internet, that has completely restricted access and content and is completely separate from the open Internet. If you are looking at the Internet for children it is not what you filter out is all about what you let on. Blocking some of the worst content, promotion of alcohol, self destructive behaviour, junk foods and gambling.
The reality is, if you are really concerned about what children have access to on the Internet, you should be able to activate a setting the would lock access to a separate DNS service and a set series of IP addresses that only provides content that has be accessed, reviewed and approved as fit for children web sites, as the web sites would have to be applicable to each of the age ranges for children, obviously what is fit for a young adult is not suitable for a toddler.
The stupidity of the senators is made obvious just be that latter part, come one, lets filter the Internet so that it is suitable for toddlers, a kindergarten grade Internet http://www.funnyhub.com/pictures/pages/elephant-sl ide.html, a republican congressmen's version of tubes that run the republican Internet.
You just cant grasp the logic can you. Your acquire the target, you bring the laser onto the target and track the target with the laser until the target is destroyed, some seconds, as the laser cuts a swathe across the sky based upon the velocity of the mortar round and the 'minimum' required time to destroy the target or until you reach the minimum depression angle for the laser weapon.
Now follow out the arc across the sky and at a still lethal or extremely dangerous distance and it is cutting a very long arc across the sky, add to that of course is the fact that the earth ain't flat, high rise construction and aeroplanes or even satellites, all of this of course is line of sight to the horizon, quite a ways.
Now add multiple targets and multiple firings and it becomes like two blind swordsmen fighting a duel in a room full of people, everybody else ends up dead before the swordsmen have even clashed swords.
In other words they behave like drug addicts, they are just addicted to the junk additives in junk foods, hardly surprising, as those additives are designed to be addictive.
So how sorry do you feel for unwitting drug addicts, especially as their addiction is as a result of corruption and those addictive substances are being marketed and targeted at children with the full support of for profit government departments.
The reality is still different, in the medium and long term, M$ will never be able to make any real money out of it's products in China, by far the majority simply will never be able to afford the products, and don't count products that are be sold in China and just re-exported to western countries, so it is all just about keeping Linux out permanently and not a 'loss leader' as will be in a permanent loss state, as soon as M$ stop, Linux takes over.
What of course is odd is that a authoritarian anti-democratic communist leader has such great respect and devotion for M$ and it's products, what the hell is that really meant to be about, why the public display of comradeship, why the fawning adulation between authoritarian anti-democratic communist leaders and the board of M$ ?!?
In point if fact I started with cpm, and M$ from dos 2.1 on. Oddly enough the M$ Qdos (quick dirty operating system) was far more reliable than windows has ever been, even when M$ try to hide most of the faults behind layers of emergency repair gunk (treat the disease - bad code, central registry - don't treat the symptoms - restore it, auto reboot).
As for reliability, hands down, Kubuntu has been by far the most reliable OS I have ever used, no crashes (not one), no reboots (not one), on upgrade no requirement to reboot, no WGA crap, no invasive copyright crap, and the most effective way to keep my game playing, toy OS, windows partition going.
Now was Kubuntu harder to install, of course, I don't get enough practice, you do it once per computer device and by the time your next computer turns up you forget the things you did during the previous install years ago. The windows install is far more complex, but unfortunately I get a lot of practice re-installing it, for myself and others, ad nauseum re-installs, so I can remember the whole extensive convoluted day long procedure.
Actually what that can do is provide two networks, one that is a tightly controlled education network and another where they operate just as any other ISP would operate and hence get the normal protections of an ISP. Staff and students would then connect to the most appropriate network for what ever they wished to do at the time. You have to remember live in students who are not free to choose an independent ISP in their dorm room.
Even in common facilities like the library students should be able to use the, independent ISP university network rather than the university education network if they so choose ie. all legal problems solved.
XP doesn't crash, no, just random reboots instead, and that is only if your run the service to detect crashes which then automatically initiates a reboot, if you don't the system still 'crashes' you just manually reboot, ah the joys of M$ marketing. Vista sole function is to provide a layer of copyright protection, which will be extended into an xbox like scheme, don't pay the M$ licence fee for any hardware, or software or content and it wont run.
Actually you do not really need to even pay people to do the work, just shift the elections to a Saturday and hold the booths open for 12 hours, so that the majority of people can more readily participate.
Elections and democracy are about people, I absolutely can not understand why some governments are so desperate to get people out of the system, it should be driven as an inclusionary process, is it fundamentally the most important part, the ultimate defining act of any democracy.
Sure you might have electronic voting for less important things, like the approval or disapproval by the public of any and all congressional or senatorial votes, or local government votes but for the main federal and state elections it makes absolutely no sense at all.
The only real reason for electronic voting is so that the system can be more readily corrupted by the ass hats who don't believe in democracy.
It is just another fluff piece, a look at the hand piece. The main things slowing Linux adoption are monopolistic tactics by M$ (including political manipulation and corruption, false advertising which for some odd reason is never prosecuted, exclusionary tactics and built in incompatibilities), people unwillingness to learn another system if they do not have to (for most people there is a considerable mental effort required to learn a computer operating system, which we computer geeks who love learning new computer stuff all of the time tend to forget) and sufficient motivation (which M$ is thankfully providing by supplying controlling, anti-customer, unreliable software) as well as of course time (overcoming the built up inertia of a dominant OS takes some time).
It does take a long time to transition for one dominant system to another, years, from a text bases system to a gui for example, that Linux has achieved as much as it has is a testament to the quality of the people involved and the quality of the software they are producing and that Linux exists at all speaks volumes about the quality of M$'s software.
To be honest I would be quite tempted to get another computer even though my current one has loads of power etc. A cheap, robust, mobile unit that was low powered had long battery life, light weight and still provided usable colour screen real estate and a keyboard.
So as a second computer, or a specific travel computer, or a holiday computer or a school computer, the cheap durable laptop is viable unit in conjunction with a more high powered unit for more high powered activities.
So what we are looking at is the slow but sure technological evolution of the $100.00 laptop project and the bridging of the technological divide or for me a laptop that I would not be all that fussed about having dropped, trodden on, run over, drenched etc. (apart from the inevitable data loss).
Of course if it misses for any reason at all, the laser tends to set fire to what ever else it hits for as far as the eye can see. The higher the energy output the more dangerous it becomes.
Well I don't believe in that theory at all, that you do, and that you read and post on slashdot would tend define you by your own beliefs.
I find slashdot an excellent place for the exchange of views and opinions, they only ones I do like all that much are the paid to post losers, not because of their message, but because they're not that good at commenting and of them all, the government propagandist are by far the worst. What is it about becoming a corrupt government official seems to attract the dumbest and most likely to publicly stuff up, even when they tilt the whole legal process in their favour they still get publicly caught out.
In this case, if you hire someone with publicly demonstrable expertise in an area, why then would anybody be stupid enough to accept a political appointee with no expertise, who is only there because they provided support during the election process and they now have the final say. The whole concept is just blatant political corruption.
The only real difference between the various 'text' messaging services is the protocols driving them and the current limitations of hardware and bandwidth. Once the PDA/phone become the same device, the old sms will be a kids toy, and voicemail, vidmail, textmail(often to be combined with the first two, with of course file transfer) will dominate.
How the receiver controls it, will present a whole new range of problems, with the IPv6 address range attempting to block undesired messages will be difficult (a continuously moving problem), most likely will shift to a filtered model, live messaging for known/accepted sources and recorded for replay from unknown/undesirable sources and even special restricted times when a further reduced range of addresses be allowed live messaging.
You would have thought either of those contrarians would have noticed that I did use the term 'textmail' and not email.
No it is far simpler. Forward spam to a government department, after ten complaints, the department contacts the ISP to force a disconnect warning upon the account holder. The account holder if they are a spammer can simply then stop sending spam, or if their machine has been compromised and they can do something to fix it. No why wont they do this, apparently there is no profit in it. What is good to see is that http://www.acma.gov.au/interforms/spam/spammatters .htm is working in Australia, so all that needs to happen now is for other countries to follow suit and to create spam treaties.
Actually the big competitor for the ipod is simply technological aggregation ie. a stand alone music player will just get absorbed as a feature in other products, like a phone/PDA. So zune version 2 makes about as much sense as, well, anything else ballmer comes up with, bascially none at all.
A better way of looking at it, is what is the difference between email and text messaging, is it the number of words, is it the device or are they in reality much the same thing, no real difference at all. In fact the article writers are just so out of date, so behind the times, so out of touch because with the IPv6 address range messages will be going from phone to pc to notebook to handheld be they voicemail, vidmail or plain old textmail.
Text messaging is plain crappy old tech, based upon limited hardware capabilities, limited transmission bandwidth and the greed of telecom's.
I think you missed the point, it is only ever gambling, when every one involved is gambling, when one side is not gambling and is guaranteed to win the other side by definition is guaranteed to lose and is not gambling they are just losing.
The laws should simply be changed to ensure that both sides are actually gambling, then we shall see how long the cheats want to keep their casinos open.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually his mistake was in his contract with the conference people, he should simply have reversed the process and made the company complete the paperwork. They send him the application, he fills it out and sends it back to them and leaves all further hassles, paperwork and costs up to them ie. their government, their problem.
Like all corporations the personality of M$ is the personality of it's management, in the case of ballmer a lying insurance salesman. So the question is not whether you can trust M$, obviously replace the current pathetic liars with decent and honest management with integrity as their defining characteristic,and you could trust them, but can you trust ballmer, the communist, viral, terrorist, cancer man, absolutely not.
The reality is of course, if they completely open the source code for windows or office, it would not alter their copyright or patent protection in the US, however it would high light all the bad code, accidental and purposeful incorporated there in.
I look forward to Microsoft making genuine contributions to Source Forge and genuine non-proprietary contributions to OLPC, and even to Linux and I dare say they will, once ballmer is gone and instead of looking back into the past they start reaching for the future and launch successful new products that the marketplace wants rather than a string of ballmer lead failures.
Small government, a government controlled by a greedy self obsessed minority to control and exploit the majority.
Big government, a government controlled by the majority, to ensure it provides for and serves the majority and basically locks away that lying, deceitful, corrupt, minority who otherwise endeavour to turn the rest of us into slaves.
In the past twenty years, those definitions have been far more accurate, than the political advertising that suggests the opposite.
Yes, perhaps I should have been a little clearer, democratic governments ended slavery. After all a monarchy or any totalitarian 'government' is just slavery from the top down, free enterprise as defined, for the boss at least ie. I do not consider any corporate or totalitarian structure to be a government, in my mind I only ever really consider democracies to be actuall governments.
You really did wildly shift your argument, is was all about government enforced regulation of a market (provision of Internet bandwidth), a controlled market, not a free market, so hospital services would be deplorable under a free marker and can only be effective under a tightly controlled and regulated market.
So yes, all government regulations take away freedoms, freedom to lie, freedom to cheat, freedom to steal, freedom to kill, because corporations are just the people who hide in the shadows making the decisions and with out laws to force something resembling moral behaviour out of them, they would be even more corrupt than they already are.
Should there be more regulation, definitely, and specifically the deregulation that corrupt governments allowed at the end of the 20th century should be re-regulated, we have truly seen the consequences for those corrupt decisions.
How many systems would have failed if left to private enterprise would be a mess today, the rail system, the telephone system, the postal system, private enterprise left to it's own devices would have made all of them far worse, why, because private enterprise loves a monopoly and if left to it's own devices will endeavour to force one and eliminate all choice so as to maximise the profit margin.
Some of the silly shit that comes out about private enterprise. Hunt for the cheapest bargain, sure, trial and error for the cheapest DVD player. 1st try the unit fails with in weeks of it's thirty day guarantee, 2nd try next unit fails within months of its 90 day guarantee, 3rd try unit still going a years later after 90 day guarantee has expired. Now do that with a critical hospital operation and hunt for the best bargain, what, it doesn't work after the 1st try because your dead, well I'll be fucked, there definitely seems a bloody good reason to ensure hospitals are heavily regulated to 'ENSURE' they provide reliable services.
Government regulation forces reliable services out of corporations, advertising allows unreliable services to be delivered by corporations, they just lie about the quality.
That is the biggest hole in the whole silly censor the internet debate, any children's access must be age specific and in terms of countries those age specific ranges need to be varied. So a TLD is insufficient. Also it has to be extended to cover IRC and social networks, which need to be specifically monitored, by trained adults.
Who censors or controls it in the US I absolutely do not care, not being in the US. At any stage the parent can turn it off, to allow the child supervised by the parent access to the open Internet, so your argument is a nonsense. It is basically a set and forget thing for parents who do not have the time or do not sufficiently care to supervise their child's access to the Internet and a far superior solution to attempting to censor an adult's access to the Internet so that it is fit for children of all ages.
The problem with it is although most people do actually care about it, greedy corporations actively oppose a system that would prevent them from marketing their products to children, from alkypop drinks to junk food, a white list would completely block all unsuitable commercials, so it is not the cost, ten of millions of dollars, it is the threat to lost revenue tens of billions of dollars, for all the crap that is targeted and marketed at children.
Besides you do not really need international consensus as it can be locked off at a national level, which will be required. For example, whilst the US would accept junk food/drink adds etc. targeted at children most other modern democracies would reject them.
It does not need to be international, it would be after all a restricted children's Internet, basically educational with some approved children's recreational content. At any stage should the parent choose to, they can allow the child access to the 'open' Internet for international content.
It is a required solution but it will require considerable pressure to be placed upon politicians to approve it because of extreme commercial pressures against it (corporate greed).
The reality is, if you are really concerned about what children have access to on the Internet, you should be able to activate a setting the would lock access to a separate DNS service and a set series of IP addresses that only provides content that has be accessed, reviewed and approved as fit for children web sites, as the web sites would have to be applicable to each of the age ranges for children, obviously what is fit for a young adult is not suitable for a toddler.
The stupidity of the senators is made obvious just be that latter part, come one, lets filter the Internet so that it is suitable for toddlers, a kindergarten grade Internet http://www.funnyhub.com/pictures/pages/elephant-sl ide.html, a republican congressmen's version of tubes that run the republican Internet.
Now follow out the arc across the sky and at a still lethal or extremely dangerous distance and it is cutting a very long arc across the sky, add to that of course is the fact that the earth ain't flat, high rise construction and aeroplanes or even satellites, all of this of course is line of sight to the horizon, quite a ways.
Now add multiple targets and multiple firings and it becomes like two blind swordsmen fighting a duel in a room full of people, everybody else ends up dead before the swordsmen have even clashed swords.
So how sorry do you feel for unwitting drug addicts, especially as their addiction is as a result of corruption and those addictive substances are being marketed and targeted at children with the full support of for profit government departments.
What of course is odd is that a authoritarian anti-democratic communist leader has such great respect and devotion for M$ and it's products, what the hell is that really meant to be about, why the public display of comradeship, why the fawning adulation between authoritarian anti-democratic communist leaders and the board of M$ ?!?
As for reliability, hands down, Kubuntu has been by far the most reliable OS I have ever used, no crashes (not one), no reboots (not one), on upgrade no requirement to reboot, no WGA crap, no invasive copyright crap, and the most effective way to keep my game playing, toy OS, windows partition going.
Now was Kubuntu harder to install, of course, I don't get enough practice, you do it once per computer device and by the time your next computer turns up you forget the things you did during the previous install years ago. The windows install is far more complex, but unfortunately I get a lot of practice re-installing it, for myself and others, ad nauseum re-installs, so I can remember the whole extensive convoluted day long procedure.
Even in common facilities like the library students should be able to use the, independent ISP university network rather than the university education network if they so choose ie. all legal problems solved.
XP doesn't crash, no, just random reboots instead, and that is only if your run the service to detect crashes which then automatically initiates a reboot, if you don't the system still 'crashes' you just manually reboot, ah the joys of M$ marketing. Vista sole function is to provide a layer of copyright protection, which will be extended into an xbox like scheme, don't pay the M$ licence fee for any hardware, or software or content and it wont run.
Elections and democracy are about people, I absolutely can not understand why some governments are so desperate to get people out of the system, it should be driven as an inclusionary process, is it fundamentally the most important part, the ultimate defining act of any democracy.
Sure you might have electronic voting for less important things, like the approval or disapproval by the public of any and all congressional or senatorial votes, or local government votes but for the main federal and state elections it makes absolutely no sense at all.
The only real reason for electronic voting is so that the system can be more readily corrupted by the ass hats who don't believe in democracy.
It does take a long time to transition for one dominant system to another, years, from a text bases system to a gui for example, that Linux has achieved as much as it has is a testament to the quality of the people involved and the quality of the software they are producing and that Linux exists at all speaks volumes about the quality of M$'s software.
So as a second computer, or a specific travel computer, or a holiday computer or a school computer, the cheap durable laptop is viable unit in conjunction with a more high powered unit for more high powered activities.
So what we are looking at is the slow but sure technological evolution of the $100.00 laptop project and the bridging of the technological divide or for me a laptop that I would not be all that fussed about having dropped, trodden on, run over, drenched etc. (apart from the inevitable data loss).
Of course if it misses for any reason at all, the laser tends to set fire to what ever else it hits for as far as the eye can see. The higher the energy output the more dangerous it becomes.
I find slashdot an excellent place for the exchange of views and opinions, they only ones I do like all that much are the paid to post losers, not because of their message, but because they're not that good at commenting and of them all, the government propagandist are by far the worst. What is it about becoming a corrupt government official seems to attract the dumbest and most likely to publicly stuff up, even when they tilt the whole legal process in their favour they still get publicly caught out.
In this case, if you hire someone with publicly demonstrable expertise in an area, why then would anybody be stupid enough to accept a political appointee with no expertise, who is only there because they provided support during the election process and they now have the final say. The whole concept is just blatant political corruption.
How the receiver controls it, will present a whole new range of problems, with the IPv6 address range attempting to block undesired messages will be difficult (a continuously moving problem), most likely will shift to a filtered model, live messaging for known/accepted sources and recorded for replay from unknown/undesirable sources and even special restricted times when a further reduced range of addresses be allowed live messaging.
You would have thought either of those contrarians would have noticed that I did use the term 'textmail' and not email.
No it is far simpler. Forward spam to a government department, after ten complaints, the department contacts the ISP to force a disconnect warning upon the account holder. The account holder if they are a spammer can simply then stop sending spam, or if their machine has been compromised and they can do something to fix it. No why wont they do this, apparently there is no profit in it. What is good to see is that http://www.acma.gov.au/interforms/spam/spammatters .htm is working in Australia, so all that needs to happen now is for other countries to follow suit and to create spam treaties.
Actually the big competitor for the ipod is simply technological aggregation ie. a stand alone music player will just get absorbed as a feature in other products, like a phone/PDA. So zune version 2 makes about as much sense as, well, anything else ballmer comes up with, bascially none at all.
Text messaging is plain crappy old tech, based upon limited hardware capabilities, limited transmission bandwidth and the greed of telecom's.
The laws should simply be changed to ensure that both sides are actually gambling, then we shall see how long the cheats want to keep their casinos open.